Affective Forcasting

Similar to Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson's work on affective forcasting, a new article was recently published in Psychological Science investigating how we predict we will feel. In one of the experiments, 27 students were asked to predict the grade they would receive. They were also asked to describe how much regret and rejoicing they would experience if their actual mark was higher or lower than they expected. After receiving their grade, they reported how they actually felt.

Overall, the students underestimated the mark they received, but they overestimated how delighted this better-than-expected result made them feel. Thus, the findings suggest we overestimate how despondent bad outcomes will make us feel, and we overestimate how pleased good outcomes will make us feel.

Sevdalis, N. & Harvey, N. (2007). Biased forecasting of postdecisional affect. Psychological Science, 18, 678-681.

Important Traits in Baseball

Livescience.com has an interesting article on the psychology of baseball. Here is an excerpt:

"Beane was just sort of crushed by the pressure of the batter's box, just didn't have that sort of self-confidence, almost arrogance, just to know, 'I do this well. I'm fine. So what I just struck out, I'm going to hit next time,'" Stadler said.

Strawberry displayed the exact opposite reaction: "You can look at some of Strawberry's early interviews when he broke into the league and was struggling a little bit as player's naturally do, but he, even then he just said, 'I know I'm a good hitter. I'm going to hit plenty of home runs,'" Stadler said. "He just wasn't worried about the pressure."

What makes up what Stadler calls a "baseball personality" like Strawberry's was described by personality test called the Athletic Motivation Inventory (AMI) developed by William Winslow, still used by many baseball teams today to sort out which players have the personality traits it takes to succeed in major-league baseball.

The traits that seemed to be most important in baseball were some of the ones Strawberry clearly displayed: self-confidence, mental toughness (or how well a player rebounds from failure), emotional control in stressful situations and a slight tendency toward aggression (in this context, the desire to make things happen).

Strawberry's self-confidence and mental toughness are particularly apparent in his comments and are critical traits in a major-league hitter.

"If you're a hitter, you fail two-thirds of the time, so you can imagine why self-confidence would be really important," Stadler said. "You have to keep, sort of keep plowing through, even though you just struck out four times in a game or something"

NIH Funded Research to be Open Access

The Senate approved a bill requiring that NIH-funded research be made freely available to the public within one year of appearing in a peer-reviewed journal. Having already been approved by the House, the two bills will be combined into one awaiting the President's signature.

Sleep Deprivation and Emotions

A recent study in the October 23, 2007 issue of the journal Current Biology discussed how sleep deprivation affected emotions. Here is an excerpt from livescience.com that discusses the research:

Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.

"While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn't predict they'd overreact as much as they did," Walker said. "They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."

Cancer and Happiness

A new study in the December issue of Cancer reports that a self-report measure of well-being does not affect overall survival of patients with head and neck cancer. Quotes from the study authors are quite strongly worded. For example:

“The belief that a patient’s psychological state can impact the course and outcome of their cancer is one that has been prominent among patients and medical professionals, alike,” says James C. Coyne, PhD, Co-Leader, Cancer Control and Outcomes Program, Abramson Cancer Center; Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Penn; and lead author of the study. ...“While this study may not end the debate, it does provide the strongest evidence to-date that psychological factors are not independently prognostic in cancer management,” says Dr. Coyne.

However, there are some questions about the methodology employed in this study. First, the study looked at a self-report measure of emotional well-being at baseline. I wonder how the diagnosis of cancer might affect well-being across time. One could easily imagine someone indicating a high emotional well-being initially becoming devastated as cancer treatment progressed, while someone with low initial well-being may show resiliency and have higher emotional well-being during cancer treatment. This study tells me very little about the impact of emotional well-being in that it only looks at initial levels of well-being. A stronger design would have looked at how well-being changed throughout the course of cancer.

Monks

An excerpt from livescience.com:

the Dalai Lama seems to be the happiest monk of all.

His lecture at Cornell University last week started with a big laugh and was all about happiness.

What's with these guys? Why are they so happy?

The answer is, of course, that the monks have worked very hard to become happy, peaceful people. They spend hours a day meditating and quieting the mind, and they also work hard to maintain a philosophy of compassion for all human beings.

Question is, why does it take so much work to become a compassionate, peaceful, happy person? Why aren't we all wearing saffron robes and laughing?

...

His Holiness maintains that we are also naturally armed with compassion for others, and this is true. Humans express both sympathy and empathy, emotions that often move us to help those in need, even strangers.

But it's also human nature to forget very quickly some disaster, grief or bad experience felt by someone else, and that's why we need to be reminded by someone who is a master at compassion.

Finding mental peace is also so difficult for humans because our minds evolved to be ever on alert, ready to puzzle-solve, always thinking. It goes against human nature to turn that mental machine off, although we'd all like to sometimes.

And that's why people are drawn to the Dalai Lama and why it is such a gift that monks roam my town. They are reminders that even if we have certain natural tendencies, it doesn’t mean we have to respond only to those tendencies.

We could, in fact, have a better human nature if we just worked at it.

The Next Bestseller

An excerpt from Wired.com on how to create the title of the next best selling book:

1. Create a title-as-theory.
Your title needs to both summarize your Big Idea and introduce a new term. It sounds tough, but we've made it easy. Instructions: Choose a word from column A and combine it with one from column B. Feel free to use one or two connectors from the middle and start with "The" if necessary.

(A)	+	(OPTIONAL)	+	(B)
Paradox Innovation Death Birth Community Smart Meta Folk Creation Destruction World		of and is the in		Storm Virus Circuits Meme Multitudes Point Everyday Money Hordes Zeitgeist onomics

Hint: The best Big Idea titles tend to sound like B movies: Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Black Swan, and Guns, Germs, and Steel could all pull double duty as fright flicks. We've heard rumors that Freakonomics is under option from Wes Craven.

2. Subtitle it!
Since your Big Idea title is an entirely new concept, you'll need a subtitle that can do some heavy lifting and explain things a bit. It should be both specific and vague, expressing your Big Idea in a simple catchphrase while not giving away too much. After all, you want people to buy the book. Instructions: Pick one or more clauses from column C, followed by one from column D.

(C)	+	(D)
A Transformative ­Measurement of Dynamic Change in How Everyday Metrics Expose the Secrets of How Hidden Wisdom Transforms How Working Together Separately Empowers The Power of The New Radical Force of A Novel History of The Secret Human Power of		Unbalanced Wealth Business, Organizations, and the Marketplace Humanity Tribes, Nations, Culture, and Society the 22nd Century the Power of Unconscious Thought You Everything

Hint: Before taking it to a publisher, pitch your Big Idea to Robert Scoble over an online telelunch. If he's blogged 16 entries and started four businesses based on it by dinner, you've got a winner.

3. Pick a premise.
Your book needs what seems like a premise. Not every nitwit will pick up on your Big Idea from the subtitle, so this is a little helper that your publisher can send out in a letter to reviewers. Don't worry — it doesn't actually need to make sense as long as it's sweeping and profound. Instructions: Select one word or phrase from each column to sum up your brilliant-sounding idea.

(E)	+	(F)	+	(G)	+	(H)
Organizations that harness the forces of Small-scale global fluctuations of Permanent changes driven by Dynamic unseen shifts in		untapped existing market phenomena unproven instruments and products collective power profound ideas and desires		will cause have enabled spur remade		previously hidden marketplaces to emerge. innovation, growth, and wealth. the economy in bold new ways. everything.

Fearful Faces Recognized First

An excerpt from Livescience.com:

People recognize a fearful expression faster than any other, a new study finds.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University set out to test how quickly people become aware of fearful, neutral and happy expressions. Because human brains can process facial expressions with astonishing speed—in fewer than 40 milliseconds—the psychologists devised a way to slow down this recognition speed so that it would be measurable.

Study subjects looked at a screen through a viewer (similar to the eyepiece of a microscope) which allowed different images to be presented to each eye. Multiple flashing images were presented to one eye, while a static image of a face was shown to the other. The flashing images acted like visual "noise" to suppress the image of the face.

The subjects indicated when they first became aware of seeing a face, and it turns out they became aware of faces with fearful expressions faster than those with neutral or happy ones.

The researchers think that a region of the brain called the amygdala, which has a primary role in processing emotional information, shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images and causes the fearful face to jump out more quickly.

"The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first," said study team member David Zald of Vanderbilt. "We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on."

Zald and his colleagues think the expression of the eyes in a fearful face holds the key to its quick recognition.

"Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing," Zald said. "That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it's only getting a fairly crude representation."

...

Happy expressions were the slowest to be recognized, the study (detailed in the November issue of the journal Emotion) found, which also fits into the evolutionary explanation.

"What we believe is happening is that the happy faces signal safety," Zald said. "If something is safe, you don't have to pay attention to it."

Sumo Wrestling and Tennis

Steven Levitt and Mark Duggan wrote a paper using statistical analysis to look at match rigging in sumo wrestling. Levitt also wrote about this paper in the book Freakonomics. In a new Sports Illustrated report, 150 matches are being investigated by tennis officials. Here is an excerpt of what Steven Levitt has to say about rigging tennis matches:

My hunch, having seen no data and only read this article, is that the number of rigged tennis matches will ultimately turn out to be very small. My reason for this conclusion is that there is something absent from tennis that is present in sumo wrestling: a highly non-linear incentive scheme. The eighth win in a sumo tournament is worth far more than a six, a seventh, a ninth, or a tenth win. As such, the sumo wrestlers themselves can see strong gains from trade. In tennis, however, the only apparent incentive at work is bribes related to gambling. ... The lack of incentive for tennis players to trade wins has to mean that endemic cheating is far less likely. The fact that betting markets are small — especially on unimportant matches– also makes it more difficult to cheat, because big bets will stick out like a sore thumb. In key matches, the prize money stakes are so high that rigging is unlikely.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that steroids are much more common in tennis than match rigging.

Social Cooperativeness and eBay

An excerpt from Scientific Mind:

Every second buyers collectively swap more than $1,839 for products through eBay, sending money to complete strangers with no guarantee that the goods they buy will in fact arrive, let alone in the condition they expect.

As a rule, they are not disappointed. To some economists, this is a borderline miracle, because it contradicts the concept of Homo economicus (economic man) as a rational, selfish person who single-mindedly strives for maximum profit. According to this notion, sellers should pocket buyers’ payments and send nothing in return. For their part, buyers should not trust sellers—and the market should collapse.

Economist Axel Ockenfels of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues have spent the past several years figuring out why this does not happen. It turns out that humans do not always behave as if their sole concern is their personal financial advantage—and even when they do, they consider social motives in the profit-making equation. As Ockenfels has discovered, a sense of fairness often plays a big role in people’s decisions about what to do with their money and possessions, and it is also an essential part of what drives trust in markets full of strangers such as eBay.

Ockenfels’s Equity, Reciprocity and Competition (ERC) theory, which he developed with economist Gary Bolton of Pennsylvania State University, states that people not only try to maximize their gains but also watch to see that they get roughly the same share as others: they are happy to get one piece of cake as long as the next person does not get two pieces. This fairness gauge apparently even has a defined place in the brain. On eBay, however, fairness takes the system only halfway, researchers have now learned; eBay’s reputation system is critical for augmenting the level of trust enough for the market to work.

Circumstance also sculpts behavior, studies have revealed, regardless of natural character traits or values. That is, whether a person is competing in a market of strangers or negotiating with a partner can make a big difference in whether fairness, reciprocity or selfishness will predominate. In fact, the ERC theory hints at ways to alter economic institutions to nudge people to compete—or cooperate—more or less than they currently do.

Economists have long been studying volunteers in the laboratory to determine how and why they make financial decisions. In competitive markets, from the U.S. Stock Exchange to auctions at Sotheby’s, people generally act like Homo economicus, behaving in ways that maximize their own profits.

But inherent selfishness cannot explain behavior in other settings. Take a child who has been given a bag of jelly beans, which her left-out sibling is eyeing jealously. Many children would voluntarily share the candy just to be fair, even though that would mean fewer jelly beans for them. Mathematicians who practice game theory see something similar when they ask people to bargain in a test of social motives called the Ultimatum Game. In this two-player game, player A is endowed with a certain sum, say, $20, if he agrees to share some of it with player B. If B accepts A’s offer, the money is divided accordingly. But if B rejects the offer, both players end up with nothing.

In Ultimatum Game studies, researchers have found that the average offer is about 40 percent of the sum and that the most frequent split is 50–50, analogous to a child giving her sibling half or nearly half of the jelly beans she received. The recipient, B, usually accepts such roughly equal offers. When A offers less than one third of the total, however, B usually reacts with scorn and scraps the deal. This response seems nonsensical to someone who is only out to maximize profit. But it is more logical if people have a competing social concern: fairness. If individuals want a fair split, then accepting significantly less than that would mean forfeiting that objective.

Mindless Eating

An excerpt from Wired.com:

Brian Wansink is no new-age diet doctor. He's the Director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell, where a funhouse of one-way mirrors helps him spy into the hidden psychology behind Americans' prodigious food intake.

Here's a test you can do at home. Take two glasses. Make sure one is stubby, the other tall and skinny. Now pour the same amount of beer in each glass. Chances are you just poured 34 percent more into the short glass. Didn't think you would? He knew you'd say that too. Wansink is in your head.

We reached him over the phone in Ithaca to discuss connections between the size of your plates and those saber-tooth tigers that evolutionary psychologists love.

Wired News: Tell me about this so-called Food and Brand Lab? How is it laboratorial?
Brian Wansink: People typically think of wet labs where there are beakers and crazy scientists with Einstein hair. But the essential thing labs try to determine is causality: if you do something to this hamster, will it respond in this way or that way? We're not studying proteins in rodents. We're studying people using the same scientific method.

The physical space itself has one-way mirrors connected with kitchens that connect into different rooms that I can make look like a den or dining room.

WN: Do you see yourself as a scientist? A freakonomicist? A sociologist?
Wansink: In some cases, if you fall solidly between a bunch of fields, that's something that you just deal with. Any one of those fields will embrace the articles that you publish within that field, but not the others. That's the blessing and the curse of being between those fields.

WN: Do you see yourself as part of the food industry or as an outside critic?
Wansink: We don't take any funding from the food industry but also we don't criticize the food industry either. We believe most of the things that trick people into overeating are often the result of how we set up our own environments. We end up much more guilty of booby-trapping our lives than any company could be.

WN: What are some examples of "booby-trapping"?
Wansink: Take the simple idea of serving bowl. If people leave a serving bowl on their table, even if it's something they don't like, they end up eating 30 percent more than if they move the serving bowl 6 feet away by the stove. Or plate size. People end up serving themselves 25 percent more on a 12 inch plate than on a 10 inch plate. But if you ask them about it, they'll deny that.

WN: A lot of Wired readers spend a lot of time at desks, in front of their computers. Have you done any research on eating at your desk?
Wansink: We've done a couple things with desktop dining. We bring people in and give them pizza and Mountain Dew. But we have them do different tasks like answering email, surfing the web, or talking on the phone while they eat. When they talked on the phone, they ate the least but they liked their food the most. People ended up eating the most and the fastest and liking it the least when they were answering emails. Surfing the web was in-between, like magazine reading.

WN: What kinds of brain processes are driving these things?
Wansink: Automaticity, which says that a lot of our behavior is automatic or scripted once we do something enough times, like driving to work. We just trip the brain macro and go. Automaticity is important because in some ways it suggests that we're not as much the master and commander of all our choices as we think we are. There are certain decision defaults that guide our behavior. We can either acknowledge they happen or deny that they happen. But they are going to happen.

WN: What's the benefit of going on autopilot? What's the advantage to the human animal?
Wansink: We're very much cognitive misers. Our ancestors only allocated enough attention to eating as it required, so they could be vigilantly looking out for mating opportunities or sabertooth tigers that might jump us. That's the same situation we're in, but maybe with fewer saber tooth tigers. We don't want to focus all our concentration on "Must… not… overserve… self." We have a million other things to think about.

WN: What about food labels? Are they helpful?
Wansink: In every study we do, regardless of what focus is, there's about 15-20 percent of the people who look at the food label and read it and process it accurately. Of course, 70 percent of people say they do, but they don't. Plus, if you give someone something and say it's organic or pesticide-free or low-fat, there's a health halo that kicks in. People believe it has fewer calories and is more nutritious, so they eat more of it.

WN: Then how do we keep people from eating all the bad stuff?
Wansink: During the last year or two, I've really changed a lot of my thinking. I used to think that awareness was the solution. I'm now convinced that it has nothing do with behavior change. If awareness were the answer, we'd all be rich, skinny, and athletic.

WN: If how we educate consumers is not the question to be asking, what is the right question?
Wansink: What is the best way to mindlessly change behavior? Simply and metaphorically, we need to put the serving bowl back by the stove. Smaller plates. Taller, skinnier glasses. That's what we want to go for. Things they don't have to think about. It's not about educating people. Part of it relates to economics, I don't mean dollars and cents. I mean the economics of cognitive effort and the economics of physical effort. Here's an example. We eat a lot less of the Oreos that come in mini-packs of 2 or 3 because there's a little cognitive cost and a little physical cost to opening another little package. We have to pause and think.

See Also: Wansink's Book, Mindless Eating

State Prisons have Lowest Murder Rate

An excerpt from the Freakonomics Blog:

Crime rates have a large influence on the choices people make about where to live. The amazing declines in crime over the last fifteen years have been especially strong in big cities, a factor that helped fuel an urban renaissance. Ironically, however, some of the lowest murder rates are found in places where one might suspect just the opposite to be true: U.S. prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics recently released data on the causes of death among inmates in state prisons. In 2005, 56 prisoners were murdered. There are roughly 2 million inmates held in state prisons, meaning that the homicide rate per 100,000 prisoners last year was only 2.8. That number is less than half the rate of New York City (6.6 per 100,000) and an order of magnitude lower than Baltimore (42 per 100,000). Indeed, of the 66 largest cities in the United States, only El Paso, Tex. and Honolulu, Hawaii have lower homicide rates than the state prisons.

Interestingly, suicide rates in prison are about average for the U.S. There were 215 suicides in state prisons in 2005, for a rate of roughly 10 per 100,000. The overall suicide rate for all Americans is 10.6 per 100,000.

A plan to save Hockey

An excerpt from Slate.com:

Much of the time I save by ignoring the NHL every year is spent following British soccer. I've come to love its system of promotion and relegation. The English Premiership, where teams like Manchester United and Liverpool play, is the big leagues. There are several other leagues below it. At the end of each season, the three worst Premiership teams are kicked down to the league immediately below them. The best two teams from that lower league move up; the third team gets promoted after winning a thrilling playoff series.
...

The first order of business: Getting down to your fighting weight. Convene a crack independent panel of hockey people and economists (say, Wayne Gretzky, Alan Greenspan, Alan Thicke, and Neal Peart) to come up with the optimal number of NHL franchises. Some sports economists suggest that a 20-team NHL would be making money hand over fist. I'll use that figure until Thicke and co. come back with their findings. But how do you ditch teams without looking like you're waving the white flag? You contract through relegation.

Tomorrow, issue a press release that says you will eliminate the five teams with the worst records at the end of the 2008-09 season. Then, don't answer media phone calls for a couple of days. After you've milked your moment in the PTI/SportsCenter/talk-radio sun, watch as teams scramble for players. This process will be grossly unfair: The wealthy teams will buy up the talent and the struggling teams will get scraps. Sure, a few teams will spend way above their ability to pay. They'll do it, though, because their very survival will be on the line.

Once the regular season begins, hockey's TV ratings will pass those of the NBA. While pro basketball's worst teams lose on purpose to secure a better position in the draft lottery, the dregs of your league will leave their blood on the ice. Picture it: "Tonight on Versus, it all comes down to one game for the Atlanta Thrashers. Beat the Colorado Avalanche or say goodbye to the NHL." I'd watch that, and I'm not even sure I get Versus.

Women and Happiness

An excerpt from the Freakonomics Blog:

Stevenson and Wolfers released a new study, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” that is bound to generate a great deal of controversy. By almost any economic or social indicator, the last 35 years have been great for women. Birth control has given them the ability to control reproduction. They are obtaining far more education and making inroads in many professions that were traditionally male-dominated. The gender wage gap has declined substantially. Women are living longer then ever. Studies even suggest that men are starting to take on more housework and child-raising responsibilities.

Given all these changes, the evidence presented by Stevenson and Wolfers is striking: women report being less happy today than they were 35 years ago, especially relative to the corresponding happiness rates for men. This is true of working women and stay-at-home moms, married women and those that are single, the highly educated and the less educated. It is worse for older women; those aged 18-29 don’t seem to be doing too badly. Women with kids have fared worse than women without kids. The only notable exception to the pattern is black women, who are happier today than they were three decades ago.

There are a number of alternative explanations for these findings. Below is my list, which differs somewhat from the list that Stevenson and Wolfers present:

1. Female happiness was artificially inflated in the 1970s because of the feminist movement and the optimism it engendered among women. Yes, things have gotten better for women over the last few decades, but maybe change has happened a lot more slowly than anticipated. Thus, relative to these lofty expectations, things have been a disappointment.

2. Women’s lives have become more like men’s over the last 35 years. Men have historically been less happy than women. So it might not be surprising if the things in the workplace that always made men unhappy are now bedeviling women as well.

3. There was enormous social pressure on women in the old days to pretend they were happy even if they weren’t. Now, society allows women to express their feelings openly when they are dissatisfied with life.

4. Related to No. 3 in the preceding paragraph: these self-reported happiness measures are so hopelessly garbled by other factors that they are completely meaningless. The ever-growing army of happiness researchers will go nuts at this suggestion, but there is some pretty good evidence (like this paper by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan) that declarations of happiness leave a lot to be desired as outcome measures.

Stevenson and Wolfers don’t take a stand on what the most likely explanation might be. If I had to wager a guess, I would say Nos. 3 and 4 are the most plausible.

Psychological Experiment Needed

An interesting idea from Scott Lilienfeld:

"The most important psychology experiment that’s never been done would determine whether psychology can save the world.

Yes, that statement is admittedly more than a bit hyperbolic. And this experiment will probably never be conducted, at least not in our lifetimes or even our great-grandchildren’s lifetimes. But it is at least worth pondering as a Gedanken experiment. This experiment rests on three premises for which, I contend, there is substantial, although not yet definitive, support.

Premise #1: The greatest threat to the world is ideological fanaticism. By ideological fanaticism, I mean the unshakeable conviction that one’s belief system and that of other in-group members is always right and righteous, and that others’ belief systems are always wrong and wrongheaded – even to the point that others who hold them must be eliminated. Contra Hitchens (2007), religion per se is not a threat to the world, although certain religious beliefs can provide the scaffolding for ideological fanaticism, as we can see in the contemporary wave of Islamic extremism. As many historians have observed, the three most deadly political movements of the 20th century - Hitler’s Nazism, Mao Tse-Tung’s cultural revolution, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge - were largely or entirely secular. What unites all of these movements, including Islamic extremism, is the deeply entrenched belief that one’s enemies are not merely misguided, but so profoundly misguided that they are wicked and must be liquidated.

Premise # 2. Biased thinking is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for ideological fanaticism. Among the most malignant biases, and those most relevant to ideological fanaticism, are: (1) Naïve realism: the erroneous belief that the world is precisely as we
see it (Ross & Ward, 1996). Naïve realism in turn often leads to the assumption that “because I perceive reality objectively, others who disagree with me must be foolish, irrational, or evil” (see Pronin, Puccio, & Ross, 2002); (2) Bias blind spot (“not me” bias): the erroneous belief that we are not biased, although others are (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004); and (3) Confirmation bias: the tendency to selectively seek out information consistent with one’s beliefs and to ignore, minimize, or distort information that that is not (Nickerson, 1998).

Premise # 3: Critical thinking is the most effective (partial) antidote against ideological fanaticism. By critical thinking, I mean thinking designed to overcome one’s biases, especially the three aforementioned biases.

Regrettably, malignant biases in thinking are virtually never addressed explicitly or even implicitly in educational curricula, which is troubling given that so much of everyday life - left-wing political blogs, right-wing political talk radio, political book buying habits (Krebs, 2007), ad infinitum - reinforce them. Moreover, our selection of friends can generate not only communal reinforcement for our biases (Carroll, 2003), but the erroneous belief that our views are shared by most or all other reasonable people (i.e., a false consensus effect; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). In some Islamic countries, of course, much of the educational curriculum comprises indoctrination into a cultural and religious worldview that implies that one’s enemies are mistaken, blasphemous, and despicable. In the United States, some social critics (e.g., Bloom, 1987; Horowitz, 2007) have charged that the higher educational system typically engenders an insidious indoctrination into left-wing ideology. The merits of these arguments aside, it is undeniable that even among highly educated individuals (a group that includes many or most terrorists; Sageman, 2004), the capacity to appreciate views other than one’s own is hardly normative.

So, the most important psychological experiment never done would (1) begin with the construction of a comprehensive evidence-based educational programme of debiasing children and adolescents in multiple countries against malignant biases, (2) randomly assign some students to receive this program and others to receive standard educational curricula, and (3) measure the long-term effects of this debiasing program on well-validated attitudinal and behavioural measures of ideological fanaticism. To some extent, the goal of this program would be to inculcate not merely knowledge but wisdom (Sternberg, 2001), particularly aspects of wisdom that necessitate an awareness of one’s biases and limitations, and the capacity to recognize the merits of differing viewpoints (e.g., Meacham, 1990 see p.181-211 here).

The greatest obstacle to conducting this experiment, aside from the sheer pragmatic difficulty of administering a large scale curriculum across multiple countries, is the surprising paucity of research on effective debiasing strategies. Nevertheless, at least some controlled research suggests that encouraging individuals to seriously entertain viewpoints other than their own (e.g., “considering the opposite”) can partly immunize them against confirmation bias and related biases (Kray & Galinsky, 2003; Wilson, Centerbar, & Brekke, 2002). Whether such educational debiasing efforts, implemented on a massive scale, would help to inoculate future generations against ideological fanaticism, is unknown. But launching such an endeavor by conducting small-scale pilot studies would seem to be a worthwhile starting point."

Anchoring in Self-Reports

An excerpt from the Social Science and Statistics Blog:

"How's it going?" If you ever tried to compare the answer to this question between the average American ("great") and European ("so-so" followed a list of minor complaints), you hit directly on a big problem in measuring self-reported variables.

Essentially the responses to questions on self-reported health, political voice and so on are determined not only by differences in actual experience, but also by differences in expectations and norms. For a European "so-so" is a rather acceptable status of wellbeing whereas for Americans it might generate serious worries. Similarly people's expectations about health may change with age and responses can thus be incomparable within a population (see this hilarious video on Gary King's website for an example).

A way to address this problem in surveys is to use "anchoring vignettes" that let people compare themselves on some scale, and then also ask them to assess hypothetical people on the same scale. The idea is that ratings of the hypothetical persons reflect the respondents' norms and expectations similarly to the rating of their own situation. Since the hypothetical scenarios are fixed across the respondents any difference in response for the vignettes is due to the interpersonal incomparability.

Using vignettes is better than asking people to rank themselves on a scale from "best" to "worst" health because it makes the context explicit and puts it in control of the experimenter. Gary and colleagues have done work on this issue which shows that using vignettes can lead to very different results than self-reports (check out their site).

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One fix is to use anchoring vignettes that let the interviewer control the context against which ratings are made.

For example, in a 2002 paper on the use of vignettes in health research, Salomon, Tandon and Murray ask respondents to rank their own difficulty in mobility on a scale from 'no difficulty' to 'extreme difficulty'. Then they let respondents apply the same scale to some hypothetical persons using descriptions like these:

"Paul is an active athlete who runs long distances of 20km twice a week and plays soccer with no problems."

"Mary has no problems walking, running or using her hands, arms, and legs. She jogs 4km twice a week."

Using the difference in how people assess these controlled scenarios, one can adjust the rating of people's own health. Doing this across or within various populations then allows to examine systematic differences across groups. These vignettes have been used in recent World Health Surveys in a number of countries.

King, Murray, Salomon and Tandon introduced the vignettes approach and used the measured differences to correct responses to self-rated questions on political efficacy. The idea is that applying the vignettes to a sub-sample is cheap and sufficient to understand systematic differences in self-reports. Their methods are laid out in the paper, but the results show how much difference the vignettes method can make: instead of suggesting that there is a higher level of political efficacy in China than in Mexico (as self-reports would indicate), the vignette method shows the exact opposite because the Chinese have lower standards for efficacy and thus understand the scale differently.

Intuitively that's what we do all the time: once you talked to enough Europeans and Americans about their (and other peoples') well-being you use your mental model to adjust responses and stop taking the European's minor complaints too seriously. Using this insight in survey-based research can make a huge difference too.