Babies Judging Character

The Nov. 22 issue of the journal Nature has an article that discusses how babies can recognize helping behaviors. Here is an excerpt about this article from Livescience.com:

To test if babies could tell a helper from a hinderer, Hamlin had groups of 6-month-olds and 10-month-olds watch a "puppet" show with neutral, anthropomorphized wooden shapes, where one shape, the climber, was trying to get up a hill. In one scenario, one of the other shapes helped the climber get up the hill, but in the other scenario a third shaped pushed the climber down.

"One way we thought that [ability] might come out with babies is just being able to tell the difference between someone who might harm you and someone who might help you," Hamlin told LiveScience.

Babies were then presented with the helper and hinderer shapes so they could pick which one they preferred, and 14 out of 16 10-month-olds and all 12 6-month-olds picked the helper.

While this clear preference doesn't necessarily indicate that this is an innate ability, it shows language isn't necessary for it to develop (since the babies had not yet begun to meaningfully speak) and is also unlikely to be something that is explicitly taught.

"It's highly unlikely that any parent is going to sort of set up these situations for their babies and teach them about it," Hamlin said.

So what role natural ability and experience play in acquiring these skills is uncertain.

"It might be that this is something that babies come to the table with from the beginning, or it might be that they're just set up to learn it incredibly quickly," Hamlin said.

Hamlin and her colleagues also think the ability to tell helpers from hinderers could be the first step in the formation of morals.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud's ideas are seen almost everywhere in popular culture. However, a recent article in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that most university psychology departments view his theories as obsolete. Their survey of 150 top colleges and universities indicates that of 1,175 courses that referenced psychoanalysis, more than 86% were offered in other departments.

Here is an excerpt from a NY Times article discussing this research:

The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.

...

Scott Lilienfeld, a professor in the psychology department at Emory University, said, “I don’t think psychoanalysis is going to survive unless there is more of an appreciation for empirical rigor and testing.”

The humanities and social sciences have welcomed psychoanalysis without caveats. But the report complains of the wide gulf between the academic’s and the psychoanalyst’s approach and vocabulary, which has made their respective applications of Freud’s theories virtually unrecognizable to each other.

Scholars in the liberal arts have tended to use Freud as a springboard to examine issues and ideas never dreamt of in his philosophy — like gender studies, post-colonial studies, French postmodernism, Queer theory and so on.

Mailingering

The detection of malingering (faking bad symptoms for the benefit of personal gain) has always been difficult. A recent article in The Clinical Neuropsychologist investigated faking mental retardation. Here is a description of the article:

... researchers have administered the WAIS-III intelligence test, two tests of psychiatric malingering, and three tests of cognitive malingering to 26 mentally retarded people and 26 non-retarded participants who had no more than 11 years of education.

Half the non-retarded participants were given information about mental retardation and asked to fake being retarded, with a reward of $20 if they managed to do so successfully.

Faking mental retardation wasn't difficult. According to the WAIS-III, even using special indices designed to detect deliberate poor performance, the scores of the non-retarded fakers were indistinguishable from the genuinely mentally retarded. The same was true for the tests of psychiatric malingering.

However, the three tests of cognitive malingering were moderately successful at distinguishing the fakers from the genuinely mentally retarded (although some of the genuinely retarded were also classified as fakers, showing the tests lacked specificity).

An example of a test of cognitive malingering is the 'Test of Memory Malingering'. This requires participants to view 50 pictures and then say which picture in a series of pairs was among those originally viewed. Performance is known to be relatively unaffected by a broad range of neuropsychological impairments which is what makes it a useful measure of malingering.

The researchers concluded: "At present there are almost no other published data on the characteristics of individuals attempting to feign MR, making it difficult to judge how 'realistic' the present malingerers were."

Graue, L.O., Berry, D.T.R., Clark, J.A., Sollman, M.J., Cardi, M., Hopkins, J. & Werline, D. (2007). Identification of feigned mental retardation using the new generation of malingering detection instruments: Preliminary findings. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 21, 929-942.

Commitment Devices

Here is an excerpt from the authors of Freakonomics in the column in the NY Times:

Deborah Kattler Kupetz is a Los Angeles businesswoman and mother of three who tries to watch her weight. That’s why she recently bought two lifelike plastic models of human body fat from a medical-supply company, a one-pound blob and a five-pound blob, and put them on display in her kitchen.

By doing so, Kattler Kupetz wouldn’t seem to have much in common with Han Xin, a legendary Chinese general who lived more than 2,000 years ago. But she does.

Upon entering one battle, Han assembled his soldiers with their backs to a river so that retreat was not an option. With no choice but to attack the enemy head-on, Han’s men did just that.

This is what economists call a commitment device — a means with which to lock yourself into a course of action that you might not otherwise choose but that produces a desired result. While not as severe as Han’s strategy, Kattler Kupetz’s purchase of those fat blobs was a commitment device, too: every mealtime, they force her to envision what a few extra pounds of fat looks like.

Deal or No Deal vs. Jeopardy

An excerpt from a NY Times Column:

So the cause is, essentially, that people eat too much; and the cure is, essentially, to eat less. But bariatric surgery seems to fit in nicely with the tenor of our times. Consider, for instance, the game shows we watch. The old model was “Jeopardy!,” which required a player to beat her opponents to the buzzer and then pluck just the right sliver of trivial knowledge from her vast cerebral storage network. The current model is “Deal or No Deal,” which requires no talent whatsoever beyond the ability to randomly pick a number on a briefcase

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Regression to the Mean part II

Alexander Wolff wrote an article describing his analysis of the Sports Illustrated jinx. Here is an excerpt of his sidebar with some background about the article:

[W]e conducted a thorough exploration of what happened to everyone who has appeared on our cover … On the one hand, we listened as sober statisticians went over the basics of “regression to the mean,” which would explain why a hitter who gets hot enough to make the cover goes into a slump shortly thereafter. On the other hand, we heard from sports psychologist Jim Loehr, who believes that there is an SI Cover Jinx of sorts. Only he calls it ‘a failure to efficiently metabolize heightened expectations’ or some such … In investigating virtually all of SI’s 2,456 covers, we found 913 “jinxes” — a demonstrable misfortune or decline in performance following a cover appearance roughly 37.2 percent of the time. One of the most fascinating things we discovered seemed to buttress Loehr’s contention that the Jinx is more likely to strike athletes in fine-motor-skill sports like golf and tennis than smashmouth sports like boxing. Golfers were “jinxed” almost 70 percent of the time and tennis players after more than 50 percent of their appearances, while boxers suffered barely 16 percent of the time.

Decision Making and Worrying

An excerpt from Livescience.com discussing our ability to make decisions and worrying:

Recent research by Louisa Egan, Laurie Santos and Paul Bloom at Yale University demonstrated with capuchin monkeys and 4-year-old kids that the ability to self-deceive is deeply engrained in us primates. Capuchins will choose one color M&M over another (and let's face it, all M&M's taste the same) and then downgrade the other color, and little kids will do the same with stickers.

Our brains, then, weren't so much designed to make choices as to pretend, no matter what, that we made the right choices. The goal seems to be mental peace; as we all know too well, the time from bad choice to righteousness is very uncomfortable and so the sooner we justify our decisions, the better.

...

Worrying about something as silly as the choice of a new pair of shoes distracts a person from the truly important choices in life, such as how to find a mate and pass on genes.

Also, the worried brain is a useless organ. When the time comes to make evolutionarily significant decisions, such as jumping out of the way of a car and making sure your genes aren't eliminated form the gene pool, it's a good idea to have a clear head. One doesn't want anxiety about the choice of paper vs. plastic to get in the way of feeding the baby, that packet of one's genes.

Podcasts and Interesting Videos

Here are some interesting podcasts:
Geneticist Armand Leroi discusses James Watson's remarks on race and intelligence;
Steve Pinker discusses the relationship between language and thought,
and ABC radio a podcast on mental health and physical well-being.

Haidt's 5 Moral Systems

Jon Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has written about morality. Specifically, he discusses 5 factors of morality. A video of his description can be found at the New Yorker 2012 Conference. Here is an excerpt of a NY Times description of his work:

Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures...

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.

The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt’s view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness...

He is aware that many people — including “the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology” — equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain...

Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)

They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.

Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.

Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories.

Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group’s traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups.

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. “A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,” he said. “I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco — most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.”

Placebo Effect in Athletes

The Economist discusses a recent study looking at giving athletes a placebo that they believed was going to assist them in there performance. Here is an excerpt:

In their new experiment, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, he and his colleagues simulated a sporting competition by pitting four teams of ten athletic young men against each other in a pain-endurance test. With a tourniquet strapped around one forearm, these men had to squeeze a hand-spring exerciser repeatedly until pain forced them to stop. Their scores, measured by the time they managed to keep going, were averaged over the whole team.

One of the teams received a morphine injection just before training sessions held two weeks and one week before the contest, and an injection of saline solution on the big day, along with the suggestion that it was morphine. Another received the same regime, but the saline was combined with naloxone, an opiate-blocking drug. The remaining teams received either no treatment at all, or the placebo on competition day alone.

Members of the team that received morphine followed by a placebo were able to endure significantly more pain during the competition than any of their rivals. In particular, those injected with naloxone did no better than the other two control groups. This finding supports the theory that placebos reduce pain by encouraging the brain to produce more natural opiates than usual.

Although hand-spring squeezing is not yet an Olympic sport, it is a good enough surrogate to suggest that these effects might be shown in real competitions, too. So the question is, how useful would Dr Benedetti's observations be, should they be taken up by an unscrupulous but legalistic coach?

That depends how cynical athletes really are. The placebo effect depends on what the recipient believes is happening, so he would have to think he was cheating, even though, strictly, he wasn't. Also, if the practice became widespread, it would be hard to maintain the fiction that the injection on competition day contained the drug. On the other hand, as Dr Benedetti observes, doctors have been getting away with giving placebos for millennia, and their patients still fall for it. Perhaps if it were sold to athletes as a form of homeopathy, they would not ask too many awkward questions.

Odds Ratios

The Language Log Blog has an interesting discussion of odds ratios being reported by the media:

A few years ago, some researchers from Georgetown University published in the New England Journal of Medicine a study that demonstrated systematic race and sex bias in the behavior of America's doctors. Needless to say, this finding was widely reported in the media:

Washington Post:	"Physicians said they would refer blacks and women to heart specialists for cardiac catheterization tests only 60 percent as often as they would prescribe the procedure for white male patients."
L.A. Times:	"[Doctors] refer blacks and women to heart specialists 60% as often as they would white male patients."
N.Y. Times:	"Doctors are only 60% as likely to order cardiac catheterization for women and blacks as for men and whites."

Now let't try a little test of reading comprehension. The study found that the referral rate for white men was 90.6%. What was the referral rate for blacks and women?

If you're like most literate and numerate people, you'll calculate 60% of 90.6%, and come up with .6*.906 = .5436. So, you'll reason, the referral rate for blacks and women was about 54.4 %.

But in fact, what the study found was a referral rate for blacks and women of 84.7%.

What's going on?

It's simple -- the study reported an "odds ratio". The journalists, being as ignorant as most people are about odds and odds ratios, reported these numbers as if they were ratios of rates rather than ratios of odds.

Let's go through the numbers. If 90.6% of white males were referred, then 9.4% were not referred, and so a white male's odds of being referred were 90.6/9.4, or about 9.6 to 1. Since 84.7% of blacks and women were referred, 13.3% were not referred, and so for these folks, the odds of referral were 84.7/15.3 ≅ 5.5 to 1. The ratio of odds was thus about 5.5/9.6, or about 0.6 to 1. Convert to a percentage, and you've got "60% as likely" or "60 per cent as often".

The ratio of odds (rounded to the nearest tenth) was truly 0.6 to 1. But when you report this finding by saying that "doctors refer blacks and women to heart specialists 60% as often as they would white male patients", normal readers will take "60% as often" to describe a ratio of rates -- even though in this case the ratio of rates (the "relative risk") was 84.7/90.6, or (in percentage terms) about 93.5%.