Category: Psychology

Those Who Are Overconfident Convince Others They Are More Competent

(p. B6) What is it about an elite upbringing that seems to make people feel qualified for tasks where they have little experience? This is one of the questions that inspired a study published Monday in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers suggest that part of the answer involves what they call “overconfidence.” In several experiments, they found that people who came from a higher social class were more likely to have an inflated sense of their skills — even when tests proved that they were average. This unmerited overconfidence, they found, was interpreted by strangers as competence.

. . .

In an attempt to understand the implications of overconfidence, the researchers constructed a mock job interview. The students were asked the same question and videotaped. A group of strangers then watched the videos and rated the candidates. The selection committee generally opted for the same people who’d overestimated their trivia abilities. Overconfidence was misinterpreted as competence.

. . .

So how do managers, employers, voters and customers avoid overvaluing social class and being duped by incompetent wealthy people? Dr. Kennedy said she had been encouraged to find that if you show people actual facts about a person, the elevated status that comes with overconfidence often fades away.

“We may also need to punish overconfident behavior more than we do,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Heather Murphy. “Why High-Class People Think They Know More, and Why You Believe Them.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 21, 2019): B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2019, and has the title “Why High-Class People Get Away With Incompetence.”)

The study mentioned above from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is:

Belmi, Peter, Margaret A. Neale, David Reiff, and Rosemary Ulfe. “The Social Advantage of Miscalibrated Individuals: The Relationship between Social Class and Overconfidence and Its Implications for Class-Based Inequality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (May 20, 2019), published online in advance of print publication.

SpotMini Robot Looks Like a Dog, but “Is Like a Hollow Doll”

(p. B3) Last time in this esteemed newsletter, my colleague Steve Lohr warned that automation would change the economy. But as he also explained, jobs are “more likely to be transformed by digital technology than destroyed by it.” This becomes clear as you look a little closer at the progress of robotics, including everything from the robotic arms that help build stuff in factories to the jaw-droppingly agile machines under development at a company called Boston Dynamics.

This past week, I wrote about Boston Dynamics, which runs a semi-secretive lab in Waltham, Mass., about 10 miles outside Boston. Built to move like animals and even humans, its machines are truly amazing (as YouTube watchers will attest).

At times, you can’t help but think of these mechanical creations as living things. The company will start selling one of them, a doglike robot called SpotMini, in the coming year. But even Boston Dynamics is not quite sure what these robots are actually good for.

Robots play tricks on the mind. We tend to think they are more advanced than they really are, perhaps because of science fiction movies or because our brains are wired to believe in bots. This is particularly true when it comes to the biomimetic machines inside a lab like Boston Dynamics.

“When we see a biped that looks like a person or a quadruped that looks like a dog, we project our previous experiences with people and dogs onto these machines. But, in fact, there is nothing inside,” said Gill Pratt, who worked with Boston Dynamics as an official at Darpa, a research arm of the Defense Department, and is now exploring new forms of robotics as the chief executive of the Toyota Research Institute. “It is like a hollow doll.”

For the full commentary, see:

Cade Metz. “The Week in Tech; Robots Are Improving Quickly, But They Can Still Be Dumb.” The New York Times (Monday, Oct. 1, 2018): B3.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 28, 2018, and has the title “The Week in Tech; The Robots Aren’t as Human as They Seem.”)

Caring Bonds Among Sentient Beings Refute “Anthropodenial”

(p. 1) The two old friends hadn’t seen each other lately. Now one of them was on her deathbed, crippled with arthritis, refusing food and drink, dying of old age. Her friend had come to say goodbye. At first she didn’t seem to notice him. But when she realized he was there, her reaction was unmistakable: Her face broke into an ecstatic grin. She cried out in delight. She reached for her visitor’s head and stroked his hair. As he caressed her face, she draped her arm around his neck and pulled him closer.

The mutual emotion so evident in this deathbed reunion was especially moving and remarkable because the visitor, Dr. Jan Van Hooff, was a Dutch biologist, and his friend, Mama, was a chimpanzee. The event — recorded on a cellphone, shown on TV and widely shared on the internet — provides the opening story and title for the ethologist Frans de Waal’s game-changing new book, “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.” Continue reading “Caring Bonds Among Sentient Beings Refute “Anthropodenial””

Your Passion Is Not “Found,” It Is Developed with “Time, Effort and Investment”

(p. B7) People “often assume that their own interest or passion just needs to be ‘found’ or revealed. Once revealed, it will be in a fully formed state,” said Paul A. O’Keefe, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Nonsense, of course, he said.

“By that logic, pursuing one’s passion should come with boundless motivation and should be relatively easy,” he said.

Dr. O’Keefe was part of a team that published a study in 2018 that examined how two different “implicit theories of interest” impacted how people approach new potential passions. One, the fixed theory, says that our interests are relatively fixed and unchanging, while the other, the growth theory, suggests our interests are developed over time and not necessarily innate to our personality.

In other words: Do we truly find our passions, or develop them over time? (You can probably guess where this is going.)

The researchers found that people who hold a fixed theory had less interest in things outside of their current interests, were less likely to anticipate difficulties when pursuing new interests, and lost interest in new things much quicker than people who hold a growth theory. In essence, people with a growth mind-set of interest tend to believe that interests and passions are capable of developing with enough time, effort and investment.

“This comes down to the expectations people have when pursuing a passion,” Dr. O’Keefe said. “Someone with a fixed mind-set of interest might begin their pursuit with lots of enthusiasm, but it might diminish once things get too challenging or tedious.”

Passion alone won’t carry you through in the face of difficulty, he said, when overcoming those challenges actually counts.

For the full story, see:

Stephanie Lee. “Finding Your Passion’ Takes Some Work.” The New York Times (Monday, May 6, 2019): B7.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 21 [sic], 2019, and has the title “Why ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Such Terrible Advice.”)

The academic article discussed above, is:

O’Keefe, Paul A., Carol S. Dweck, and Gregory M. Walton. “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?” Psychological Science 29, no. 10 (Oct. 2018): 1653-64.

“Confidence Stops You from Learning”

(p. A15) Mr. Karlgaard, a former publisher of Forbes magazine, has plenty of vivid anecdotes to make his case for late bloomers.

. . .

Bill Walsh, the great coach of the San Francisco 49ers, got his first NFL head coaching job when he was 46 and won his first Super Bowl at 50. He was famously twitchy, self-deprecating and eager to learn, and had this to say about confidence: “In my whole career I’ve been passing men with greater bravado and confidence. Confidence gets you off to a fast start. Confidence gets you that first job and maybe the next two promotions. But confidence stops you from learning. Confidence becomes a caricature after a while. I can’t tell you how many confident blowhards I’ve seen in my coaching career who never got better after the age of forty.”

Late bloomers, Mr. Karlgaard argues, are not just people of great talent who develop later in their lives. They also possess qualities that can only be acquired through time and experience. They tend to be more curious, compassionate, resilient and wise than younger people of equal talent. This may be true, Mr. Karlgaard notes, of older people generally, who are being flushed out of the workforce much too early.

For the full review, see:

Philip Delves Broughton. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazes.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 30, 2019): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 29, 2019, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Late Bloomers’ Review: Please Don’t Rush Me.”)

The book under review, is:

Karlgaard, Rich. Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. New York: Currency, 2019.

Machine Learning Finds Female Brains Age Slower Than Male Brains

(p. C4)  . . .  there is fresh evidence that women not only have a longevity advantage; their brains seem to be more youthful throughout adulthood, too.

The new study, published last month [February 2019] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was led by radiologist Manu Goyal and neurologist Marcus Raichle, both at the Washington University School of Medicine.

. . .

The researchers used machine learning to detect distinctive patterns in the brains they studied. “When we trained it on males and tested it on females, then it guessed the female’s brain age to be three to four years younger than the women’s chronological age,” said Dr. Goyal. Conversely, when the machine was trained to see female metabolic patterns as the standard, it guessed men’s brains to be two to three years older than they actually were. That difference in metabolic brain age added up to approximately a three year advantage for women.

These brain age differences persisted across the adult lifespan and were visible even when people’s brains showed the harbingers of Alzheimer’s disease. “These new findings provide yet more evidence, as if more were needed, of just how ubiquitous sex influences on brain function have proven to be, often showing up in places we least expect them,” said Larry Cahill, a neuroscientist who studies sex differences in the brain at University of California, Irvine.

For the full commentary, see:

Susan Pinker.  “MIND AND MATTER: Women Have Younger Brains Than Men.”  The Wall Street Journal  (Saturday, March 30, 2019):  C4.
(Note:  ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note:  the online version of the commentary has the date March 27, 2019.)

The published research summarized above, is:

Goyal, Manu S., Tyler M. Blazey, Yi Su, Lars E. Couture, Tony J. Durbin, Randall J. Bateman, Tammie L. S. Benzinger, John C. Morris, Marcus E. Raichle, and Andrei G. Vlassenko. “Persistent Metabolic Youth in the Aging Female Brain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 8 (Feb. 19, 2019): 3251-3255.

Dogs Feel Guilt When They Hurt Their Humans

(p. 6) Dr. Horowitz concluded that whether dogs take on a guilty look — lowered gaze, ears pressed back, tail rapidly beating between the legs — is unrelated to whether or not they followed orders. If the owner scolds them, they look extremely guilty. If the owner doesn’t, they still sometimes look like this, but less often.

One problem, however, is that our rules are of our own making, such as “Don’t jump on that couch!” or “Keep your nails off my leather chair!” It must be as tough for our pets to grasp these prohibitions as it was for me to understand why I couldn’t chew gum in Singapore.

It would be better to test behavior that is wrong by almost any standard, including that of their own species. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz gave one of my favorite examples, about his dog, Bully, who broke the fundamental rule never to bite your superior.

Humans don’t need to teach this rule, and indeed Bully had never been punished for it. The dog bit his master’s hand when Dr. Lorenz (p. 7) tried to break up a dogfight. Even though Dr. Lorenz petted him right away, Bully suffered a complete nervous breakdown. For days, he was virtually paralyzed and ignored his food. He would lie on the rug breathing shallowly, occasionally interrupted by a deep sigh. He had violated a natural taboo, which among ancestral canines could have had the worst imaginable consequences, such as expulsion from the pack.

For the full commentary, see:

de Waal, Frans.  “Your Dog Feels as Guilty as She Looks; Animals are no less emotional than we are.”  The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, ):  6-7.

(Note:  the online version of the commentary has the date March 8, 2019.)

Turing Award Winners’ Neural Networks “Are Still a Very Long Way from True Intelligence”

(p. B3) On Wednesday [March 27, 2019], the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share.

. . .

Though these systems have undeniably accelerated the progress of artificial intelligence, they are still a very long way from true intelligence. But Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio believe that new ideas will come.

“We need fundamental additions to this toolbox we have created to reach machines that operate at the level of true human understanding,” Dr. Bengio said.

For the full story, see:

Cade Metz.  “Pioneers Whose Neural Networks Are Bringing A.I. to Life Win Turing.”  The New York Times (Thursday, , 2019):  B3.

(Note:  ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note:  the online version of the story has the date , 2019, and has the title “Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence.”)

Neanderthal’s “Body Was Archaic” but “Spirit Was Modern”

(p. B14) Starting in the mid-1950s, leading teams from Columbia University, Dr. Solecki discovered the fossilized skeletons of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals who had lived tens of thousands of years ago in what is now northern Iraq.

Dr. Solecki, who was also a Smithsonian Institution anthropologist at the time, said physical evidence at Shanidar Cave, where the skeletons were found, suggested that Neanderthals had tended to the weak and the wounded, and that they had also buried their dead with flowers, which were placed ornamentally and possibly selected for their therapeutic benefits.

The exhumed bones of a man, named Shanidar 3, who had been blind in one eye and missing his right arm but who had survived for years after he was hurt, indicated that fellow Neanderthals had helped provide him with sustenance and other support.

“Although the body was archaic, the spirit was modern,” Dr. Solecki wrote in the magazine Science in 1975.

Large amounts of pollen found in the soil at a grave site suggested that bodies might have been ceremonially entombed with bluebonnet, hollyhock, grape hyacinth and other flowers — a theory that is still being explored and amplified. (Some researchers hypothesized that the pollen might have been carried by rodents or bees, but Dr. Solecki’s theory has become widely accepted.)

“The association of flowers with Neanderthals adds a whole new dimension to our knowledge of his humanness, indicating he had a ‘soul,’” Dr. Solecki wrote.

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts.  “Ralph Solecki, 101, Archaeologist Who Uncovered the Inner Life of Neanderthals.”  The New York Times  (Wednesday, April 17, 2019):  B14.

(Note:  the online version of the obituary has the date April 11, 2019, and has the title “Ralph Solecki, Who Found Humanity in Neanderthals, Dies at 101.”)

“Ridiculous” to Project “Our Psychology into the Machines”

(p. A8)  . . .  the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”

“In ‘Star Trek,’ there is a world in which humans are governed through democracy, everyone gets good health care, education and food, and there are no wars except against some aliens,” said Dr. Bengio, whose research has helped pave the way for speech- and facial-recognition technology, computer vision and self-driving cars, among other things. “I am also trying to marry science with how it can improve society.”

. . .

Cherri M. Pancake, the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, which offers the $1 million award, credited Dr. Bengio and two other luminaries who shared the prize, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, with laying the foundation for technologies used by billions of people. “Anyone who has a smartphone in their pocket” has felt their impact, she said, noting that their work also provided “powerful new tools” in the fields of medicine, astronomy and material sciences.

Despite all the accolades, Dr. Bengio recoils at scientists being turned into celebrities. While Dr. Hinton works for Google and Dr. LeCun is the chief A.I. scientist at Facebook, Dr. Bengio has studiously avoided Silicon Valley in favor of a more scholarly life in Montreal, where he also co-founded Element A.I., a software company.

“I’m not a fan of a personalization of science and making some scientists stars,” said Dr. Bengio, a self-described introvert, who colleagues say is happiest when hunched over an algorithm. “I was maybe lucky to be at the right time and thinking the right things.”

Myriam Côté, a computer scientist who has worked with Dr. Bengio for more than a decade, described him as an iconoclast and freethinker who would feel stymied by the strictures of Silicon Valley. A communitarian at heart, she said, he shuns hierarchy and is known for sharing the profits from his own projects with younger, less established colleagues.

“He wants to create in freedom,” she said. Citing the credo of student rebels in 1968 in Paris, where Dr. Bengio was born, she said his philosophy was: “It is forbidden to forbid.”

That, in turn, has informed his approach to A.I.

Even as Stephen Hawking, the celebrated Cambridge physicist, warned that A.I. could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization,” and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has cautioned it could create an “immortal dictator,” Dr. Bengio has remained more upbeat.

. . .

. . .  he dismissed the “Terminator scenario” in which a machine, endowed with human emotions, turns on its creator. Machines, he stressed, do not have egos and human sentiments, and are not slaves who want to be freed. “We imagine our creations turning against us because we are projecting our psychology into the machines,” he said, calling it “ridiculous.”

For the full story, see:

Dan Bilefsky.  “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; Teaching a Generation of Machines, Far From the Spotlights of Silicon Valley.”  The New York Times (Saturday, March 30, 2019):  A8.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

(Note:  the online version of the story has the date March 29, 2019, and has the title “THE SATURDAY PROFILE;  He Helped Create A.I. Now, He Worries About ‘Killer Robots’.”)

Good Luck Comes to Optimists Who Do Not Give Up

(p. C3) Luck occurs at the intersection of random chance, talent and hard work. There may not be much you can do about the first part of that equation, but there’s a lot you can do about the other two. People who have a talent for making luck for themselves grab the unexpected opportunities that come along.
The good news is that there’s plenty of luck to go around if you know how to look for it.
. . .
Think yourself lucky. Psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania told us that if he were looking for a lucky person, “the number one ingredient that I’d select for would be optimism.” Early in his career, Dr. Seligman did groundbreaking experiments on learned helplessness, showing that animals put in stressful situations beyond their control eventually stop trying to escape. People also have a tendency to give up and complain when they think they’re victims of bad luck.
“Believing that you have some control over what happens fuels trying,” Dr. Seligman said. “If there’s a potentially good event for me, am I going to seize the opportunity and follow up, or am I going to be passive?”

For the full essay, see:
Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. “Make Your Own Luck.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 3, 2018): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the essay has the date March 1, 2018, and has the title “To Be Successful, Make Your Own Luck.”)

The essay is based on the authors’ book:
Kaplan, Janice, and Barnaby Marsh. How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life. New York: Dutton, 2018.