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Evolutionary Psychology and, increasingly, behavioral economics spin a lot of intriguing stories explaining foibles and otherwise mysterious behaviors as the byproduct of various tricks nature utilizes to get us to do her bidding. I am on record in this blog as being a fan of this methodology. But I also maintain a healthy skepticism and not just at the tendency to concoct “just-so” stories that often ask us to reformulate our theories of huge chunks of evolutionary history just to explain some nano-economic peculiarity.
Instead, when evaluating some theory of how emotions have evolved to induce us to behave in certain ways, skepticism should be aimed squarely at the basic premise. The theory must come with a convincing explanation why nature would rely on a blunt instrument like emotions as opposed to all of the other tools at her disposal. These questions seemed especially pressing when I read the following article about depression as a tool to blunt ambitions:
Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
Why not a simpler mechanism: just have us figure out that the goal is unattainable and (happily) go do something else? Don’t answer by saying that this emotional incentive mechanism evolved before our brains were advanced enough to do the calculation because the existence of an emotional response indicating the right course of action presupposes that this calculation is being made somewhere in the system.
Even granting that nature finds it convenient to do the calculation sub-(or un-)consciously and then communicate only the results to us, why using emotions? Plants respond to incentives in the environment and they don’t need emotions to do it, presumably they are just programmed to change their “behavior” when conditions dictate. Why would nature bother with such a messy, noisy, and indirect system of incentives rather than just give us neutral impulses?
Finally, you could try answering with the argument that evolution does not find optimal solutions, just solutions that work. But that argument by itself can be made into a defense of everything and we are back to just-so stories.
How often does your mind wander?
Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.
When I was a kid I thought there was something wrong with me because I would “read” pages at a time without paying attention to what I was reading. My eyes would crawl over the words and move from line to line and in a certain real sense I was reading but my conscious mind was completely uninvolved. After a few pages I would notice that I had absorbed nothing.
I still have a wandering mind but over time I have come to view it as a net asset. The key is learning to teach your wandering mind to leave breadcrumbs. Because it knows how to get to places that your conscious mind doesn’t.
Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise. There are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that become active during those creative flashes belong to the default network and the executive control system as well.
The article is worth a read. (akubura ack: Mindhacks)
That’s the title of a new essay by the omnipresent David Levine. An excerpt:
The key difference between psychologists and economists is that psychologists are interested in individual behavior while economists are interested in explaining the results of groups of people interacting. Psychologists also are focused on human dysfunction – much of the goal of psychology (the bulk of psychologists are in clinical practices) is to help people become more functional. In fact, most people are quite functional most of the time. Hence the focus of economists on people who are “rational.” Certain kinds of events – panics, for example – that are of interest to economist no doubt will benefit from understanding human dysfunctionality. But the balancing of portfolios by mutual fund managers, for example, is not such an obvious candidate. Indeed one of the themes of this essay is that in the experimental lab the simplest model of human behavior – selfish rationality with imperfect learning – does an outstanding job of explaining the bulk of behavior.
Jonah Lehrer suggests leveraging “mental accounting” to create a free lunch by imposing a tax on homeowners to pay for energy retro-fitting that they won’t notice because of its small size relative to the price of the house:
But I can already hear the naysayers: Won’t homeowners object? Won’t that just add thousands of dollars to the cost of buying a home?Enter mental accounting, an irrational bias that can be tweaked to produce positive outcomes. Because a home is already such a gigantic purchase, and because the home buying process is already so saturated in peculiar fees (inspection charges, loan points, escrow fees, mortgage broker expenses, etc.) I’d argue that consumers will be much less sensitive to the cost of a home renovation. They’ll barely even notice the $5000 “energy efficiency charge” when it appears on their massive bill from the real estate agent. (Besides, they’ll get a big chunk of the money back as a tax credit.) In other words, they’ll act just like me the last time I stayed at a fancy hotel, when I ordered the internet and ate the peanuts.
It is well-known that when you ask a person to construct a random sequence, say of zeroes and ones, the sequence they create differs in systematic ways from a “truly random” sequence. For example, they exhibit regression to the mean: the person constructing the sequence is too careful to make sure that the short-run averages are 50-50 resulting in too-frequent alternations between zero and one.
Knowing this, here is a simple bet you can use as a money pump at parties. Tell someone to write down a random sequence of heads and tails, and bet them that you can guess the numbers in their seqeunce. A simple strategy that correctly predicts more than 50% of the time is to randomly guess the first number and then guess that each subsequent number is the opposite of the previous. But if you study this article (and its links), you can refine your strategy and do even better.
And soon, as icing on the cake, you can offer your victim favorable odds, say you pay $1.10 every time you are wrong and she pays you $1.00 every time you are right. You will still make money.
Then after you have relieved your fellow revelers of their pocket cash, and they want to turn the tables on you, remember to use one of the coins you have just won to construct your sequence in a truly random fashion.
Behavioral economists Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer have a new paper showing that professional golfers perform differently on putts that are identical in all respects except that one is for par and one is for birdie. What does “identical in all respects mean?” From a summary in the New York Times:
The professors, Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer, seemingly anticipated every “But what about?” reflex from golf experts. The tendency to miss birdie putts more often existed regardless of the player’s general putting or overall skill; round or hole number; putt length; position with respect to the lead or cut; and more.
They find that par putts are made more often than birdie putts. One natural response might be the following. If the putt is for par, then the golfer is, on average, farther behind than if the putt is for birdie. And when you are farther behind you have an incentive to take greater risk. In putting, you can increase the chance of making a putt at the expense of a more difficult next putt if you miss (by say using a firmer stroke.) You would have more incentive to do this when you are farther behind. (Then you care less about the consequences in the event of missing since in that event you are even further behind.)
But they apparently control for this by matching par putts with birdie putts that are identical in terms of the total score that would result from sinking them. They find the bias is still there. (See Column 8 of Table 3 in their paper.)
However, you might say that this means that the bias is not due to loss aversion. Because in these two matched settings the golfer is at the same point relative to any reference point. And if you appeal to “narrow framing” by saying that the players are using a hole-by-hole reference point of par, then the same narrow framing makes it rational to take risks when the putt is for par and play it safe when the putt is for birdie.
A real smoking gun would be the following. Take the birdie and par putts matched in terms of score conditional on sinking the putt. Now ask what is the expected final score, or tournament rank, or prize money, or other measure of success, conditional on whether the putt was for birdie or bogey. The null hypothesis is that these would be the same. Loss aversion would imply that they are not the same, although it is not obvious which direction it would go. (The authors do a back of the envelope calculation to address a related question in their concluding section. They find that the apparent loss aversion matters for final scores but they don’t seem to include any of the controls from the earlier parts of the paper in this calculation.)
(Gatsby greeting: kottke.org)
The possibility is nearing that you can take a pill and remove some memories. (This evening I opened a nice bottle of Yangarra Old Vine Grenache 2005 and removed some memories but that doesn’t count because they will come back tomorrow.)
Media treatment of these advances always focuses on enabling us to erase bad memories. But its not so obvious that bad memories are the ones you want to lose. Bad memories often serve an important purpose. They record a lesson learned. It may be a lesson about what not to do (memories of car accidents after opening a nice bottle of…) It may be a lesson about people not to trust (memories of abuse.)
On the other hand, many good memories just get in the way. I remember vividly the film Leolo. But because of that memory I will never get to enjoy that film again. Likewise I remember the first time I heard Chick Corea’s Children’s Song #6, how to juggle, the end of The Naked and the Dead and the smell of my wife. These are all novelties that are no longer available to me, unless I could erase some good memories.
The good/bad distinction is less important than the following distinction. Is the memory affecting my decisions or not? Whether the memory is good or bad, I want to keep it if it encodes an important lesson helping me continue to make good decisions and avoid bad ones. And I want to erase it if its function is pure consumption. The bad memories I want to lose forever, the good memories I want to repeat.
Psyblog has a rundown of 18 failures of the brain’s system of attention. My favorite:
9. Ironic processes of control
In fact sometimes attention is a real bear. What about when you really want to get something right, like putt the ball, hit a beautiful serve right in the corner or reverse the car into a narrow space? Naturally you concentrate even harder than normal, really focus. Unfortunately that just seems to make things worse: you miss the putt by a mile, frame the ball 50ft in the air and ding the car. What gives? These are what Wegner et al. (1998) call ‘ironic processes of control’. Sometimes too much attention is just as detrimental as too little.
I normaly strive to pay as little attention as possible.
- Next there will be scam-baiter-baiters, etc.
- Psychological time travel. Must have something to do with this.
- Jazz and brain chemistry.
Today I heard about the following experiment. Subjects were given a number to memorize. Half of the subjects were given 7 digit numbers and half were given 2 digit numbers. The subjects were asked to walk across a hallway to another room and report the number to the person waiting there. If they reported the correct number they were going to earn some money. On the way, there was a cart with coupons available that could be redeemed for a snack. There were coupons for chocolate cake and coupons for fruit salad. Subjects could take only one or the other before proceeding to the end of the corridor and completing their participation in the experiment.
63% of the subjects memorizing 7 digit numbers picked the chocolate cake.
Only 49% of the subjects memorizing 2 digit numbers picked the chocolate cake.
I can see two possible explanations of this. One is very interesting one is more prosaic. What’s your explanation? I will post mine, and more information tomorrow.
Update: The experiment is in the paper “Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making” by Shiv and Fedorikhin. Unfortunately I cannot find an ungated version. It is published in the Journal of Consumer Research 1999. I heard about the experiment from a seminar given by David Levine. Here is the paper he presented which is partially motivated by this and other experiments.
Our interpretations are similar. The interesting interpretation is that we have an impulse to pick the chocolate cake and we moderate that impulse with a part of the brain which is also typically engaged in conscious high-level thinking. When it is occuppied by memorizing 7 digit numbers the impulse runs wild.
The less interesting interpretation is that when we dont have the capacity to think about what to choose we just choose whatever catches our attention first or most prominently, independent of how “tempting” it is. One aspect of the study which raises suspicion is the following. In the main treatment, the coupons were on a table where threre was displayed an actual piece of chocolate cake and and a bowl of fruit salad. This treatment gave the results I quoted above. In a separate treatment, there was just a photograph of the two. In that treatment the number of digits being memorized made no difference in the coupon taken.
The authors explain this by saying that the actual cake is more tempting than a picture. That’s plausible, but it would be nice to have something more convincing. Would we get the same result as in the main treatment if instead of chocolate cake and fruit salad we had yogurt and fruit salad?
We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.
Essays about creativity teach us a lot. Not a whole lot about creativity, mind you, but they teach us a lot about the person writing the essay and also the social and political context. Not that David Brooks is a particularly important person to learn a lot about. Instead, treat this more of as an example of how the way in which we talk about unique people really says something more about the way we see ourselves in relation to unique people. (Similarly, this essay will not teach you much about its main subject matter but it will probably reveal stuff about me.)
People, especially intellectuals, are obsessed with what makes people creative. Mostly what makes other people creative. We are surrounded by amazing people who are always coming up with ideas that seem to come from nowhere. It gets worrisome when every day we hear people say ingenious things that would never have occurred to us in a million years. It is comforting to adopt theories of the origin of creativity that puts us on equal footing with them.
These theories come in two varieties.
- Theories that say that those people who seem to be unique are really just ordinary.
- Theories that say that us ordinary people are in fact unique.
And of course these are two ways of saying the same thing. And that’s why these essays don’t really tell us anything about creativity. But the choice of which way to say it reveals a lot about the person saying it.
Psychologists, and especially magicians, know that a lot escapes our attention, even things happening right under our noses. The most impressive example I have seen of this comes out of an experiment in which unwitting subjects are asked for directions by a stranger. In the middle of giving the directions, an obstruction briefly allows the stranger to swap places with another stranger. When the new stranger comes back into view the subject doesn’t notice that he is talking to someone completely different.
Its not just that we don’t notice. Instead, our minds often prefer to explain away the unexpected rather than investigate. A new series of experiments show just how far this can go and they raise deep questions about how we make decisions. In these experiments, subjects were shown photos of two strangers and asked to pick the more attractive photo. Then they were handed the photo they chose and asked to explain why they picked it. But by a sleight-of-hand, the subjects were actually handed the other photo, the one they deemed less attractive.
Not noticing the switcheroo, these subjects went on to point to the photo and give detailed reasons why they prefer the one that they in fact did not prefer.
Here is an article from the New Scientist about this and related experiments. (thanks to Toomas Hinnosaar for the pointer.)
Here is a video of the swapped stranger experiment.
Cheap Talk 