Category: Theory

Foreign Policy magazine has an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon on the role of cognitive biases in the decision to go to war.

Kahneman is a nobel prize winning psychologist known for his work on decision making and Renshon is a political scientist and author of the book Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (ISBN 0275990850).

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

The article is an interesting attempt to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to understanding political decision making in high stress, high stakes situations.

This is an area which is becoming increasingly important in military psychology. Both to understand how individual soldiers might make battlefield decisions, and how leaders might make strategic choices during conflict.

Link to article ‘Why Hawks Win’ (via Frontal Cortex).

Marvin Minksy, one of the founding figures in Artificial Intelligence, in his Society of Mind (1985):

People ask if machines have souls. And I ask back whether souls can learn. It does not seem a fair exchange – if souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn – to trade all change for changelessness. And that’s exactly what we get with inborn souls that cannot grow: a destiny the same as death, an ending in a permanence incapable of any change and, hence, devoid of intellect.

…

We start as little embryos, which then build great and wonderous selves – whose merit lies entirely within their own coherancy. The value of a human self lies not in some small, precious core, but in its vast constructed crust

What are those old and fierce beliefs in spirits, souls, and essences? They’re all insinuation that we’re helpless to improve ourselves. To look for our virtues in such thoughts seems just as wrongly aimed a search as seeking art in canvas cloths by scraping off the painter’s works.

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on a new generation of anthropologist military strategists, such as David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, who argue that social networks, not ideologies, are key to understanding terrorist campaigns.

Like Kilcullen, [McFate] was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives…

Similarly, Kilkullen has drawn on his own military experiences and research on the role of social groups in insurgencies, and is now responsible for writing counter-insurgency guidelines for deployed soldiers.

One of the most influential sociology papers ever written was Mark Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties (review article at this pdf) which looked at how people were connected in social networks and how this facilitated information exchange, and, consequently, individual goal attainment.

Granovetter demonstrated that ‘strong ties’ (i.e. family and close friends) were actually less important in social networks for getting things done than ‘weak ties’ (i.e. acquaintances) because ‘weak ties’ tend to be people who have different and diverse resources that aren’t in the immediate social group.

This led to the realisation that group structure was important, and, crucially, that these could be analysed using the mathematical tools of graph theory.

Social network theory is now an important and growing area of social psychology and understanding how information flows through social network is thought to be key for making sense of how groups work, co-operate, expand and influence others.

Importantly, this has meant the individualist approach of traditional social psychology (‘how do social groups influence the individual’) and the computational approach of social network theory (‘how does social structure influence information flow’) can be powerfully combined.

Kilkullen argues that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda need to be understood in terms of how their information strategy is being implemented through their social networks, and how they are attempting to recruit collaborators to further their routes of communication.

The article discusses how this has affected US counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategy – from global policy to field manuals for company captains.

Perhaps, one take-away message from the piece is just how important social science is becoming to military forces of all persuasions as they increasingly fight through communities rather than for them.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Knowing the Enemy’.

The cover story in this week’s Science News is an in-depth investigation into the science of psychopaths and psychopathy.

The article is a fantastic round-up of much of the most recent work on the neuroscience and psychology of psychopathy, and clarifies exactly what is meant when someone is diagnosed as being a ‘psychopath’.

One psychopathic offender murdered his ex-girlfriend to stop her from interfering with his new relationship. Another psychopathic inmate arranged and committed the murder of his wife to cash in her life insurance policy.

In contrast, a large majority of the nonpsychopathic prisoners had killed someone in the heat of the moment or upon reaching an emotional breaking point.

Porter measured psychopathy using a tool called the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). This clinical-rating scale, devised by psychologist Robert D. Hare of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has served as the gold standard of psychopathy tests for about 20 years.

In this approach, a psychologist or psychiatrist interviews a person and reviews his or her criminal record. The rater then judges whether any of 20 psychopathy-related traits applies to that person. These traits include being superficial, acting grandiosely, lying frequently, showing no remorse, lacking empathy, refusing to accept responsibility for misdeeds, behaving impulsively, and having committed many crimes.

The article also looks at an increasing area of research – non-criminal psychopaths.

These are supposedly people with many of the psychopathic personality traits who don’t come in contact with the law or legal system. Many supposedly thrive in business, where socially underhand but lawful tactics can be an advantage.

If you want a good overview of the current state of psychopathy research, the Science News article is a remarkably good summary, although the recent study on the recognition of facial emotion in psychopaths was too new to be included.

Link to Science News article ‘The Predator’s Gaze’ (via BB).
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on ‘The Mask of Sanity’.

Slate has a short article on the intriguing question of how economists measure happiness.

This has become a key issue this year, as the two leading political parties in the UK, and the kingdom of Bhutan, have cited ‘happiness’ as a national goal.

Happiness, otherwise known as ‘subjective well-being’ (sounds more scientific doesn’t it?), is actually quite a tricky thing to measure.

Despite it being fairly prominent as a human desire throughout history, only recently has it been studied in earnest by psychologists.

This has been linked to the ‘positive psychology‘ movement that has begun to specifically focus on human strengths and virtues, after hundreds of years of psychology being dominated by the study of mental distress or reasoning abilities.

In fact, the idea that psychologists were studying happiness caused enough of a stir to make the front cover of Time magazine in 2004. The pdf of the article is available online if you want to have a look.

The Slate article briefly describes the current approaches to measuring happiness: essentially, either by judging overall ‘life satisfaction’ or by recording day-by-day emotions and working out an average.

If you want a bit more on the emerging science of happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote a good summary for Edge which is still available online.

Link to Slate article ‘The Not-So-Dismal Science’ (with mp3 version).
pdf of Time article ‘The New Science of Happiness’.
Link to Edge discussion with Daniel Gilbert.

If you thought that the founders of the Artificial Intelligence movement were the first to think that intelligence was just the product of computation, think again:

When man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels….For reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 5 ‘Of Reason and Science’

The Psychologist has just made an article available online that examines the history of how novelists have used metaphors to describe the human mind. The article also tackles how this has reflected our understanding of the mind itself.

Mind-metaphors have always reflected dominant scientific ideas, and psychologists and cognitive scientists have always used metaphors in building their theories (Leary, 1990). During the heyday of behaviourism, when theorising about internal states was more-or-less taboo, the incidence of metaphors of mind in published psychological research dropped away accordingly (Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Metaphors of mind, both literary and scientific, can act as ‘guide fossils’ in reflecting the prevailing scientific orthodoxies of the eras in which they are found (Draaisma, 2000). What if these metaphors turn out to be wrong? What if the mind doesn’t work that way?

A book that has looked at metaphors for psychology in more detail is Metaphors of Memory by dutch psychologist Prof Douwe Draaisma.

He notes that psychological theories have often been inspired by technology, so we understood the mind as being a system of pneumatic and hydraulic forces in the 1800s, while we now use metaphors of information processing as computers have become the dominant technology.

It’s interesting to think that our understanding of ourselves might be limited by our ability to build technology.

It’s also interesting to wonder whether the move to incorporate more biological function into technology will mean we are less bound by restrictive metaphors in future cognitive science.

In The Psychologist article, Charles Fernyhough argues that fiction may be a rich source of metaphors, and work in developing more poetic approaches to understanding the mind may make important contributions to theory building in psychology.

Link to article ‘Metaphors of Mind’.

Controversial psychiatrist Thomas Szasz is the subject of an in-depth article in The New Atlantis magazine that re-examines his legacy and impact on psychiatry.

Szasz has made some of the most important and cutting criticisms of modern psychiatry but is now largely ignored by both academia and patients’ rights groups.

This is partly because the classical liberal philosophy that motivates many of his arguments has become less popular and partly because he’s been associated with Scientology – known for its wild-eyed anti-psychiatry.

It is also true to say that while making some pertinent and uncomfortable observations, he’s also made some rather less impressive and sometimes, downright insulting, accusations.

One of his most well-known arguments is that mental illness is a ‘myth’. This is widely misunderstood to mean that Szasz is arguing that there is no such thing as mental suffering or bizarre behaviour, or that it shouldn’t be treated, which is not the case.

Szasz would argue that these things are labelled as mental illnesses because of society’s willingness to medicalise, and often control, people who behave abnormally.

He argues that while these things occur, they are not diseases in the same sense that, say, AIDS, is an disease, because there is no clear biological marker for mental distress.

In a sense, modern psychiatry is cursed only to deal with disorders that do not have a discrete biological cause.

As soon as a clear biological cause is found, the disorder is often taken out of the hands of mainstream psychiatry and becomes the domain of neurology or neuropsychiatry, as has happened with neurosyphilis, epilepsy, Huntingdon’s disease and many others.

In a way then, Szasz is right, because psychiatry necessarily applies medical concepts only to fuzzy human phenomena.

As science advances, the concepts become less fuzzy, and so Szasz’s arguments might apply to a smaller and smaller number of disorders.

This would be the case, perhaps, if it weren’t for the fact that other unpleasant experiences and behaviours are increasingly included in psychiatry’s remit. Extreme shyness can now be diagnosed as social phobia, for example.

The New Atlantis article examines some of the motivations behind Szasz’s 40 year crusade, the hubris of 60s psychiatry, and why he is now less relevant in modern psychiatric practice when he was once centre stage.

Link to article ‘The Myth of Thomas Szasz’.

In some circles behaviourism is associated with a kind of fascism, or at the very least an austere puritanism (to contrast it with its nemesis, the literary/humanistic psychoanalysis). B.F. Skinner particularly suffers from this association, because of his pivotal role in the development of the science and philosophy of behaviourism, and perhaps because of some of his political writings (e.g. ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity‘, 1971). There’s even an entirely false story that he applied behaviourist control techniques to his family, with disastrous results.

Skinner As Self-Manager by Rober Epstein, a student and later colleague of Skinner, gives an account of Skinner, and his style of life, which is in stark contrast to the disempowering, mechanistically-clinical, image some might have of behaviourist psychology:

Each day of our collaboration brought new projects and new excitement, and, as I got to know Skinner better, my awe began to subside. He insisted, for one thing, that I call him ‚ÄòFred,‚Äô and it‚Äôs hard to be in awe of someone named Fred (his full name is Burrhus Frederic Skinner)… Fred‚Äôs manner was casual and far from intimidating. He often leaned back in his chair as he spoke, and his eyes sparkled with the energy of a man in his 20s, even though he was past 70. He told jokes and recited limericks, and he loved to hear new ones.

…

To my knowledge, and all of the rumors notwithstanding, Fred did not rely on ‘behavior modification’ techniques to ‘control’ people. Quite the contrary. He was relaxed, natural, and gentle in most of his dealings with other people. His interpersonal style was made milder, if anything, by the scientific principles he helped to develop, because his research convinced him that punishment was a poor tool for changing behavior, so he avoided using it in his everyday life.

…

Life, to Fred, was a series of joys to relish and challenges to overcome, and he did both extremely well…Fred was the most creative, most productive, and happiest person I have ever known.

Many of the big websites use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to make meaning out of chaotic data. Now, new software technology allows the automated use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.

As complex data-processing becomes a commodity, biological intelligence is becoming assimilated into the network as just another software application. As this commodity increases in value, your mind will become a prime target for cognitive hijackers.

Continue reading “Hijacking intelligence”

PsyBlog has posted the first of a new series entitled ‘Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here’ that will examine how much control we have over emotions and how they link to our thoughts and experiences.

Many people would say their emotions only come when they will and not when they want. So how do thoughts and emotions interact in everyday life and in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioural therapy? Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?

The first part looks at the work of the philosopher Robert Solomon who attempts to unpick ‘common sense’ psychology to show that our everyday understanding of emotions poorly describes how they affect our thoughts and behaviour.

Further parts in the series will analyse some of the latest findings from emotion science that are helping us make sense of our chaotic feelings.

Link to Part 1 of ‘Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here’ from PsyBlog.

ABC Radio’s The Philosopher’s Zone has an edition on one of Freud’s most famous cases, named ‘The Wolf Man’, because the patient had a dream about a tree full of white wolves outside his bedroom window, waiting to eat him.

That’s a picture of the dream on the right (click for larger version) painted by the patient himself, whose real name was Sergei Pankejeff.

Pankejeff was a member of the Russian upper-classes whose sister and father had committed suicide and personally suffered from a debilitating depression.

Freud analysed Pankejeff and interpreted his current emotional turmoil as being due to a disruption in his early sexual development.

His ‘wolf dream’ was thought to be a masked expression of his disturbance at accidentally seeing his parents have sex when he was a child. Freud thought the wolves were an expression of seeing this ‘primal’ act.

This edition of The Philosopher’s Zone looks at the importance of the ‘Wolf Man’ for the development of psychoanalysis, but also looks at wider issues of how evidence is used in building theories of the mind.

Freud is often criticised for the validity of his theories, and the programme discusses whether he was justified in drawing these conclusions when there was little other evidence on the function of the mind to work with.

Link to audio and transcript of ‘Who was the Wolf Man?’.

Science has a special online collection on computational neuroscience – the science of creating computer models of the mind and brain to test theories and develop treatments.

The collection is a mixture of freely available and closed access articles, but all the summaries are freely available so you can get a taster of this exciting field just by skimming the abstracts.

If you can’t get access through a college or subscription, your local library might subscribe to Science as it is one of the most widely read science journals.

Link to Science special issue ‘Modeling the Mind’.
Link to introduction to special collection.

ABC Radio’s The Philosopher’s Zone has just had two special editions on Freud and his relevance to modern day thinking.

The programmes look at two contrasting areas of his wide-ranging theories.

The first is on Freud’s contribution to philosophy and the second contrasts Freud’s theories of dreaming with modern dream science derived from neuroscience.

The discussion picks out theories which were seminal in igniting research, and those which have not stood the test of time.

For those wanting an almost entirely critical take on Freud, the Times Literary Supplement has a review of a Frederick Crews’ new book entitled Follies of the Wise (ISBN 1593761015), which attempts to show that even many of Freud’s more popular ideas are fundamentally flawed.

Taking pot shots at Freud is quite fashionable in this day and age. However, as Freud wrote so much and about so many different topics, it is easy to find something to criticise but difficult to dismiss all his ideas at once.

Link to Philosopher’s Zone on Freud the Philosopher.
Link to Philosopher’s Zone on The Dream Debate.
Link to TLS book review.

I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted: it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry, since it is not a being distinct from sensations. A cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind, because they are observed to attend each other. Thus, when the palate is affected with such a particular taste, the sight is affected with a red colour, the touch with roundness, softness, &c. Hence, when I see, and feel, and taste, in such sundry certain manners, I am sure the cherry exists, or is real; its reality being in my opinion nothing abstracted from those sensations. But if by the word cherry you mean an unknown nature, distinct from all those sensible qualities, and by its existence something distinct from its being perceived; then, indeed, I own, neither you nor I, nor any one else, can be sure it exists.

George Berkeley Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous

Several decades ago, an eminent psychologist defined the field of psychology as ‘a bunch of men standing on piles of their own crap, waving their hands and yelling “Look at me, look at me!”’ Fortunately, things have changed quite a bit over the years, and the field is no longer composed entirely of men.

Daniel Gilbert, Are psychology’s tribes ready to form a nation?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol.6 No.1 January 2002.