Category: Psychology

Half of Important Psychology Articles Could Not Be Replicated

(p. A1) The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.
Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday [August 27, 2015] in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.
The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

For the full story, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “Psychology’s Fears Confirmed: Rechecked Studies Don’t Hold Up.” The New York Times (Fri., AUG. 28, 2015): A1 & A13.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 27, 2015 and has the title “Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says.”)

The Science article reporting the large number of psychology articles that proved unreplicable, is:
Open Science Collaboration. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349, no. 6251 (Aug. 28, 2015): 943.

Long-Term Goals, Rather than Friends, Most Stimulate the Intelligent

(p. D1) A study published in February [2016] in the British Journal of Psychology looked at 15,000 respondents and found that people who had more social interactions with close friends reported being happier–unless they were highly intelligent. People with higher I.Q.s were less content when they spent more time with friends. Psychologists theorize that these folks keep themselves intellectually stimulated without a lot of social interaction, and often have a long-term goal they are pursuing.

For the full story, see:

ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN. “Why Making New Friends Is Harder for Grown-Ups.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 19, 2016): D1 & D4.
(Note: the bracketed year was added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 18, 2016, and has the title “The Science of Making Friends.”)

The academic psychology paper mentioned above (with title ellipsis in original), is:
Li, Norman, and Satoshi Kanazawa. “Country Roads, Take Me Home… to My Friends: How Intelligence, Population Density, and Friendship Affect Modern Happiness.” British Journal of Psychology (epublished on Feb. 1, 2016) DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12181.

Bold, Intelligent, Freedom-Loving Octopus “Inky” Escapes to the Sea

OctopusInkyEyesCaptors2016-05-16.jpgInky eyes captors. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A8) It was an audacious nighttime escape.

After busting through an enclosure, the nimble contortionist appears to have quietly crossed the floor, slithered through a narrow drain hole about six inches in diameter and jumped into the sea. Then he disappeared.
This was no Houdini, but rather a common New Zealand octopus called Inky, about the size of a soccer ball.
The breakout at the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, which has captured the imagination of New Zealanders and made headlines around the world, apparently began when Inky slipped through a small gap at the top of his tank.
Octopus tracks suggest he then scampered eight feet across the floor and slid down a 164-foot-long drainpipe that dropped him into Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of North Island, according to reports in New Zealand’s news media.
. . .
Alix Harvey, an aquarist at the Marine Biological Association in England, noted that octopuses, members of a class of marine animals including squid and cuttlefish called Cephalopoda, have shown themselves to be adept at escaping through spaces as small as a coin, constrained only by their beaks, the only inflexible part of their bodies.
Ms. Harvey said that octopuses had also been documented opening jars and sneaking through tiny holes on boats, and that they could deflect predators by spraying an ink that lingers in the water and acts as a decoy. Some have been seen hauling coconut shells to build underwater shelters.
. . .
She continued, “They have a complex brain, have excellent eyesight, and research suggests they have an ability to learn and form mental maps.”
. . .
Octopuses’ intelligence, she said, was partly an evolutionary response to their habitation in complex environments such as coral reefs, in which the animals need to hide from predators and sneak up on their prey.

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “Octopus Escapes From an Aquarium in New Zealand.” The New York Times (Thurs., APRIL 14, 2016): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 13, 2016, and has the title “Inky the Octopus Escapes From a New Zealand Aquarium.”)

Many Empirical Research Results Are False

(p. B7) Research on 100 studies in psychology found in 2015 that more than 60% couldn’t be replicated. Similar results have been found in medicine and economics. Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke University and president of the American Finance Association, estimates that at least half of all “discoveries” in investment research, and financial products based on them, are false.
. . .
Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit seeking to improve research practices, has spent much of the last decade analyzing why so many studies don’t stand up over time.
Because researchers have an incentive to come up with results that are “positive and clean and novel,” he says, they often test a plethora of ideas, throwing out those that don’t appear to work and pursuing those that confirm their own hunches.
If the researchers test enough possibilities, they may find positive results by chance alone — and may fool themselves into believing that luck didn’t determine the outcomes.

For the full commentary, see:
JASON ZWEIG. “Chasing Hot Returns in ‘Smart-Beta’ Can Be Dumb.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Feb 13, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb 12, 2016, and has the title “Chasing Hot Returns in ‘Smart-Beta’ Funds Can Be a Dumb Idea.”)

College Students Have Been Raised to Be Fragile

In the passage quoted below, John Leo interviews John Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU.

(p. A9) Haidt: . . . Children since the 1980s have been raised very differently–protected as fragile. The key psychological idea, which should be mentioned in everything written about this, is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility.

Leo: What’s the theory?
Haidt: That children are anti-fragile. Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. So, I think millennials come to college with much thinner skins. And therefore, until that changes, I think we’re going to keep seeing these demands to never hear anything offensive.

Source of the Haidt interview passage quote:
“Notable & Quotable: ‘Anti-Fragility in Children.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 23, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the quotes from the interview with Haidt has the date Feb. 22, 2016, and has the title “Notable & Quotable: Our Weak, Fragile Millennials.”)

For John Leo’s full interview with Jonathan Haidt, see:
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt/

The Taleb book referred to, is:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.

Slower World of Narrative Leads to Analogies, Comparisons and Understanding

(p. A25) As the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes in her book “Mind Change,” expert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
. . .
Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
The slowness of solitary reading or thinking means you are not as concerned with each individual piece of data. You’re more concerned with how different pieces of data fit together. How does this relate to that? You’re concerned with the narrative shape, the synthesizing theory or the overall context. You have time to see how one thing layers onto another, producing mixed emotions, ironies and paradoxes. You have time to lose yourself in another’s complex environment.
As Greenfield puts it, “by observing what happens, by following the linear path of a story, we can convert information into knowledge in a way that emphasizing fast response and constant stimulation cannot. As I see it, the key issue is narrative.”
When people in this slower world gather to try to understand connections and context, they gravitate toward a different set of questions. These questions are less about sensation than about meaning. They argue about how events unfold and how context influences behavior. They are more likely to make moral evaluations. They want to know where it is all headed and what are the ultimate ends.
Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use experience, knowledge and the products of lifelong education that have been stored in long-term memory. It is the ability to make analogies and comparisons about things you have studied before. Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.

For the full commentary, see:
David Brooks. “Building Attention Span.” The New York Times (Fri., JULY 10, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book discussed in the commentary, is:
Greenfield, Susan. Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains. New York: Random House, 2015.

Ugly, Invasive, Depressing Federal LEDs Disrupt Sleep and Increase Risk of Breast Cancer

(p. B1) In my repellently contented middle age, I don’t seek blue light. Like most sane people, I spurn restaurants whose lighting glares. I recoil from mirrors under fluorescent tubes. I switch on an overhead only to track down a water bug while wielding a flip-flop. Yet each evening from March onward, in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live part of the year, it seems as if the overhead is always on.
Along with other parts of South Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace is an early recipient of the Department of Transportation’s new light-emitting diode streetlights. New Yorkers who have not yet been introduced to these lights: We are living in your future.
Our new street “lamps” — too cozy a word for the icy arrays now screaming through our windows — are meant to be installed across all five boroughs by 2017. Indeed, any resident of an American municipality that has money problems (and what city doesn’t?) should take heed.
In interviews with the media, my fellow experimental subjects have compared the nighttime environment under the new streetlights to a film set, a prison yard, “a strip mall in outer space” and “the mother ship coming in for a landing” in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Although going half-blind at 58, I can read by the beam that the new lamp blasts into our front room without tapping our own Con Ed service. Once the LEDs went in, our next-door neighbor began walking her dog at night in sunglasses.
Medical research has firmly established that blue-spectrum LED light can disrupt sleep patterns. This is the same illumination that radiates in far smaller doses from smartphone and computer screens, to which we’re advised to avoid exposure for at least an hour before bed, because it can suppress the production of melatonin. . . .
While the same light has also been associated with increased risk of breast cancer and mood disorders, in all honesty my biggest beef with LEDs has nothing to do with health issues. These lights are ugly. They’re invasive. They’re depressing. New York deserves better.
. . .
Even fiscally and environmentally conscientious California has compromised on this point. Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco have all opted for yellow-rich LEDs. These cities have willingly made the modest 10-15 percent sacrifice in efficiency for an ambience that more closely embodies what Germans call Gemütlichkeit and Danes call hygge: an atmosphere of hospitality, homeyness, intimacy and well-being.
. . .
As currently conceived, the D.O.T.’s streetlight plan amounts to mass civic vandalism. If my focus on aesthetics makes this issue sound trivial, the sensory experience of daily life is not a frivolous matter. Even in junior high school, I understood that lighting isn’t only about what you see, but how you feel.

For the full commentary, see:
LIONEL SHRIVER. “Ruining That Moody Urban Glow.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 17, 2015.)

Serendipity May Be Source of 50% of Patents

(p. 1) A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, (p. 4) X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.
. . .
(p. 5) So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.
. . .
A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk. In a 2005 paper (“Serendipitous Insights Involving Nonhuman Primates”), two experts from the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle cataloged the chance encounters that yielded new insights from creatures like the pigtail macaque. Meanwhile, the authors of a paper titled “On the Exploitation of Serendipity in Drug Discovery” puzzled over the reasons the 1950s and ’60s saw a bonanza of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication, and why that run of serendipity ended.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 3, 2016): 1 & 4-5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 2, 2016, and has the title “Cultivating the Art of Serendipity.”)

Pagan’s commentary is based on her book:
Kennedy, Pagan. Inventology: How We Dream up Things That Change the World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2016.

“Minds Feel More Crimped, Fear More Pervasive, Possibility More Limited”

Maybe to lead happy or satisfying lives, we need more adventure, or more projects (hard and important ones) to commit ourselves to?

(p. 19) Freedom is still out there. We all have our idea of it, the deferred dream. Your psyche builds layers of protection around your most vulnerable traits, which may be closely linked to that precious essence in which freedom resides. Freedom is inseparable from risk.

. . .
I don’t know if the world is freer than a half-century ago. On paper, it is. The totalitarian Soviet Imperium is gone. The generals who bossed Latin America are gone, generally. Asia has unshackled itself and claims this century as its own. Media has opened out, gone social.
Yet minds feel more crimped, fear more pervasive, possibility more limited, adventure more choreographed, politics more stale, economics more skewed, pressure more crushing, escape more elusive.
. . .
Which brings me to Finnegan’s wonderful book, a kind of hymn to freedom and passion. Freedom is inside you. It’s the thing that cannot be denied. For Finnegan, that’s surfing and writing. “How could you know your limits unless you tested them?” he asks — a question as true before the ferocious energy of the wave as before the infinite possibilities of the written form.

For the full commentary, see:
Cohen, Roger. “Ways to Be Free.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 23, 2016): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 21, 2016.)

The Finnegan book praised in the passage quoted above, is:
Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

“Good News for the Grumpy”: Happiness Does Not Lengthen Life

(p. A6) A study published on Wednesday [Dec. 9, 2015] in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.
“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.
“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford.
He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.
Such beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.
“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea,” Professor Peto said in an interview. “There are enough scare stories about health.”
The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.
. . .
Professor Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema.
A “substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely to die than were the women who were generally happy.

For the full story, see:
DENISE GRADY. “Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds.” The New York Times (Thurs., DEC. 10, 2015): A6.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 9, 2015, and has the title “Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds.”)

The research summarized in the passages quoted above, appeared in:

Liu, Bette, Sarah Floud, Kirstin Pirie, Jane Green, Richard Peto, and Valerie Beral. “Does Happiness Itself Directly Affect Mortality? The Prospective UK Million Women Study.” The Lancet (Dec. 9, 2015) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)01087-9.

Open Offices Are “an Absurd Attack on Concentration”

(p. A11) Mr. Newport acknowledges the good intentions behind open offices: They are meant to encourage serendipity and teamwork. But he argues that burdening workers with perpetual distractions constitutes “an absurd attack on concentration” that creates “an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously.” Sure, there’s collaboration–not least the unspoken camaraderie among coworkers who have shared in the cringe-inducing experience of hearing a colleague castigate her spouse over the phone.
Mr. Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is the unusual academic who will sully himself with matters as practical as: How can a talented employee rack up the rarefied and acute skills–writing, coding, scouring the latest mergers and acquisitions–that make someone indispensable? His answer? Expanding your capacity for “deep work,” ruthlessly weeding out distractions and regularly carving out stretches of time to sharpen abilities. Mr. Newport explains why honing an ability to concentrate can yield enormous professional payouts. Then he lays out rules for becoming one such rare bird.
Most corporate workers, Mr. Newport argues, don’t have clear feedback about how to spend their time. As a result, employees use “busyness as a proxy for productivity,” which Mr. Newport describes aptly as “doing lots of stuff in a visible manner”–blasting out emails, for instance, or holding meetings on superficial progress on some project.
. . .
The book’s best example is the Pulitzer Prize winning Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, known for working on a meticulous schedule in his Manhattan office dressed in a coat and tie “so that he never forgets when he sits down with his research that he is going to work,” as one profile of Mr. Caro put it.

For the full review, see:
KATE BACHELDER. “BOOKSHELF; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?; Yes, open offices cultivate camaraderie–among coworkers who all cringe as a colleague shouts at her soon-to-be ex-husband over the phone.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Jan. 20, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 19, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016.