Category Archives: Cognitive psychology

Compared to What?

Cognitive psychology, Politics, ,

According to an October 22-24 The Economist/YouGov poll, 51% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of George W. Bush, while only 42% have an unfavorable opinion of him. Journalist Jacob Sugarman calls this “the single most depressing poll of Trump’s presidency.” He implies that our current president is implicated in this result.

George W. Bush told the American people the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law. It resulted in the deaths of 4400 Americans and 268,000 Iraqis at a cost conservatively estimated at $2 trillion. It set off chaos in the Middle East and led indirectly to the formation of ISIS, sponsors of a terrorist threat that continues 14 years later. According to a Gallup poll, only 6% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of Bush when his presidency ended in January 2009. But now a majority of Democrats have a favorable opinion of him. How can we explain this?

Human judgment is context dependent. Today’s temperature will feel warm or cool depending on what the temperature was yesterday. Both assimilation and contrast effects can occur. If today’s temperature is similar to yesterday’s, it may be assimilated to yesterday’s and the two days perceived as more alike that they actually were. However, if there is a noticeable difference between yesterday’s and today’s temperatures, a contrast effect occurs, with the result that today’s temperature feels cooler when it follows a warmer day than when it follows a colder day.

What determines whether assimilation or contrast will occur? Assume we are comparing an object of judgment, called the target, to a standard of comparison. According to the inclusion/exclusion model of Norbert Schwarz and Herbert Bless, if the standard of comparison can be included within the target group, assimilation will occur, and the evaluation of the target will shift in the direction of the standard. However, if the standard cannot be included within the target—that is, if it is excluded—the target will be contrasted with the standard and its evaluation will shift in the opposite direction.

If that sounds complicated, here’s an example. In a 1992 study, Schwarz and Bless encouraged participants to think about a corrupt politician. They used German politicians, but an American example might be Richard Nixon. Participants were then asked to judge the trustworthiness of politicians in general, and the trustworthiness of several specific politicians. In this example, Richard Nixon is the standard by which other politicians are judged. Since Nixon is a member of the category of politicians, he is assimilated to the target group, and politicians in general are evaluated more negatively. However, when participants are asked to judge other politicians, say, Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, contrast effects occur. Richard Nixon is not Gerald Ford; they are mutually exclusive. If Nixon comes to mind when Ford is evaluated, they will be contrasted and Ford will be seen as more trustworthy than he would have been if the participants had not been thinking about Nixon.

According to an August 2017 survey by the American Psychological Association, a majority (59%) of American adults consider this to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember. The target of the Economist/You Gov survey was George W. Bush. Let’s assume that Donald Trump’s recent behavior has been very salient to most Americans. Even though respondents were not asked to compare Bush to Trump, he is now the standard to which all other presidents are compared. Since Bush is not Trump, he will be contrasted with Trump. In the survey, 91% of Democrats had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, while 7% had a favorable opinion. Therefore, we can expect Bush to be evaluated more favorably by Democrats than he would have been had Trump not been our president.

The argument here is that Democrats consider Donald Trump to be so corrupt and so incompetent that, while he has a negative effect on the evaluation of politicians in general (an assimilation effect), he has a positive effect on the evaluation of all other specific politicians (a contrast effect). Compared to Donald Trump, any other past president looks good to Democrats, even George W. Bush.

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A Plague on Both Your Houses

The Stress of Politics

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Implicit Bias Against Atheists?

Cognitive psychology, Prejudice and discrimination, Religion, ,

Consider the following problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which alternative is more probable?

A. Linda is a bank teller.

B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

“A” is the correct answer. Since there are undoubtedly some bank tellers who are not feminists, “B” cannot be more probable than “A”. To answer “B” is to commit a conjunction fallacy, since the conjunction of two events (bank teller and feminist) cannot be more probable than one of them (bank teller) alone. We commit this error because we associate the other qualities mentioned in the description with being a feminist.

Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky and his colleagues used the conjunction fallacy to measure what they call “extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists.” Participants were 3,256 people from the United States and 12 other countries. (See the chart below for the countries). They read a description of a man who tortured animals as a child. As an adult, he engaged in several acts of violence, ending with the murder and mutilation of five homeless people. Half the participants from each country were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who is a religious believer.

The other participants were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who does not believe in god(s).

“B” is always the wrong answer, but the authors infer that if more people give this incorrect answer when the target is described as not believing in a god than when he is described as a religious believer, then the participants are (collectively) biased against atheists. Presumably, the respondents believe serial murderers are more likely to be atheists than religious people. Here are the results.

The chart shows the probability of a participant answering “B” when the target is an atheist compared to when he is religious, while statistically controlling for the participant’s gender, age, socioeconomic status and belief in god(s). There was bias against atheists in 12 of the 13 countries, the exception being Finland. Overall, people are about twice as likely to commit the conjunction fallacy when the target is described as an atheist (61%) than when he is described as religious (28%).

What is the effect of the respondents’ own belief in god(s) on answers to these questions? In the chart above, the individual’s certainty of the existence of a god increases from left to right. People at all levels of religious belief show prejudice against atheists, including atheists themselves—that is, people at the left who answered that the probability of a god’s existence is zero.

The authors did several followup studies. Using the same research method, they found that:

  • People are more likely to assume that a person who does not believe in god(s) is a serial murderer than a person who does not believe in evolution, the accuracy of horoscopes, the safety of vaccines, or the reality of global warming.
  • People are more likely to assume that a priest described as having molested young boys for decades is a priest who does not believe in god than a priest who does believe in god.

The assumption that morality depends on religious belief seems to be quite widespread, since it was obtained in religiously diverse cultures, including Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim societies. This association between atheism and bad behavior is all the more impressive given the lack of empirical evidence for a moral effect of religious beliefs.

On the other hand, 28% of the respondents who were given that choice saw the target as more likely to be a murderer if he was described as a religious believer than when his religiosity was not specified. This suggests that a minority of respondents associate religiosity with violence.

The authors describe their results as demonstrating an “intuitive” prejudice against atheists. They don’t indicate whether an intuitive belief operates consciously or without conscious intention. However, this prejudice seems to have some of the characteristics of an unconscious or implicit bias. It was measured using a fairly subtle technique. Participants were never asked to directly compare atheists with religious believers (although when the target was described as just a teacher, participants may have made the default assumption that he was religious). Furthermore, it is a bias shared by atheists themselves, suggesting that participants are repeating a popular cultural assumption, rather than reporting a belief that they have thoughtfully considered.

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The Implicit Association Test: Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Teaching Bias, Part 1

A Darker Side of Politics

Living in the Danger Zone

Cognitive psychology, Politics, , ,

We often receive information about alleged benefits or harms of existing or possible states of affairs. We may be told that North Korea has missiles that can reach the United States or that carbon sequestration and storage is a viable strategy for preventing climate change. How do we determine whether such information is credible?

One basic principle is that “bad is stronger than good.” We are more likely to pay attention to and remember negative information than positive information. The costs of mistakenly believing hazard information, unnecessary precautions, are much lower than the costs of mistakenly disregarding such information, which may include injury or death. There is no such asymmetry between the costs of mistakenly accepting or dismissing positive information. We are more vigilant toward hazards because the stakes are higher.

This is related to the principle of loss aversion in decision making. We consider losing $1000 to be a more negative outcome than gaining $1000 is positive. The larger the amount, the greater this disparity. According to Kahneman, loss aversion is a product of our evolutionary history: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

In 2014, the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences published a target article by political scientist John Hibbing and two colleagues presenting research suggesting that conservatives are more physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative information than liberals. This negativity bias causes conservatives to prefer stability rather than change, which can be seen as threatening. The article was followed by 26 commentaries by social scientists, most of which questioned details of Hibbert’s argument, but did not seriously challenge its basic assumptions.

A new article by Daniel Fessler and others explores the implications of negativity bias (or threat bias) for information processing. They conducted two separate, but similar, studies involving a total of 948 participants recruited through the internet. Particpants read 16 statements, half of which claimed the existence of a benefit while the others claimed to have identified a hazard. The majority of the statements (14 of them) were false. Here are two examples.

  1. People who own cats live longer than people who don’t.
  2. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. have increased since September 11, 2001.

Respondents were asked whether they believed each statement on a 7-point scale ranging from absolutely certain the statement is false to absolutely certain it is true. They were also asked judge the magnitude of each benefit or hazard on a 7-point scale running from small to large. (The benefit and hazard items had been matched in magnitude on the basis of previous testing.) The authors created an index of credulity by multiplying the judged truth of the statements by the magnitude of their benefit or hazard. Negativity bias was computed by subtracting the credulity of the eight benefits from the credulity of the eight hazards.

The authors constructed a summary measure of liberalism-conservatism combining input from four measures: an issues scale asking them to evaluate 28 political concepts, i.e., gun control; a social principles index asking them to choose between 13 social principles, i.e., punishment vs. forgiveness; self-ratings on a 9-point liberalism-conservatism scale; and political party affiliation.

Replicating Fessler’s previous research, they found that, for the sample as a whole, hazards were rated as more credible than benefits. As they predicted, there was a positive relationship between conservatism and this negativity bias. Breaking the effect down, they found that conservatives rated hazards as more believable than liberals, but there was no difference between liberals and conservatives in the credibility of benefits.

Of the four components of the conservatism measure, the issues index accounted for greatest portion of its relationship to negativity bias. This index contained three types of items: social conservatism, i.e., school prayer; military conservatism, i.e., drone strikes; and fiscal conservatism, i.e., tax cuts. As shown in the chart below, only social conservatism was strongly related to negativity bias. Fiscal conservatism was unrelated to it, while the relationship between military conservatism and negativity bias was positive but not statistically significant.

(For you statistics nerds, in these charts, the small squares indicate the sizes of the correlations and the lines indicate the confidence intervals. If the line crosses zero, the relationship is not statistically significant. Study 1 is on the left; Study 2 on the right.)

It is impossible to state, in the abstract, whether conservatives have a better strategy than liberals for processing information about potential hazards. If we had independent evidence suggesting that the hazard information were true, the conservative strategy would be more rational, while the liberal approach would be more sensible if the information were known to be false.

We can say, however, that their negativity bias leaves social conservatives vulnerable to alarmist rhetoric such as candidate Donald Trump’s often repeated claim that the homicide rate in the U. S. is the highest it has been in 45 years, or his attempt to publicize crimes committed by immigrants.

In a previous post, I reported that conservatives are more likely than liberals to rate syntactically correct but meaningless statements—technically known as “bullshit”—as profound. There is also evidence that conservative websites contain a higher percentage of “fake news.” It would be interesting to know how many of these fake news stories report alleged threats to people’s well-being. There may be a pattern here.

Much of today’s most alarming rhetoric deals with threats of terrorism. Since 2001, an average of 40% of Americans report that they fear they will be victims of terrorism. The actual probability of perishing in a terrorist attack—about one in four million per year—contrasts favorability with more prosaic dangers such as being killed in an auto accident or drowning in the bathtub. Fear of terrorism imposes enormous financial and social costs on our society, way out of proportion to the actual threat. These fears are ripe for exploitation by politicians. How much freedom have Americans already surrendered in the name of false security? As Timothy Snyder notes in On Tyranny, “It is easy to imagine situations in which we we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we . . . vote for a fascist.”

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit: A Footnote

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Cognitive psychology, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

The other day in California, last week, a woman, 66 years old, a veteran was killed, raped, sodomized, tortured and killed by an illegal immigrant. We have to do it! We have to do something! We have to do something!

Presidential candidate Donald Trump

Judgmental heuristics are the simple rules or mental shortcuts that people use to make decisions quickly and efficiently. One of those rules is the availability heuristic, which states that the frequency of an object or event is judged on the basis of the number of instances retrieved from memory and the ease with which they come to mind. The easier it is to think of examples, the more frequent the object or event is assumed to be.

The availability heuristic often leads to correct inferences. In the northeastern United States, robins are in fact more common than other birds. But availability can be misleading. For example, when estimating the frequency of various causes of death, people overstimate dramatic events such as homicides and traffic accidents and underestimate less public illnesses such as strokes and diabetes. The presumed explanation is media salience. Estimates of the frequency of causes of death are highly correlated with space devoted to types of death in recent newspapers.

The availability heuristic is one explanation for for a common cognitive error known as the base-rate fallacy. This refers to a tendency to overgeneralize from individual examples while ignoring statistical base rates. A specific case is more emotionally interesting and easier to remember; it is more available. A statistical statement is not as interesting. Base rates are usually underweighted, and sometimes completely disregarded, especially when specific instances are available. It follows that if propagandists want people to overestimate the frequency of an event, they should publicize examples of that event, preferably with vivid pictures and lots of memorable details.

Availability biases can influence social policy. An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events that starts with a small number of cases that are heavily publicized by the media, leading to public panic and large-scale government action. One goal of terrorism is to start availability cascades. An availability campaign occurs when some pressure group, for altruistic or self-interested reasons, tries to instigate an availability cascade.

I was reminded of this by last Tuesday night’s address to Congress when President Trump introduced four alleged victims of crimes committed by immigrants who were seated in the audience and announced an executive order creating an office called Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) within the Department of Homeland Security, whose purpose is to make public “a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” (He didn’t say that the “aliens” had to be in the country illegally.) Right-wing news organizations have been heavily reporting real or fake crimes committed by immigrants for several years.

Apparently the President thinks that one way to increase support for his immigration policies—the wall along the Mexican border, mass deportations, the Muslim ban—is to induce Americans to overestimate the frequency of crimes committed by immigrants. To this end, he is starting an availability campaign.

What is the actual base rate of crimes by immigrants? Research consistently shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. Robert Adelman and his colleagues analyzed data from 200 metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. They found that as immigration increased, rates of murder, robbery, burglary and larceny decreased, and rates of aggravated assault remained the same.

In a forthcoming study, Charles Kubrin and Graham Ousey conducted a meta-analysis combining the results of over 50 studies examing the relationship between immigration and crime published between 1994 and 2014. Their conclusion: “More immigration equals less crime.” However, the rate of crime by second generation immigrants–that is, the children of immigrants–does not differ from than of other Americans.

Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl studied why immigrants commit crime at lower rates than non-immigrants. They concluded that people who self-select to immigrate to the U. S. are less criminally active than the native born population, and are more responsive to deterrents to crime, such as the threat of a jail sentence.

This is not the only instance in which the president has presented misleading information apparently intended to persuade us that the exception is the norm. He has criticized the media for “underreporting” acts of terrorism by Muslims, when in fact the opposite is the case. In last week’s address, he cited an unrepresentative 116% increase in health insurance premiums in Arizona to support his claim that the Affordable Care Act was failing.

Anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda, 1937.

Trump’s behavior is a classic example of scapegoating. Scapegoating refers to the singling out of an individual or group for blame that is not deserved. Scapegoating is presumed to be responsible for the increase in prejudice and violence toward already stigmatized minority groups during economic hard times.

Until 1938, it was the policy of Hitler’s Ministry of Justice to forward all criminal indictments of Jews to the press office to be publicized. With VOICE, the U. S. now has its own government-run ministry of propaganda given the mission of convincing us of something that isn’t true—that immigrants commit more crimes than native born Americans.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Trump’s Trump Card

Heavy Traffic

Cognitive psychology, Environment, ,

It should be fairly evident that living next to a busy road is not a great idea. In 2010, the Health Effects Institute examined over 700 studies and found sufficient evidence to link traffic pollution to childhood asthma, cardiovascular diseases and impaired lung function. Evidence linking traffic exposure to cancer was deemed inconclusive.

A new epidemiological study by Dr. Hong Chen and colleagues found that living near a major road is associated with an increased risk of dementia. The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. The authors tracked all people between the ages of 20 and 85 living in Ontario, Canada (6.6 million people) between 2002 and 2012. Medical records were examined to determine whether they were diagnosed with dementia, Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis. Their proximity to a major roadway was determined by postal code. The data analysis statistically controlled for alternative explanations such as socioeconomic status, education, smoking, diabetes and body mass index.

Living near a major highway was associated with dementia, but not Parkinson’s disease or MS. They identified 243,611 cases of dementia. Those who lived within 50 meters showed a 7% increase in the risk of dementia; those between 50 and 100 meters, a 4% increase; and those between 100 and 200 meters, a 2% increase. The greatest risk was found among those who had lived within 50 meters of the roadway for the entire decade, a 12% increase in the likelihood of dementia. According to their analysis, for those who lived within 50 meters, up to 1 in 10 cases (7-11%) of dementia were accounted for by traffic exposure.

Of course, this is a correlational study, and it is possible that other uncontrolled variables account for part of the effect. The fact that they measured diagnoses of dementia raises the possibility that the decision to seek treatment was a possible contaminant. However, it is not obvious why, in a country with universal healthcare, people living near major highways would be more likely to seek treatment.

The authors suggest that the effect may be due to a combination of air pollution and noise. They found that long-term exposure to two common pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, is related to dementia, but the effect is not large enough to explain their results. Studies have found toxic nanoparticles linked to Alzheimer’s disease in human brain tissue.

Noise is an environmental stressor that has been linked to declines in cognitive performance. Heat and crowding are two other stressors that may be plausibly linked to heavy traffic. A previous study found that children whose schools were located near major roadways in Barcelona showed smaller improvements in cognitive performance than other children from the same city.

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Unsafe Exposure

I Cough in Your General Direction

Get the Lead Out, Part 1

Bullshit: A Footnote

Cognitive psychology, Media, Politics, ,

A year ago, I wrote a short piece entitled “Bullshit,” about research using Gordon Pennycook’s Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). The BSR measures willingness to see as profound ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements, such as “Imagination is inside exponential space time events.” The scale also includes ten mundane but meaningful statements (“A wet person does not fear the rain”) to correct for the tendency to rate every statement as profound. Pennycook defines bullshit sensitivity as the difference between the ratings of the ten pseudo-profound bullshit statements and the ten mundane statements.

In January 2016, two German psychologists, Stefan Pfattheicher and Simon Schindler, asked 196 American volunteers recruited on the internet to complete the BSR. Participants also rated, on 5-point scales, their favorability toward six American presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. Finally, they rated themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism.

Above are the correlations between scores on the BSR and the political attitude measures. The darker yellow bars are the most important, since they are the correlations with bullshit sensitivity, which control for agreement with the mundane statements. Favorable ratings of the three Republican candidates and of conservatism were all positively related to bullshit receptivity. In other words, conservatives appear to be more easily impressed by bullshit. Democratic partisans, on the other hand, were not as susceptible to bullshit.

These are correlations. They do not mean that conservatism causes bullshit receptivity, or vice versa. However, they do suggest that conservatives may be more likely to accept statements as profound without thinking carefully about what they actually mean.

The Need For Cognition Scale measures people’s tendency to engage in and enjoy critical thinking. (One of the items reads, “I only think as hard as I have to.”) In an interview, social psychologist John Jost reported the results of a not-yet-published review of 40 studies in which 25 of them found a significant tendency for conservatives to be lower in need for cognition.

To be fair, I should report that Dan Kahan, in a highly publicized study, found no differences between liberals and conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test, a measure of a person’s ability to resist seemingly obvious, but wrong, conclusions. (“If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The answer is not 100 minutes.) However, Jost claims that 11 other studies showed that liberals outperform conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test.

These studies may be relevant to current concerns about Americans’ susceptibility to fake news and the possibility that we are living in a “post-truth” era. The Oxford Dictionary has chosen post-truth, defined as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as its 2016 word of the year. Last week, a man blasted a Washington pizza shop with an assault rifle after reading a fake news story that the shop was the home of a child sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton.

The editors of BuzzFeed News analyzed 1,145 stories forwarded through Facebook but originating in three left-wing (Addicting Information, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%), three right-wing (Eagle Rising, Freedom Daily and Right Wing News), and three mainstream (CNN, ABC and Politico) sources of political news. The fact that these stories were forwarded suggests that the person who did so was impressed by them. Two people independently rated each story as mostly true, mostly false, or a mixture of true and false statements. Differences of opinion were resolved by a third reader. The results showed more fake news at the right-wing sites.

The study is flawed. There is no assurance that the nine chosen sites are representative of all sites within the three categories, and the authors don’t say how they knew a story was true or false. Nevertheless, convergent evidence from different sources seems to points to the same conclusion: Conservatives are more willing consumers of bullshit, including fake news stories.

Most articles about fake news end with the recommendation that mainstream journalists be more aggressive in identifying false claims made by politicians and pundits. However, surveys show that conservatives are more likely than liberals to distrust mainstream news sources. Mr. Trump may have neutralized this approach by telling his followers that the mainstream media peddle bullshit—which, in fact, they sometimes do.

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit

Framing the Debates

Guarding the Hen House

“Here I Am. Do You See Me?”

Cognitive psychology, Social psychology,

Maybe because of the continuing increase in economic inequality in the United States, social psychologists are taking a greater interest in social class differences in behavior. I have previously written about studies showing that upper class people are less likely to help a person in need than lower class individuals, and are more likely to engage in unethical behavior—behavior that is potentially harmful to others.

A new article by Pia Dietze and Eric Knowles of New York University suggests an explanation for these differences: Upper class individuals regard others as less motivationally relevant—that is, less “potentially rewarding, threatening or otherwise worth attending to”—than lower class members do. If that is the case, then members of the upper clases should pay less attention to other people they meet in public places.

In the first of three studies, Dietze and Knowles asked 61 college students to take a walk around the streets of Manhattan “testing” the Google Glass, a device that fits over the right eye and records what the person is looking at. Six independent judges watched these videos and measured the participants’ social gazes—the number and duration of their looks at the people they passed. The students were asked to classify themselves as either poor, working class, middle class, upper-middle class or upper class. These five labels were treated as a 5-point continuous scale.

Results showed that the number of social gazes did not differ by social class, perhaps indicating that it is necessary to at least glance at passers-by to successfully navigate the sidewalk. However, as predicted, the higher the self-reported social class of the participants, the longer the time they spent looking at the people they passed.

Is this only because other people are less “motivationally relevant” to upper class participants? After reading this study, I thought about sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of civil inattention. Goffman said that when we pass strangers, we glance at them briefly, but then quickly look away, in order to avoid the appearance of staring at them. Are upper class children more likely to have been taught that it’s not polite to stare? Fortunately, the other two studies the authors report don’t involve face-to-face interaction and are not subject to this alternative explanation.

In the second study, 158 participants were asked to look at several visually diverse street scenes while fitted with an eye-tracking device which measured which part of the scene they were looking at, and for how long. The authors recorded the time spent looking at both people and things (cars, buildings, etc.) in the environment. Time spent looking at things did not differ significantly by social class, but participants who classified themselves in the lower classes spent more time looking at people. This is illustrated in the chart below, which compares working class and upper-middle class participants. (Study 2a involved 41 New York City scenes, while Study 2b added an equal number of scenes from London and San Francisco.)

In the last study, 397 paid internet volunteers participated in a flicker task. On each trial, participants were shown two rapidly alternating slides consisting of pictures of a person’s face and five other objects. On some trials, the two slides were identical, but on others, one of the six pictures—either the person or one of the five things—was different. Participants were asked to press a key as quickly as possible indicating whether the slides were the same or different, and the computer measured how rapidly participants responded. It was expected that lower class participants would be better at detecting changes among the people, but not among the things. This hypothesis was confirmed.

Although the flicker task has no obvious relevance to everyday life, the fact that the lower class participants detected changes in the faces more rapidly than the upper class participants suggests that they were more likely to be looking at the faces, rather than some other part of the slide. The fact that the differences were in milliseconds—a millisecond is a thousandth of a second—suggests that this is an automatic response rather than one that is under conscious control.

The chart above is from an article by Michael Kraus and two colleagues summarizing research on class differences in behavior. The present studies deal with cognition. Lower class people’s cognition is said to be contextual because it is directed at the social environment, probably because their lives are controlled more by outside forces, such as bosses and government policies. Upper class people are more likely to be paying attention to themselves and their own thoughts. It is hypothesized that this explains the differences in prosocial (helpful) behavior among the lower classes vs. selfish behavior among the upper classes that I noted in the opening paragraph. It may also help to explain class differences in political party affiliation and voting behavior, as long as voters are not confused or misled about which policies the candidates actually favor.

You may also be interested in reading:

Class Act

Me First

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Longevity, By the Book

Cognitive psychology, Health, Media,

Here’s good news for readers. Book reading, sometimes maligned as a sedentary behavior that may harm your health, actually increases your life expectancy. This  according to a study by Avni Bavishi and two colleagues from the Yale University School of Public Health. Since this is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation, it’s worth looking at their methods in some detail.

The data came from 3635 participants in the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of adults over 50. They were interviewed every other year between 2001 and 2012, during which time 27.4% of them died. Participants were asked how many hours they spent during the past week reading books. They were asked the same question regarding periodicals (magazines and newspapers). The average time spent reading books was 3.92 hours a week; for periodicals, it was 6.10 hours. The correlation between book and periodical reading was modest (r = .23).

The authors predicted that the effect of book reading on life expectancy would be mediated by cognitive engagement; that is, reading books causes you to think about them, which in turn increases your longevity. Cognitive engagement was measured by performance on eight mental tasks, including immediate and delayed recall, backward counting and object naming.

In a correlational study such as this, it is important to control for alternative explanations that might cause both reading and longevity. Three variables predicted greater book reading in their sample. Women read more than men, people with more education read more, and so did higher income people. The statistical analysis held these three variables constant, plus an impressive list of others: age, race, visual acuity, marital status, job status, depression, self-rated health, and the presence of seven health problems (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.). The analysis also controlled for cognitive engagement scores at the beginning of the study.

The results showed that book reading increased longevity, and that the more time you spend reading, the greater the effect. The effect of reading books was greater than that of reading magazines and newspapers. By the end of the study, 27% of the book readers had died, compared to 33% of non-readers. Comparing book readers and non-readers at the time at which 20% of the participants had died, the readers had a survival advantage of 23 months.

fig-1-survival-advantage-associated-with-book-reading-unadjusted-survival-curves-jpgAs predicted, the effect of book reading on longevity was mediated by cognitive engagement. (See this earlier post for an explanation of mediational analysis.) The researchers suggested two ways in which reading books increases cognitive engagement. First of all, book reading is deep reading, meaning that the greater length of books encourages readers to ask questions as they go along and to draw connections between various parts of the book. Secondly, book reading promotes empathy with the persons you are reading about, which might lead to greater social intelligence.

Of course, it’s impossible to rule out all possible alternative explanations for these results. I’m troubled by the lack of control for the participants’ social capital—the sum total of people’s involvement in community life-–which is known to be related to good health and life expectancy. However, the relationship between social capital and reading is unclear. You could argue that people who are involved in the community have less time to read. On the other hand, community involvement may encourage reading. People may read books in order to discuss them with other people, who in turn may suggest new books to read.

If these findings are valid, they raise several interesting questions. For example, would listening to audiobooks produce the same survival advantage? That is, is it the act of reading that is beneficial, or is it the content, regardless of how it is accessed? Of course, content must have some effect, since periodicals were less beneficial than books. Future researchers might want to look at the differences between fiction and non-fiction, or between genres or topics. Mysteries, for example, would seem to encourage deep reading.

As the authors note, the average American over 65 spends 4.4 hours per day watching television. In a 2012 study similar to this one, Peter Meunnig and his colleagues found that TV viewing reduced longevity. Specifically, each hour of daily viewing cost their participants about 1.2 years of life expectancy. The effect was mediated by greater unhappiness, reduced social capital and lower confidence in social institutions. If people could be persuaded to spend some of that 4.4 hours reading instead, they might be doing themselves a favor in more ways than one.

You may also be interested in reading:

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Bullshit

Name That Cognitive Bias

Cognitive psychology, Social psychology

Cognitive and social psychologists have identified an amazing number of cognitive biases to which we are all prone, especially when we are not thinking slowly. I realize the chart is too small to read. You can look at a larger version here.

cog-bias

This reminds me of an old joke.

Patient:  “Doctor, I’m suffering from a nameless dread.”

Therapist:  “Not to worry. We have a name for everything.”

Bullshit

Cognitive psychology

It is important to remember that amateurs built the ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.

Dr. Ben Carson

Ten years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a short book, On Bullshit, about the way language is used to obscure rather than clarify what is happening. Last month, Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo published a paper entitled “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit” in the respected psychological journal Judgment and Decision Making. Pseudo-profound bullshit refers to statements such as, “Hidden meaning transforms abstract beauty”—statements which might sound impressive if you don’t think about them, but which are actually meaningless nonsense.

Unlike Frankfurt, who wrote mainly about bullshitters, Pennycook and his colleagues focus their attention on the “bullshittee,” the gullible person. With the help of a website called the New Age Bullshit Generator, they constructed a measure, the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR), which consists of ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements such as the above example. Participants were asked to rate each sentence on a 5-point scale, from “not at all profound” to “very profound.” The authors then conducted four studies to examine the relationship between BSR scores and both content and process measures of bullshit receptivity. By content I refer to belief in other types of bullshit, and by process I mean being unable or insufficiently motivated to think critically about bullshit. Of course, bear in mind that these are all correlational data, so they don’t demonstrate that any of these variables cause bullshit receptivity.

The participants were college undergraduates in one study and paid volunteers recruited through the internet in the other three. The average score on the BSR was 2.6, midway between “somewhat” and “fairly profound,” suggesting a disturbing amount of bullshit receptivity. In three of the studies, the authors included real world examples of pseudo-profound statements, quotations from spiritualist Deepak Chopra. The tendency to rate Chopra’s ideas as profound was strongly related to scores on the BSR. To ensure that they were not simply measuring a tendency to see any statement as profound, the researchers also calculated bullshit sensitivity—the difference between BSR scores and ratings of sentences that were genuinely meaningful. Bullshit sensitivity was strongly related to bullshit receptivity.

Content. Pennycook included several scales to measure what he described as “belief in things for which there is no evidence.” Participants completed an Ontological Confusion Scale, which required them to distinguish between statements that are literally true (“Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player”) and metaphorical statements (“Friends are the salt of life”). (The opening comment by Ben Carson illustrates exactly this sort of ontological confusion.) Some of the studies also included a Religious Belief Scale; a Paranormal Belief Scale, which included acceptance of such things as precognition, mind reading, and extraordinary life forms; and measures of belief in political conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. All of these scales were positively related to bullshit receptivity and to one another, suggesting that there is a constellation of related beliefs held by some people that could be described as bullshit. (Comedians Penn and Teller did a cable TV series from 2003-2010, coincidentally called Bullshit!, which debunked many of these topics. Unfortunately, in one of their early programs they criticized the theory of global warming as bullshit.)

Process. The authors also measured the ability and the motivation to engage in critical thinking. Ability measures included tests of verbal intelligence and numeracy. Measures of motivation to think included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), in which participants are asked to solve math problems for which there is an “obvious” answer that turns out to be wrong; a test of susceptibility to misleading heuristics and biases such as the gambler’s fallacy and the conjunction fallacy, and a Faith in Intuition Scale. As expected, verbal intelligence, numeracy and CRT scores were predictive of a tendency to see through bullshit, while use of heuristics and biases and Faith in Intuition were related to bullshit acceptance.

My primary reservation about this study is its exclusive focus on the “bullshittee,” which can easily turn into victim blaming at a time when young Americans are exposed to mountains of bullshit, but given insufficient education in bullshit detection. Pseudo-profound statements are only one type of bullshit. In everyday use, the term also refers to statements that are meaningful but are known or strongly suspected to be false. Both types of bullshit are conspicuously present on the presidential campaign trail. Pointing out the presence of bullshit would seem to be a core function of journalism. However, this seldom happens; in fact, journalists are sometimes punished for it on the grounds that informing the public about bullshit shows bias against the bullshitter or his or her political party.