Tag Archives: Psychology

Memories Lie

By Robin Hanson · April 20, 2010 5:30 pm · Comments (16)

[Academic philosophers] Russ and I have presented our joint work in a number of venues now … and normally when we do so, … we set up a random beeper … When the beep sounds, each audience member is to think about what was going on in her last undisturbed moment of inner experience before the beep. We then use a random number generator to select an audience member to report on her experience. We interview her right there, discussing her experience and the method with the audience and each other. We’ll do this maybe three times in a three-hour session.

As a result, we now have a couple dozen samples of reported inner experience during our academic talks, and the most striking thing we’ve found is that people rarely report thinking about the talk. … Most audience members, listening to most academic talks, spend most of their time with some distraction or other at the forefront of their stream of experience. They may not remember this fact because when they think back on their experience of a talk, what is salient to them are those rare occasions when they did make a novel connection or think up an interesting objection.

(I think the same is true of sex thoughts. People often say they spend a lot of time thinking about sex, but when you beep them they very rarely report it. It’s probably that our sex thoughts, though rare, are much more frequently remembered than other thoughts and so are dramatically overrepresented in retrospective memory.)  (more)

We too easily assume we know what we have been doing.  Most who think they are obsessed with sex, or that they pay attention to academic talks, are wrong.  While understanding its content is what you are supposed to do at an academic talk, attending is probably more about showing your dedication and monitoring.  Similarly, our society places a high premium on sex, and looks down on the asexual.  In both cases our bias seems to be to assume we have doing whatever would make the best impression if it were true.  If you can be this mistaken about stuff this basic, how wrong could you be about other things?

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Young Heads, Old Hearts

By Robin Hanson · April 3, 2010 8:50 am · Comments (24)

If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is
not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head.

Francois Guisot (1787-1874) said this first re “republican” while French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) changed it to “socialist”, and many others, including Winston Churchill have since said similar things. But new results seem to conflict:

We presented 60 younger and 60 older adults with health care choices that required them to hold in mind and consider multiple pieces of information. … The emotion-focus condition asked participants to focus on their emotional reactions to the options. … The information-focus condition … instructed to focus on the specific attributes, report the details about the options, and then make a choice. … Decision quality data indicate that younger adults performed better in the information-focus than in the control condition whereas older adults performed better in the emotion-focus and control conditions than in the information-focus condition. …

Fluid intelligence, that is, deliberative/effortful processing, peaks early in life followed by a steady decline thereafter. This component of intelligence comprises several subcomponents that all show consistent age-related decline including speed of information processing, temporary storage of information (i.e., short-term memory), and the storage and manipulation of information (i.e., working memory). Emotional processing, in contrast, appears to be well maintained at older ages.  More important, this selective preservation of emotional processing is found even in working memory. …

Previous research has linked this age-related emphasis on emotion-regulatory goals to preferential processing of emotionally salient and positively valenced material among older relative to younger adults. … In advertising contexts, older adults prefer and better remember ads with emotionally meaningful appeal whereas younger adults prefer and better remember ads with knowledge-related appeal.

So do young folks actually choose socialism with their heads, or are they mistakenly listening to their hearts instead of their heads?  Do old folks actually reject socialism with their hearts, not their heads?  Do we even know that old folks actually like socialism less than young folks?

Added 11:30a: Four (!) comments point to OKCupid results suggesting young and old adults are economically socialist, while kids and the middle-aged are not, for self-interest reasons.  People do seem to get more consistently socially restrictive with age, so maybe that is more tied to the young heads vs. old hearts trend.

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Ems Like Alters?

By Robin Hanson · March 28, 2010 1:00 pm · Comments (30)

In ’08 I forecasted:

A [future] world of near-subsistence-income ems in a software-like labor market, where millions of cheap copies are made of a each expensively trained em, and then later evicted from their bodies when their training becomes obsolete.

This will be accepted, because human morality is flexible, especially given strong competitive pressures:

Hunters couldn’t see how exactly a farming life could work, nor could farmers see how exactly an industry life could work.  In both cases the new life initially seemed immoral and repugnant to those steeped in prior ways.  But even though prior culture/laws typically resisted and discouraged the new way, the few groups which adopted it won so big others were eventually converted or displaced. …

Taking the long view of human behavior we find that an ordinary range of human personalities have, in a supporting poor culture, accepted genocide, mass slavery, killing of unproductive slaves, killing of unproductive elderly, starvation of the poor, and vast inequalities of wealth and power not obviously justified by raw individual ability. … When life is cheap, death is cheap as well.  Of course that isn’t how our culture sees things, but being rich we can afford luxurious attitudes.

Our attitude toward “alters,” the different personalities in a body with multiple personalities, seems a nice illustration of human moral flexibility, and its “when life is cheap, death is cheap” sensitivity to incentives.

Alters seem fully human, sentient, intelligent, moral, experiencing, with their own distinct beliefs, values, and memories.  They seem to meet just about every criteria ever proposed for creatures deserving moral respect.  And yet the public has long known and accepted that a standard clinical practice is to kill off alters as quickly as possible.  Why?

Among humans, we mourn teen deaths the most, and baby and elderly deaths the least; we know that teen deaths represent the greatest loss of past investment and future gains.  We also know that alters are cheap to create, at least in the right sort of body, and that they little help, and usually hurt, a body’s productivity.

While unproductive humans can look like the sort of person we might have been, alters seem like the sort of demons sorcery says possess people.  So while we might plausibly have evolved (genetically or culturally) a tendency to show concern for unproductive humans, to signal our empathy, we plausibly also evolved a tendency to show revulsion of alters, to signal our hatred of sorcery.

Since alter lives are cheap to us, their deaths are also cheap to us.  So goes human morality.  In the future, I expect the many em copies in an em clan (of close copies) to be treated much like the many alters in a human body.  Ems will tend to adopt whatever attitudes most support clan productivity, and if that means a cavalier attitude toward ending em lives when convenient, such attitudes will come to dominate.

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Is Curing Sybil Murder?

By Robin Hanson · March 27, 2010 5:40 pm · Comments (33)

Sybil supposedly had sixteen distinct personalities.  “Curing” such patients by eliminating or merging their personalities isn’t obviously good:

The cognitive fragmentation that characterizes DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder] far outstrips … self-deception and akrasia.  Indeed, … it becomes difficult not to regard each alter as a distinct locus of experience, thought and agency.  As Wilkes points out with respect to the Beauchamp case,

[Prince] firmly (for example) ticked Sally off for her tricks follies, and would lecture her sternly; he criticized or approved of B4′s plans for finding a job, or for taking a holiday; and he commended B1′s sweet and self-sacrificing nature. All the alternate personalities were thus treated as moral and prudential agents, with respect to other people, with respect to each other, and with respect to their own selves. Prince is by no means alone in taking such an attitude to the diverse personalities of a patient – it is practically impossible to avoid.

There are two standard therapeutic approaches to DID. … [Restoration] involves the installation of a particular alter as the unique `owner’ of a body.  … An alternative … [is] integration of the various alters into one self, a single agent with a (unified) stream of consciousness and a unified psychological profile. …

Assuming the strong model of DID and a psychological account of full moral status, restoration would seem to involve the involuntary elimination of an entity with a right to continued existence. (I assume that – as is in fact often the case – the alters in question do not want to be eliminated. …). Restoration may not amount to murder … but it would seem to involve an act of comparable moral gravity. …

Enforced integration does not appear to be as wrong as restoration, but it does seem to be deeply problematic nonetheless. It is not clear that integration should be thought of as the `elimination’ of an alter, but it may well approach that (especially as the number of alters that are integrated increases).

More here and here.  Our future will contain a much wider range of creatures, and we will have to decide when it is good or bad to create or destroy them.  We should at least prepare by coming to terms with the creatures we have today.

Added 18Mar: The fictional Borg merged humans into a larger more-integrated collective mind.  If merging alters is good, why isn’t a Borg better?

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Prefer Ignorant Fans

By Robin Hanson · March 4, 2010 8:40 pm · Comments (25)

Tell pretty women they are smart, and smart women they are pretty. saying

We prefer to be liked, vs. disliked, but we also care about which features others most like about us.  For example, we might prefer to be liked for our sense of humor, rather than our looks.  But it seems to me that we most prefer that people who like us not know why exactly they like us.

It is of course a bad sign about someone’s opinion of you if they can’t think of any positive features of you.  It is also a good sign about their devotion if they sometimes try to make sure you know that you have good features.  But we would be disappointed and even disturbed to learn that someone knew that how much they liked us was captured by a particular known formula referring to objectively measurable features, no matter what those features were.

Someone who knew exactly where you and other folks ranked on their quality scale, and who could easily track how those rankings changed with time will know how much they like you more or less as your features changed.  Even if you are their favorite person at this moment, the odds are that someone else will soon outrank you.

In contrast, consider someone who has had a lot of contact with you, and who knows mainly that they like you, but not why exactly they like you.  This person will have more trouble finding someone else that they like more than you.  In this case you are more of an experience good, that has to be experienced to be evaluated.  If it is expensive to experience other folks enough to know their attractiveness, you have more confidence that you will continue to be one of their favorite people.

(From a conversation with Amanda Budny.)

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Do Larks Repress Owls?

By Robin Hanson · February 21, 2010 9:15 am · Comments (40)

Richard Chappell suggests morning larks treat night owls unfairly:

Scheduling maintenance work on campus housing for 7:45am somehow doesn’t strike the university as grossly inconsiderate, the way that scheduling it for 11pm surely would. … It should be common knowledge that there’s a fair bit of variation in the sleep schedules of graduate students. …. Perhaps [early-risers] think that any grad student who’s still asleep at 8am is just “sleeping in”, the way that they themselves might do on a lazy weekend. … Perhaps the inconsistent treatment is thought to be justified by early-riser moralizing: really (the thought goes), people ought to wake early. Those on later sleep schedules must just be lazy.

Intrigued, I dug:

A higher degree of eveningness in more impulsive subjects. more

Morningness was stable before age 35 and increased afterwards. more

College freshmen who kept night-owl hours had lower GPAs. more

Evening-types are more likely to have higher intelligence scores. more

Late risers tire less quickly. … Those who rise later tend to be both cleverer and richer.  more

Night workers more likely to be evening type and the unemployed less likely to be moderately morning type … Evening types were 2.5 times more likely to report that their general health was only poor or fair. more

Owls had the largest mean income and were more likely to have access to a car. There was also no evidence that larks were superior to those with other sleeping patterns with regard to their cognitive performance or their state of health. more Continue reading "Do Larks Repress Owls?" »

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Two Anecdotes

By Robin Hanson · January 17, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (17)
In December 2008, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. The first was the release of Stephen Greenspan’s book, Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It. Greenspan, a professor of psychology, … discussed gullibility in fields including finance, academia, and the law. … The second was the exposure of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, run by Bernard Madoff, which cost its unsuspecting investors in excess of $60 billion. … The irony is that Greenspan, who is bright and well regarded, lost 30 percent of his retirement savings in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
…
At conference dealing with spine surgery, a surgeon presented the case of a female patient with a herniated disc in her neck and pain that was caused by a pinched nerve. She had already failed typical conservative treatments such as physical therapy, medication, and waiting it out.
The surgeon asked the [doc] audience to vote on a couple of choices for surgery. The first was the newer anterior approach, where the surgeon removes the entire disc, replaces it with a bone plug, aim fuses the discs. The vast majority of the hands shot up. The second choice was the older posterior approach, where the surgeon removes only the portion of the disc that is compressing the nerve. No fusion is required because the procedure leaves most of the disc intact. Only a few audience members raised their hands.
The speaker then asked the audience, which was almost entirely male, “What if this patient is your wife?” The show of hands was reversed for the same two choices. The main reason is that the amount surgeons are paid for the newer and more complicated procedure is typically several times what they’d receive for the older procedure.

On the impotence of book learning:

In December 2008, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. The first was the release of Stephen Greenspan’s book, Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It. Greenspan, a professor of psychology, … discussed gullibility in fields including finance, academia, and the law. … The second was the exposure of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, run by Bernard Madoff, which cost its unsuspecting investors in excess of $60 billion. … The irony is that Greenspan, who is bright and well regarded, lost 30 percent of his retirement savings in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

On distorted doc incentives:

At conference dealing with spine surgery, a surgeon presented the case of a female patient with a herniated disc in her neck and pain that was caused by a pinched nerve. She had already failed typical conservative treatments such as physical therapy, medication, and waiting it out.

The surgeon asked the [doc] audience to vote on a couple of choices for surgery. The first was the newer anterior approach, where the surgeon removes the entire disc, replaces it with a bone plug, aim fuses the discs. The vast majority of the hands shot up. The second choice was the older posterior approach, where the surgeon removes only the portion of the disc that is compressing the nerve. …

The speaker then asked the audience, which was almost entirely male, “What if this patient is your wife?” The show of hands was reversed for the same two choices. The main reason is that the amount surgeons are paid for the newer and more complicated procedure is typically several times what they’d receive for the older procedure.

More here.  I’m actually surprised by this doc story; I’ve heard that docs over-consume med like everyone else.
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Status Quo Institution Bias

By Robin Hanson · November 23, 2009 2:25 pm · Comments (25)

New studies show existence and positive purpose biases.  First, we presume that what exists is better that what is not:

People treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that an existing state is evaluated more favorably than an alternative. Study 3 shows that imagining an event increases estimates of its likelihood, which in turn leads to favorable evaluation; the more likely that something will be, the more positively it is evaluated. Study 4 shows that the more a form is described as prevalent, the more aesthetically attractive is that form. … Mere existence leads to assumptions of goodness; the status quo is seen as good, right, attractive, tasty, and desirable.

Second, we presume the universe is designed to achieve broad positive purposes:

Children in first, second, and fourth grades were asked whether rocks are pointy because they are composed of small bits of material or in order to keep animals from sitting on them. The children preferred the teleological explanation. … Recent work suggests that it’s not just children: [researchers] found the same tendency to ascribe purpose to phenomena like rocks, sand, and lakes in uneducated Romany adults. They also tested BU undergraduates who had taken an average of three college science classes. When the undergrads had to respond under time pressure, they were likely to agree with nonscientific statements such as “The sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life.”

For social institutions, these biases combine into a perfect storm: we assume our social institutions are well designed to achieve laudable broad purposes, rather than being more accidental arrangements where we each achieve private purposes holding constant others’ behavior.

Yes things that we have adapted to our needs are probably better than random other things that could be there instead.  I’d rather keep the current parts in my car than replace them with other random objects.  And yes when institutions have varied from place to place the better ones have probably spread further.

But even so we seem far too eager to believe that our current institutions are so well designed that there is little reason to consider alternatives.  This error is encouraged by the above biases, and by the fact that we can show loyalty to our local culture by believing it has superior institutions.  But be warned: it is nevertheless an error.  (And yes, I’ll tediously argue yet again that prediction markets could help correct this error.)

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Smile Till It Hurts

By Robin Hanson · November 21, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (10)

Kate Tuttle reviews Bright-Sided:

When Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, the sharp-eyed social critic found herself nearly as discomfited by the “pink ribbon culture” surrounding the disease as by the illness itself. Relentlessly upbeat, cloyingly inspirational, the breast cancer world, as Ehrenreich describes it, is a place where anger, fear and depression — all perfectly reasonable responses to a potentially mortal diagnosis — are frowned upon and the cancer itself is lauded as a great opportunity for spiritual growth. … Why do so many of us seem so willing to discount reality in favor of vague wishes, dreams and secrets? …

Ehrenreich’s examination of the history of positive thinking is a tour de force of well-tempered snark, culminating in a persuasive indictment of the bright-siders as the culprits in our current financial mess. … The author deploys her sharpest tone to eviscerate the business community’s embrace of positive thinking. Offered as a sap to those facing layoffs, used as a spur to better performance by those workers who remain. … “American corporate culture had long since abandoned the dreary rationality of professional management for the emotional thrills of mysticism, charisma, and sudden intuitions.”

We are naturally happy when times are good and sad when times are bad.  Since we prefer to associate with folks having good times, we prefer associates who act happy.  So we tend to be biased to act happier than our hidden info about our circumstances justifies.  Of course when things go really bad we may switched to acting depressed, to realistically assess our prospects, and to perhaps induce more assistance.

But going too far signaling your confidence via happiness can interfere with signaling your intelligence – you might just seem too stupid to notice how bad things are.  Since Ehrenreich has much intelligence to signal, it makes sense for her to show snarkiness instead of happiness.  But it is not clear why business deserves more criticism than any other part of society on this – the clearer harm here seems the meds wasted on faint hopes.

Added 11a:  In case there are any doubts, yes of course the recent panel advice to reduce breast cancer testing is right, and yes this bodes ill for US med spending.

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Evolving Diverse Fragility

By Robin Hanson · November 18, 2009 2:00 pm · Comments (25)

Over the last 50,000 years humans have evolved many fragile features – features that in the wrong situations fail badly, but in the right situations gain greatly.  Apparently, in previous environments the cost of failure was too high to tolerate such fragile features, but our larger denser societies somehow magnify the gains while minimizing the losses, enough to make such features useful.

I’m not entirely clear how this works, but it does suggest even more diverse fragility in our future, and the importance of supporting such diversity.  Some details:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people. …

Researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. …  Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. … Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience. … Continue reading "Evolving Diverse Fragility" »

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