Psychology links
podcast with Adam Mastroianni; Rob Henderson on the appeal of violent males; J. Daniel Sawyer on groups vs. teams; Ian Leslie on reading and the brain
Derek Thompson talks with Adam Mastroianni on problems of reliability in psychology research. They discuss four problems that Mastroianni has written about.
Studies failing to replicate
Studies not asking important questions
Big 5 personality model not outperforming “amateur” models in predicting behavior and outcomes
Theories not leading to real-world effectiveness. For example, “nudges” do not work in practice.
The second half of the podcast, with journalist Daniel Engber, discusses a fascinating and complex case of apparent widespread research fraud.
My thought on Mastroianni’s four problems is that in social science in general, and in psychology in particular, it is really difficult to create scientific test conditions. You want an independent variable that is well-defined, well-measured, and varies in a way that cannot be subject to confounding by other variables.
Take personality psychology. Is extraversion really well-defined? Is it well-measured by asking someone to answer survey questions? Can you test its effect on behavior by comparing two people with different levels of extraversion and believe that otherwise everything else the same?
I should add that there are similar challenges in economics. We are lucky that the laws of supply and demand work, so that I think we can be justifiably confident about them. More sophisticated theories, especially in macroeconomics, are much more fragile.
A 1987 review by Carol Thurston revealed that in the 1970s, half of all romance novels included the rape of the heroine, typically by the hero/love interest.
Fifty Shades of Gray was by far the top selling book of the 2010s. The second-best-selling book of the decade was its sequel, Fifty Shades Darker. The third best selling-book was the last of the trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed.
…My suggestion is that the attraction to violent males is an adaptive strategy to reduce offspring mortality. This impulse is present not just in our great ape cousins, but in ourselves as well. Arousal in response to a violent male reduces the likelihood of infanticide. For our ancestors, it increased the likelihood of survival and reproduction. In other words, the protective strategies that existed in our nearest common ape ancestors (and is still practiced by chimps and gorillas today) persist in modern human females.
I think we are a long way from understanding female attraction to males who are violent in general, and especially to males who are violent to females in particular. If you spout your pet theory in the comments, don’t expect me to agree.
Note that the human attraction to violence is manifest in many ways. Horror movies, celebrations of torture, and so on. Many people look for excuses to commit or witness acts of cruelty.
You can’t manage a tribe, or a family, or an outing into dangerous territory to do laundry/bathing/gathering if you don’t effortlessly think in “group” mode. And you can’t organize a hunt, build a cathedral, or wage war if you can’t slip automatically into “team” mode.
He says that females tend to form groups and males tend to form teams. A group values solidarity. Make sure members feel welcome. Exclude someone whose behavior disturbs the feeling of togetherness.
A team values accomplishment. Make sure that members each do their separate tasks. Get rid of someone who cannot perform.
In brute economic terms, are we deep readers just stubborn, backward-looking losers? Or does being highly skilled at reading and writing become more valuable in a post-literate society? I can see a good case for the latter. After all, increasing scarcity often leads to higher prices.
“Cognitive endurance” is the ability to sustain effortful thinking over a continuous period of time. It’s a crucial skill. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics points out that richer people tend to have it more than poorer people; it’s one of those self-reinforcing effects that make inequality so hard to fix.
His essay looks at how a cultural trend away from reading could be adversely affecting our brains. It relates to Andrey Mir’s work, which I reviewed here.
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“that make inequality so hard to fix.”
Nothing to fix. An unchangeable fact of life. Get over it, people!
"He says that females tend to form groups and males tend to form teams. A group values solidarity. Make sure members feel welcome. Exclude someone whose behavior disturbs the feeling of togetherness. A team values accomplishment. Make sure that members each do their separate tasks. Get rid of someone who cannot perform."
The old saying goes, "To a boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Having read Joyce Benenson, everything is starting to look like "Warriors and Worriers".