A Better World Through Video Games

Over the last few years evidence has been mounting that violence in the media and especially interactive media such as video games contributes to aggression displayed by individuals.[1] This ability to influence our behaviour in such a way is concerning and may undermine attempts to build a peaceful society that nevertheless respects a person’s right of autonomy and the ability to choose the entertainment in which we wish to partake[2].

If we accept that the entertainment we consume may have negative effects on our behaviour, (and much as I hate to admit it the evidence is pretty convincing) at what point do we decide that it is our responsibility to curtail these forms of entertainment for the greater good?[3] I’ll leave you with that to ponder ‘cos that’s not actually what I’d like to address, this is just the lead-in.

The research suggests that, like yawns, aggression is contagious. Bad stuff. But, what about positive feelings and outcomes? Can we propagate happiness and kindness in the same way? A recent paper suggests: yes.

‘“Remain Calm. Be Kind.” Effects of Relaxing Video Games on Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior‘ is the title of a paper recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. In it authors  Jodi Whitaker and Brad Bushman look at the effects playing different sorts of video games has on post game behaviour. The full paper remains locked behind a pay-wall but a decent overview is provided here. Essentially the researchers randomly assigned participants to either relaxing, neutral or violent games. The participants then had their levels of aggression or prosocial tendencies measured in one of two ways.

In the first experiment the subjects participated in a mock competition (not mock to them, they thought it was real) in which they had to push a button faster than their “competitor” If the competitor won the study participant chose an amount of money to give them. If the competitor lost then the subjects got to blast them with noise, and could choose how loud and long the blast was.

Predictably, those who had played the violent games hit their opponents with longer and louder sound blasts than those who played the neutral games, who in turn were more aggressive than the relaxed gamers. Conversely the most money was given to winners by the participants who played relaxing games.

The second experiment was a little more subtle. Post gaming the participants were given a questionnaire measuring their mood, once this was completed the participants were told the experiment was over. The researcher then asked for help sharpening pencils for another study, how many pencils the participants choose to sharpen was used as a measure of prosocial behaviour.

As you will have inferred, the (now) hippy-dippy gamers opted to spend more of their time sharpening pencils than their amped-up counterparts. Thus the world is made just a little bit better through the use of video games. Or at least there are slightly more sharp pencils than there would otherwise have been, that’s progress, right?

I’d like to know the full suite of games that were used in the studies but we do have one example from each category: “Endless Ocean” is one of the relaxing games, “Super Mario galaxy” is a neutral game and “Resident Evil 4” is, of course, the violent game. Now I know what you’re thinking, “that stupid scuba game couldn’t possibly be as much fun as blasting zombies!” well, apparently, it is. An independent group of students rated the entertainment and enjoyment value of each of the games and the researchers were careful to match the game ratings.

I doubt that relaxing and calming games are likely to supplant the violent kind in the gaming ecosystem any time soon but it is nice to see that people can be influenced in good ways as well as bad by media.

To plagiarise and butcher a quote from Homer Simpson:

“To video games! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

——————————————————————————-
Whitaker, J., & Bushman, B. (2011). “Remain Calm. Be Kind.” Effects of Relaxing Video Games on Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611409760

Footnotes:

1.Here’s a list of publications supporting a link between games and aggressive behaviour spanning couple of decades. Obviously more of a taster than a full list:

Bushman, B., & Gibson, B. (2010). Violent Video Games Cause an Increase in Aggression Long After the Game Has Been Turned Off Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (1), 29-32 DOI: 10.1177/1948550610379506
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/1/29.full.pdf+html

Gentile, D., Lynch, P., Linder, J., & Walsh, D. (2004). The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance Journal of Adolescence, 27 (1), 5-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2003.10.002
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.120.746&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Silvern, S. (1987). The effects of video game play on young children’s aggression, fantasy, and prosocial behavior Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 8 (4), 453-462 DOI: 10.1016/0193-3973(87)90033-5
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0193397387900335

Anderson, C., Shibuya, A., Ihori, N., Swing, E., Bushman, B., Sakamoto, A., Rothstein, H., & Saleem, M. (2010). Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in Eastern and Western countries: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 136 (2), 151-173 DOI: 10.1037/a0018251
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2010-03383-001

2. With the normal caveats of not harming anyone else or restricting their freedoms, yada yada. My point is how far up the chain do we determine that an action harms another?

3. As we do with other forms of potentially harmful behaviour eg speeding limits, driving blood alcohol limits etc.

How Narcissistic are You?

Haven’t posted anything for a while, I’m wrapped up in the warm embrace of procrastination. Thought this was interesting though and an easy post. Take the online Narcissism test.

Despite all evidence to the contrary I only scored a 4. If you score greater than 20 you probably have a mirror in your pocket right now.

Some quiz answering music for you….

Related articles

• Am I Raising a Narcissistic Child? (psychologytoday.com)
• Narcissists in Hollywood (socyberty.com)
• Narcissists More Likely To Cheat On Tests: Study (huffingtonpost.com)

Delayed Gratification = Success?

Today we are going to step into the time machine and go back 21 years to 1989. It was in this year that the study to become known as the “Marshmallow experiment” was published. Performed by Walter Mischel at Stanford University this experiment showed an amazing thing, that testing a child’s self-control at 4yrs could predict academic success later in life.

The numerous experiments actually entailed in this study started with the same basic premise. Children were told that they could obtain a small reward immediately or could hold out for a more valuable reward later. The rewards were carefully calibrated to produce conflict in the child over whether to go for the immediate reward or wait for the larger reward (eg one marshmallow vs two, hence the name of the experiment). The experimenter would then leave the child alone and return a short (although not for the child) time later, typically about 15 minutes. The child could ring a bell at any time to recall the experimenter and receive their lesser reward.

Over a series of experiments the researchers examined what strategies were most effective at helping the child to delay their own gratification the longest. In some situations the rewards were fully visible, allowing the children to see only the immediate reward, only the delayed reward or both. In others the rewards were present in the room but hidden. We might find it obvious but those children who could see the rewards could not wait as long as those that had the rewards hidden.

It’s important to remember here that while some of the conclusions of the study seem obvious in hindsight (and possibly to anyone with young children) previous theories of the ability to delay gratification have considered the ability to conceptualise rewards instrumental to being able to to inhibit impulsivity. To explore this hypothesis then the researchers primed the children with various thoughts prior to the experiments, either by encouraging the children to think about the rewards or by giving them other fun things to think about.

The findings showed that how the child thought about the rewards significantly impacted how long they waited, whether or not the rewards was sitting in full display in front of them. Those children that were distracted by the fun thoughts could hold out longer than those who ere primed to think about the rewards.

To examine this further children where then primed to think about the rewards in different ways. Those who were told to think about what were termed “arousing” properties of the rewards, for example the texture and taste of a food reward, had much more difficulty delaying than those who were directed to think about the abstract qualities of the reward. Indeed, those children who were told to imagine real rewards were only pictures of the objects did much better than children who were told to imagine that pictures of the rewards were real.

One of the best strategies found by the study was for the child to imagine the arousing properties of a different food to the one they would get as a reward, eg thinking about the taste of pretzels while waiting for marshmallows.

So far so good, here’s where the real surprising aspect comes, in a follow-up to these experiments children from the original studies were then looked at more than ten years later to see if the ability to delay self gratification had effects later in life. They authors predicted that differences in the ability of children to delay when they had been given no strategies to help them (eg hiding the rewards) would perform better later in life than those who had the rewards removed from sight. This prediction turned out to be upheld, those students who could had been able to delay their own satisfaction without external help had higher test scores and were described by their parents as, to quote the study:

“more verbally fluent and able to express ideas; they used and responded to reason, were attentive and able to concentrate, to plan, and to think ahead, and were competent and skillful. Likewise they were perceived as able to cope and deal with stress more maturely and seemed more self assured.”

The results of this study seem to imply that those individuals who are able to spontaneously generate strategies to aid them in planing for and achieving future rewards are better equipped to deal with life. Hhmm, when I put it that way it seems obvious, I have to point out though that it is only through experiments and observations such as this that these conclusions become obvious. Without the ability to identify the ability of children to employ coping strategies themselves there would have been no basis upon which to predict this outcome.

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of this post, here’s a reward. An amusing video featuring a re-creation of the original experiment showing children in the sweet agony of indecision.

Youtube – Marshmallow Experiment

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–
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. (1989). Delay of gratification in children Science, 244 (4907), 933-938 DOI: 10.1126/science.2658056

Can the Order You View Things Affect Your Opinion of Them? Or, To Make a Good Impression Ensure You’re Introduced First

“First the worst, Second the best, Third the golden eagle.”

The above is a rhyme from my youth¹, the implication being that you really don’t want to be first in anything. First is the worst after all. Obviously this is not true in the world beyond the playground, firsts in every field are celebrated, sometimes in great disproportion to their inherent worth². How then is the position of first regarded by the human psyche? Do we give it more weight in other areas of our life? Can the order that we see things influence how we think about them, can we be manipulated into seeing things a certain way just by controlling what we see first?

Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer is yes. I should qualify that, it should be surprising that the order in which we observe something affects our decisions about it. We are after all rational beings aren’t we? We take in information, process it and come to conclusions based on the merits of what we have considered. Well, sort of. We are in actuality a mess of conflicting thoughts and desires, we all come with our own preconceptions and biases that can distort how we view the world without our really being aware of them. Is it really so surprising that we’ve found another one? Not to me, though this one is weird.

So what am I talking about really?3 Work performed by Dana Carney⁴ and Mahzarin Banaji looked at how the order we are exposed to things can affect the way we think about them and lead us to conclusions that otherwise we might not be justified in making. In a series of six experiments the question of how much influence the order we are exposed to stimuli affects our actions is asked. The experiments progressed from relatively cautious beginnings showing an implicit bias (using the Implicit Association Test – IAT as discussed in my previous post here) without explicit bias (self reporting) or real world consequences to actual choice biases in the real world.

In the first two experiments pairs of images (horses or people) were presented and then were rated for preference by the participants using either the IAT or an explicit seven point scale (eg “I strongly prefer x to y”). The implicit test showed a bias towards the first picture seen while the explicit measure did not.

Progressing from this the second two experiments attempted to determine if this implicit bias could be revealed in actions in the real world. Both used a pair of small consumables, either chewing gum or a lollypop, that would be placed on a table sequentially. The participant would then choose which item they preferred and would get to keep the item. In the first experiment subjects had to choose as quickly as they could (“within one second or so.”), this mimicked the IAT. In this condition 75% of participants chose the item placed on the table first.

The second experiment in this pair took place using commuters in a train station. Once again subjects were asked to choose one of two items which they were shown sequentially, this time however they were asked to either choose quickly or to take their time (mimicking the explicit test). In this set up 62% of the subject chose the first item in the time-pressured condition while no preference was seen if they could take their time.

Finally the study authors decided to test whether the preference for items seen first was due to an impulse to regard these items more positively than later seen items or if it was because the condition enhanced previously held beliefs about the object. In other words perhaps the first gum you see isn’t taken because your are made to think it’s better than the second gum but because you already have a positive view of gum and have this positive view reinforced by seeing one type first and so chose it for that reason.

To try and tease out these factors the authors used pictures of convicts in the final two experiments in order to use a stimulus that would naturally be seen negatively. In this set up participants were asked to indicate which criminal was a better candidate for parole. If first seem items have a more positive aspect imparted to them by virtue of being first then the first convict would be chosen. If on the other hand a baseline feeling about objects is enhanced then the second convict would be chosen. Once again however the IAT showed a preference for the first convict seen, labelling them better suited for parole. Also again, no preference was seen in the explicit measures.

What does this tell us about the general human capacity for decision making. Well superficially it’s good news. Given the time we will deliberate and make decisions based on the evidence available. If however we are working under time pressures then our implicit biases may come to the fore. There are however certain decisions that the authors of this study point out are known to be subject to implicit bias, such as consumer brand preference or even treatment preferences of doctors for specific patients.

We should be wary then of this new bias that has been thrown into the mix. Our heads are already full of biases that we may or may not be aware of, only by attempting to identify them do we stand much hope in correcting or tempering their influence on us.

So next time you need to make a snap decision, try to slow down and think it through. You may make a better choice⁵.

Submit To Open Laboratory 2010(What’s This?)

1. There seem to be versions of this around the world but the one above is most common in New Zealand as evidenced by this report.

2. Looking at you gold medal in Olympic BMX.

3. And how many rhetorical questions can I fit into one article? (does this one count? [or that one? {ok I'll stop now}])

4. Of the “Is Your Boss A Better Liar Than You? Probably, Yes” post.

5. On the other hand you may not want to think complex decisions through too much.

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Does Your Environment Determine Your Behaviour?

Last week I posted about the effects of alcohol availability on the amount of violence in an area and mentioned that disorder in the area might also contribute to this. I thought this needed expanding upon, are we really so shallow as a species that we allow the environment that we may be in only briefly to dictate how we behave?

This approach to behaviour is referred to as the Broken Windows Theory and states that signs of disorderly behaviour will beget more disorderly behaviour. These signs might be graffiti, littering or the observation that legitimate signage requesting a particular behaviour is being ignored. We are a species that learns by watching others, it is reasonable to conclude that we don’t only pick up good and productive behaviours in this way but potentially antisocial or destructive behaviours as well.

Acting on this theory cities around the world have embarked on projects to clean up urban areas in order to reduce the instance of petty crime. Trouble was that there was no conclusive evidence to back this theory up. A paper that goes some way towards rectifying this was published in late 2008. It looked at the effects of manipulating the environment on the propensity for people to break either social norms, police enforced ordinances or requests by companies.

The paper hypothesised that people were not merely copying behaviours but that indications of social or legal norms not being followed in an area allowed other personal goals to override our normal instincts to act in socially acceptable ways. To investigate this the researchers set up conditions to see if the breaking of one rule lead to the breaking of a different rule e.g. graffiti leading to littering or litter leading to stealing.

In all 6 studies were performed, in the first an ally where bicycles were commonly parked was set up to have either clean or graffiti covered walls. The effect of this environment on littering was then observed by attaching a useless flyer onto the bicycle handlebars and counting instances of littering compared to those that took the flyer with them (there were no bins in the ally). In the clean wall condition 33% of those collecting bikes littered, compared with 69% in the graffiti condition.

In the second study the conditions were whether an injunction to not lock bicycles to a fence would affect whether or not people would take a police sanctioned detour. Two signs were placed along the fence of a car-park, the first prohibited locking bicycles to the fence while the second advised that the closest entrance to the car-park was closed and that a second entrance 200 metres further along had to be used. The entrance was closed with a temporary fence but a gap left that could be used. Bicycles were then conspicuously left either locked or not locked to the fence. When the bicycles were not locked to the fence 73% of people entering the car-park took the detour compared with only 18% when the bikes were seen violating the sign.

I think we can see a pattern emerging. I’m going to skip the third and forth studies that are variations on the littering theme and to go straight for the fifth and sixth. These two studies concerned stealing and had very similar set-ups, an envelope visibly containing a €5 note was set-up hanging out of a mail collection box. The box was then either clean and the area around it tidy or the box was graffitied or there was litter around the box. Taking or opening the envelope were both counted as stealing. The clean and tidy condition resulted in 13% of passers-by stealing the envelope, whereas the graffiti and litter conditions resulted in 27% and 25% of people stealing respectively.

What does this tell us about human behaviour? First off I see it as very positive, social conventions are a powerful factor for encouraging acceptable behaviour, on balance people prefer to act responsibly in the absence of cues that suggest irresponsible behaviour is tolerated. This suggests that policing general behaviour may be achieved in a subtle fashion by re-enforcing social conventions rather than with actual shows of force and punishment. That said the authors of the paper take a slightly more pessimistic view of areas that have already succumbed to spreading disorder, concluding with this thought:

“.. once disorder has spread, merely fixing the broken windows or removing the graffiti may not be sufficient anymore. An effective intervention should now address the goal to act appropriately on all fronts.”

The trick then is prevention rather than clean-up, at least in areas where behaviours have become entrenched. I think this is good news over all.

Submit To Open Laboratory 2010(What’s This?)

–
Keizer, K., Lindenberg, S., & Steg, L. (2008). The Spreading of Disorder Science, 322 (5908), 1681-1685 DOI: 10.1126/science.1161405

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Alcohol: Effects on Teenage Brains and Correlations Between Availability and Violence

I’ve written previously about the effects of alcohol on decision making. Today I’ll be looking at two further aspects of alcohol consumption and how it affects society. First up is a study that examines the cognitive effects of moderate to heavy drinking during adolescence, with different effects on males versus females. Secondly I’d like to cover an interesting paper that relates the amount of violence in a community to the number alcohol outlets in the community.

There is an interesting contrast between the two papers, one focusing on the effects of alcohol on the individual and possible long term effects and the other on the wider community. Like tobacco the use of alcohol is coming under increased scrutiny in our society and this is a good thing. The difficult part in both processes is to ensure our actions are guided by evidence rather than knee jerk emotion. Smokers complain that they are unfairly victimised when alcohol causes so much harm, this may be true but it is irrelevant to the discussion of the harms of tobacco use. The same is true from the alcohol side of the debate.

Each substance must be approached and dealt with on it’s own merits and derailing the discussion to decry the abuse of one or the other is unhelpful. I am not an expert on public policy and do not advocate any particular solution to either of these issues, I don’t know what the best solution is but it is tiresome to see the same diversionary tactics arise time and again in these sorts of debates. With that, lets move on to the science.

The first paper, “Initiating moderate to heavy alcohol use predicts changes in neuropsychological functioning for adolescent girls and boys“, follows a cohort of 76 adolescents starting at ages 12-14 years. The participants of the study were chosen to limit the amount of exposure at baseline to addictive/mind altering substances. These individuals were then followed over approximately 3 years and given a battery of tests and questionnaires to determine their drinking habits and cognitive abilities.

As we might expect heavier drinking patterns in the adolescents predicted poorer test results. The interesting result is the differences in the effects of the alcohol in male versus female subjects.

Take the test Here

Female subjects that consumed higher amounts of alcohol in the preceding 12 months performed worse on tests of visuospatial functioning than the control group. One of the ways this was measured was using something called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure test (see pic), this entails the subject copying the figure, and then drawing it again some interval of time later (in this case 30 mins) from memory.

The number of drinks required to see this effect appeared to be 12 or more a month (in the previous 3 months), with the larger doses leading to a more pronounced detriment. Of course this was a trend effect in a population, on average heavier drinking females did worse in these tests but any one female was not guaranteed to see a reduction in performance.

Males on the other hand tended to do worse in the attention tests. Going by this measure I’m sure wives the world over would swear their husbands had been habitual binge drinkers throughout adolescence. The test of sustained attention in this case was done by the Digit Vigilance Test, this simple test consists of rows of single digit numbers printed in either red or blue (single colour per page). Subjects must find either 6s or 9s on each page.

By timing the task and counting the errors committed a measure of sustained attention can be determined and compared to the control group.

A drawback of this work is that the number of subject was limited, the entire study had a total of 76 adolescents, of those 29 were female (leaving 47 males). These groups then had to be further bisected to give the drinking and control groups. This study was quite small but is consistent with previous research showing negative effect on the brain for developing individuals. The bottom line of research like this is not difficult to get to, there are detrimental effects to be had by allowing young people to indulging moderate to heavy alcohol consumption. What we do with this information is up to us.

The second paper was presented by William Pridemore and Tony Grubesic at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego earlier this year. With the engaging title of “Alcohol outlets and community levels of interpersonal violence: Spatial density, type of outlet, and seriousness of assault” the paper examines the correlation between the number of places where alcohol is available in a community and the amount of violence the community experiences.

I think we can all guess the outcome but it’s nice to have actual data to back up our intuitions. The study was quite detailed in it’s approach with the violence broken down by simple assault and aggravated assault and the type of alcohol outlets subdivided into bars, restaurants and so-called “off-premise” outlets where alcohol is sold but not consumed on site, such as supermarkets and liquor stores.

It comes as no real surprise that a higher density of alcohol outlets was correlated with a higher level of violence in the area. A result that I did not expect though was the significant effect the “off=premise” alcohol outlets appear to have on the levels of violence in the area. The study estimated such sites contribute between 25%-30% of the violence (depending on the category)  of an area. This compares to approximately 10% each for bars and restaurants.

The reason for this difference is suggested to be that these areas can act as impromptu gathering places where it is perceived that the normal rules of society do not apply, especially if the area is unkempt in appearance. In such areas individuals may have an altered perception of the moral expectations and this coupled with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol could lead to the greater propensity for violence.

Once again the information may merely inform our decisions not make them for us. Is the best approach simply to limit the number of alcohol outlets, or ban then from some areas altogether (or completely?). Or should we use this information to put measures into place to reduce violence while retaining access to alcohol, perhaps by creating environments around outlets that are less conducive to violent confrontations. Maybe some nice waterfalls and soothing music would help, I’m sure I have an Enya CD around here somewhere I could donate to the cause (or possibly The Corrs).

Submit To Open Laboratory 2010(What’s This?)

–

Squeglia, L., Spadoni, A., Infante, M., Myers, M., & Tapert, S. (2009). Initiating moderate to heavy alcohol use predicts changes in neuropsychological functioning for adolescent girls and boys. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 23 (4), 715-722 DOI: 10.1037/a0016516

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Can Our Fantasy Life Affect Our Perceptions of Real Life?

Recently there’s been a television promotional advertisement that really bugs me. It shows a man watching events appearing before his eyes and has a voice-over that says something to the effect of “When you look back on your life are you going to see a life filled with interesting people and excitement?” and when is becomes obvious that what the man is watching are clips from television shows ends with “or will you see your own life?”.
(Forgive my poor paraphrasing I seldom watch network television and I couldn’t find a link to the video online.)

But the advert did get me thinking, we occasionally do hear of people that confuse their favourite characters for real people and even that they are personal friends. Now these people may very well have contributing psychological factors but human behaviour exists on a spectrum. Does television watching actually trick our brains into thinking we have more friends than we really do?

This line of thinking lead me to another paper from the mind of controversial evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, of the Intelligence and Monogamy/Liberalism/Atheism paper.In “Bowling with our imaginary friends” Kanazawa postulates that our behaviours developed and were refined in the long periods before the present when there was no such thing as television and the one-sided relationships that we have with fictional characters. As a consequence of this he suggests that we subconsciously treat these characters as if they were truly people we know and interact with. To determine this Kanazawa used an existing social survey (The US General Social Survey) to confirm whether individuals who watch certain types of shows are more satisfied with their friendships.

An additional prediction of the paper took the differences between the make-up of men’s and women’s friendships into account. Women tending to have more friends among family while men have co-workers feature more prominently. Thus the prediction was that women would report more satisfaction with friendships when they watch shows where families interact and men should report more when they watch less personal “people at work” shows.
It’s at this point that Kanazawa loses me a bit, he chose to split the television watching into the subgroups “Drama and sitcoms”, “News” and “Educational” (actually PBS). Where “Drama and Sitcoms” represents the family friendships of women and the other two represent the male circle of friends. In a critique of the paper Jeremy Freese wrote in “Imaginary imaginary friends? Television viewing and satisfaction with friendships”:

“how well does the distinction between dramas/comedies and news/PBS shows map onto the distinction between programs about ‘‘people in families’’ and ‘‘people at work’’? Nielsen ratings for the 1992–1993 television season included 8 dramas or comedies among the 10 most watched shows, but only 3 of these were centered on families (Roseanne, Full House, and Home Improvement; the others were Murphy Brown, Coach, Murder, She Wrote, Cheers, and Northern Exposure).”*

Freeze goes on to note that if television has a direct effect on friendship satisfaction then controlling for satisfaction in other areas should enhance the correlation. This makes the null hypothesis in this case that people who are more satisfied with their life in general then they will be more satisfied with their friendships irrespective of television watching habits. According to Freeze’s reading of the data this is exactly what we find, that there is no significant correlation between television and friendship satisfaction once overall life satisfaction is controlled for.

However, the story gets even murkier, in a follow-up rebuttal (“The relativity of relative satisfaction”) Kanazawa disputes the method Freeze used to calculate overall life satisfaction and himself uses the answers to the survey’s own data on this question (Freeze combined data on satisfaction with other life areas rather than use the dedicated question on this subject). Once re-calculating his result controlling for the extra factor Kanazawa asserts that most of his findings still stand while some even show stronger effects.

So do we have an answer? I don’t know, but it’s certainly an interesting question. If anyone has any info on more recent discussion of this topic I would be very interested in seeing it.

*Yes you read that right, those are some old shows. The papers were written in 2001-2002 based on data from the early 1990s, ah nostalgia.

Kanazawa, S. (2002). Bowling with our imaginary friends Evolution and Human Behavior, 23 (3), 167-171 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(01)00098-8

Jeremy Freese (2003). Imaginary imaginary friends? Television viewing and satisfaction with friends Evolution and Human Behavior, 24 (1), 65-69 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00109-5

Kanazawa, S. (2003). The relativity of relative satisfaction Evolution and Human Behavior, 24 (1), 71-73 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00108-3

I’m Certain That I Can Certainly be Wrong or Confidence and Memory, Is one a Good Measure of the Other?

A man is the sum of his memories, you know, a Time Lord even more so.

The Doctor, in “The Five Doctors”

We all know that our memories can’t always be trusted, time and life tends to erode the confidence we have in our memories. At least that is the case for normal memories. We also tend to have special memories that seem to be burned into our brains, events in our lives that hold such significance that it feels like we are in some sense still experiencing the moment the memory represents. Such memories are described as being “flashbulb memories” as if at that moment as sort of metaphysical flash went off and recorded every detail of an event vividly in our consciousness.

This “flashbulb” effect allows us to confidently recall these events days, weeks or even years later. Memories such as this may be unique to each individual but there are commonly cited examples of shared flashbulb memories such as where a person was and what they were doing when they heard about the events of 9/11. In fact this event was used in an experiment to test the accuracy of this type of memory. At Duke University on September 12th 2001, 54 students recorded their memories of hearing about the incident as well as a recent everyday event by answering a series of questions about the events. Then either 1, 6 or 32 weeks later they answered another questionnaire and this was used to evaluate the confidence and consistency of the memories.

Surprisingly there was no difference in the consistency of memory recall for the flashbulb memory compared to the everyday memory but the flashbulb memory continued to be reported with a high degree of confidence while confidence in the everyday memory decreased. This implies that while we can be very confident in the details of a memory this is no guarantee of their accuracy. In fact other studies between confidence and accuracy of recall (for example in eye witness reports of crimes) shows the same lack of correlation between how confident we are and how accurately our recall matches events.

With regard to confidence in memories hypnosis is often put forward as a means of increasing the reliability of recall (even featuring on Mythbusters). There is evidence however that what actually happens is the hypnosis increases the confidence of the recall but is not effective at increasing the accuracy of the information gained through this process.

Finally, as a little reward for getting this far that is modestly related to this subject, here’s an interesting little test that is meant to measure your risk IQ based on your confidence in the answers to certain questions rather than on the answers themselves. (as previously blogged on by Alison over on Bioblog). So go take the test and feel free to report back your score.

References:

Talarico, J., & Rubin, D. (2003). Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories Psychological Science, 14 (5), 455-461 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.02453
Smith, V., Kassin, S., & Ellsworth, P. (1989). Eyewitness accuracy and confidence: Within- versus between-subjects correlations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74 (2), 356-359 DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.74.2.356
Green, J., & Lynn, S. (2005). Hypnosis versus relaxation: accuracy and confidence in dating international news events Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19 (6), 679-691 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1133

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Intelligence, Monogamy and Journalistic Licence

Last week news came out about a study linking intelligence with liberal attitudes and atheistic beliefs, oh and in men an increased tendency for monogamy. Today I read the NZ Herald‘s short take on the study, a semi-chauvinistic piece pointing out how we evolved intelligent men can think our way to monogamy while those sexually immoral women can’t. I felt just a little dirty reading it. Ok, perhaps it isn’t really that bad but having being familiar with the study before reading the story that’s how it stuck me.

The full published study is locked behind Social Psychology Quarterly’s pay wall but the lead author, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, rather nicely provides copies of his papers on his own website. I like him already. The paper, rather provocatively called “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent.”, discusses a concept Kanazawa calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis. Essentially this states that our behaviours were shaped by our evolutionary past and that intelligence may allow us to adapt these behaviours and introduce new behaviours that are “evolutionarily novel”. In this scenario general intelligence (IQ) evolved as a mechanism by which we could adapt to novel situations that our genes alone had not equipped us to deal with.

To investigate this principle three types of evolutionarily novel behaviours/values were examined to determine if there was any correlation with intelligence. To wit the behaviours looked at were liberalism, atheism and monogamy. Throughout the paper the relation of monogamy to men as being evolutionarily novel specifically excludes women, not because women’s behaviour in this regard cannot be moderated by intelligence but because monogamy is not a novel concept for women. In our evolutionary past women (according to the hypothesis) would always have been more monogamous and so this would be classed as an evolutionarily familiar strategy which does not require higher intelligence to change thus the prediction that intelligence would not be correlated with greater monogamy in women where it would be in men.

In fact multiple studies have already shown that across cultures women tend to be more monogamous so what this study implies is that men have to be more intelligent (in order to overcome our stupid genes) just to get on a par with women. Frankly though this is the least interesting part of the study. More fascinating (though also more potentially inflammatory) is the association of intelligence with liberal and atheistic modes of thought. For the purposes of the study Kanazawa simplified the definition of liberalism to:

“the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.”

Stated in this way the concept actually looks a little unfamiliar to me as well as my hypothetical ancestor. But if I consider it for a while I can squint my eyes and see it as encompassing most of those values I generally lump together as being liberal. In any case Kanazawa’s argument boils down to the conjecture that our ancestors would not have lived in societies in which we would have been surrounded by large numbers of unrelated individuals such as we are now. In this case they would not have had much incentive to develop behaviours which valued unrelated strangers as much as ourselves, in fact I could see this sort of behaviour as actually being detrimental.

This may explain why liberal people are more intelligent than their conservative counterparts but it does not address the question as to why intelligence might lead to the adoption of these principles, why aren’t we just more intelligent conservatives? What’s so great about being liberal?

The question might be slightly clearer in the case of atheistic beliefs as those that espouse this point of view tend to make it into an argument about truth. Certainly there must be an advantage to knowing the truth about the world around us but how this might relate to a more or less abstract truth such as the existence or absence of a deity is not obvious. I would be interested to see if intelligence is more highly correlated with believing more concrete truths about the world independent of actual scientific training (which presupposes that the beliefs formed about the world in this fashion are approaching trueness).

Fun as these topics maybe to speculate about it’s difficult to say how much these sorts of studies tell us about the evolutionary origins of particular behaviours as I have seen in comments to this study elsewhere it smacks of just so stories. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist so I’d rather stay away from interpretation in this vein but perhaps we would do well to take any conclusions with a grain of salt, especially if those conclusions are what we want to hear.

Reference:
Kanazawa, S. (2010). Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent Social Psychology Quarterly DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602

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Rats, Bad Decisions and Jelloshots

It is an accepted fact of life that alcohol and good decision making have only loose a acquaintance  with one another. Like ships passing in the night, they may meet or they may not. This is true for the momentarily intoxicated but does that propensity for poor choices follow us even after the libations cease? Adolescents who drink alcohol from an early age appear to suffer from impaired decision making skills later in life but the connection is not clear cut as to whether the alcohol lead to that ill advised life choice or if the bad decisions lead to the alcohol.

In an effort to tease out those threads researchers used rats to model behaviour. In this case to entice the rats to consume the alcohol they provided it as part of a “palatable gel matrix” or in common parlance, jelloshots. This allowed the researchers to promote high levels of voluntary alcohol consumption among the adolescent rats. Now to measure the effect of this alcohol on the rats decision making abilities they weren’t able to offer the rats stock market options or the choice of marrying Tony Veitch. To substitute for these sorts of things the rats were give a choice between low risk certain rewards and large but uncertain risky rewards.

Rats that had consumed large amounts of alcohol were biased towards the high risk behaviour even after 3 months without alcohol, or well into maturity. Whereas the control rats displayed behaviour that assessed the risk against the pay-off and went for the more certain rewards. Unfortunately the full study is locked behind a pay wall* so I can’t determine how the study was controlled, how reliable these results are and what they actually tell us about the link between early alcohol abuse and risk taking behaviour later in  life. If anyone has access to this info I’d appreciate it. In the absence of this information it seems as if the alcohol is a significant predictor of risk seeking behaviour independent of the innate predilections of the individual. Or to put it another way:

*Why is the best stuff hidden away? Universal Open Access, your day will come!

Can Torture Ever Be Justified?

I don’t think I would be going out on too much of a limb if I observed that most of us find the idea of torture to be repellent. As social creatures it is natural for us to shy away from inflicting harm on our fellows, empathy stays our hand when ruthlessness might otherwise help us achieve our personal goals. This holds true both in normal social interactions and in the extreme situations of conflict. It requires a significant expenditure of effort for us to overcome our inbuilt aversion to causing pain.

Even so torture can be rationalised as being for the “greater good” such as in the hypothetical situation which illustrates when torture might be a reasonable recourse known as the “ticking time bomb” scenario. In this case it is supposed that a terrorist has planted a bomb in a populated area, the terrorist is captured but the authorities have not been able to ascertain the location of the bomb which might go off at any time killing hundreds or possibly thousands of innocent people. If the terrorist refuses to co-operate, so the logic goes, it is then not only permissible to resort to torture to extract the information it might even be obligatory in order to prevent greater harm.

This situation however contains a hidden assumption that if untrue leaves the entire argument moot, namely, torture leads to accurate information. If this assumption is false then the justification falls apart. Last week in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences Shane O’Mara argued exactly this point. The main thrust of O’Mara’s argument asserts that prolonged stress causes changes in the brain that make it difficult for the subject to accurately recall memories and make the implantation of false memories and confabulation more likely.

False memories can be laid down when a subject incorporates what they are told into their own memory as if it actually happened when it did not. Simple repetition of information can induce false memories in normal subjects, assuming that it does not also happen in stressful situations is not  particularly reasonable.

Confabulation is the involuntary creation of false memories in response to questioning when the frontal lobe of the brain is impaired. The subject believes what they are saying and so is not lying but the information may not be accurate in any meaningful way. Events from the subject’s past and imagination can be jumbled together without the ability to tell the difference between them, when or if they happened. As prolonged stress can have negative effects on the frontal lobe confabulation could be a real danger in torture situations.

In addition the subject will also be conditioned that while they are talking the extreme interrogation techniques are stopped, thus talking represents safety. There is no extra inducement to truthful speech. In this situation there is no immediate method of ascertaining the truth of the subject’s words and so as long as the subject continues to talk further interrogation is not necessary.

Given these objections and certainly in the absence of reliable data to refute these points the justification for the use of torture simply dissipates. I for one find this information very reassuring.

Disgust or Anger?

The ability to recognise the emotional states of those around us is a very useful tool which allows us to act appropriately in social situations. If this ability is impaired then it could lead to inappropriate reactions when dealing with others, this in turn could land us in hot water. An impairment like this has been suggested to explain the behaviour of delinquents, though it is unlikely to be a sole cause of antisocial behaviour.

A study published recently lends support to this hypothesis, published last month in the journal of  Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health (or CAPMH for short, catchy) the study looked at 24 Japanese young adults that were serving time in correction facilities (in Japan). Simply put the researchers compared these so-called delinquents with a control batch of young people (matched for age and gender), in the ability to correctly match an emotion to a facial expression. Six basic emotions were represented with 8 different pictures each, so participants had to match a total of 48 pictures.

The emotions covered were anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, the prediction was that the incarcerated subjects would have difficulty interpreting some facial expressions and that this difficulty would skew the subjects towards misidentifying expressions as anger. This in fact did happen, the delinquent subjects actually identified disgust as anger more than the control group.

This interesting result is lessened in it’s impact somewhat due to the fact that the control group also made this mistake a large percentage of the time. This predilection in the delinquents however is an insight into how certain personalities might perceive some social situations as being more hostile than they really are. These personalities are also marked by being quick to anger and experiencing more intense anger than others so recognising how this occurs can be useful information in diffusing these situations and possibly diagnosis of individuals who might otherwise be labelled as simply “difficult”.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!*

A few weeks ago my wife went out dancing with friends, when she came back the one thing that had stood out for her in the evening was how similarly certain groups of people had been dressed. As the youngsters dancing around her left and were replaced each new batch had it’s own discernible style, this type of clothing with that kind of jewelry. Of course there were variations within each group but the similarities, at least to her, were far more striking. We all know of people around us that seem to slavishly follow the crowd, who wear the popular clothes, style their hair the popular way, listen to to popular music or in other ways agree with the popular opinion. We are certainly not as easily influenced as them, we are individuals.

There does seem to be this tendency to be able to recognize conformist behaviour in those around us while simultaneously denying such influences in ourselves. Our peers follow the pack while we make reasoned and informed choices. This effect is the focus of a study performed by Stanford and Princeton Universities. Students were subjected to a number of different surveys and situations designed to show how much they deemed their own choices were dictated by social influences versus their peer group. From university policy decisions to political party positions, driving behaviour  and why they bought an iPod respondents consistently followed popular behaviour themselves while ascribing to their fellows more susceptibility to such influences.

This pattern seemed to hold whether or not such conformity was described as positive or negative behaviour. In other words even when making the same choices as their peers was set up as being desirable they still denied that it was a factor in their own choices. As discussed in the final paragraphs of the study this difference in perception of other’s behaviour compared to our own is likely to contribute to exacerbation conflict and misunderstandings when dealing with those whose views disagree with our own. In such circumstances if we regard ourselves as rational and others as blindly following the crowd (and vice versa) then this makes finding common ground more difficult and demonising the enemy easier. So it may be more constructive not to wonder why are they behave the way they do but to step back and consider why do I think the way I do?

* Obviously this title is ironic, I am of course trying to show people that they are following the pack even while admitting that I must do so myself.

Project Implicit

Are you sexist? Have a tendency to think that women should stay out of science? Do you prefer the company of straight people over that of gays? Like whites more than blacks? In these enlightened politically correct times it is socially unacceptable in most circles to answer yes to many or all of these questions (depending on where you live). Some will deny that they would answer yes to any of these questions but privately do so, while others will deny even privately that they would. That is to say I might publicly decry the attitudes portrayed in the above questions and even consider myself to be tolerant and unbiased while still holding the views subconsciously.

This is where Project Implicit comes in. Project implicit attempts to uncover the unconscious attitudes of those that take the test and in the process learn something about human nature. The tests are devised in such a way that categories under study have both positive and negative words associated with them in turn. Thus you end up with four alternatives: Gay/Good, Gay/Bad, Straight/Bad, Straight/Good. Once these associations are stipulated the subject is timed in their ability to adhere to these groupings when the positive or negative words are flashed on a screen. When a positive word flashes when the Gay/Good:Straight/Bad pairings are active the subject must hit a key to assign it to the Gay/Good category and conversely when a negative word is flashed assign it to the Straight/Bad category. Each participant must complete testing rounds covering all four possible pairings, after which the amount of time it took to assign each word is tallied and the implicit bias determined.

The underlying assumption of the tests is that people with a preference for one set of pairings, say Gay/Bad:Straight/Good will respond faster than with the reverse pairings. This is meant to indicate the extra processing time required to artificially group the categories. In other words, using less politically charged groups, a combination of Natural/Food and Artificial/Buildings will seem more natural and be easier to assign the words apple, grass, rocks, airplane, computer, garage. In which case participants will do this task faster than the more unwieldy categories of Natural/Buildings and Artificial/Food (ok perhaps in this age Artificial/Food isn’t so unusual but you get the idea).

Can human attitudes be “tricked” into showing themselves in this way? The researchers think so and a mounting pile of scientific papers seems to back them up. I certainly recommend at least taking a few of the “Demo” tests, the results may surprise you. Approximately 30% of respondents register strong preference for whites over blacks or straights over gays so there is a good chance of falling into those categories despite your own expectations. The website even has a warning before the tests are administered: “In reporting to you results of any IAT test that you take, we will mention possible interpretations ……. If you are unprepared to encounter interpretations that you might find objectionable, please do not proceed further.” For some reason the words of Yoda and Luke are brought to my mind:

Luke: There’s something not right here… I feel cold. Death.
Yoda: That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.
Luke: What’s in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you.

Fast Thoughts are Happy Thoughts

Ever noticed that when you are excited or happy your thoughts seem to zip hither, thither and yon at a dizzying pace? Perhaps at the same time you also had feelings of increased energy, creativity and self esteem. These are all symptoms of the psychiatric condition of mania, but you’re probably fine. The persistent linking of mania with rapid thoughts has lead some researchers to suspect that the speed of thought itself, and not necessarily the content of those thoughts, has a direct effect on a person’s mood. Thus merely thinking at a faster pace can create a more positive mood, along with those other symptoms, I mean normal feelings, of creativity, energy, etc.

With this approach as their starting point psychological scientists Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner, of Princeton and Harvard University respectively, conducted an experiment to elucidate the exact effect of thought speed on mood, independent of the contents of those thoughts. To this end they recruited a number of students to read statements aloud at different speeds, the statements were either fast and positive (eg ‘‘Wow! I feel great!’’) or fast and negative (eg ‘‘I want to go to sleep and never wake up’’) and were contrasted with the reverse combinations, slow/positive, slow/negative. The results showed that the speed of a person’s thinking does indeed have an impact on their mood independent of what they are thinking. Those who read depressing statements fast had a more positive outlook than those who read the depressing statements more slowly.

This work has implications for the treatment of both mania and depression, having manic patients work to slow down their thought processes or those suffering depression increase the speed of theirs might be a more sustainable and empowering (for the patient) method of treating the conditions. Not to mention how this might affect business brainstorming sessions, want to boost your team’s creative output? Just get them doing quick mental exercises to get their brains in the mood. Have some bad news to give? Say it really fast.