Mixing Memory

This Blog Has Moved

2006-06-12T00:15:00.000-05:00

Mixing Memory has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory.

Moving to ScienceBlogs

2006-06-09T01:24:00.000-05:00

So, the move to ScienceBlogs is now complete. That means there will be no more posts here on the Blogger site. Sure, I'll miss all of the downtime, the lost posts (all of my really good posts were lost by blogger; you'll just have to take my word for that), and the fact that Blogger took away the bullets in the template I've used since I started the blog. But after a brief mourning period, I will be able to move on.

Here is the new URL: http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory. If you don't want to type that out, you can just click here. I'm going to try to post more often there, for various reasons (if you reach a certain traffic level, you get paid!). But I'm not going to change the way I post, so hopefully those of you who find the blog interesting will continue to do so.

There are three different banners at the new site, one by Todd Hartman (on the Archives page), and two by Anton Oettl (Main page, About, and Contact -- I'll provide a link to his page when he gives me with one). I am very grateful to them for the time they put into making such great banners.

When you get over there, feel free to email me with your suggestions or advice about the look or anything else. Also, as I've always said, I'm always taking suggestions. I know, I know, I still owe you posts on two previous requests, theory-theory (vs. simulation) and memes. The first post on theory-theory should be the first substantive post at the new site, and the post (probably a series) is still coming, but I've actually been doing some new reading on memes, and I want to incorporate all of that into the post, so it will be a little while before it's finished. However, new requests are always welcome, and I may very well get to them before I get to memes, so send them my way either in contacts or in email.

Finally, let me just say thank you to everyone who's read this blog over the last year and a half. If ScienceBlogs brings me new readers, that's great, but there'll always be a special place in my blogging heart for the people who've read and contributed to Mixing Memory from day 1. In the introductory post at ScienceBlogs, I talk about viewing Mixing Memory as a collaborative effort with the readers, and I really feel that way. The suggestions, advice, and requests that you've all given me have shaped the blog, and I'm very grateful for them.

Mixing Memory Banner

2006-06-05T23:37:00.000-05:00

So, the move to ScienceBlogs is almost complete. They set up the site and everything, though I don't think I'm supposed to give out the link yet. They haven't made the new blogs public, and until then, they're being all cloak and dagger. Anyway, I tried to come up with a title banner for the site, but failed miserably. Here's what my best effort produced:

It's a bit small, but those are brain images (actually the same image) on the right and the left. Sucks, huh? Trust me, you do not want to see the other one I came up with.

Anyway, I write this in the hopes that someone out there not only thinks that he or she could do better, but is willing to show me that he or she can by making a Mixing Memory banner that actually looks, you know, good. I'd offer to compensate you for your efforts, but blog expenses simply aren't in the budget. However, I will link you prominently on the front page of the website, so you'll get free advertising (for your blog, your business, or whatever).

Linkable Links

2006-06-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, but I've been really busy lately. I've got a few posts brewing, but for now, how 'bout some links?

To start, a couple from John Hawks. First, there's this post on a paper by Daniel Oppenheimer from Applied Cognitive Psychology titled "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly."

Then there's this post discussing a paper on the distinction between short-term and long-term memory, and the distinction between memory for features (objects and attributes, in my language) and memory for relations between features. Omni Brain also posted on the paper, here (with a link to a pdf of the paper, too). Here's a bit from the press release:

For over 40 years, the chief paradigm has been that the hippocampus was important for creating long-term memory but not short-term or working memory," said Ingrid Olson, a member of Penn's Department of Psychology and researcher at Penn's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. "However, our data show that one type of working memory, working memory for the relationship between bits of information, is dependent on the hippocampus.

Which leads Olson to claim:

While 'long-term' memory and 'short-term' memory have been useful distinctions for us, they may not exist in the same way for the brain.

I'll have more to say about this article in a full post, but for now let me say this: the reason I think this finding is so interesting is not that it undermines the short-term/working memory vs. long-term memory distinction, because I don't think it does. Instead, I think it's interesting because it actually confirms some things that some people have been saying about working memory for a while, now, namely that relations are processed differently, that relations take up more processing capacity, etc.

Next up, a great post at Cognitive Daily on research purporting to show that sex and violence don't sell.

Then this post at Neurocritic (a great blog, by the way!) on neurogenesis and depression is a must read. The connection between neurogenesis and depression has been all the rage for the last few years, and the Neurocritic does a nice job of summarizing what we actually know. He concludes:

SUMMARY FROM THE NEUROCRITIC: Although it's all very trendy to consider neurogenesis as "The Reinvention of the Self" (see article in SEED), at this stage of the game, it's all very hyberbolic.

Finally, this post by Adam Roberts at The Valve titled "Why are the greatest composers all German?" While Roberts claims:

I’ve also little time for the Dawkins school of ‘memes’, ideas, concepts and beliefs that ‘infect’ human minds, such that ‘religion’ is thought of existing in a quasi-living manner like a virus, and subject to Darwinian constraints. I don’t think I’m talking about memes.

Anytime someone writes something like this:

Think instead of texts as animals, he says, living in an environment of readers, viewers and listeners. These texts compete with one another not for food and sexual partners, but for our attention. In this environment, the most successful pieces of music (for example) will win many listeners, and those listeners will ‘keep the music alive’ by playing it, buying copies of it, re-recording and replicating it. It is as simple as that. Mozart’s music has prospered because it is best ‘fitted’ to its particular environment (us, or more specifically our taste in music). Salieri’s music failed because it was less well fitted. It is not that Salieri’s music is in any sense intrinsically ‘worse’ than Mozart’s, any more than a dodo was intrinsically worse than a seagull. It is simply that one was adapted to its environment better than the other.

I can't help but feel they're talking like a memeticist. In fact, because he doesn't really mention an analogy to genes, it sounds an awful lot like the "meme as virus" metaphor that he explicitly rejects. And it suffers from many of the problems that plague memetics. As such, it's a nice lead up to my post on memes (which, to those of you who requested it, is coming... I promise).

Children's Acceptance of Testimony About the Spiritual and the Scientific

2006-05-25T01:57:00.000-05:00

Via Coturnix, I learned about this post and this article about this paper by Harris and Koenig (this is not the final version) in this month's issue of Cognitive Development. I don't know about people in other sciences, but I think this is the first time I've ever seen press coverage of a literature review. It's a very interesting literature review, though, so I'm glad it's getting attention. Only, I wish the whole review was getting attention, instead of one small part of it.

The review focuses on children's acceptance of testimony from adults about things that the children either haven't or cannot observe. They describe several examples of acceptance, and integration into coherent beliefs, of scientific knowledge, including knowledge of the importance of the brain for thought, personality, etc., the roundness of the earth, and the inevitability and permanence of death. They also describe similar examples for spiritual phenomena including God's ability to have knowledge that humans cannot have (e.g., God doesn't have false beliefs, and God can see objects that are occluded), beliefs about the afterlife, beliefs about the origins of humans and other animals (including a discussion of the work of Margaret Evans mentioned in this post). In the grand scheme of things, children's willingness and ability to accept testimony from adults about spiritual matters is very similar to their willingness and ability to accept testimony from adults about scientific matters.

Still, there are differences between the two, and this is the focus of the press report. I'll give you an example of the way children's beliefs about scientific and spiritual entities differ, from the article. In a study by Harris et al.¹, children between the ages of 4 and 8 were presented with five different types of entities:

Real entities: Things that they can see (e.g., tigers)
Scientific entities: Things that they can't see, but have been told exist, such as germs and oxygen.
Endorsed entities: Things they can't see, but that are endorsed by parents and other adults, like God, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.
Equivocal entities: Things they've heard about, but that aren't often endorsed by adults, like monsters or ghosts.
Impossible entities: Red elephants and barking cats... enough said.

For examples of each type of entity, children were asked whether they or other people would say they exist (whether there are any in the world), and then asked to say how sure they were. Children were most likely to say that real entities exist, and were the most confident about this belief, though scientific entities followed close behind in each experiment (and the difference between the two was not statistically significant), and they were the least likely to say that impossible entities exist, and were very confident in this belief as well. Endorsed and equivocal entities fell in between, with children being less likely to say that endorsed entities existed, and to be less confident in their belief in them, than they were for real and scientific entities, but were more likely and more confident for endorsed than for equivocal entities. In other words, children had slightly more doubt about the existence of endorsed entities like God and Santa Claus than they did about scientific entities, despite the fact that both types of entities are unseen, and their knowledge of the existence of such entities is entirely dependent on adult testimony.

Since the existence of things like germs and oxygen are likely no less counterintuitive (or counter to experience) for children who don't have sophisticated scientific knowledge than are things like God and Santa Claus, it's likely that the reasons for the difference in certainty about the existence of the two kinds of entities are pretty subtle, and may have to do with how people talk about them. Harris and Koenig offer the following explanation:

[C]hildren hear people talk in a matter-of-fact fashion about the causal properties of germs or oxygen. Such remarks do not explicitly attest either to the existence of those entities or to the speaker’s faith in their existence. Thus, children rarely hear utterances such as, “There really are germs” or “I believe in oxygen.” Instead they hear claims and warnings that take the existence of the entities for granted, for example, “Throw that away – it has germs” or “He needs oxygen to breathe.” In the case of God or Santa Claus, on the other hand, children may well hear avowals such as “There really is a Santa Claus” or “I believe in God.” Such avowals may lead children to conclude that the existence of these special beings is not altogether beyond doubt. (p. 35)

They also suggest that children may occasionally hear people express doubt about God or Santa Claus, while they would rarely hear people express doubt about the existence of germs or oxygen, and thus children are less confident in the existence of spiritual entities.

So, there is a small difference between children's beliefs about scientific and spiritual entities, and the explanation for this difference may reveal a lot about children's ability to detect subtle cues when assessing testimony from adults. Still, the bulk of the article is actually about the similarity between children's acceptance of testimony on scientific and spiritual entities. It's a really interesting literature review, so if you're into cognitive development, check it out.

¹Harris, P.L., Pasquini, E.S., Duke, S., Asscher, J.J., & Pons, F. (2006). Germs and angels: The role of testimony in young children's ontology. Developmental Science, 9(1), 76–96.

A Blog I Found and a Question

2006-05-22T19:17:00.000-05:00

First, the question. Does anyone know if the DSM-I and/or DSM-II can be found online somewhere? I can't find either of them, and I'm too lazy to go to the library right now. I'm looking for some good psychodynamic definitions of mental disorders for an upcoming post, and I know the first two volumes of the DSM were full of them.

Now the blog. I was scowering the internet for places to eat in Austin, and I came across this blog. It's OK, but it had this interview with another blog, Apartment Food Hobos, that is hilarious. Here's a portion of the interview that expresses how I often feel:

OUTSIDER: What made you decide to start a blog? Aren’t blogs for dorks?

HOBOS: Blogs aren’t for dorks, blogs just re-affirm your sincere commitment to becoming a generational cliché. We deal with the self-loathing every time we post.

And to give you a taste (bad pun) of the blog itself, here's a quote:

The Knight's Vale cheese stank up my life and won my heart. God almighty. A finer cheese I have rarely tasted. Soft and creamy but as pungent as the old dirty foot of a Hungarian gypsy trapped in the South of Spain during WWII. Speaking of pungent, lets talk about smoked salmon. You take a stinky, stinky fish like salmon (--good stinky, I aint hatin') and you increase the stink with the addition of smokeifying. Then you sell it to me for 10 bucks? AHA HA HA HA!! GENIUS!!!

If you love good food, but you're dirt poor, or if you just enjoy good food humor, check out the blog.

There Is No Green Dot!

2006-05-18T13:57:00.000-05:00

I love visual illusions, and this one is really cool (via The Neurophile). I'd never seen it before.

As usual, looking at one visual illusion led to looking at more, and now I've got a headache. Once, I ran an experiment using after effects, and spent hours and hours looking at the stimulus as I was trying to perfect the Matlab code for the experiment. I had a headache for like three weeks.

Oh, and thank you Chicago and Vancouver folks for the restaurant recommendations. Does anyone in either of those cities drink, though? And Austin people, where are you? I know there are good restaurants and bars in that city, and I'm sure that someone reading this knows of at least one of them.

Mixing Memory on the Road

2006-05-17T19:40:00.000-05:00

I hate to trump a cog sci post with a personal one, but I'm going to be doing some traveling over the next couple months, and in the towns I will be visiting, I'm going to be looking for good eats (that's southern for "good food"), and a nice place to get a drink in the evening. I'm going to be in Austin, Chicago, and (potentially) Vancouver. Also Nashville, but I know that city pretty well. So, if you live in one of these cities, or know them well, please drop me an email or leave a comment with suggestions about places to eat and/or drink (and by drink, I don't mean water).

More Linguists on Starlings and Recursion

2006-05-17T18:42:00.000-05:00

Those of you still interested in the Gentner et al. paper on starlings learning a context-free grammar might want to read this letter submitted to Nature (and immediately rejected) by Ray Jackendoff, Mark Liberman, Geoff Pullum, and Barbara Scholz (via Language Log). This is the letter's conclusion:

The Gentner experiment may help us understand animal pattern recognition and learning abilities, some of them possibly prerequisites for linguistic abilities; but the implications are being considerably exaggerated, especially in popular media accounts with headlines like "Songbirds May Be Able to Learn Grammar."

Ray Jackendoff is definitely someone to take seriously when discussing issues related to the evolution of language (which is not to say that the others aren't; I'm just less familiar with their work). His book Foundations of Language is one of my favorites in cognitive science, largely because of the incredibly lucid and level-headed discussion of the evolution of language in Chatper 8. It may be the only evolution of language discussion out there with those qualities. It helps, of course, that Jackendoff backs it up with 7 chapters of theoretical discussion, clear even to a nonlinguist (though I wouldn't recommend it for people with no background in linguistics). So, when Jackendoff speaks on this topic, I listen.

Experimental Philosophy: Morality, Intentionality, and Values (Oh My!)

2006-05-16T03:19:00.000-05:00

If you haven't been following the On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC), you should go over and check it out. It has just finished its third of four weeks, and there were some good papers in this round. I was particularly interested in the paper by Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder titled "The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies," because it's experimental philosophy, and it's by Knobe, whose work is easily the most interesting in experimental philosophy.

Before I get into Knobe's work, and the Knobe and Roedder paper, let me tell you a story. When I was in graduate school, I went to see a talk (that sounds weird, doesn't it?) by a pretty well-known philosopher of mind. I won't mention his name, but as a hint, I will say that you can wear him with a dress shirt, and if you're wearing a tuxedo, you're probably wearing him in a bow. I've forgotten the exact topic, but it had something to do with the unity of conscious experience. The talk was filled with counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and little thought experiments. In other words, it was pretty much everything you'd expect from "conceptual analysis." By the end of the talk, it was all I could do to stay awake. I wasn't just sleepy, though; I was frustrated and sleepy, and those two states do not work well in combination. I was sleepy because conceptual analysis is, well, boring. I was frustrated because he was talking about an issue that I felt, and still feel, would be better addressed through empirical, rather than conceptual analysis. And that's not simply because I'm coming at it from the usual scientific perspective, which amounts to, "Yes, but where's the data?" It's also because the unity of consciousness is an empirical topic, and questions about it are empirical questions. So they should be asked and answered that way. When I stood up to ask a question about the potential empirical implications of his position, I probably looked like a raving narcoleptic, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the philosophers in the room dismissed them. The speaker certainly didn't seem to find them very interesting. But I think they were important questions, nonetheless.

The point of my telling this story is that even before I had heard of experimental philosophy, I was a fan of it. I felt that there were many philosophical questions, especially those pertaining to problems of mind and psychology, that could best be answered by conducting experimental investigations. When I learned of experimental philosophy, I was very excited. Finally, philosophers who recognize that empirical investigation is essential. Then I started to read some experimental philosophy, at first by accident; I stumbled upon a Stich paper in the journal Cognitive Psychology, without realizing he was a philosopher, or that he was doing experimental philosophy. It turns out, they weren't doing quite what I had in mind. They were doing conceptual analysis, and attempting to answer questions that only arise out of conceptual analysis, but they were doing it with an n larger than 1. That's better than doing it with an n of 1, but it still doesn't feel like it's quite right.

The point of my telling you that is this: the one experimental philosopher I've read whose work feels like it is, or at least could be, an example of the empirical approach to philosophy that I've always envisioned, is Joshua Knobe. In fact, he's already used his experimental work to say something about problems that arose out of empirical psychology, and not conceptual analysis in philosophy (see this paper). So that's why I find Knobe's work to be the most interesting in experimental philosophy, and also why I was eager to read his OPC paper. Now I'm eager to talk about it, and since I have a blog, that's what I'm going to do.

Let me start (I say "let me start" in the 4th paragraph; that's funny) by describing some of Knobe's older work on intentionality. His most well-known experiment used the following scenarios (from this paper, p. 3):

Scenario 1: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.'

The chairman of the board answered, 'I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.'

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.

Scenario 2: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment.'

The chairman of the board answered, 'I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.'

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped.

After reading one of these scenarios, participants were asked whether the chairman had intentionally harmed/helped the environment. Eight-two percent of the participants who read scenario 1 said that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment, while 77% of the participants who read scenario 2 said that the chairman had not harmed the environment. Using this, and several follow up experiments (check out Knobe's homepage for links to his many papers on this topic), Knobe has argued that morality plays a role in our use of the concept of intentionality. I'll say more about these experiments in a moment, but for now, let's move on to the OPC paper.

The OPC paper is, as the title suggests, on valuing. It's a short paper, so you should probably just go read it yourself. Go on, I'll wait. OK, back? Since you've just read the paper, you know that it presents an argument against a view of the concept of valuing in the philosophical literature that Knobe and Roedder put thusly (p. 1):

[T]he concept of valuing can be defined in purely descriptive, non-normative terms.

They argue that, contrary to this view, "moral considerations actually play a role in the concept [of valuing]." They don't claim that moral features are the only, or even the primary features of our concept of valuing, but that, when other features are absent, moral features can determine whether we believe a person does or does not have a certain value. As evidence for their position, they present the results of two experiments. Since you've read the paper (you haven't? Go, now! I'll wait again), you don't need me to describe the experiments, but because I'm a nice guy, I'll do so anyway. In their first experiment, they use these two scenarios (p. 3-4):

Scenario 3: George lives in a culture in which most people are extremely racist. He thinks that the basic viewpoint of people in this culture is more or less correct. That is, he believes that he ought to be advancing the interests of people of his own race at the expense of people of other races.

Nonetheless, George sometimes feels a certain pull in the opposite direction. He often finds himself feeling guilty when he harms people of other races. And sometimes he ends up acting on these feelings and doing things that end up fostering racial equality.

George wishes he could change this aspect of himself. He wishes that he could stop feeling the pull of racial equality and just act to advance the interests of his own race.

Scenario 4: George lives in a culture in which most people believe in racial equality. He thinks that the basic viewpoint of people in this culture is more or less correct. That is, he believes that he ought to be advancing the interests of all people equally, regardless of their race.

Nonetheless, George sometimes feels a certain pull in the opposite direction. He often finds himself feeling guilty when he helps people of other races at the expense of his own. And sometimes he ends up acting on these feelings and doing things that end up fostering racial discrimination.

George wishes he could change this aspect of himself. He wishes that he could stop feeling the pull of racial discrimination and just act to advance the interests of all people equally, regardless of their race.

In the Scenario 3, George consciously harbors values that most people in our society would consider to be morally bad, but "feels a certain pull" towards values that we would consider morally good. In Scenario 4, the opposite is true. George consciously believes he values something we would consider morally good, but "feels a certain pull" towards values that we would consider morally bad. After reading the scenario, the participants were asked whether they agreed with these statement: "Despite his conscious beliefs, George actually values racial equality" (for Scenario 3) or "Despite his conscious beliefs, George actually values racial discrimination" (for Scenario 4). They rated their agreement on a 6-point scale (-3, disagree strongly, +3, agree strongly). Participants' were significantly more likely to agree with the statement for Scenario 3 than for Scenario 4. In other words, they were much more likely to believe that the man in Scenario 3 really did value something they thought to be morally good than they were to believe that the man in scenario 4 valued something they thought to be morally bad.

In their second experiment, Knobe and Roedder used this scenario:

Situation 5: Susan grew up in a religious family, but while she was in college, she started questioning her religious beliefs and eventually became an atheist.

She will be getting married in a few months to her longtime boyfriend. Recently, the subject of premarital sex has come up.

Susan definitely has a desire to have sex with her boyfriend, but whenever she thinks about doing so, she remembers what her church used to say about premarital sex and feels terribly guilty. As a result of these feelings, Susan has not had sex yet.

Because she is no longer religious, Susan believes there is nothing wrong with premarital sex.

They gave this scenario to two groups: members of a Mormon Bible study group, and people in Washington Square Park in New York. As you might expect, members of the Mormon Bible study believed that refraining from premarital sex was morally good, while the Washington Square Park participants didn't really care about premarital sex. And consistent with the results from their first experiment, those who thought that refraining from premarital sex was morally good were much more likely to believe that Susan valued it as well than those who didn't value premarital sex.

So, from these two experiments, it really does appear that, "people's intuitions about an agent's values depend in part on moral considerations" (p. 6). The commenter on the Knobe and Roedder paper, Antti Kauppinen, has a different interpretation, appealing to Donald Davidson's "principle of charity." I won't get into that, but you can read the commentary here. Instead, I'm going to argue that the studies don't tell us much about valuation.

Here is the problem I see with both experiments. One of many proper control conditions for these studies would involve a scenario like this:

Scenario 6: Susan lives in Atlanta, where most people are Braves fans. She thinks these people are basically correct. That is, she enthusiastically roots for the Braves, regardless of who they're playing.

Nonetheless, Susan sometimes feels a certain pull in a different direction. She often finds herself feeling like the Cubs are a better team to root for. And sometimes she ends up acting on these feelings and rooting for the Cubs.

Susan wishes she could change this aspect of herself. She wishes that she could stop feeling the pull to root for the Cubs and just root for the Braves.

You'd then give this scenario to people in Atlanta and people in Chicago, and ask them how much they astatementh the statment: "Despite her conscious beliefs, Susan is actually a Cubs fan." You might predict that Chicagoans (who would be Cubs fans, for the most part) would believe that Susan was really a Cubs fan, while Braves fans in Atlanta wouldn't. Presumably Cubs and Braves fans don't have moral reasons for valuing one team over the other (unless they live in Boston), so if this prediction was confirmed, it wouldn't be a result of moral considerations. OK, I know that's pretty silly, but I threw it together as I typed it. If you don't like it, substitute it with a scientist who's feeling a pull towards a rival theory. The point is, if you're going to argue that moral considerations at work, you have to test similar scenarios in which morality is not an issue. It may simply be that people are inclined to believe that people agree with them, and all they need is one piece of evidence to confirm that belief. In that case, it's just motivated cognitionbias my-side bias, an illusion of common ground, or something similar at work. Sure, that could still mean that moral considerations would be at play in intuitions about valuation, which might result in the same philosophical implications knobe and Roebberson believe their position does, but it could also mean that other considerations based on evidence of other common belief could influence those intuitions as well. The problem Knobe and Roedder's experiments is that they don't test any potential psychological mechanisms, and thus we don't know the extent, or the cause, of their results.

That problem's not unique to these studies, either. Knobe's intentionality studies (e.g., the one using Scenario 1 & 2, and those linked at Knobe's homepage) don't test different possible mechanisms, either. One might be able to explain the results of the experiment using Scenario 1 & 2 by reference to research on counterfactual thinking, for example. We know, for instance, that people are much more likely to counterfactually mutate negative events/outcomes. Counterfactual reasoning is also associated with attributions of blame and experiences of guilt and regret. Perhaps people are more likely to attribute intentionality to the chairman in Scenario 1 because they're more likely to reason about it counterfactually (simply because it involves a negative outcome; negative for moral reasons, for sure, but it would be more likely to be mutated if it were negative for any other reason), and thus to assign blame (which might require intentionality), whereas Scenario 2 involves a positive outcome that is not likely to be counterfactually mutated. If counterfactual reasoning is involved in that way, then the implications for our intuitions about intentionality is much different. It's still related to morality through blame, which wouldn't be very surprising, but morality would play an indirect role in the assigment of intentionality through the mutability of negative outcomes. That explanation might not work, but we don't know, because no psychological mechanisms have been tested. And thus, we don't really know how to interpret the data.

As I've arrived at the end of this post, I feel like I've been overly critical of Knobe's (and Roedder's) work. The truth is, I find his experimental designs to be ingenious, and his results often surprising, at least at first glance. And as I said earlier, I think his work is really the most promising in experimental philosophy. Still, there's one more step to take: connecting these experiments more directly with the larger literature on concepts and reasoning, and then testing the predictions of different possible psychological mechanisms in order to tease out the ways in which morality plays a role in intuitions about intentionality and values. Once researchers begin to do that, I'll be the biggest fan of experimental philosophy out there. And if that's not motivation enough, then this might be. Understanding the mechanisms involved will help us to develop a much greater understand our intuitions related to important philosophical issues. If understanding those intuitions is as important to philosophy as experimental, then such work would be of great importance to philosophy.

UPDATE: If you read this post before this update was added, you may have noticed some weird things going on. You can thank Blogger's spell check for that. Hopefully most of them are gone, now.

Wow

2006-05-16T01:47:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching Judgment at Nuremburg. It was on TV this evening, and I watch it anytime I can, because it's a very good movie (Maximilian Schell is great, if creepy, in his role as the defense attorney). Watching it tonight also served as a sort of cleansing, because I was feeling rather ill after reading this (via Good Math, Bad Math):

And [Bush] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

When I read this in the Good Math, Bad Math post, I couldn't believe it. Vox Day, the author of the statement, had to have provided a context that made it clear he wasn't really comparing Germany's forceful deportation of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, political dissidents, gays, and the disabled to concentration camps to our current situation with undocumented immigrants. But no such context was to be found in the article. Desperate, I looked to Day's blog, where I found that not only was he comparing the two situations, but he is proud of doing so, and feels it's the only reasonable comparison. He writes (all emphasis, in the form of capitalization, is his):

But apparently today's column gave numerous double-digit IQs the vapors, as they were unable to ascertain that the IDENTIFICATION, FORCED TRANSPORTATION and MURDER of six million Jews in four years by the National Socialists proves that President Bush was absolutely incorrect - and presumably lying - when he stated that IDENTIFYING and FORCIBLY TRANSPORTING twelve million illegal aliens was not possible.

Quite clearly, it is. As for those who find all mention of the National Socialists or the Holocaust inherently beyond the pale, I am certainly open to hearing any suggestions that similarly prove the case. Has anyone else besides the National Socialists been identifying and transporting millions of people lately? Does anyone else put the lie to Dear Jorge? And if not, do we simply pretend that it never happened and that there are no lessons to be learned from it? Wasn't the whole point of the Shoah documentaries and the survivor recordings and the Holocaust museums to make sure that no one ever forgot?

When the Nazis regime is the only regime you can think of to compare to your present situation, red flags should go up. It's hard to separate the lesson Vox thinks we should learn from the Nazis from all of the other "lessons" that led to this one. And if we're really learning the lesson of Nazi deportations, then we'd have to pay attention to how they did it: placing people in cattle cars so crowded that it was not possible to sit, much lay down, and transporting them for days, sometimes even for weeks, without food or water. Sure, we've learned the lesson, Vox: if you want to deport millions of people over a few years, you have to do it the dirty way, and you're going to kill a lot of people in the process.

Also, I think Vox might be happy to know that the Nazis weren't the only ones to use forced deportations. The Soviets, under Stalin, did it by the millions as well, deporting Germans, political dissidents, Jews, and anyone else they didn't like, to the gulag. So, mass deportations over a short period of time are possible. Hitler and Stalin did it, therefore we can do it too! That may be a rational argument, but I can't imagine it's one anyone wants to make.

The Unbear... I Mean, Automatic Social Thinking

2006-05-14T01:49:00.000-05:00

If you'd clicked on the second link in the last post, you'd have discovered what is now a classic paper in social cognition, "The Unbearable Automaticy of Being" (ugh), by Bargh and Chartrand. Having linked to it, it seems only appropriate to talk about it. In that paper, Bargh and Chartrand describe research demonstrating the automatic activation of what they interpret as stereotypical behaviors through the unconscious priming of stereotypes in thought. It appears that thinking primes action, or in the words of William James:

[E]very representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object.

I've described the Bargh studies at length before (here), so I won't do so again, but I'll quickly summarize a couple of them. In two of the studies, researchers presented participants with a scrambled sentence task, which consists of giving them a set of words and asking them to use those words to form a sentence. In one experiment, half of the words primed the concept RUDE, and half primed the concept POLITE, while in the other experiment, one version had words associated with the concept ELDERLY, and the other words that were age-neutral. When the concept RUDE was primed, participants were quicker to interrupt an experimenter than when the concept POLITE was primed, and when the concept ELDERLY was primed, participants walked more slowly than when they had been presented with age-neutral words. So far, no one has actually tested an explanation of these interesting demonstrations, though Bargh now at least recognizes that it's time to start trying to do so. But each time I've read about these sorts of effects, I've thought about studies showing the reverse effect -- action priming thought (e.g., performing avoidance actions priming negative evaluations). So I wondered if performing stereotyped actions might prime stereotyped thinking.

Well, Thomas Mussweiler wondered that as well, but instead of resting on his laurels like me, Mussweiler actually did the research¹. In his first experiment, he "unobtrusively induced" half of the participants to move in a way associated with obesity. I'll let Mussweiler describe the method for inducing this sort of movement "unobtrusively":

The first study was introduced as part of a research project conducted in collaboration with the local lifeguards. The ostensible purpose of this study was to examine how well people are able to move in emergency situations. Participants were asked to perform a number of movements designed to simulate typical movements on board a ship and in water. The instructions were carefully worded to avoid any reference to concepts associated with portliness. Experimental participants were asked to put on a life vest and a set of four gymnastic weights that were wrapped around their wrists and ankles. The experimenter explained that the weights were used to simulate water resistance. The life vest and weights unobtrusively induced participants to move in a portly manner. (p. 18)

The participants then performed a series of actions, like climbing onto a chair. The other half of the participants, the control group, performed the same actions without wearing the vest or weights.

After completing the movement portion of the study, participants were told they were also going to participate in a second, unrelated study on "person perception." The study involved reading a description of a person in "ambiguous terms," and then rating the person on fifteen dimensions, seven of which were associated with obesity stereotypes (based on previous research, e.g., healthy, insecure), and eight of which were not (e.g., musical, articulate), using a nine-point scale. The results are in the pretty graph I made from Mussweiler's Table 1, below:

As you can see, the people whose movements were stereotyipically "portly" rated the person described in "ambiguous terms" higher on traits associated with the obesity stereotype than on traits not associated with that stereotype, and their ratings on the stereotypic traits were also higher than those of the control ("Normal," in the graph) participants. So it appears that performing "portly" movements primed "portly" stereotypes.

In the second study, participants were placed on a stationary bicycle and instructed to either pedal very slowly (experimental group), or pedal at a normal speed (control group). They then read an ambiguously worded description of a person, as in the first experiment, and were asked to rate her on one stereotypic (forgetfulness) and one nonstereotypic (friendliness) dimension. Once again, participants who had performed the stereotypic action, pedalling slowly in this case, rated the person higher on the stereotypic trait than participants in the control group, though it should be noted that the ratings for the stereotypic trait (7.11 and 6.22, on a 9-point scale, for the experimental and control group respectively) were much higher than for the nonstereotypic trait (2.68 and 2.84) in both groups. And one has to wonder whether moving slowly primes only the elderly stereotype, if it primes a stereotype at all. Hell, moving slowly is associated with obesity, too. Might these participants have rated the person higher on obesity-stereotypic traits as well? Why the elderly stereotype specifically? And was the description really neutral with respect to the person's forgetfulness if both the experimental and control groups both thought the person was pretty forgetful (an average rating of 4 or 5 would mean an average level of forgetfulness, but both groups average ratings were over 6)? Unfortunately, the description isn't included in the article, so we can't judge for ourselves.

The third study was almost the exact reverse of Bargh's study. Participants were first instructed to walk in a circle for five minutes (listening to a story on headphones) at either a slow pace (30 steps per minute) or a fast one (90 steps per minute). When the five minutes were up, participants completed a lexical decision task. In lexical decision tasks, letter strings are presented, and participants are told to indicate whether the strings are words or not as fast as they can. Lexical decision tasks are often used as measures of priming. In this study, the participants were presented with 40 letter strings, eight of which were words associated with the elderly stereotype, 8 of which were words not associated with the elderly stereotype, and 24 of which were nonwords. Participants who walked slowly responded to elderly-stereotypic words significantly faster than did participants who walked at a normal speed, once again indicating priming of the elderly stereotype. The data are in the graph below (created by yours truly from Mussweiler's Table 3; latencies are in milliseconds).

So, here we have three demonstrations, using two different stereotypes and two different measures of priming, that the effects Bargh and his colleagues have observed in actions after priming stereotypical thoughts can also be observed in reverse, by having people perform stereotypical actions and thereby priming stereotypical thoughts. At least, that's the standard interpretation. As I indicated in my reaction to Mussweiler's second experiment, I'm somewhat skeptical of this interpretation. It's clear that priming is occurring, but what, exactly, is doing the priming (the movement, the level of arousal, or what)? And what's being primed (single stereotypes, multiple stereotypes, whole stereotypes or just parts, etc., etc.)? As with the Bargh studies, no explanations are actually tested in Mussweiler's studies, so we don't really know the answer to any of the questions raised by the demonstrations. But it does seem to provide another piece of evidence for the tight coupling of action and thought that James mentioned over 100 years ago, as well as for the largely unconscious nature of that coupling. If nothing else, then, these studies provide yet more evidence for my belief that you can find everything we've learned in modern cognitive science in James' writing.

¹Mussweiler, T. (2006). Doing is for thinking! Stereotype activation by stereotypic movements. Psychological Science, 17(1), 17-21.

A New Law

2006-05-07T03:49:00.000-05:00

I want to propose a new law: no one can ever use a play on the title of a Milan Kundera book again, for any purpose. I've written my senators and congressperson. I hope you will all do the same.

UPDATE: It just won't stop!

On Death and Dread and Doom

2006-05-05T03:24:00.000-05:00

Or just dread. You might have heard about the study reported to show that the anticipation of pain can be as bad as the pain itself. It's by Berns et al., and was published in this week's Science. Here is the abstract:

Neurobiological Substrates of Dread

Given the choice of waiting for an adverse outcome or getting it over with quickly, many people choose the latter. Theoretical models of decision-making have assumed that this occurs because there is a cost to waiting—i.e., dread. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured the neural responses to waiting for a cutaneous electric shock. Some individuals dreaded the outcome so much that, when given a choice, they preferred to receive more voltage rather than wait. Even when no decision was required, these extreme dreaders were distinguishable from those who dreaded mildly by the rate of increase of neural activity in the posterior elements of the cortical pain matrix. This suggests that dread derives, in part, from the attention devoted to the expected physical response and not simply from fear or anxiety. Although these differences were observed during a passive waiting procedure, they correlated with individual behavior in a subsequent choice paradigm, providing evidence for a neurobiological link between the experienced disutility of dread and subsequent decisions about unpleasant outcomes.

There's good discussion of the article at BRAINETHICS, here, and uh... metadiscussion at The Neurocritic, here and here.

And while we're on the subject of pain, you might enjoy this post at Eide Neurolearning Blog (via Omni Brain), on the role of "sensory-motor incongruence" in certain types of pain. Here's an excerpt:

"In 66% of health volunteers, abnormal sensations of pain (“numbness, pins and needles, moderate aching and/or a definite pain”) or other sensations (“perceived changes in temperature, limb weight, altered body image, disorientation”) were reported following artificially-induced sensory-motor incongruence."

Reading about their methodology, I can't help but be reminded of the famous rubber hand experiment ("Rubber hands 'feel' touch that the eye sees"), though that had nothing to do with pain.

And while we're on the subject of Omni Brain, check out this post on research demonstrating (un)importance of neurogenesis. From the post:

Hen's team zapped mice with a focused dose of radiation to halt neurogenesis in a portion of the animals' hippocampuses. They then placed half the animals in regular cages and half in enhanced environments for 6 weeks before testing their anxiety and spatial memory. To the researchers' surprise, the animals with better accommodations had improved spatial memory skills and were less anxious than mice in smaller confines, despite not having any new neurons in their hippocampuses. "We thought we would see a dependence on neurogenesis in some of the behaviors we saw in the enriched environment, but that's not what we found," says Hen.

By the way, isn't it hoppocampi?

And while we're on the subject of a bunch of blogs by neuroscientists, where are the cognitive psychologists? Are Cognitive Daily and Mixing Memory alone in the blogosophere?

Craving a Cigarette Warps Your Sense of Time

2006-05-02T19:33:00.000-05:00

As anyone who's ever tried to quit smoking can attest, craving a cigarette can warp the way you think about just about anything. In a great example of this "warped" thinking in the literature¹, sadistic experimenters approached German university students (who, as we know, all smoke) as they were leaving a 90-minute class, and asked if they wanted to participate in a 10-minute experiment. They were told that if they participated, they would get a cup of coffee and would be able to participate in a raffle. Half of the students who agreed to participate were tested in the classroom where smoking was prohibited, and half were taken out into the hallway. When the latter half were taken out into the hallway, the experimenter (also German, therefore also a smoker) lit up a cigarette, and predictably, the students who'd just sat through a 90-minute smokeless lecture quickly did the same, without being explicitly prompted to do so. These were the low need-to-smoke participants. The participants who were kept in the classroom to complete the study couldn't smoke (that's the sadistic part), and were thus the high need-to-smoke participants. The first part of the study completed by all participants was billed as "an investigation of the perception of objects in daily use," and presented them with a page containing 14 pictures of cigarettes of different lengths (between 80 and 90mm, arranged left-to-right by length). The participants were asked to indicate which cigarette "reflected the true length of a standard cigarette." As you've probably guessed by now, the students in the high need-to-smoke condition chose longer cigarettes as representative of the standard cigarette than did those in the low need-to-smoke condition. And that was only a manipulation check. In the main task, high need-to-smoke participants actually seemed to treat money as less valuable than the low need-to-smoke participants (an instance of what the authors term the devaluation effect). If smoking makes money seem less valuable, it's no wonder higher taxes on smoking products don't deter many smoker!

Anyway, warped perceptions of cigarette length, and the devaluation of money, are cool, but this post is about time perception. I'm sure everyone who's smoked has experienced minutes feeling like hours while craving a cigarette. Apparently inspired by stories of this experience from smokers (or having experienced it themselves), Sayette et al² recently set out to explore the relationship between cigarette cravings and time perception. In their first experiment, participants were divided into nicotine-deprived and non-deprived conditions, and during the initial screening session, participants in the nicotine-deprived condition were told not to smoke for 12 hours before the experimental session, while non-deprived participants were told to smoke as they usually would (to test whether they complied with these instructions, participants' carbon monoxide levels were tested during screening and at the beginning of the experimental session, and the two tests were compared). Upon arriving for the experimental session, participants in the two conditions were given one of two kinds of cues. For the non-deprived participants, a box was placed on the table in front of them, and they were instructed to open it. Inside was a roll of tape, and they were instructed to pick it up and hold it in their hands. The nicotine-deprived participants weren't so lucky. A box was placed on the table in front of them, and they were told to open it. Inside was a pack of cigarettes (their own pack, which they had given the experimenter upon arriving) and a lighter. In an act of unprecedented sadism, the experimenters told the participants to pick up the cigarettes and the lighter, light a cigarette without putting it in their mouth, and then hold it (without smoking it). This was meant to increase their cravings.

While the participants were holding their objects (the roll of tape or the lit cigarette), they completed a 12-item questionnaire, and were then asked how long they had been holding the item (a "retrospective" estimation). After that, they were all told that they could smoke in exactly 2 1/2 minutes, and were then told to indicate to the experimenter when they believed 45 and 90 seconds had passed (a "prospective" estimation).

As every smoker would expect, participants in the deprived condition slightly overestimated the amount of time that had passed in the retrospective estimation, and indicated that 45 and 90 seconds had passed before they actually had, in the prospective condition. Their estimates were different from the non-deprived participants, who actually tended to underestimate the amount of time that had passed. Interestingly, the deprived participants' estimates were more accurate, overall, than those of the non-deprived participants. This is likely because, in the time-estimation literature, people tend to underestimate the amount of time that has passed, just as the non-deprived participants did. The fact that the non-deprived participants were more accurate, and even overestimated how much time has passed, is an indication that the cravings really did affect their time perception. However, the difference between the deprived and non-deprived conditions was statistically significant only in the 45-second estimate, but in each case, the deprived participants' estimates were longer than those of the non-deprived participants.

In their second experiment, a new group of participants (which were called the "experience group") who'd also gone 12 hours prior to the experimental session without a cigarette were shown the box, opened it, picked up the cigarette, lit it, but were not able to smoke it even after the 2 1/2 minute period. They were then asked to sit quietly in the experiment room after 5, 10, 15, 25, 35, and 45 minutes, were asked to rate their "urge to smoke" on a 100 point scale. The nicotine-deprived participants from the first experiment had been asked, right after they had begun to hold their newly lit cigarette that they could not smoke, to estimate their "urge to smoke" at the same time intervals. For this second experiment, these participants were called the "anticipate group."

The comparison of interest is between the ratings over time for the experience group, and the estimate ratings for the anticipate group over the same time period. For the experience group (black bars in the graph below), the "urge to smoke" ratings did not change significantly over the 45 minutes. The anticipate group (white bars), however, predicted that their cravings would increase dramatically over time. The difference between the two groups was significant. Here is the graph of the data (from Figure 1, p. 91):

Now these are experienced smokers, so you would think that they'd have a good handle on how their cravings act over time, but obviously something about having the craving in at this moment distorts your perception of how it will change over time if you do not smoke a cigarette.
The importance of this study for counseling is pretty clear. As the authors note, smoking relapses are closely related to cravings, and if people believe that their cravings will increase over time, and furthermore, actually perceive time as going by more slowly, they will have a harder time resisting those cravings. What's important, then, is to educate people about the actual behavior and effects of cravings, showing them that cravings don't actually get worse over time (though notably, they don't appear to get any better, either). As someone who had to go through the process of quitting smoking, I can definitely appreciate the value of that knowledge. One of the more difficult aspects of quitting is an intense craving that overwhelms your ability to think about much of anything besides cigarettes, and the fear that not only are you going to suffer more, but that if you don't do something about this craving right now, it's going to get worse, and you're not going to get anything accomplished. Of course, this information alone isn't going to get people to quit smoking, but it may help them when they try. And from the experiment I described at the beginning of this post, we also know that offering them raffle tickets for cash won't help, and that really big cigarettes will look extra attractive.

¹Brendl, C.M., Markman, A.B., & Messner, C. (2003). The Devaluation Effect: Activating a Need Devalues Unrelated Objects. Journal of Consumer Research, 29, 463-473
²Sayette, M.A, Loewenstein, G., Kirchner, T.R., & Travis, T. (2005). Effects of smoking urge on temporal cognition. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 19(1), 88-93.

Potential Move

2006-05-02T18:23:00.000-05:00

I'm talking with ScienceBlogs, home of Cognitive Daily, Pharyngula, Gene Expression, Deltoid, and several other good blogs, about moving Mixing Memory over there. Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily thought moving over there might make for some great opportunities for two cognitive psychology blogs to play off each other, and I think he's right. Plus, moving to ScienceBlogs tends to increase traffic, and I like the idea of exposing more poeple to cognitive science; especially people from other sciences (most of the blogs there are life science blogs, if you haven't noticed). Plus, it gives me an opportunity to get away from Blogger, with which I've had problems since I started. The blogger site would remain open, though, as an archive for all of the Mixing Memory posts that are already here.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing this is that since I started this blog, I've relied heavily on the suggestions and advice from readers, and I wouldn't want to make a big move like this without asking for comments. So, what do you think? Let me know in comments or, if you prefer, drop me an email.

P.S. If you're wondering, the meme post is coming (it's probably going to be a few posts), and so is one on theory-theory, though I haven't yet decided whether to do theory-theory generally, or focus on a couple applications, like theory of mind (theory-theory vs. simulation theory, in a 12 round bout) and/or causal reasoning.

Linkage

2006-04-30T18:58:00.000-05:00

First up is an older post that I had meant to link to way back when, but forgot, so I'm linking to it now. It's a post from Cognitive Daily titled "Seeing and awareness, or how fear can bypass the visual system," which describes an experiment in which participants exhibited a fear response to fear-inducing faces without a conscious experience of having actually seen the faces:

What Morris's team found is that although the amygdala showed more activity during unseen fear-inducing faces, other areas of the brain associated with conscious visual activity were more active when the faces were seen. The mask [the effect making it difficult to consciously perceive the faces] appeared to disrupt the conscious visual process, but not the process that led to the fear reaction. The masked images were sensed -- detected by the eye -- but not perceived. The researchers identified a separate neural pathway which activates the amygdala, independently of visual cognition.

On to something more recent, there's an interesting post by John Hawks on culture, communication (animal and human), and the relationship between human culture and other animals. It's very thought-provoking.

At Brainethics, there is a post with a link to and discussion of a paper by Fisher and Marcus on the evolution of language. Here is the paper's abstract:

The human capacity to acquire complex language seems to be without parallel in the natural world. The origins of this remarkable trait have long resisted adequate explanation, but advances in fields that range from molecular genetics to cognitive neuroscience offer new promise. Here we synthesize recent developments in linguistics, psychology and neuroimaging with progress in comparative genomics, gene-expression profiling and studies of developmental disorders. We argue that language should be viewed not as a wholesale innovation, but as a complex reconfiguration of ancestral systems that have been adapted in evolutionarily novel ways.

On a non-cognitive science related note, Brandon has two posts over at Siris about the Texas revolution, the first on Lorenzo de Zavala, and the second on Juan Seguín. It had been a while since I'd thought about Seguín's story, but I'm glad Brandon reminded me of it. Seguín was at the Alamo, but after Santa Anna's army had laid siege to the mission, Travis sent him to Goliad to get reinforcements. He returned after the battle, and was charged with burying the dead defenders. After the revolution, he went into politics, but when Texas became a state, he was forced to return to Mexico, where he was arrested and forced to fight in the Mexican-American war on the Mexican side. What I find so interesting about his story is that it's one among many that shows how complicated the story of the Texas revolution, and Texas' subsequent independence and annexation, really were. Instead of the clean elementary school textbook picture of brave men fighting for freedom against a crazed (and cowardly) military dictator, it was actually a big mess of social, political, and ethnic conflicts.

This post at blac(k)ademic, inspired by discussion of the Duke rape case, takes the position that gender does not trump race. The post is very thought-provoking in itself, but it also reminds me of one of the issues on which I've been meaning to actually explore empirically (as in running actual experiments; anyone want to help with the design?). The issue is this: people who are not the subjects of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression on a regular basis tend to have a more difficult time perceiving instances of those forms of oppression, especially when those instances are subtle, as they so often are. In the extreme, this leads to white people actually believing that racism is no longer a problem, and men believing that sexism is dead, and straight people being ignorant of the very idea of heteronormativity. This probably seems obvious to some of you, but as far as I can tell, there is no empirical research on the issue. In her post, blac(k)ademic is discussing the tendency for white feminists to ignore, or at least de-emphasize race when gender is also at issue. In the post, and the comments, you'll find many frustrated exhortations about the race-unconsciousness of mainstream, white-dominated feminism. I wonder whether this is an instance of what I just described: white women, who are subject to pervasive discrimination themselves for reasons of gender, being less sensitive to issues of race because they simply don't have to deal with them in their own lives. One might think that being the object of discrimination would make people more sensitive to discrimination in general, but if my own theory is right, that wouldn't be the case, and it would mean that even for white feminists and others fighting discrimination against groups to which they belong, a great deal of dilligence is required to perceive and take into account other forms of discrimination.

Oh, and I almost forgot, at Crooked Timber, you can read a passage from Karl Marx's one attempt at fiction (written when he was 19). I have to say, it makes me feel a little better about my own youthful attempts at fiction writing.

LATE ADDITION: The Neurocritic discusses a new study on video game violence.

Online Philosophy Conference

2006-04-30T18:32:00.000-05:00

The Online Philosophy Conference has begun, and you can read the first papers and commentary here. Of the papers already up at the site, Kelly and Stich's titled "Two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality," and Michael Cholbi's commentary on the paper, might be of particular interest to Mixing Memory readers. Kelly and Stich are arguing for a largely nativist approach to moral psychology, which will always give me pause. I'm an empiricist at heart, and while the tendency to focus on innate intuitions is growing in moral psychology research, I can't help but feel like the inference to innate architectures, primarily from evidence of domain specificity (with the occasional "poverty of stimulus" argument thrown in for good measure), is a bit premature. But among the new wave of post-rationalist theories of moral psychology, there aren't really any good empiricist theories, except perhaps some of the connectionist ones. I sometimes wonder whether this is in part a reaction to the overly-empiricist theories of Kohlberg and his disciples, but since this new wave is still very young, I'm sure there's still time for a good empiricist to come along and shake things up.

Is It OK To Laugh at Rush?

2006-04-29T17:33:00.000-05:00

No, not the band (it would be perfectly OK to laugh at them), but Rush Limbaugh, who is in trouble again for prescription drug-related crimes. Over at Shakespeare's Sister, which has never been the most mature progressive blog, they're laughing at him. My reaction to this was that laughing at someone for having a drug problem is beyond the pale. Granted, the man is totally morally bankrupt, and there is a certain poetic justice to him having a drug problem when he's been so hypercritical of drug addicts (am I the only one who wonders whether his harshness towards drug addicts is a part of his denial of his own drug problem?), but I just can't bring myself to laugh at anyone for having a problem that can cause so much suffering. I can't imagine anyone who's been close to someone with a drug problem laughing about it either. However, in the comments at Shakespeare's Sister, no one agreed with me, and I was labeled a conservative troll for voicing my opinion. Everyone disagreeing with me, and my saying you shouldn't laugh at anyone, even a conservative, for having a drug problem, apparently makes me a conservative. Now, I don't consider myself a conservative, and I've never been called one before (pinko commie is an epithet I've heard more frequently), but maybe I'm wrong. Have Limbaugh's sins made it OK to laugh at his suffering? I can't help but feel like that position smacks of some seriously old-school Protestant ressentiment, but that could just be me. What do you folks think?

Chomsky's Take on Starling Grammar

2006-04-29T17:02:00.000-05:00

Here's what Chomsky had to say about the starling paper, in a LiveScience article (via John Hawks):

"The article is based on an elementary mathematical error," said Chomsky, professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They are overlooking the fact that there are many intermediate systems that are ignored in mathematical linguistics because their properties are empirically irrelevant.

"Based on other work done 50 years ago by George Miller, Chomsky thinks further research would show that the birds are not grasping linguistics in the way the new study concludes. "It has nothing remotely to do with language; probably just with short-term memory," Chomsky told LiveScience.

The ability for the starlings to sort through the patterns may also just be a benefit of natural selection, a process responsible for the origin of new species and the adaptation of organisms to their environments, as proposed by Charles Darwin.

"That aside, if someone could show that other animals had the basic property of human language, it would be of very little interest to the biology of language, but would be a puzzle for general biology," Chomsky said. "It's expected that if a species has some ability that has real selectional advantage, it will use it."

I wonder, as I did with the counting explanation, whether a simple short-term memory explanation (and one based on outdated work, apparently, though I suspect Chomsky merely mentioned Miller, and the reporter ran with it) could account for the generalization. Maybe it could, but to do so, I think you'd still have to say something about pattern recognition. The question, ultimately, is whether the pattern they're pattern recognition has anything to do with context-free insertion (self-embedding, in the paper).

Also, I feel a little bit better about my post now that I've seen Chomsky express a similar conclusion to mine: the ability, if it exists, didn't evolve in birds (or, in all likelihood, any other nonhuman species) for linguistic purposes, so if the starlings really do recognize context-free recursion, the question is, what do they use that ability for?

Starlings and Recursion

2006-04-28T01:08:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: The actual linguists at Language Log have posted on the Gentner et al. paper, here and here, and they're less impressed with the results than I am. Since they're linguists, you should probably just read their post instead of this one.

UPDATE II: A really good discussion (much better than mine, and no, I'm not just being modest), and critical evaluation of the experiments can be found here. The one thing I wonder is whether the explanation there (simple counting) would account for the generalization to A³B³sequences. It might, but I'd have to think about it a bit more.

A few years ago, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch wrote a paper in which they argued that the "only uniquely human component of the language faculty" is recursion, and on top of that, recursion is the only component of the language faculty that is not co-opted from other perceptual systems (though they believe that even recursion evolved for other purposes). It turns out that recursion recursion may not be uniquely human after all. A paper by Gentner et al. published in yesterday's issue of Nature shows that, in the authors' words:

European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar.

What does that mean? I'll try to explain. Since I'm not a linguist, I'll probably get something wrong. Feel free to point out my errors.

In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky specifies a hierarchy of grammars for formal languages, with those at the top being the most inclusive grammar, called Type-0, or unrestricted grammars, and at the bottom, the least inclusive, called Type-3 or finite-state grammars, which are grammars that can be decided by a finite-state machine. In essence, a finite-state grammar includes rules that allow you to add elements (words, morphemes, phrases, or whatever) either at the beginning of a string or at the end. For example, you could start with the word "Chris," and at each step add a new word after the last word in the sequence, perhaps based on a rule specifying which word you should choose based on the last word, and come up with a sentence, like say, "Chris should stick to psychology."

Two steps up from finite-state grammars in the hierarchy is the Type-2 grammar, or the context-free grammar (the next level up is context-sensitive, at Type-1). Context-free grammars can have rules that add elements (again, these can be any linguistic element) at the beginning and end of strings, but also in the middle of strings. So, a context-free grammar would allow you to produce the sentence, "Chris should stick to psychology," and then add, in the middle of the sentence, "Chris really should stick to psychology."

One of the important arguments in Aspects is that the grammars of natural languages are not finite-state grammars. In order to model natural languages, you need at least a Type-2, context-free grammar. It's upon that argument (and the work done based on it between 1956, when Aspects was published, and 2002) that Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch are building. The type of recursion they're talking about is the type that is possible in context-free grammars. They are arguing that the only uniquely human component of the language faculty is the recursion of context-free grammars.

If that description doesn't make sense, then check out this graphic presentation from the Gentner et al. paper (Figure 1):

Gentner et al. used two elements of starlings' songs, rattles and warbles (here's a recording of a starling song, which also contain whistles not used in the stimuli), and produced two grammars, one finite-state grammar defined as ABⁿ in the figure above, and the other a context-free grammar, defined as AⁿBⁿ in the figure (an example sequence might be rattle-warble-rattle-warble). They then used operant conditioning to train half the birds to respond to the A²B² (e.g., rattle-rattle-warble-warble ) sequences, and half to the AB² (e.g., rattle-warble-rattle-warble) sequences. If the starlings could tell the difference between the two grammars, and thus can accurately respond to one or the other, it would mean that humans are not unique in this ability. And though it took the birds bit longer (about 3000 trials) than it usually takes for starlings to be trained to classify songs, nine out of the eleven birds they trained did learn to classify the two types of grammars. Furthermore, all nine of the birds who learned to classify the two types of grammars were also able to classify A³B³ (e.g., rattle-rattle-rattle-warble-warble-warble) and AB³ (e.g., rattle-warble-rattle-warble-rattle-warble) sequences, though not A⁴B⁴ or AB⁴. This implies that the birds who had learned to recognize the grammars were able to generalize that learning, and recognize longer strings. So there were memory limitations (most humans can recognize strings with more than 6 elements).

What does this mean for Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch's claims? Well, here's what Gentner et al. concluded:

Although uniquely human syntactic processing capabilities, if any, may reflect more complex context-free grammars or higher levels in the Chomsky grammatical hierarchy, it may prove more useful to consider species differences as quantitative rather than qualitative distinctions in cognitive mechanisms. Such mechanisms (for example, memory capacity) need not map precisely onto strict formal grammars and automata theories. There might be no single property or processing capacity that marks the many ways in which the complexity and detail of human language differs from non-human communication systems.

In other words, the Hauser et al. claim that the recursive component is unique to the human language faculty needs to be qualified. The recursive component itself is not unique to humans, though the complexity of that component may be. This may mean that the language faculty (in Hauser et al.'s narrow sense) involves more than just recursion.

While the authors don't address it, I think their research might also say something about one of the other major claims of Hauser et al. It's unlikely that starlings use context-free recursion in their everyday singing and song recognition, as evidenced by the fact that it took them longer than usual to learn to recognize the context-free grammar sequences. So it's also unlikely that starlings evolved the ability to recognize recursion for the purposes of singing/song-recognition. Instead, the ability probably evolved for some other reason. Hauser et al. suggest that it may have evolved in humans for faculties other than language as well, and give as possible examples number computation, navigation, and social relations. I don't really know anything about European starling social relations, or their ability to compute numbers, but navigation certainly seems like a possibility for the evolution of recursion in birds. While it's not direct evidence, the fact that recursion may have evolved in birds for reasons other than language production and comprehension means that, even if it evolved separately in humans (and it likely did, as Fitch and Hauser found no evidence that cotton-top tamarins could recognize context-free grammar sequences), it could have evolved for use by faculties other than language in our evolutionary history too.

And Now for Some Good Research

2006-04-27T16:34:00.000-05:00

After exposing you to some really bad research, I felt a rather intense pang of conscience, and decided I should at least mention some good research. It just so happens that I read about some this morning. It's a pretty easy read, so instead of writing a long post about it, I'll just link you to it, and give you the abstract:

Does geometry constitute a core set of intuitions present inall humans, regardless of their language or schooling? We usedtwo nonverbal tests to probe the conceptual primitives of geometryin the Mundurukú, an isolated Amazonian indigene group.Mundurukú children and adults spontaneously made useof basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism,or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, andthey used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometricalmaps to locate hidden objects. Our results provide evidencefor geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experiencewith graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometricalterms.

I figure math people, and those interested in cross-cultural research, will find this interesting. Unfortunately, the paper contains no cute pictures of monkeys playing with toys, though.

Monkeys Playing With Boys and Girls Toys: One for the Annals of Really Bad Research

2006-04-26T20:37:00.000-05:00

I've been known to be critical, perhaps overly so, of the media's bad science reporting, because it's, well, bad. But what is the media to do when the science itself is really bad? Since my advice to the media (which no one in the media has actually read, of course) is usually to listen to scientists, I don't really have an answer to that question, because when there's bad science, there's a scientist doing it. If the media listens to that scientist (and it's his or her work, so why wouldn't they?), they're probably not going to know it's bad science, even when it's really bad, as in the case of the study I'm about to describe (really, really, really bad). I suppose they could contact other scientists who are not involved with the research, and ask them about it, but that means finding a person who's not only read the study, but also works in an area close enough to that of the study to actually be able to evaluate it. And that's just too much work when you have deadlines.

Inevitably, then, we'll get bad science reporting that's not actually the fault of reporters. Like this (via Omni Brain), which can also be found here (via Ozarque). The article reports on this study by Gerianne Alexander and Melissa Hines. First, what does the press article say? Things like this:

Just like human boys and girls, male monkeys like to play with toy cars while female monkeys prefer dolls, a research project has shown.

This intriguing discovery is one of many signs of deep-rooted behavioral differences between the sexes that scientists are exploring with the latest tools of genetics and neuroscience.

Where did the reporter get this idea? From Alexander, who is quoted in the article as saying things like:

The differences apparently date far back in evolutionary history to the time before humans and monkeys separated from their common ancestor about 25 million years ago, said Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the experiment published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

and

"Vervet monkeys, like human beings, show sex differences in toy preferences," Alexander wrote in the report. "Sex-related object preference appeared early in human evolution."

Alexander speculated that females of both species prefer dolls because evolution programmed them to care for infants. Males may have evolved toy preferences that involve throwing and moving, skills useful for hunting and for finding a mate.

Now that's some pretty provocative stuff! Though the paper was published in 2002, the press articles are pretty timely, coming soon after Larry Summers' remarks about his daughters' behavior upon being given toy trucks to play with. The findings would seem to confirm Summers' generalization from his own experience. When a scientists says something that bold, based on findings he or she has published, I feel duty-bound to go check out the paper itself. So I did. And in it the claims are no less provocative. Take this, from the abstract:

The results suggest that sexually differentiated object preferences arose early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. This implies that sexually dimorphic preferences for features (e.g., color, shape, movement) may have evolved from differential selection pressures based on the different behavioral roles of males and females, and that evolved object feature preferences may contribute to present day sexually dimorphic toy preferences in children.

Wow! I don't know about you, but I can't wait to read more. But before I get to the experiments themselves, consider the motivation. The problem the paper is attempting to address is this: why do human boys and girls tend to prefer different toys, as several previous studies have shown? There are two general classes of answers: the essentialist position, which says that gender is largely biological, or based on genetic differences interacting with the environment (including culture); or the constructionist position, which says that gender is largely cultural, or a product of socialization. Based on the quotes above, Alexander and Hines obviously lean towards the essentialist position. And I have to applaud them for their choice of approach. If they were Evolutionary Psychologists, they'd have done a survey, but as actual scientists, they adopted a comparative approach. The idea behind the study, then, is that if gender differences in preferences are due largely to evolved differences in gender roles, then we might find similar preferences in other primate species, because they exhibit similar differences in gender roles. So they look at another primate species.

Here's what they did. They picked six different toys based on previous research on male and female preferences in human children. Two of the toys are "masculine" toys (an orange ball and a toy police car), two are "feminine" (a human baby doll and a red cooking pot) and two are gender neutral (a stuffed toy dog and a picture book). Fourty-four male and 44 female vervet monkeys were then individually presented with each toy in two or three sessions (the first being used to familiarize the monkeys with the toys). Each item was presented by itself, for five minutes, to each monkey in each trial. The experimenters recorded the number of times each individual approached the toys, and the number of times they came into contact with them (which counts as playing with the toys).

Consistent with the prediction of their essentialist hypothesis, the male vervets played with the ball and the car more than the female vervets, and the females played with the doll and pot more than the males. Furthermore, dominant males played with the "masculine" toys more frequently than less dominant males, and less dominant males played with the "feminine" toys more frequently than the more dominant males. Here are the graphs from the paper (from Figure 1, p. 471):

So it's pretty straightforward, right? Boy monkeys like boy toys, and girl monkeys like girl toys. The findings lead Alexander and Hines to conclude:

Our data suggest that this interest varies with the sex of the animal and across sex-typed toy categories derived from empirical studies (Berenbaum & Hines, 1992; Connor & Serbin, 1977; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974) of sex differences in children's object play. Children's toys, therefore, appear to have differential value for males and females of at least two primate species, vervets and humans. (p. 473-474)

and thus:

In view of this evidence, our findings suggest that object features or functions associated with human sex-typed toy categories may have adaptive significance for males and females. In addition, evolved, specialized recognition systems for these object characteristics may direct object preferences in some primate species. (p. 474)

But before we get all excited, let's take a step back. First, we need to take a closer look at the data. Notice that it's in percent of total contacts. This is because male vervets had many more "contacts" than females. We don't get the absolute data, though, so we can't tell whether males actually played with the female toys less often, or just at a lower frequency relative to their overall amount of playing. Furthermore, males appear to have played with the two "masculine" toys and the cooking pot, a "feminine" toy, with about the same frequency, and with the furry dog only slightly more than these three. They played with the baby doll less than the two "masculine" and other "feminine" toys, but about as frequently as they played with the picture book. So it appears that, with the possible exception of the doll, the males didn't really care whether the toys were "masculine," "feminine," or "neutral." Do only female vervets have specific sexual preferences for toys (objects)? That's not what the authors concluded, but it would be hard to say otherwise based on their data, wouldn't it?

And then what about the toys themselves? The "feminine" toys include a baby doll and a red cooking pot, and the "masculine" toys an orange ball and a police car. Wait a minute, a cooking pot and a police car? What the hell do these have to do with evolved gender roles in vervet monkeys (putting aside, for a moment, the same questions about a human baby doll and a ball)? I suppose one could argue that cars have been designed to appeal to men, and thus have masculine forms (though I recall reading several years ago that the engineers at Jaguar based their body designs on the female body), but a cooking pot? It's shape is a product of cultural evolution, designed to afford holding the to-be-cooked substance, and handling without coming into contact with the part directly exposed to the heat. But vervets don't cook! So what is it about the pot that could possibly be consistent with vervet gender roles? Vervets don't drive, either, so the same question could be asked about the police car. And as Katherine noted in the comments at Omni Brain, there were two types of dolls, a dog and a human baby, neither of which are of the same species as the vervets, so why would they prefer one over the other (do they perceive the human doll as more like vervets than the dog doll? that's an empirical question that their data does not address)? The male vervets appear to have preferred the dog, while the female vervets played with both dolls about equally. What does that mean? I don't know, but I do now that it's more than a bit of a stretch to say that it means "that object features or functions associated with human sex-typed toy categories may have adaptive significance for [male] and [female]" vervets.

Given these problems, what do the authors have to say about the specific object preferences? For the female preferences, they write:

Female rhesus monkeys have been found to show a preference for the characteristic "reddish-pink" facial coloration of infant vervets compared to yellow or green. Consistent with this female color preference, girls are also more likely than boys to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green) (Minamoto, 1985 cited in Iijima, Arisaka, Minamoto, & Arai, 2001). A preference for red or reddish pink has been proposed to elicit female behaviors to infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact (Higley, Hopkins, Hirsch, Marra, & Suomi, 1987). The hypothesis that reddish pink or red may be a cue signaling opportunities for nurturance and thus eliciting female responsiveness could explain our finding of greater female contact with both the doll (with a pink face) and the pot (colored red). (p. 475)

And for males:

Toys preferred by boys, such as the ball and police car used in this research, have been characterized as objects with an ability to be used actively (O'Brien & Huston, 1985) or objects that can be propelled in space (Benenson, Liroff, Pascal, & Cioppa, 1997). Preferences for such objects may exist because they afford greater opportunities for engaging in rough or active play In humans, these characteristics have in turn been suggested to relate to targeting or navigating abilities (for discussion, see Alexander, in press) that might be particularly useful for males for purposes of hunting or locating food or mates (Eals & Silverman, 1994; McBurney, Gaulin, Devineni, & Adams, 1997; Silverman & Eals, 1992). As suggested for females in regard to object that signal nurturance, males may therefore have evolved preferences for objects that invite movement.

Call me crazy, but it looks like their own explanations for their data actually undermine the conclusions they derived from it. According to them, the females weren't playing with the cooking pot and baby for any reason associated with the objects' human "femininity," but for reasons associated with species-specific gender roles (nurturing infant vervets with reddish faces). Furethermore, their explanations don't actually explain anything. They argue that males may enjoy moving things like cars and balls. But wait, the males also liked the pot and the stuffed dog. Is it easier to move stuffed dogs than baby dolls? I don't think so. And the females played with the brown dog as often as they played with the pink-faced baby doll. Why is that?

By the time I reached the end of the paper, I was forced to conclude that the authors' conclusions had absolutely nothing to do with their data whatsoever. While the female preference for "feminine" toys is obvious, the males don't seem to have a gender-preference at all. Furthermore, the female preference can't be explained by reference to any features of the objects themselves, and even if it could, it would be a result of feature preferences that are species-specific (e.g., the pink face of the baby and the red color of the pot), and thus wouldn't tell us anything about the origins of human gender-specific preferences. In short, the data tells us zilch, zero, nada, nothing. It's a terrible experiment, but in the hands of the press, with some overly-eager scientists who ran a silly experiment and then came to conclusions that had nothing to do with it giving the press quotes, this research becomes a profound revelation into the origins of human gender. Ugh.

Cognitive Comedy

2006-04-26T01:21:00.000-05:00

Undoubtedly, some of you are Chomsky (qua linguist) fans, and some of you are, like me, Ali G fans. If either is the case, or both, then you have to check this out: Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky (via Omi Brain). The very fact that Ali G somehow manages to get into the man's office and get him on camera is, by itself, hilarious, but the interview is pretty funny too (if you didn't see the "bilingual" joke coming, slap yourself).

To Parents

2006-04-17T00:40:00.000-05:00

If you're a parent, and especially if you're a parent of a child who's been diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, you might want to check this out (from an email I received earlier):

ABA4Autism.com and the Psychology Department at the University of Tennessee at Martin are conducting a second survey on the causes of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This survey is for mothers of children with ASD as well as mothers of normally developing children who are ten years of age or younger. Mothers who participate in the survey will receive a free ABA program to teach their child to follow directions as well as free ABA mini programs for common problems like sharing. To take the survey please go to http://www.aba4autism.com. Thanks

Dr.Gary Brown
Professor and Chair
Psychologist/HSP

Links, Easter Edition

2006-04-16T23:39:00.000-05:00

I've been busy, busy, busy; too busy for lengthy posts, but not too busy to link to some of the cool stuff out there in the blogosphere and beyond. And since it's Easter, I feel duty bound to start with this website in which ground-breaking Peeps research is described. I was particularly impressed with the findings of the "Reaction to heat" experiment, which led the researchers to conclude:

Furthermore, observations of Peep biochemistry indicate a molecular structure unlike any other terrestrial organisms yet encountered, leading to the obvious conclusion that Peeps are not of this world (Mulder & Scully, et. al. 1996). In addition, while early evolutionary biologists have suggested that the lack of variation in the peep population was due to an ancient bottleneck event, we suggest the more likely scenario of the founder effect phenomenon during terrestrial colonization.

Fascinating work.

Then, to continue with the Easter theme (while avoiding any religious content whatsoever, and throwing in a gratuitous link to Heo Cwaeth), Heo gives us Yeats' "Easter 1916," a poem about the characters of the 1916 Easter rebellion in Ireland, about which most of us probably know very little (I do know that the Germans provided the Irish with guns and ammo, and that it was bloody, though ultimately affective). But you don't need to know much about the historical event to grasp the message of ordinary people, bound by little more than a common homeland, can come together to do profound things. The attitudes of the poem present quite a contrast with contemporary American apathy. And besides, as Settembrini says in The Magic Mountain, literature is about beautiful words, and Yeats is a master of beautiful words.

OK, that's all the Easter I can stomach. Next up are two posts from John Hawks, the first of which links to a 1947 article on chimpanzee economics. The second is a link to this post at Afarensis on new world origins.

Then there's this post at Neurofuture, which links to a whole bunch of interesting science podcats, including one of V.S. Ramachandran discussing his work on aesthetics (which I blogged about long ago here, here, and here), and an interview with Michael Gazzaniga on "Ethics in the Age of Neuroscience."

And finally, I got an email the other day asking me about representation and memory retrieval. The email was from someone who works with two prominent cognitive scientists, who both work on representation and memory retrieval, so I suspect the emailer knows a little about the topic, and can learn about it from people who know a whole hell of a lot more about knowledge representation and memory than I do (or than just about everyone else, for that matter, since their work defines one way of modeling retrieval). Still, I think it might make for an interesting post, because how you theorize information is represented in memory, to a large extent, how you theorize information gets retrieved from memory, and that means it defines how you think about memory period. It would take several posts to lay out all of the issues, but I thought I might also approach it a different way. I'd been thinking about linking to classic or otherwise important papers in cognitive science, and seeing if people wanted to discuss them (perhaps over at the Yahoo group). So the first paper I'll try is John R. Anderson's "A spreading activation theory of memory." Anderson was the 2004 winner of the Rumelhart Prize, largely for his work on ACT cognitive architecture, and its later variants, and this paper presents the ACT theory of memory. If you want to read it and talk about it, then head on over to Yahoo.

Updated Blogroll

2006-04-12T15:13:00.000-05:00

I drank way too much coffee this morning, got a little bored, and totally rearranged the blogroll. So, check it out, and let me know if you think there's a blog I should add. If you're on it, and think I put you in the wrong category, tell me. Categories are fuzzy things, and I'm bound to have misclassified some of the instances at the category boundaries.

Oh, "The Lesser Sciences" is a joke, so I don't want to get any nasty emails from physicists.

Hostile Media Effects

2006-04-11T00:36:00.000-05:00

Here are two things that, when taken together, cry out for explanation. Over the last five decades, study after study of media bias has found little or no evidence of systematic bias in either direction¹, and a meta-analysis of bias studies over 6 decades, using several different measures of bias, found no bias in newspaper reporting, and only a miniscule, inconsequential right-wing bias in magazines, and left-wing bias on television². Yet, while in 1988, only 12% of the public believed the media to be systematically biased³, that percentage has grown steadily over the last two decades, with 62% of Americans believing the media to be biased in 2005⁴. And in almost every case, the perceived bias is towards the opposition. How is it that, over the same period in which studies have consistently shown a lack of media bias⁵, more and more people have come to believe that it exists, and that it favors their opponents' viewpoints? My reaction to the belief in media bias has usually been to assume that perception of bias was a result of people holding extreme views, and that as a result, anything to the right or the left of them, even if it's firmly in the center, will be perceived as bias. While this explanation might have worked in 1998, when only a few Americans believed the media to be biased, it doesn't work when the majority holds that belief. So, I had to look deeper to find an explanation.

If people tended to believe that the media was biased in favor of their own views, it would be easy to explain. There is an extensive literature on "assimilation bias," or the tendency to perceive neutral information as favoring one's own views. Since most perceptions of media bias are in the opposite direction, however, this explanation won't work. In fact, in one study, participants were presented with the exact same information either in the form of a journalist's report or a student's essay⁶. When reading the context of a journalist's report, participants perceived the information to be biased in favor of the opposition, but when reading the same information in the context of a student's essay, they tended to see it as neutral or as supporting their own position (assimilation bias). So there must be something about the context of mass media that elicits the perception of bias that is inconsistent with the way in which we usually interpret information. And that means it's not going to be easy to find an explanation. But many researchers have been trying, and I'm going to try to summarize some of what they've found.

Serious psychological study of perceived media bias began in the mid-1980s with studies by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper⁷, and by Perloff⁸. In both studies, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian participants were presented with television news coverage of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and subsequent fighting. The pro-Israeli participants believed that the coverage was biased in favor of the Palestinians, and that it would make neutral observers feel less favorable towards their side, while the pro-Palestinians were convinced the coverage was biased in favor of the Israeli side, and that it would hurt their image in the eyes of neutral observers. This is despite the fact that when neutral observers did view the coverage, in Perloff's study, they failed to perceive any bias, and their opinions of the two sides stayed the same. Vallone et al. termed this the "Hostile Media Phenomenon," or "Hostile Media Effect" (HME from here on out). After the publication of these two studies, research on the HME took off.

Both the Vallone et al. and Perloff studies looked at one specific issue, and used as participants people who had strong opinions about that issue. Subsequent research has shown that even those who have only a moderate involvement in a particular issue will tend to show the HME, though at a lower rate, and that both strong and moderate partisans will show the HME for general (e.g., liberal vs. conservative) viewpoints in addition to specific issues⁹. As is often the case, though, for the first decade or so after the initial finding of the HME, researchers tended to focus merely on demonstrating that it exists in a particular domain, rather than trying to figure out why it exists. And research on the mechanisms and factors involved still hasn't gotten very far. But the literature does provide some hints.

First off, the nature of the information, and its presentation, seem to be important. Obviously, any political issue is game, but it appears that political issues that are presented as conflicts (e.g., between ethnicities, between social classes, etc.) are particularly prone to elicit the HME¹⁰. On top of this, there are clear social and individual factors involved. In an analysis of data from a nationwide survey, Eveland and Shah¹¹ found that the following factors were associated with HME:

Gender: Males are slightly more likely to perceive a hostile media bias than females.
Income: as income goes up, perception of hostile media bias goes down.
Political party: Republicans are much more likely to perceive a hostile media bias than Democrats.
Strength of identification with a party: Strong partisans are somewhat more likely to perceive a hostile media bias than moderates.
Political involvement: the more involved you are in politics, the more likely you are to perceive hostile media bias.
What Eveland and Shah call "Safe Discussions": The more time you spend talking about politics with people who share your views, the more likely you are to perceive hostile media bias.

They also found an interaction between political party and "safe discussions," such that the more "safe discussions" Republicans had, the more likely they were to perceive bias, while the number of "safe discussions" Democrats had did not affect the probability that they would perceive bias. They argue that this interaction is likely due to the fact that "liberal bias" is such a common Republican talking point that it's likely to come up fairly frequently in discussions between Republicans. Interestingly, a couple variables that you might have thought would be associated with HME were not. Education showed a small, indirect relationship (i.e., as education went up, HME went down), it did not approach statistical significance. I might have predicted that as education went up, HME would go down. And since "safe discussions" make HME go up, it would be natural to predict that "dangerous discussions," that is, discussions with people who disagree with you, would make it go down. But they found only a small, non-significant relationship between the two.

Of course, the question that interests me is, what cognitive (and affective) mechanisms are involved in the HME? The research on this question is incredibly muddled, so I'm not going to talk about it in any detail. Suffice it to say that for every cognitive mechanism hypothesized to be involved, there's a paper presenting data that indicates it's not. I suspect that motivated reasoning is involved, though no direct evidence for this currently exists. If it is involved, it would mean that people are probably selectively retrieving memories of media coverage when they're reasoning about media bias, and that their interpretation of specific instances is biased as well¹². This doesn't explain why the HME seems to be specific to the media and, as in the Gunther and Schmitt paper cited above (footnote 6), disappears when the same information is placed in another context. This is probably a result of the beliefs about the media that trigger motivated reasoning in the first place, and these beliefs are probably the result of complex socio-cultural factors. In addition, Gunther and Schmitt argue that their data may indicate the influence of the "perceived reach of the information." This may be true, and would explain why people are quick to claim that the coverage will hurt their side's image in the view of others, but it says little about the mechanisms involved in this reasoning, or even why the "perceived reach" has an effect at all. I imagine that near future research will explore people's beliefs about the media bias, and how those who exhibit the HME reason about information presented by mass media, more thoroughly, and perhaps we'll soon have an answer to the mechanism questions. Until then, we'll have to be satisfied with what the literature has told us: lower middle class, strongly partisan Republicans who spend a lot of time hanging out with other Republicans probably think there's a liberal bias in the media. Duh!

Let me end with a note on what inspired this post. First, there's that dizzingly surreal show on Fox News on Sunday evenings (I forget which one it is), during which a panel of mainstream media journalists, on a mainstream media TV network, talk about how biased the mainstream media is. Then there's the comments section of this post at The Volokh Conspiracy, in which the "liberal media" meme is tossed about with abandon. You won't find anything you haven't already seen, there, but the two combined made me want to talk about the HME. I don't think posting about it will change anyone's mind, really, as responses by those who believe the media to be biased to the research showing that it isn't are generally the same. Most of the time, the response I hear is something like this: "I don't care what the research says, because all I have to do is turn on the TV to see the bias with my own eyes." Others make at least a feeble effort to criticize the research, usually by saying the research itself must be biased, claiming that most people employed by mainstream media outlets are registered Democrats (a fact that might lead you to predict bias, but which is not itself an indication of bias), or citing the fatally flawed Groseclose and Milyo study linked in footnote five. But none of that speaks to the fact that over a period of more than 40 years, the Groseclose and Milyo study is the only major one to find systematic bias in the mainstream media, or to the empirical research on HME, in which people clearly perceive bias even when balance has been purposefuly included in the stimuli, and perceive it only when it's in the context of media coverage.

Of course, even when I'm not frustrated with "biased media" nonsense in blog comments and on Fox News, I still find the HME interesting, and empirical research on it important. I'm interested in it, and motivated reasoning in general, because I wonder about the role of schematic processes. But the research is also important because, more and more, the belief in media bias is having serious affects on our political process, and the media itself. The media, responding to claims of bias, seems to be taking extra pains to avoid looking biased by giving voice to opinions that have no real factual merit as contrasts to facts and opinions that are concentrated on one side of the political spectrum (e.g., in the evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate). Politicians, particularly on the political right, take advantage of the increasing distrust of a media perceived as biased, by blaming failures on the media, and dismissing negative claims those in the media make about them or their policies. So discovering, and countering, the processes and mechanisms involved in the HME will have very real practical implications.

¹E.g., Woodard, J.D. (1994). Coverage of elections on evening television news shows: 1972-1992. In A.H. Miller & B.E. Gronbeck (Eds.), Presidential Campaigns and American Self Images. Boulder, CO: Westview; Mantler, G., & Whiteman, D. (1995). Attention to candidates and issues in newspaper coverage of 1992 presidential campaign. Newspaper Research Journal, 169(3), 14-28; Domke, D., Fan, D.P, Fibison, M., Shah, D.V., Smith,S.S., & Watts, M.D. (1997). News media, candidates and issues, and public opinion in the 1996 presidential campaign. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 74, 718-737; Shah, D.V., Watts, M.D., Domke, D., Fan, D.P., & Fibison, M. (1999). News coverage, economic cues, and the public's presidential preferences: 1984-1995. Journal of Politics, 61, 914-943; Waldman, P., & Devitt, J. (1998). Newspaper photographs and the 1996 presidential election: The question of bias. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 75, 302-311.
²D'Alessio, D., & Allen, M. (2000). Media bias in presidential elections: A meta-analysis. Journal of Communication, 50(4), 133-156.
³Eveland, W.P., Shah, D.V. (2003). The impact of individual and interpersonal factors on perceived news media bias. Political Psychology, 24(1), 101-117.
⁴See the Gallup Poll detailed here.
⁵I ignore this study by Groseclose and Milyo for the obvious reason that its methodology is not only worthless, but downright nonsensical.
⁶Gunther, A.C., Schmitt, K. (2004). Mapping boundaries of the hostile media effect. The Journal of Communication, 54(1), 55.
⁷Vallone, R.P., Ross, L., & Lepper, M.R. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 577-585.
⁸Perloff, R.M. (1989). Ego-involvement and the third person effect of televised news coverage. Communication Research, 16, 236-262.
⁹E.g., Dalton R. J., Beck, P. A., & Huckfeldt, R. (1998). Partisan cues and the media: Information flows in the 1992 presidential election. American Political Science Review, 92(1), 111-26.
¹⁰Price, V. (1989). Social identification and public opinion: Effects of communicating group conflict. Public Opinion Quarterly, 53, 197-224.
¹¹Eveland Jr., W. P., & Shah, D. V. (2003). The impact of individual and interpersonal factors on perceived news media bias. Political Psychology, 24(1), 101-117.
¹²Schmitt, K. M., Gunther, A. C., & Liebhart, J. L. (2004). Why partisans see mass media as biased. Communication Research, 31(6), 623-641.

Culture and Perception: The Role of the Physical Environment

2006-04-10T02:00:00.000-05:00

Every time someone asks me about cultural differences in cognition, be it a student, a blog reader, or my mother, I cringe. I mean, sure, I can tell them about the various differences that have been observed in the laboratory, and point them to books like The Geography of Thought, but inevitably, they'll ask what causes the observed differences, and I have to tell them I don't know. No one does, really. The problem is that there hasn't been much experimental work designed to determine what might be causing these differences. Most of the empirical work amounts to demonstrations that the differences do exist. I usually tell people that there are a few possible explanations for the differences. The first possible explanation is that the differences are innate, that is, that something about the differences in the genetic make up of Europeans and East Asians, for example, causes differences in perception, conception, and reasoning. However, there's no evidence whatsoever for innate causes, so we can probably rule this type of explanation out. The second possible explanation is that there are differences in the environments of Europeans and East Asians, and that these differences somehow cause differences in cognition and perception. A third possible explanation is that the cognitive and perceptual differences are due entirely to differences in culture that arose purely by historical accident. And finally, a fourth explanation, along the lines of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is that language differences cause cognitive and perceptual differences.

The problem, for researchers, with these last three levels of explanations is that they would all interact, and it would be difficult, if not impossible to tease them apart in practice. And of course, there are all sorts of observed differences, which may all have different causes. The best we can do, then, is look to see whether manipulating something from the environment, culture, or language (which, I know, isn't really separate from culture, but neither is the environment) affects a particular cultural difference. This won't tell us where that level fits in the causal chain, but it would at least be positive evidence that it fits in it somewhere. For example, by manipulating an hypothesized effect of culture, like fear of isolation, we can show that one factor resides at the level of culture, or by showing that cultures with different numbers of color terms perceive colors differently, we can show that language has some influence. Having talked about those levels in previous posts, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the potential role of the environment this time. Again, looking at one level doesn't exclude the other levels, because we don't know how the different levels might interact. It just says that that level plays a role. So the purpose of the research I'm going to describe is not to show that perception is the cause of cultural differences in cognition and perception, just that it might be one among many.

One interesting observed difference between Europeans an East Asian (e.g., Japanese and Filipinos) has to do with attention and perception. The difference is usually framed in terms of analytic vs. holistic perception. For example, in one experiment¹, Japanese and European American participants were first given a square (which served as the frame) with a line inside it (see the figure below). That square was then removed, and they were given an empty square different in size from the original, and asked to draw a line inside it that was either the same length as the original line (absolute condition) or that had the same length relative to the frame (relative condition).

Figure 1 from Ishii & Kitayama (2003).

The European American participants were significantly more accurate than the Japanese participants in the absolute condition, while the Japanese participants were significantly more accurate than the European American participants in the relative task.

In another experiment², this one on "change blindness", European American and Japanese participants were presented with moving scenes. In each scene, there were large, "rapidly moving" foreground objects set against a static background scene. In one condition, aspects of the objects in the foreground changed, while in others, aspects of the static background changed. European Americans were significantly better than the Japanese participants at detecting changes to foreground objects, while Japanese participants were better at detecting changes to the background.

These findings, and others, have been used to argue that Europeans tend to focus their attention on objects, independent of context (i.e., to attend and perceive analytically), while East Asians focus on the context (attending and perceiving holistically). But again, they just demonstrate the difference, and weren't designed to assess any causal hypotheses. However, these findings do contain clues. Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda³ noted that in the change blindness experiment, when the participants were shown Japanese scenes, both the European Americans and Japanese noticed more changes to the background than to the foreground objects, and when the scenes were American scenes, participants from both cultures detected more changes in the foreground objects. Might there be some difference in typical scenes to which people from the two different cultures are exposed, then, and might these differences influence the adoption of particular attentional styles?

To answer this question, Miyamoto et al. first gathered photos of scenes from similar contexts (schools, hotels, and post offices) from six cities, three in the U.S. and three in Japan. For each country, one of the cities was a small city (population less than 5,000), one medium-sized (population ~100,000), and one large (population ~8,000,000). Examples of the photos are below. They hypothesized that at each city-size, the Japanese scenes would be more "complex" and "ambiguous" than the American scenes. This, they further hypothesized, would cause the Japanese scenes to prime the holistic, context-focused attentional style observed in East Asian participants in previous experiments, while the American scenes would prime the analytic, object-focused attentional style observed in American participants. To test the first hypothesis, they used two measures of complexity and ambiguity. For the first, they presented participants with 82 photos, 41 of Japanese scenes and 41 of American, and asked them to answer the following four questions about each photo (on a 5-point scale):

"How ambiguous is the boundary of each object?"
"How many different objects do there seem to be?"
"To what degree do there seem to be parts of the scene that are invisible?"
"To what degree is the scene either chaotic or organized?"

Answers to these four questions were highly correlated, so they combined them together to form a composite score of "complexity-ambiguity." On this score, the Japanese scenes were rated as significantly more complex/ambiguous than American scenes. Using a computer program designed to detect objects in photographs, they then counted the number of objects (excluding things like leaves) in each scene, and consistent with the ratings, found that the Japanese scenes contained more objects than the American scenes.

Having shown that the Japanese scenes were indeed more complex and ambiguous, Miyamoto et al. conducted another change blindness study to test their second hypothesis. In this study, culturally neutral scenes were presented to both Japanese and European American participants. In each scene, changes occurred either in the background or to foreground objects, as in the previous change blindness experiments. In this experiment, though, participants were primed with either Japanese or American scenes prior to viewing the culturally neutral scenes. Miyamoto et al. predicted that priming them with scenes from Japanese cities would prime holistic attentional focus, and the American scenes would prime analytic attentional focus, regardless of whether the participants were Japanese or American.

As in the previous change-blindness study, Japanese participants in this study perceived more changes to the background, overall, than American participants, though both American and Japanese participants detected about the same number of changes to foreground objects. In essence, Japanese participants detected more changes than American participants. More importantly, when primed with scenes from Japanese cities, both the American and Japanese participants detected more changes to the background than when they were primed with American scenes, and when primed with American scenes, Japanese participants detected more changes to foreground objects than when primed with Japanese scenes. American participants' detection of changes to foreground objects did not differ as a function of the type of priming image.

Overall, then, the data is consistent with the second hypothesis, that the different types of scenes in the two countries contribute to the differences in attentional style between the two cultures. Miyamoto et al. don't really offer any reasons why this might be. Perhaps the greater complexity in the Japanese scenes makes attending to specific objects more difficult, or makes each individual object slightly less salient, thus making it easier and more effective to attend to the overall context. They do, however, make it clear that differences in the complexity and ambiguity of the scenes is not likely to be the only cause of the differences in attention, and that there may be cultural factors that influence what types of scenes predominate in a particular culture, though they don't speculate on what those factors might be. In the final analysis, then, the study doesn't tell us a whole heck of a lot. At least the study provides a step in the right direction though, in that it shows that there are environmental factors at work in shaping cultural styles in attention and perception. So, while the study doesn't add anything to my answer to questions about cultural differences in cognition, it at least lets me feel more confident in telling people that environmental factors are one type of potential cause.

¹Ishii, K., & Kitayama, S. (2003). Selective attention to contextual information in Japan. Poster presented at 25th Annual meeting of Cognitive Science Society; Kitayama, S., Duffy, S., Kawamura, T., & Larsen, J.T. (2003). Perceiving an object and its context in different cultures: a cultural look at new look." Psychological Science, 14(3), 201-206.
²Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R.E. (In Press). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive Science.
³Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R.E., & Masuda, T. (2006). Culture and the physical environment: Holistic versus analytic perceptual affordances. Psychological Science, 17(2), 113-119.

Links out the Wazoo

2006-04-07T15:14:00.000-05:00

Welcome to this week's links post. First off, you may have heard about the study by social psychologists involving linguistic analysis of interviews by Kerry and Edwards during the 2004 campaign, and Gore during the 2000 campaign. A link to the paper (via Coturnix) is here. A more comprehensive analysis by the same research team, which compares Kerry, Edwards, Bush, and Cheney, can be found here. The analyses are undertaken using a program called LIWC (pronounced Luke), which stands for Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The program looks for the 2300 words and word stems in its dictionary (as of the 2001 edition; I believe the 2006 edition may have more), and divides them into 73 different categories. Previous research has correlated these categories with specific variables, such as cognitive complexity or honesty. So, your LIWC "scores" are meant to indicate how "honest" or "intelligent" (cognitively complex) your speech is. There are problems with this method, particularly in the procedures involved in correlating word categories with variables, but it makes for interesting reads. If you want to play with an abridged version of LIWC yourself, you can enter any text you like into the window at this website, and it will give you a short LIWC analysis.

Some of you may be aware of the ongoing debate about a face recognition module. Several studies have suggested that part of the right fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain in the temporal lobe, is specifically designed to detect and recognize faces. The area has been dubbed the "fusiform face area," or FFA. The debate is over whether this area is specifically designed to detect faces, or is instead simply an object-recognition area that detects certain kinds of complex (and perhaps highly familiar) shapes. Stephen of OmniBrain links to an article about the most recently published research on the problem. The authors of the paper offer a model from the object-recognition perspective that does a good job of accounting for the evidence used to argue for the existence of a face-recognition module. Unfortunately, the actual paper is not available without a subscription, but here is an excerpt from the abstract to whet your appetite¹:

We present a neurophysiologically plausible, feature-based model that quantitatively accounts for face discrimination characteristics, including face inversion [difficulty recognizing upside-down faces] and "configural" effects. The model predicts that face discrimination is based on a sparse representation of units selective for face shapes, without the need to postulate additional, "face-specific" mechanisms.

Next up, Richard of Philosophy, et cetera, has a very interesting post on "open relationships," which is followed by some very good discussion in the comments section.

Joshua Knobe, who consistently produces experimental philosophy's most intriguing results, has a short post about one of his recent studies on "Psychopaths and Moral Responsibility," at The Garden of Forking Paths.

Speaking of philosophy, at his blog, Brian Leiter links to this review of a collection of essays on the history of philosphy and analytic philosophy. It contains the following quote:

Analytic philosophy, Garber holds, has moved from its initial heady insistence on solving problems by logical analysis to its current watery demand for precision and rigor. It is currently in a state of crisis. Its practitioners are doing Kuhnian normal philosophy but the paradigm itself is coming unraveled. What properly and fully contextualized study of the past can do is to show us the many different things philosophers were doing in working on the problems we take as central.

Leither asks for comments, and Jason Stanley obliges, with a post titled "What Crisis?"

And finally, Tony Brown of GNIF Brain Blogger links to this interesting talk (Real Player) by Francis Crick on consciousness.

Unfortunately, no updates in the "Medieval Women I Adore" series as of yet, but go read Heo Cwaeth anyway.

¹Jiang, X., Rosen, E., Zeffiro, T., VanMeter, J., Blanz, V., & Riesenhuber, M. (2006). Evaluation of a shape-based model of human face discrimination using fMRI and behavioral techniques. Neuron, 50(1), 159-172.

Motivated Cognition in Relationships, or How Motivated Cognition Can Save Your Marriage

2006-04-05T00:28:00.000-05:00

It's easy to see why research on motivated political reasoning/cognition has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosophere lately. It fits nicely with our intuitions about how people interpret political information (and by people, we mean other people, because our political decisions are all perfectly rational), and you don't have to look very far to see instances of motivated political reasoning. This week's news about Tom Delay, for example, has highlighted the fact that liberals are often all too ready to assume Delay is guilty, while conservatives, faced with the same facts, are equally ready to assume that Delay's legal troubles are the result of a liberal conspiracy to harm a prominent conservative. But you know, all this talk of motivated political reasoning is kind of depressing, and it gives motivated reasoning a bad rap. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about motivated reasoning in another domain, romantic relationships, where the good it can do is more apparent.

To start, think about what romantic relationships are. In most cases, two individuals who are likely to be very different from each other (at least on basic personality dimensions¹) commit to each other in a way that has a the wide range of practical implications, concerning finances, careers, child rearing, location, etc. On top of all that (and perhaps because of it), we are generally pretty emotionally invested, staking much of our quality of life on the quality of our close relationships. So it's in our best interest that these relationships be satisfying. Contrary to the common wisdom (even among psychologists, especially therapists), though, realism and satisfaction tend to make poor bedfellows, with our satisfaction decreasing as our awareness of our partners' faults increases². Right away, then, we can see how motivated reasoning might be good for romantic relationships. If you want to be satisfied in a relationship, then you're going to be motivated to see your partner in a positive light. Or, as Shakespeare put it in A Midsummer Night's Dream (a quote stolen from Murray et al.³), "Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transform to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."

In what ways is motivated reasoning used in relationships? I'm glad you asked. Let's start with attributions. Fincham and Bradbury⁴ conducted a 12-month study involving 130 couples in which the effects of different types of attributions on marital satisfaction were measured. They found that when participants attributed positive behaviors by their partners to situational factors, and negative behaviors to the partners themselves (as opposed to situational factors), their relationship satisfaction was significantly lower, 12 months later, than for participants who attributed positive behaviors to their partners, and negative behaviors to the situation. In other words, satisfied participants interpreted bad stuff as being caused by the situation, and positive stuff as being caused by their romantic partners.

Showing that differences in attribution affect relationship satisfaction is great, but maybe in relationships that are working, the good stuff really is more attributable to the person, and the bad stuff more attributable to the situation. To show that people are using motivated reasoning, we'd have to show that, at least in some cases, their perceptions of their partners seem to diverge from reality. This would indicate that they're selectively choosing the facts on which they base their perceptions in order to arrive at the desired conclusion. The first line of evidence for this divergence from reality comes from research showing that most people believe their own romantic partners to be more virtuous than the average⁵. Of course, most people's partners can't be better than average, but as Murray et al. (reference in footnote 3) point out, this could simply be the result of accurate perception of one's partner, and inaccurate perception of what the average is. So, in order to look for unrealistic perceptions, they conducted a study expressly designed to compare people's perception of their romantic partners to two converging measures of "reality." First, they gathered 77 married and 28 cohabitating couples, and gave each partner two tests (27 items in all) measuring positive and negative attributes. Each partner rated both him or herself, and his or her partner on each attribute. This allowed Murray et al. to compare partners' perceptions of each other to their self-perceptions. The participants also completed a test measuring their satisfaction with their relationship.

To add another measure of "reality," each couple was asked to provide the name of a friend who could evaluate both the two partners and the quality of their relationship. Murray et al. tracked those friends down, and sent them the two tests completed by the couples, and asked them to complete them for both members of the pair. Each friend also rated how close they were to the couple with whom they were friends, and how close they were to the couple. Thus, Murray et al. could compare the partners' perception of each other and their self-perceptions to the perceptions of their friends, with self-perceptions and friends' perceptions creating two measures of "reality." If motivated reasoning is at work, we'd expect partners' perception of each other to diverge from both self and friend perceptions.

What they found is pretty straightforward. Partners' self-perceptions and their friends' perceptions of them were very similar, indicating that they could both be used as accurate measures of reality. They also found that there was a small relationship between both self and friend perception and relationship satisfaction. People who perceived themselves as having more positive attributes, and fewer negative attributes, and whose friends perceived themselves as having more positive and fewer negative attributes, had partners who were more satisfied with their relationships. Thus, people were more satisfied with relationships when their partners had a lot of positive attributes (duh!). More importantly for our purposes, though, there was a statistical interaction between the two measures of "reality" (self and friend perceptions) and partners' perception of each other, on the one hand, and relationship satisfaction on the other. People who were unsatisfied with their relationship tended to see their partners as having fewer positive attributes than their partners and friends, while people who were satisfied in their relationships tended to perceive more positive attributes than either their friends or partners. Put differently, the perceptions of the dissatisfied were more negative than reality, and the perceptions of the satisfied were more positive than reality.

This association between perceptions that diverge from reality in one direction or the other, and relationship satisfaction, is pretty clear evidence of motivated reasoning in relationships. In the case of a satisfied partner, he or she is motivated to believe that his or her partner has a wealth of positive attributes, while a dissatisfied partner is motivated to believe that his or her partner has few positive attributes (thus making it possible to attribute the relationship problems to the other person, and justifying one's dissatisfaction). The question, of course, is whether satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) causes motivated reasoning, or motivated reasoning causes satisfaction. I don't know of any experimental work on the relationship between the two, to date, so the causal question is still unanswered. However, I suspect that it works in both directions. The more satisfied you are, the more motivated you are to see your partner in a positive light, and the more you see your partner in a positive light, the more satisfied you'll be.

Of course, being motivated to see your partner in a positive light, and thus selectively interpreting the facts so will do so, isn't always a good thing. It likely causes us to overlook many faults that might one day cause problems in our relationships. Still, the evidence that being realistic about our partners' faults is harmful to relationships is overwhelming. And that's not really very surprising. If we all focused on the things we don't like about our partners, no relationship would last very long. So all in all, you should be wary of thinking too poorly of motivated reasoning. It might save your marriage one day.

¹Lykken, D.T., & Tellegen, A. (1993). Is human mating adventitious or the result of lawful choice? A twin study of mate selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 56-58.
²Huston, T.L., & Vangelisti, A.L. (1991). Socioemotional behavior and satisfaction in marital relationships: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(5), 721-733.
³Murray, S.L., Holmes, J.G., Dolderman, D., & Griffin, D.W. (2000). What the motivated mind sees: Comparing friends' perspectives to married partners' views of each other. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36(6), 600-620.
⁴Fincham, F.D., & Bradbury, T.N. (1993). Marital satisfaction, depression, and attributions: a longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 442-452.
⁵Murray, S.L., & Holmes, J.G. (1997). A leap of faith? positive illusions in romantic relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 586-604.

Notes on Blogrolling

2006-04-01T22:16:00.000-06:00

OK, I feel a bit silly writing this post, because this is not exactly a big time blog, but I've been getting a fair number of link requests lately, so I thought I should say something about how I decide whom to link on the blogroll. First, I have to know your blog exists, so feel free to send me an email, especially if you write a lot about cognitive science, any area of psychology, philosophy (any phenomenologists out there?), biology, or just about any other science or academic discipline (hell, I've got a medievalist on the blogroll!). Also, I'm really into feminist blogging, because while I've read a lot of feminist academic writing, I find that I learn as much, if not more, from reading the ideas and perspective of "rank and file" feminists, and while, as I said, this is just a podunk little blog, I would like to do my part to get other people to learn from them as well.

Second, I have to have read your blog for at least a little while. Usually what this entails is subscribing to the feed of a blog that I've just learned about and reading it for a few days. The reason for this is that I make a big to-do about the responsibility of academic bloggers, and while I may not always live up to my own ideals ("Bilingualism = Multiple Personality Disorder?" That's just an irresponsible title designed to get people to read me), I have to at least make sure you're not telling people things like, they "didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains." Also, racism, sexism, homophobia, and/or believing that linguists are better than cognitive psychologists are automatic grounds for exclusion.

Third, I'm both lazy and absent-minded. That means it's possible, even likely, that I have learned about your blog, read it, and liked it, and then forgotten to link it. If that's the case (as it was with, say, Cognitive Daily, which I'd been reading forever and had forgotten to link!), and you still want me to put you on the sidebar, then bug me as much as you want. If, after persistent nagging, I still haven't put you on the blogroll, and haven't given you a reason, then feel free to throw solid objects at me. My friends will tell you that's the best way to get me to do something.

Fourth, if you really want me to link to you, leave comments here. I love discussion. I've got some great regular commenters, but would like more. If you comment here regularly, I can virtually guarantee you you'll end up on the blogroll (as long as you're not talking about "thinking parts of the brain," of course). If you have been commenting here a lot, and I haven't blogrolled you, then see the previous paragraph.

Fifth, there's more to linking than blogrolling. I may have a post on a topic that you two have written about. Even if your post disagrees with everything I said in mine, send me a link. I'd be happy to put it in an update or in one of my new link posts.

And finally, tell me how wonderful I am. I'm a sucker for flattery. Heck, even if you don't want to be on the blogroll, or don't actually have a blog, you should probably be telling me how wonderful I am on a regular basis anyway. (This last one makes all that talk about having a "podunk blog" seem like feigned modesty, doesn't it?) I'm kidding, of course, but I do like feedback, even negative feedback (especially negative feedback, in many cases, as long as it's constructive), so give me as much feedback as you want. As with participating in discussions here, giving me feedback (again, even the negative kind) will so ingratiate you to me that I'll almost certainly link to you.

Links, Links, Links

2006-03-31T03:00:00.000-06:00

I've decided that, for now, I'm going to do this link post thing every now and then, because I always like when Brandon does it, and hey, I've stolen just about every aspect of my blog personality from him, Richard, and Clark, so what's one more theft? Plus, there's a lot of cool stuff out there, and I might have noticed some of it that you didn't.

First up is Heo Cwaeth's fourth installment in her "Medieval Women I Adore" series. This one is on Hrotswitha von Gandersheim (try saying that 5 times fast!), about whom she writes:

My love for this woman comes not only from her desire to defend the role of women in Christianity at such an early stage, but from her absolute refusal to feign idiocy. In fact, she considers her intellect a gift from God that she is required to use. Doesn't get better than that in the tenth century, folks.

Plus, did you know that she was the first European woman known to have written literary works? Now you do. As usual, Heo manages to make me adore Hrotsw... you know who I mean, too.

Next, Carl Zimmer discovers that what looks like a myth about the brain, that it can perform a massive amount of calculations using only 10 watts, is true, even though it may have originated with the poet Paul Valery.

John Hawks has a nice post on two recent papers concerning off-line memory consolidation while we're awake. Very interesting stuff on a very poorly understood topic.

Via Omni Brain, "The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science."

Also, March saw the birth of a great new blog, Stop that Crow! You should stop by and read everything, but I recommend starting with this one on similarity-based theories of concepts.

And finally, Cognitive Daily talks about The Emotion of Shapes.

Bilingualism = Multiple Personality Disorder?

2006-03-31T01:41:00.000-06:00

OK, this (via Mind Hacks) is just cool, even if I don't know quite how seriously to take it. Apparently there's been a fair amount of research over the last few years on changes in attitudes, values, and behaviors that occur when bilinguals (or multilinguals) switch between languages. For example, in one study (p. 2):

Hong Kong bilingual-Chinese managers who responded to a values questionnaire in English displayed means closer to a group of American managers in the US than did the bilingual-Chinese managers who responded to the same questionnaire in Chinese (Ralston et al., 1995).

The explanation, which the authors of the linked study (two of whom I know pretty well personally, and still had never heard of this stuff) attribute to "Cultural Frame Switching" or "cultural accomodation," is that the language primes the culture that goes with it, and the cultures values and atitudes are thus primed as well. You know, I can almost buy that.

But for social psychologists, the mere priming of values and attitudes is not sexy enough. They need something bigger; they need to show that switching between languages causes personality changes. Of course, this requires showing something equally sexy, namely that differences in personality exist between Spanish and English speakers in the first place. So the paper is, like, doubly sexy ("sexy" is, of course, a technical term in social psychology, and doesn't refer to anything related to actual sex... I hope).

In the first study, they administered the Big Five Inventory, which measures the Big Five personality dimensions, to 168, 451 (yes, that's a lot) English-speaking participants in the United States, and 1031 Spanish-speaking participants living in Mexico. They found small, but statistically different differences on all 5 dimensions (with samples that large, it's no wonder), such that the English-speakers scored higher on the Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness dimensions, while the Spanish-speakers scored higher on the Neuroticism dimension.

Using this finding, they then predicted that if bilinguals take the BFI in both languages, they will score higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness when they take it in English, and higher on Neuroticism when they take it in Spanish. In three studies, with a combined sample of 249 English-Spanish bilinguals in Mexico and the United States, they found differences in the predicted directions on four of the five dimensions, with the difference on the Openness dimension being in the opposite direction, though not statistically significant. The difference between the scores on the Spanish and English versions on the Neuroticism dimension, while in the predicted direction, was also not statistically significant.

Once again, the authors interpret these results in terms of Cultural Frame Switching. They also make it clear that, while they found small changes in personality within individuals, the correlation between scores on the English and Spanish tests, across all participants, was 0.8. This implies that the differences between the scores for a single individual on the two versions of the test were relative. If one person takes the test in English and scores higher on the Extraversion dimension than another person did on the English version, it's likely that the first person will also score higher on the Extraversion dimension on the Spanish version than the second will on the Spanish version. Thus, switching languages isn't really altering your personality all that much. It's just tweaking the levels a little. And switching between Spanish and English doesn't seem to change your level of openness at all. I guess openness isn't as prone to priming effects as, say, extroversion. So, if you're an overly close-minded Spanish speaker, I'm afraid that learning English and speaking it exclusively probably won't help. But if you're an introverted Spanish speaker with a messy bedroom (Conscientiousness), and you want to have more fun at parties and finally clean that room, then by all means, learn English.

Upcoming on Mixing Memory

2006-03-29T19:06:00.000-06:00

I've got a few posts stewing on the following topics:

Essentialism about social concepts
Motivated cognition outside of politics
Cultural differences in cognition
Memetics

These seem to be topics that garner a lot of interest. But I'd also like to take suggestions and requests. If there's a topic on cognition, perception, neuroscience, or something related, that you'd like to hear about, let me know. If I know enough about it to post on it, I will. So, leave me a comment or drop me an email.

Richards Politics and Personality Meme

2006-03-28T08:58:00.000-06:00

As some of you may remember, way back when, Richard of Philosophy, etcetera started a meme in which bloggers took both the IPIP-NEO personality test and the Political Compass quiz, and reported their results (if you want to participate, take the tests now, before reading on). Richard has posted the results, but I thought I'd say a little bit more about them. Naturally, none of these results should be treated as scientific, because, well, they're not. In addition to the fact that neither the online IPIP-NEO or the Political Compass are great tests, the sample was pretty skewed towards the Left and (Social) Libertarian ends of the Political Compass scales, as indicated in the two histograms below.
The scales both go from -10 to +10, with -10 representing the most extreme Left/Libertarian score, and +10 the most extreme Right/Authoritarian score. As you can see, there weren't many bloggers on the Authoritarian end of the Libertarian-Authoritarian scale (16 out of 89, or 18%), and there were relatively few on the Right end of the Left-Right scale (23 out of 89, or 26%). Furthermore, on both scales, those on the Left and Libertarian ends tended to be more extreme than those on the Right and Authoritarian ends. The mean for those on the Left end was -5.6 (median = -5.88), while the mean for those on the left was 4.4 (median = 4.0). The difference is even bigger for the Libertarian-Authoritarian scale. The mean for those on the Libertarian end was -5.3 (median = -5.3), while the mean for those on the Authoritarian end was 2.3 (median = 1.7). In both cases, the differences in extremity are statistically significant. The one good thing the political compass results have going for them is that they seem fairly consistent with the bloggers' self-identification as either liberal or conservative.

The point of all that is simply to make it clear that, if you wanted to compare the relationships between the scores on the compass to the scores on the personality test, this isn't the sample to do it, because it's so heavily skewed. The fact that 67% of the bloggers who gave their results were male doesn't help either. But because this is a blog, and not a scientific journal, I'm going to report the results anyway. Just remember, "bullshit" would be a good word to describe these results. But it's interesting bullshit.

Since the interesting correlations were between the personality variables and the two political compass scores, I'll focus on those. I will quickly note, however, that there were no statistically significant correlations between the personality variables and either age or sex, though the correlation between age and artistic interest (.21) was pretty damn close. It indicates that as people got older, their artistic interest grew. Don't ask me what that might mean (young people and their terrible music! bah!). Also, the correlation between the Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian scales was high (.75) and statistically significant.

For simplicity's sake, I'll report all statistically significant correlations between the compass scores and personality variables as being positive, with those that were negative (i.e., personality scores went up as individuals became more Left or Libertarian) being reported as positive correlations with Left/Libertarian. On the personality test, there were 5 personality categories (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience), the Big Five. Within each category there were 6 additional variables, each with its own score. First the correlations for the categories. Conscientiousness was positively correlated Right (.23) and Authoritarianism (.22), Agreeableness was positively correlated with Left (.22), and Openness to Experience was positively correlated with both Left (.63) and Libertarian (.66). For the variables within the categories, only one was significantly correlated with either Right or Libertarian. Dutifulness, which is in the Conscientiousness category, was positively correlated with Authoritarian (.23). There were a bunch of significant correlations with Left and Libertarian among the variables within the categories, so instead of writing them all out, I'll just let you read this table:

As you can see, all six of the variables in the Openness to Experience category were positively correlated with both Left and Libertarian, with some of the correlations in the moderate to high range. I suppose it's a good thing that the personality variable Liberal correlated with Left, and that the correlation between Liberal and Libertarian was about the same as that between Left and Libertarian.

Before signing off, I should make a few comments (because I like to hear the sound of my own typing). I think it's interesting that these results are somewhat consistent with the two highly controversial studies I mentioned in a recent post. The correlations between the Left and the category Openness to Experience, as well as Imagination, Artistic Interests, Adventurous, and Intellectual are consistent with the Jost et al. results. I suppose the correlation between Left and Sympathy could be consistent with those results as well, as could the correlation between Authoritarian and Dutifulness. I suppose the fact that this sample was hardly representative of the population as a whole is another point of consistency. Also, it might be interesting to note that the correlation between depression and Left and Depression is consistent with the literature showing that conservatives/Republicans tend to rate themselves as being happier. I don't know what the hell the correlation between Emotionality and Left means. Maybe it's why they call 'em "bleeding heart liberals."

So there you have it, the results of Richard's meme. They're kind of interesting, somewhat consistent with what I think many of us would expect, and entirely meaningless. I don't know if you could ever get a truly representative sample through blogs (though it can't be any less representative that a sample of college undergrads), but it would be nice to have a more even distribution on both the Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian scores. I suppose it's skewed because Richard and the other blogs that picked it up are mostly read by us lefties, though it's mighty tempting to say that the skew is because Richard's blog is a philosophy blog, and Intellectual is positively correlated with Left and Libertarian (that's really meant as a joke, folks).

Dennett on Religion on the Radio

2006-03-25T00:56:00.000-06:00

Daniel Dennett, bringing out the "sweet tooth" metaphor again, was the primary guest on a Radio Open Source show titled "Is God in Our Genes?"(this is the link to the mp3 file of the show). His main point, which I assume is the main point of his recent book, is that religion is an appropriate topic for scientific study. He's preaching to the choir with me, of course. I've tossed around a few ideas for experiments on memory and religion (in line with Atran's work), so I have no compunction in studying religion scientifically. But apparently some people do, perhaps because they're afraid that explaining religion will cause it to lose some of its value (or maybe just because they don't like hearing this stuff from a man who looks like Santa Claus).

Dennett starts to lose me when he gets into memetics, which I find utterly worthless, and as you might expect, he focuses a lot on evolutionary explanations of religion's origins, which I also find pretty worthless, but for the most part the interview is interesting. He's joined on the show by two evolutionary biologists, an Episcopal minister, and a philosopher of religion, each of whom has something interesting to say. So if you're into the psychology or biology of religion, you might find the interviews interesting, and if you plan to read Dennett's book, it seems to provide a nice preview of what you'll find in it. (I haven't read the book myself, but I suspect that Razib's giving good advice when he says that you should just go to the primary sources.)

Leiter and Weisberg on Evolutionary Psychology

2006-03-24T08:13:00.000-06:00

Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg have written an article, available here, titled "Why Evolutionary Psychology Is (So Far) Irrelevant to Law." It has three sections, the first and third arguing against the relevance of EP to law, and the second presenting criticisms EP itself. The arguments in the first and third sections are interesting (and new to me, at least), but I'm naturally more interested in the criticisms of EP itself in the second section. None of those criticisms are new. Most of them come from authors whose work on EP many of you have probably read, such as Elisabeth Lloyd (e.g., in this paper, and this one), Stephen J. Gould, David Buller, Jerry Fodor, the Panskepps, etc. (heck, I offered one of the arguments in a post back in 2004). But it is a nice review of those criticisms. If you're not familiar with those authors' writings on EP, the Leiter and Weisberg article might be of interest to you. Just to give you the gist, most of the criticisms concern the methodological and theoretical connections between EP and contemporary biology. The problem with EP is that there are no such connections. EP relies on a fairly antiquated evolutionary framework, and its methodology -- to look for behaviors that fit with evolutionary reasoning, rather than to use evolutionary reasoning to explain the origins of observed behaviors -- is the exact opposite of what biologists generally do.

I do want to note that the article suffers from a common problem in discussions of EP outside of psychology (especially those by philosophers): very few citations of actual work by Evolutionary Psychologists. It seems strange, to me at least, to offer criticisms without actually citing examples of what you are criticizing. I hesistate to speculate that this occurs due to a lack of familiarity with the literature (though I'm pretty sure that's what got Buller into trouble), but it does lead to problems. For example, I still think Leiter and Weisberg's criticisms miss the mark, partially, by misrepresenting the reasons Evolutionary Psychologists argue for adaptationist explanations. While I think they're right in claiming that there may be many possible non-adaptationist answers for most, if not all EP findings, by mistakenly believing that Evolutionary Psychologists simply assume adaptationist explanations, they leave themselves open to the reply that such explanations are not assumed, but empirically tested, and since predictions derived from those explanations have been empirically confirmed, the burden of proof is on those who believe there may be alternative, non-adaptationist explanations. Of course, the empirical tests used by EP leave much to be desired, both from the perspective of empirical psychology and of evolutionary biology. But still, I think that philosophers and biologists criticizing EP would do well to cite more than one or two examples of actual EP research (or at least be familiar with more than one or two examples).

Do Whiny Kids Become Conservatives?

2006-03-24T03:02:00.000-06:00

The study that's getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere, presenting data showing that differences in preschool are correlated with differences in adult political orientation, can be read here. The criticisms seem to be largely based on speculation, but I have to admit, it's hard to evaluate the study from the write-up, because it doesn't give any representation of the distribution of political orientation, and in order to get the data on things like SES, you have to read 25-year old write-ups of previous studies using the same data. It also seems natural to worry about the sample, since it comes from a town notorious for its progressive residents. As some of this post's commenters noted, it could just be that whiny kids grow up to be "hostile to their environment," and since the Berkeley environment is decidedly liberal, these particular kids grew up to be conservative. However, I will note that the study uses widely accepted methodologies and produces results that are, in many cases, highly statistically significant.

The one thing the study appears to have going for it is that its results, at least for the correlations between the adult personality measures and political orientation, are consistent with the work of John Jost and his colleagues (you can read their papers here and here, the second paper being a response to this paper). Recall that they found political conservativism to be positively correlated with death anxiety; system instability (i.e., things like social, economic, and political threats increase conservativism); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity; need for order, structure, and closure; and fear of threat and loss; and negatively correlated with openness to experience; uncertainty tolerance; integrative complexity (which just means cognitive complexity); and self esteem (though this negative correlation was fairly small). Since the Block and Block study found conservativism to be negatively correlated with things like "enjoys aesthetic impressions," "complicates simple situations," "has a wide range of interests," "tends to be rebellious, non-conforming," and positively correlated with things like "uncomfortable with uncertainty," and "behaves in a sex-typed manner," the two studies seem to line up fairly well. Of course, the Jost study has been widely criticized by conservatives, but the methods and data seem pretty sound to me. You can check out the papers and judge for yourself.

Motivated Reasoning II: Are Political Partisans Irrational?

2006-03-21T13:52:00.000-06:00

Your response, I imagine, is "duh." Partisans are emotional; stop the presses, get me rewrite. Perhaps. But I find the graphic clarity of colorful brain scans to be sobering. It's one thing to know that some people get obnoxious during political arguments; it's another thing to see that 30 adult men who read candidates' quotes while strapped down in MRI machines didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains. - Dick Meyer, in his column on the Westen et al. study

"Didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains." Let me quote that one more time. "Didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains." When I read something that stupid in an article in the mainstream media, an article linked and quoted by many bloggers, I am at a loss for words. OK, maybe not a loss; an excess, really, if you consider how long the last post was, and that it was only the first in a two-part series. But I really am blown away. You don't even have to have read anything about the study to know that Meyers must be wrong. That's just not how the brain works. But since he's spread that nonsense all over the web, I feel it's important to explain exactly what the study does show. So, after giving the background of the study in the last post, I'm ready to talk about the methods, results, and conclusions of the study in this one. If you'd like to read the unpublished write-up of the study yourself, you can request a copy from Westen here¹.

The study begins from the following position (p. 3):

Neural network models of motivated reasoning suggest that in affectively relevant situations, the brain equilibrates to solutions that simultaneously satisfy two sets of constraints: cognitive constraints, which maximize goodness of fit to the data, and emotional constraints, which maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect.

In other words, as I described in the post yesterday, there are two systems at work in motivated reasoning: a cold system, that works to come to an accurate conclusion given the input from the environment and memory, and a hot system, driven by emotion, that seeks to come to a desired conclusion (and thus "maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect") by biasing the input and interpretation of information from the environment and memory with which the cold system can work.

The study is concerned specifically with how political partisans, people who are committed to one political party, and specifically to one candidate, utilize the "hot" and "cold" systems in reasoning when presented with "threatening" information about that candidate. Utilizing imaging work like that of Goel and Dolan (discussed in yesterday's post), Westen et al. predict that when partisans are presented with threatening information about their candidate, they will see increased activation in areas associated with "hot" cognition, specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex (an area associatwiththe emotion and reward), along with suppression of activity in areas associated with "cold" cognition, such as the lateral prefrontal cortex.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Westen et al. recruited 28 right-handed men between the ages of 22 and 55 who were self-reported "committed Republicans or Democrats." They presented each participant with a series of statements either about their favored candidate (same party condition), about the opposing candidate (opposing party condition), or about a "politically neutral" individual (Tom Hanks, Hank Aaron, or William Styron; neutral party condition). I'll let Westen et al. describe the statements (p. 5):

Each statement set consisted of seven slides presenting verbal material, designed to present a clear contradiction between the target person's words and actions and then to resolve that contradiction... Slide 1 presented an initial statement, usually a quote from the target individual. Slide 2 presented a contradictory statement suggesting that the target's words and actions were inconsistent. Slide 3 asked subjects to consider whether the target's statements and actions are inconsistent with each other, and Slide 4 asked them to rate the extent to which they agreed that the target's words and deeds were contradictory, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) using a four-button pad. Slide 5 presented an exculpatory statement that explained away the inconsistency. Slide 6 then asked subjects to consider whether the target's statements and actions are not quite as inconsistent as they first appeared. The final slide asked them once again to rate the extent to which they agreed with this statement, using the same 4- point scale.

The key slides for the data analysis are those that present the contradiction (Slide 2) and those that present an exculpatory statement (Slide 5). Both slides present what are, in fact, contradictions to earlier information. The difference between the two is that, iin the same party condition, the contradiction slide gets inachievingof acheiving a desired conclusion, and thus should elicit motivated reasoning by triggering a negative emotional response, while the exculpatory statement allows the participant to arrive at his desired conclusion using cold cognition exclusively. Thus, based on the predictions described above, we would expect there to be more activity in the "hot" system areas while reading the contradiction slide than while reading the exculpatory slide. We would also expect their to be more activity in the "hot" system after reading the contradiction slide in the same party condition than in the neutral condition.

To test these predictions, Westen et al. performed four contrasts using the subtraction method. The first contrast involved subtracting the brain activity observed during the contradiction slide in the neutral condition from the activity observed during the contradiction slide in the same party condition. The results of this contrast can be seen in this figure (Figure 3 from Westen et al.):

As the figure indicates (in case you couldn't tell), this is what they found (p. 7, all emphasis mine):

[P]rocessing emotionally threatening information about one's preferred candidate relative to a neutral target activated distributed sites in medial prefrontal cortex, including particularly the ventral ("affective") subdivision of the [anterior cingulate cortex] but also the more rostral ("cognitive") subdivision. Also activated were a small superior medial prefrontal region and a larger ventromedial region of [the prefrontal cortex] associated with affective processing. The other notable finding was a large area of activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (along with coextensive regions of the precuneus and inferior parietal cortex), associated in prior studies with neural information processing related to social emotions, moral evaluations, and judgments of forgivability.

To summarize the findings of the first contrast: relative to the neutral condition (let me repeat that again, for Meyer and anyone who read him, relative to the neutral condition), they found increased activation in areas associated with emotion and affect while reading the contradiction slide in the same party condition. Note, however, that they also found some increased activity in areas associated with cognitive processing, as well.

The second contrast tested the prediction that there would be a difference between the contradiction and exculpatory slides within the same party condition. Thus, the activity observed while reading the exculpatory slides was subtracted from the activity observed while reading the contradiction slide, all within the same party condition. This is what they found (p. 8, the figure is Figure 5 from Westen et al., all emphasis mine):

The contrast analysis showed activations in the left lateral inferior frontal cortex and left insula (not shown: maximum at -36, -18, 18), both consistent with processing of negative affect. Also seen were activations in the inferior orbitofrontal cortex (gyrus rectus) bilaterally, indicative of emotion processing as well as the precuneus (suggesting evaluative judgments, as above). The only other prominent activations were bilateral activations in the parahippocampal gyrus and extending to the hippocampus, perhaps indicative of efforts to generate solutions (rationalizations) based on memory retrieval. We again observed no differential activation of [dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex], suggesting that motivated reasoning did not engage regions previously linked with conscious attempts to reason, suppress information, or regulate affect.

To summarize, in the same party condition they found increased activation in response to the contradiction, relative to the exculpatory statement, in areas consistent with negative emotional experiences, evaluation, and according to their speculative interpretation, "efforts to generate solutions (rationalizations) based on memory retrieval). Both of these contrasts are thus consistent with the hypothesis that partisans are engaged in motivated reasoning, i.e., biased interpretations, evaluations, and memory searches, in response to threatening information about their favored political candidate (I won't get into the third contrast, because it's a bit complex, but its results are consistent with the first two).

The fourth contrast, which many reporters and bloggers seem to have found incredibly interesting, was, the author admitted, more exploratory than the first three. It was designed to test the hypothesis that the motivated reasoning that occurred while reading the contradictory slide would reduce negative affect. They thus contrasted the activity observed while reading the slide (slide 3) that was shown after the contradictory slide (which was slide 2). If motivated reasoning serves to decrease negative emotional responses to the threatening material, then we would expect a decrease in the activation in areas associated with negative emotional responses (e.g., the left insular cortex). And that is, in fact, what they found: relative to the contradictory slide, activation in areas associated with negative emotions, such as the insular cortex and the lateral orbital frontal cortex decreased significantly. Activation was also seen in the anterior cingulate cortex (suggesting the processing of emotion, though not necessarily negative emotion), and in the left inferior regions of the parietal lobe (suggesting "effortful processing," or as Westen et al. speculate, "rationalization). Finally (and this is what the reporters and bloggers found so sexy), they also found increased activation in the ventral striatum, an area associated with the brain's reward system.

Summarizing all that jargon: when looking at the slide that follows the activation of motivated reasoning, they found decreased activation in areas associated with negative emotions, but continued processing of emotional information, along with areas potentially associated with rationalization (attempting to come up with a post hoc explanation for arriving at one's desired conclusion), and activation indicating that overcoming the threatening information and arriving at the desired conclusion (and the participants did arrive at the desired conclusion, as indicated by their ratings of the candidates) is rewarding. How was this reported by Meyer and others? Overcoming the threat activates the same areas of the brain that are activated by drug use and sex! Well, duh. So is any other rewarding experience (like, say, correctly classifying a chair as a chair).

OK, now we're in a position to see where Meyer went astray. First, he has no idea what the photos of brain activity data mean. If you look at the photos above you will see, as Meyer's said, little or no activity in the parts of the brain associated strictly with the "cold" system, or as Meyer's nonsensically put it, the "thinking parts of their brains." You know why you don't see that activity? BECAUSE THE PHOTOS ARE OF THE ACTIVITY EXCLUSIVE TO THE CONTRADICTION CONDITION! It is the photo of the activity observed after subtracting the activity from the neutral or exculpatory conditions. You don't see activity in the "thinking parts of their brains" because that activity was subtracted out for the analysis! Anyone, and I mean anyone, who knows anything about neuroscience would have recognized that immediately. But Meyer writes an article read by thousands, and picked up by who knows how many bloggers, who were then read by who knows how many thousands more (Leiter's blog alone gets thousands of readers per day), in which he tells everyone that partisans aren't using the "thinking parts of their brains." When Westen et al. use words like "absence," they don't mean that the "thinking parts" of the brain are shut off, they mean that motivated reasoning itself doesn't engage those parts any more than they are already engaged during cold cognition (e.g., in the neutral conditions). But trust me, the thinking parts of the brain are still working just fine, and they can even override the emotional areas activated by motivated reasoning, if the facts are overwhelming. Partisans, then, are not completely irrational. They are perfectly capable of objectively reasoning about even their own candidates, if given the right incentives and information. But as happens with all of us, when their "hot" systems were activated, it biased their own reasoning processes, without them even knowing it.

Meyer argues in his article that these findings may make political persuasion impossible. It should be obvious, by now, that he's full of shit. Nothing about the Westen et al. results implies, in the least, that persuasion is impossible, even in the case of steadfast political partisans. It does imply that when strong emotions are associated with social concepts, in this case political candidates, persuasion will be more difficult. You will have to help the cold cognition system to overwhelm the hot cognition system by presenting partisans with facts that they can't rationalize. That's easier said than done, of course, but the fact that the U.S. population, once staunchly in favor of both Bush and the Iraq War, have begun to change their opinions of both in the face of overwhelming evidence, is proof positive that it is not impossible. One thing is for certain, though: it's impossible to get people who have no clue what they're talking about to stop writing about science.

One more thing. I think it's important, whenever we talk about cognitive neuroscientific studies, to note their limits. The subtraction method is full of problems, not the least of which is that just because an area doesn't increase or decrease its activity in a targeted condition relative to the condition that is subtracted from it, does not mean that those areas are not performing vital functions exclusive to the processes activated by the targeted condition. You should always take cognitive neuroscience with a salt truck-full of grains of salt. Think of the studies, and their interpretations, as interesting speculations that may be borne out by future research. But don't, I repeat do not, treat them as scientific gospel.

¹Westen, D., Blagov, P.S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (Unpublished Manuscript). An fMRI study of motivated reasoning: Partisan political reasoning in the U.S. Presidential election.

Motivated Reasoning I: Hot Cognition

2006-03-20T03:19:00.000-06:00

The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. Though there may be (more) instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects. -F. Bacon

It's been a while since I've posted a rant about an abuse of cognitive science by the popular press or bloggers, so I figure I've got catching up to do. Fortunately, both the popular press and bloggers have given me plenty of material, by writing about research by Drew Westen on motivated reasoning in politics (a few of the dozens of contributions by bloggers, none of which I recommend, can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). he gist of the stories, both in the press and in the blogs (because the blogs got all their information from the stories, of course) is that "partisans," by which they mean people who are committed to voting for Democrats or Republicans, react to negative information about their preferred candidates emotionally, rather than rationally. The common refrain is, "partisans" are irrational. What the participants in the study are actually doing, according to Westen, is using the "hot" reasoning system, a system that is not exclusive to political partisans, and is not exclusive to political reasoning. In fact, we all use it quite often, particularly in social situations. So if "partisans" are irrational, so are we, even if our irrationality doesn't show itself in politics as strongly as their's does (though I bet you could make a case that many of those bloggers, especially the one who runs the first site I linked, have trouble using the "cold" system in anything even remotely related to politics).

OK, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I can move on. Before I get to the study, or even a little background to situate it, let me say that the study, by Westen et al. has not yet been published, but instead has just recently been presented at a conference (the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology). Ordinarily I don't present unpublished work (I don't think this work has even been submitted for publication!) here unless I know at least one of the researchers involved. If I do, then I feel confident, based on what I know of his or her prior work, that the unpublished work is of a high quality. In the case of this study, however, I only know a little of one author's (Westen's) work, and therefore can't vouch for its quality without it first being subjected to peer review. The research report is well written and detailed, at least, so I think it's possible to evaluate the methods, results, and conclusions. Furthermore, because there has been so much attention to the study, so much of it based in ignorance (of the study itself, and of its context), I feel compelled to write about it now, rather than six months to a year from now when it's been published and everyone's forgotten about it, but integrated the bad information about it from the press into their background knowledge. Naturally, a post on this topic will be long (I'm wordy; sue me), but the study deserves a careful analysis that includes at least the bare minimum of context. So, I'm going to divide it up into two posts, with the first post containing the background, and the second post discussing the study. Hopefully that will ease the reading load for anyone who's actually bothered to read this far (hi Mom).

Motivated Reasoning and the Hot vs. the Cold

When cognitive science was born, emotion essentially became taboo, and until recently (say the last decade), remained so, in the serious study of cognition. This also seems to have been true, for the most part, in economics, where rationality was discussed with little reference to affect. But in social psychology, emotion was often central, even if it wasn't referenced directly, in the work of people like Festinger and Heider in the 60s, and Kruglanski and Kunda in the 80s. Cognitive psychologists were so afraid of emotion that some of them, like Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (two big names in the history of cog sci), went to great links to show that cognitive mechanisms could account for the findings that social psychologists thought were in part the result of emotion. But as the field of social cognition grew into its own, and neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio showed just how important emotion is for cognition, emotion has become fair game in cognitive scientific research. And that has led to increased attention to motivated reasoning, and its use of "hot" cognition, as opposed to strictly "rational," "cold" reasoning.

What is motivated reasoning? Kunda¹ describes motivated reasoning with the following example:

[P]eople who want to believe that they will be academically successful may recall more of their past academic successes than of their failures. They may also use their world knowledge to construct new theories about how their particular personality traits may predispose them to academic success... If they succeed in accessing and constructing appropriate beliefs, they may feel justified in concluding that they will be academically successful, not realizing that they also possess knowledge that could be used to support the opposite conclusion. The biasing role of goals is thus constrained by one's ability to construct a justification for the desired conclusion: People will come to believe what they want to believe only to the extent that reason permits. Often they will be forced to acknowledge and accept undesirable conclusions, as they appear to when confronted with strong arguments for undesired or counterattitudinal positions. (p. 482)

In motivated reasoning, memory searches, interpretations of incoming information, evaluations of arguments, and even perception, are biased in such a way that we will be more likely to arrive at a desired conclusion (called a directional motivation; in the above example, the conclusion that we are likely to be academically successful is the directional motivation). The way this is achieved, in essence, is by limiting the information that is retrieved from long term memory into current working memory (the store of information that is available for current processing), thereby biasing the information available for supporting or evaluating conclusions and arguments, as well as interpreting incoming information (recall, as I've said here many times before, that incoming information is always interpreted in light of the background knowledge that it activates in memory). As Kunda notes in the quoted passage, our ability to arrive at that conclusion isn't absolute. If we're continually confronted with information that conflicts with that conclusion, we will be forced to deal with it. But as long as we can, we'll only deal with that information that is consistent with our conclusion (see, e.g., the quick discussion of the "my-side bias" in this recent post).

Motivated reasoning can, despite its limits, be quite powerful. Consider some experimental results. In some studies, participants' are asked to assess the probability of events, some of which are more desirable than others. Their ratings of the probability of an event depends on whether they found those events desirable. Desirable events are believed to be more likely to occur than undesirable events², even when the desired event occurred less often in the observed series³. In other experiments, people's beliefs about their own introvertedness or extrovertedness vary depending on whether they have been told that introversion or extroversion leads to academic success⁴, and they are much better at retrieving memories of experiences of introvertedness if they believe the trait will lead to success⁵. People will even revise upwards their beliefs about the average person's knowledge of history if it serves to diminish the accomplishment of a high test scores on a history test by an opponent in a history trivia game⁶.

Very recent theories of motivated reasoning in social domains (e.g., politics) have begun to tap into the "hot cognition" system to explain motivated reasoning phenomena. In one theory⁷, important because it influences the perspective of Westen and his colleagues, the use of the "hot" system works something like this: First, through evaluation, social concepts become "affectively charged." This means that they develop an associated valence (positive or negative), and this valence is stored with those concepts in memory. When social concepts are activated, and retrieved from long term memory, they bring their valence with them. This activation of the concept with its valence serves to establish our "directional motivation," and thus to color our interpretation of any new information we are bringing in at the time, as well as biasing memory searches and so on. Lodge and Taber (see footnote 7) list the following situations in which we're likely to use hot cognition-driven motivated reasoning

One's attitudes are challenged.
An affective judgment is called for.
The consequences of being wrong are weak.
The judgmental task is complex.
"Objective" information is not readily available or the evidence is ambiguous.
Disconfirming evidence is not highlighted.
Counter-arguments come easily to mind.
One is distracted or under time pressure.

These situations imply that motivated reasoning is in fact our default mode of reasoning; the one that we revert to when we are threatened, when our cognitive resources are limited, or when we aren't highly motivated to make an effortful attempt to come to the objectively "right" answer. Interestingly, under this theory, motivated reasoning is automatic, relatively effortless, and likely occurs below the level of awareness. This allows for what Kunda calls the "illusion of objectivity," which is the belief that the conclusion at which we've arrived is the objectively right one, even though the processes through which we've arrived at it were biased.

Here's how this would work in political reasoning. Imagine you're a staunch G.W. Bush supporter. Your Bush concept therefore has a strong positive emotional valence associated with it. Anytime your Bush concept is activated, the associated valence will be activated, and you will be motivated to interpret any incoming information about Bush in a positive light. If potentially negative information about Bush comes to your attention, you will search for information in memory and in the environment that will help you to come to a positive interpretation of that information. Once again, that does not mean that you will ultimately be able to interpret that incoming information in a positive light. If the negative aspects of that information are overwhelming, or you are unable to retrieve information from memory that will help you interpret it in a positive light, you will be forced to interpret that information negatively. This may then cause you to update the valence associated with Bush to make it more negative (though it may still have a positive overall valence). Recent studies in the political domain have supported this picture of political reasoning⁸.

This is the theoretical and empirical background against which Westen and his colleagues' work exists. Before turning to that work (in the next post), though, I want to say a little bit about the neuroscience of the hot and cold systems, because their study is an imaging study. In an earlier imaging study by Goel and Dolan⁹, participants were given emotionally-salient and emotionally-neutral syllogisms like the following, in order to activate the hot and cold systems:

Emotionally-Salient: No doctors are criminals. .
Some doctors are rapists.
Some rapists are not criminals.

Emotionally-Neutral: Some rock stars are guitarists.
All guitarists can sing.
Some rock stars can not sing.

While they read the syllogisms, their brains were scanned using an fMRI machine. Using the subtraction method (the details and problems of which I've discussed before, here), they were able to derive the activation of various regions in each condition relative to a baseline and the activation in the other condition (e.g., for the emotionally-salient condition, the level of activation from an emotional baseline condition, along with the activation in the emotionally-neutral condition minus its neutral baseline, were subtracted to get the activation in the "hot" system).

They found that when processing the emotionally-neutral syllogisms, activation in the lateral / dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (labeled #2 in the picture, from this website), a large area associated with "executive functions," or higher-order cognition, showed increased activation, while activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (labeled #3), an area associated with emotion regulation, decreased. When processing the emotionally-salient syllogisms, activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, along with the fusiform gyrus, increased, while activation in the lateral/dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex decreased. Thus, the cold system activates areas associated with logical reasoning, and suppresses activity in areas associated with emotion, while the hot system activates the areas associated with emotion, and suppresses activity in the areas associated with logical reasoning. It's important to note the word "suppresses." It's important to remember this, then: the hot system doesn't shut off the logical reasoning system, it just decreases the level of activity there, perhaps to give primacy to the activity in the areas associated with emotional processing.

That should be enough information to allow you to understand Westen's work. So I'll talk about that in the next post.

¹Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498.
²Arrowood, A. J. & Ross, L. (1966). Anticipated effort and subjective probability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 57-64.
³Irwin, F. W. & Snodgrass, J. G. (1966). Effects of independent and dependent outcomes on bets. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 282-285.
⁴Kunda, Z. & Sanitioso, R. (1989). Motivated changes in the self-concept. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 272-285.
⁵Sanitioso, R., Kunda, Z. & Fong, G. T. (1990). Motivated recruitment of autobiographical memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 229-241.
⁶ Kunda (1990).
⁷Lodge, M. & Taber, C. (In Press). Three steps toward a theory of motivated political reasoning. In A. Lupia, M. McCubbins, & S.Popkin (Eds.), Elements of Political Reason: Understanding and Expanding the Limits of Rationality. London: Cambridge University Press.
⁸Lodge & Taber (In Press); Redlawsk, D.P., & Hubby, C.R. (2002). Hot cognition or cool consideration? Testing the effects of motivated reasoning on political decision making. Journal of Politics, 64, 1021-1044; Morriss, J.P., Squires, N.K., Taber, C.S., & Lodge, M. (In Press). The automatic activation of political attitudes: A psychological examination of the hot cognition hypothesis. Political Psychology.
⁹Goel, V., & Dolan, R.J. (2003). Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning. Neuroimagine, 20(4), 2314-2321.

Links, Links, Links

2006-03-20T02:21:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure I've ever done a link post, but I've had the flu, and therefore have absolutely no energy whatsoever. So this is the best I can do right now. Plus, there are some really good posts by Brandon and Heo that you really should read, and I threw in a strange one by someone named Bird Dog too.

Let's start with Brandon of Siris. Partially in response to my post on thinking about evolution, and to one of the papers I cited, Brandon wrote a four-part series on essentialism: Essentialisms I, Essentialisms, Essentialisms in Biology, Essentialism and Darwin, and Intuitive Essentialism. The posts help to clarify the different senses of essentialism, as they've been used in philosophy and biology, and contain some great links (especially in the last one).

Then there's Heo Cwaeth, the best medievalist you're not reading (I know, I found that funny too!). She's started a new series titled "Medieval Women I Adore," on medieval women who, if you're like me, you've never heard of. But as the series' title suggests, Heo adores them, and after reading her posts, so do I. She has three posts so far: Æðelflæd (Aethelflaed), Chrodield and Basina, and Hilda of Whitby. I have to admit, I like Aethelflaed the most, and not only because I can't spell her name without looking. Read the post and you'll see why I think she's so cool.

Finally, I got an email earlier warning me that I would be linked at Maggie's Farm. I'd never heard of that site, so I decided to stop by and see what they were saying about the post. I found this, immediately following a call to support the academic bill of rights in the New York Assembly (I know, not a good sign):

Mixing Memory addresses the cognitive factors which they believe interfere with the supposedly benighted American population's acceptance of Evolution as Gospel. I make two points: First, as psychologists, and not physical scientists, they lack the humility which the physical scientists possess, probably because they never took Quantum Algorithms and the Fourier Transformation in college - not for lack of brain-power, but lack of interest. Second, they lack metaphysics. They are psyche-centric, which is reductionistic. I enjoy their blog regularly, but everyone has their limited view of the world, as do we, no doubt. Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." And, Yes, I do think ID is silly. But, on the other hand, I am more interested in the cognitive obstacles to connecting with God than in the cognitive obstacles to connecting with evolution. Heck - which is more important?

Huh? Maybe my fever-riddled brain has lost some of its reading comprehension skills, but if I'm not mistaken, that says that because I haven't read a nonexistent book on physics (the closest I could find to that title is a 1998 paper by Richard Jozsa in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London), I lack humility, and therefore deigned to write a post on some of the reasons why many people have trouble understanding evolution. Forgetting for a moment that the intuitions I discussed are supposed to be universal, and therefore if I was calling anyone benighted I was calling everyone benighted, what the hell does it mean that I'm psyche-centric? Does it mean that I think thought happens in the head? Because if it does, it's true. And cognitive obstacles to "connecting with God?" I'm not sure I know what that means, either, but I have written on religious cognition before. Does that count?

I think the purpose of the post was to say that accepting evolution isn't important, and might even be a bad idea. But it's hard to get that out of what it actually says, and the attempt to undercut what I said in that post by claiming that I lack humility (duh!) and that I'm a psyche-centric reductionist (I'm certainly not a reductionist in the sense that the term is ordinarily used in the philosophy of science, but OK) certainly doesn't help. But hey, the post quotes Einstein in agreement with its position, so it must be right, right?

Blogger

2006-03-17T14:10:00.000-06:00

Blogger had some sort of major malfunction yesterday, and this blog, along with many others, was inaccessible. Hopefully the problem won't reoccur, but if you got a "forbidden" message yesterday, now you know why.

Thinking About Evolution: Cognitive Factors That Get in the Way

2006-03-12T01:59:00.000-06:00

My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at least something other than Darwin Day (I thought about maybe suggesting "Variation Appreciation Day," or "Hug a Mutation Day"). But objections to the name aside, I felt kind of guilty about making such a substanceless contribution to a day with what I believe are noble purposes, especially after reading (via Clark) that 53% of Americans reject evolution entirely. So I'm going to try again. This time, I'm going to approach evolution from a cognitive scientist's perspective. That means I'm going to try to answer the question, how do people think about evolution? I suspect that most of the readers of this blog realize how important a question that is, given how many people in this country reject evolution, often as a result of gross misconceptions. Education researchers certainly realize its importance, and as a result there is a large literature on evolution education, and how students understand the central concepts in evolutionary biology like natural selection, adaptation, inheritance, and so on. The short answer to the question from that literature, which I doubt will surprise anyone, is that most people don't think about evolution very well. In fact, it almost as though Dawkins' quip from The Blind Watchmaker that "it is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism and to find it hard to believe" isn't that far off. In this post, I'm going to try to explain a few of the reasons why that is.

Evolution education is an interesting case for education researchers and cognitive scientists because there are so many of what you might call non-epistemic factors at play. For example, a study by Brem et al. a few years ago found that across the spectrum from creationist to evolutionist, college students tended to believe that evolution will have negative psychological and social consequences¹. It's likely that for many, belief in these negative consequences influences not only their willingness to believe in evolution, but also their willingness to expose themselves to information about it, or to attempt to understand that information. There are also many social or familial factors at play. To explain differences in the developmental paths towards creationism vs. evolutionism, Margaret Evans has proposed a "model of constructive interactionism," in which "children generate intuitive beliefs about origins, both natural and intentional, while communities privilege certain beliefs and inhibit others, thus engendering diverse belief systems"². In other words, children come to the table with certain intuitions about the origins of things (I'll discuss those intuitions in a bit), and socialization and education processes serve to encourage some of those intuitions while de-emphasizing others. Thus, children in strong creationist families will have their intuitions that are directly opposed to evolution encouraged, making the job of science educators even more difficult. In this post, I'm going to describe three of of the intuitions and biases that are directly relevant to how children and adults think about evolution, because I find them to be the most interesting.

Intuitive Theists

There is a growing body of evidence indicating that children are inclined to view both artifacts and natural kinds (biological and non-biological) as existing for a purpose, and to believe that they were intentionally created for that purpose. Here is Deborah Kelemen describing some of the research indicating children's inclination to believe that natural kinds have a purpose³:

Consistent with the view that from very early on, teleological assumptions constrain our reasoning about living things, studies have found that young children attend to shared functional adaptation rather than shared overall appearance (or category membership) when generalizing behaviors to novel animals (Kelemen et al., 2003a), judge whether biological properties are heritable based on their functional consequences rather than their origin and explain body properties by reference to their self-serving functions not their physical-mechanical cause.

The objects to which children will attribute a purpose range from animal parts (e.g., legs are for walking) to whole animals (lions exist "to go in the zoo"), and even non-biological kinds (clouds exist to make rain). In addition, when asked whether someone created the first of a particular item, children are likely to answer yes for all three kinds of objects (artifacts, biological kinds, and non-biological natural kinds)⁴. It's understandable, then, why evolution should be difficult to teach to children: it is counterintuitive. Both the non-teleological aspects of evolutionary explanations of the origins of biological kinds, and the lack of a need for an intelligent designer go against children's natural view of things.

But the story is actually somewhat worse for evolution than intuitions about purpose and intentional creation indicate. While evolution involves non-teleological processes, teleological language is still pretty common in discussions of evolution (even Darwin used it), and many adults who believe in various intelligent design philosophies insist that the intelligent design position is not inconsistent with evolutionary biology. But children's intuitions may be more specific than simply inferring teleology and purposeful creation. They may actually be creationists, at least at certain ages. Margaret Evans has explored the beliefs of children in both fundamentalist Christian and non-fundamentalist households, and found an interesting, and for educators, somewhat disturbing pattern⁵. In her study, children under the age of 8 in fundamentalist households tended to be strict creationists: they believed that a non-human intelligent entity (God) created all animals as they are now, while children under the age of 8 in non-fundamentalist homes held beliefs that Evans describes as a mixture of creationism and "generationist" origins (such as "the first robins came from eggs); between the ages of 8 and 10 years, children were strict creationists, regardless of the type of household; and from 11 on, children in fundamentalist households tended to be strict creationists, while children in non-fundamentalist homes tended to be evolutionists. Thus it appears that education can, in older children, overcome creationist intuitions, but only if that education is consistent (or at least not inconsistent) with what children are being taught in the home.

The work of Kelemen and Evans helps to explain why evolution has had such a hard time becoming widely accepted by the general public. From an early age, our intuitions run counter to evolutionary science, and unless children live in homes where evolution is not seen as being counter to the belief systems of their parents, they will not let go of those intuitions, even when they are taught about evolution in school. Those children will then go on to privilege those same intuitions in their children, and so on, leading to generation after generation of individuals who, by the time they are college-aged, will find it very difficult to accept any evolutionary teachings.

Intuitive Essentialists

In what's now a classic paper, Medin and Ortony⁶ argued that humans may be intuitive essentialists. They called this position "psychological essentialism," and there is a growing body of evidence indicating that they were right. We are essentialists, especially about natural kinds, and biological kinds in particular, from a very young age. It may not seem so at first, but this fact could have very important implications for evolution education, and the willingness, perhaps even the ability, of many people to accept evolution as an explanation of biological origins.

Here is how Gelman and Markman expressed what later became the psychological essentialism position⁷:

Natural kinds are categories of objects and substances that are found in nature (e.g., tiger, water, cactus)... natural kind terms capture regularities in nature that go beyond intuitive similarity... Natural kinds have a deep, nonobvious basis; perceptual features, though useful for identifying members of a category, do not always serve to define the category. For example, "fool's gold" looks just like gold to most people, yet we accept the statement of an expert that it is not gold... Because natural kinds capture theory-based properties rather than superficial features, some of the properties that were originally used to pick out category members can be violated, but we still agree the object is a member of the kind if there is reason to believe that "deeper," more explanatory properties still hold. (p. 1532)

In other words, people believe that natural kinds have an underlying, unseen essence that makes them what they are, and that while this essence is likely associated in some causal fashion with the surface features that we usually use to classify an instance of a kind, the essence remains the same regardless of whether the surface features change. For biological kinds, people (including young children) believe that origins (who the parents were) determine the essence of an individual. Thus, when an animal born as a raccoon, to raccoon parents, is painted too look like a skunk, and has a sack containing a stinky substance surgically implanted, children still call it a raccoon⁸. This belief has implications for how people make inferences about biological kinds, including inferences about origins. For example, in a study with adults, participants heard a story about a fictitious animal, called a "sorp," that has all the prototypical features of a bird (feathers, makes nests, etc.). In the story, the "sorp" falls into a vat of toxic waste, and all of its perceptual features change: its feathers are gone, and it now has wings that look like insect wings, has an insect-like exoskeleton, and so on. It now looks like an insect, not a bird. As the story moves along, the insect-like sorp mates with a normal sorp. The participants were then asked whether the offspring of the changed and normal couple will have insect-like or bird-like offspring. They overwhelmingly indicated that the offspring would be more bird-like⁹.

In a paper published in this month's issue of Cognitive Psychology¹⁰, Andrew Shtulman argues that essentialist thinking may have implications for how people understand evolution. He writes:

Applied to the study of biological adaptation, essentialism led early evolutionary theorists to commit what Gould (1996) calls the “fallacy of reified variation,” or the tendency “to abstract a single ideal or average as the essence of a system and to devalue or ignore variation among the individuals that constitute the full population” (p. 40). These theorists construed evolution as the process by which a species’ essence is transformed over time, and they proposed a variety of essence-transformation mechanisms, including the inheritance of acquired traits (Lamarck, 1809), the unfolding of a preprogrammed design (Chambers, 1844), the recapitulation of ontogeny (Haeckel, 1876), the acceleration of growth (Cope, 1896), the chemical structure of protoplasm (Berg, 1926), the lawful properties of organic matter (Eimer, 1898), the intentional properties of intelligent systems (Butler, 1916), and an élan vital (Bergson, 1911). (pp. 172-173)

Shtulman lumps these positions together under the heading of "transformationalism." Darwin, Shtulman argues, was so important because he was able to overcome the intuitive essentialist thinking that dominated the work of these and many other natural scientists, and thus overcome transformationalism. His theory embodies what Shtulman calls variationism, which he describes as (referencing the figure below):

First, chance mutations and sexual recombinations create indidifferencessrences among members of the same species (depicted in the left handfthand panel of Fig. 1 as arrows between parents and offspring of different colors). Second, some of these individual differences are retained and others are eliminated on the basis of their utility to survival and reproduction (depicted by circles around the few organisms that produce offspring.

Shtulman illustrates the differences between the two positions with this diagram:

Notice how in the transformationalist diagram, the color of some of the moths changes slowly over generations (presumably to a more and more adaptive color), while in the variationist diagram, one-time mutations create variability in the population of moths that is passed on from generation to generation, with the new color becoming more common in the population because it is more adaptive.

Most of us, unfortunately, are not Darwins, and overcoming such deeply ingrained intuitive biases may not come easy to us, even after years of science education. Shtulman presents data in his paper showing that both high school and college students (though not evolutionary biologists), tend to consistently give transformationalist answers to questions about origins and adaptation. Thus, it appears that in a very important way, our intuitive essentialist beliefs about biological kinds make it difficult for us to understand how evolution works.

The Value of Beliefs

Many factors man contribute to the value of particular beliefs. Howevrecentecents study by Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley¹¹ demonstrates two factors that may be of particular importance in the relationship between evolution and some religious beliefs (e.g., those held by 53% of the American public, according to the survey linked above). They showed that when people are asked to explain things with a belief, the perceived value of that belief goes up, whereas when people are asked to explain a belief, the perceived value goes down. They interpret this as showing that the value of a belief is, at least in part, determined by its position in a causal or explanatory sequence. If the belief explains a lot of other facts and beliefs, then it is valuable, whereas if it is explained by other facts or beliefs, it becomes less valuable. In one of their experiments, they explicitly looked at what they called "cherished beliefs," in this case, beliefs about God. Participants were divided into four groups. Two groups were asked to list things that belief in God could explain, with one group asked to give three and one ten things. The other two groups were asked to list either 3 or 10 observations that could explain God's "behavior." Overall, participants who believed in God (self-reported atheists were excluded) had a difficult time listing observations that could explain God's behavior, but when they did, whether they listed 3 or 10, their ratings of their belief in God were lower than the participants in the applications conditions. Preston and Epley argue that the difficulty participants had in providing observations that explain God's behavior may be a result of the fact that people have a hard time coming up with explanations for highly valued beliefs, because these explanations would devalue beliefseleifs.

The implications of these findings for evolution education should be obvious. For many who believe that God produce biological kinds, and humans specifically, in their present form, an alternative explanation, even if it is possible to say that it was the work of God, will serve to devalue that belief, by relegating it to a lower position in the explanatory system. Thus, the very nature of our relationship to beliefs we hold valuable may make evolution education more difficult, particularly for people raised in in fundamentalist traditions.

Conclusions

So that's my contribution. I've presented three factors that make the job of biology teachers more difficult when they're trying to teach evolution, either to children or adults.

Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will behave, and what features they should have, and which may make us interpret evidence of adaptation in transformationalist, rather than Darwinian/modern biological varationist terms.
The role of explanatory power in determining the value of beliefs, and the fact that we may resist explaining our most cherished beliefs in order to avoid devaluing them.

There are probably more cognitive factors that make understanding and believing modern biological accounts of evolution difficult for many people, but these three together, or alone, can pose significant challenges, and each should be in the backs of educators' minds when teaching people about evolution. To be honest, I'm not sure how to overcome the third factor. As recent world events have shown, when beliefs are as cherished as religious beliefs are for many, defense of those beliefs against any perceived threat can be extremely passionate, even violent. If many people really do perceive that the potential explanatory power of evolution could pose a threat to the value of their religious beliefs about the origins of man, beliefs that they cherish deeply, it's unlikely that any amount of education will overcome their defensiveness. But the prospects of overcoming the first two factors do seem promising. Clearly many biologists (including three who completed the questionnaire in Shtulman's study were able to overcome their transformationalisttnalist bias caused by their intuitive essentialism (see also this paper, by Evans and her colleagues, on one technique for overcoming essentialist biases in children), and Evans' work on intuitive theism indicates that, as long as parents aren't encouraging theistic intuitions, thus making us skeptical or resistant to evolutionary accounts of origins, our seemingly innate tendency to make design inferences can be overcome through education.

¹Brem, S.K., Ranney, M., & Schind, J. (2002). Perceived consequences of evolution: College students perceived negative personal and social impact in evolutionary theory. Science Education, 87(2), 181-206.
²Evans, E.M. (2001). Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: creation versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 42(3), 217-266.
³Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children 'intuitive theists'?: Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15(5), 295-301.
⁴Kelemen, D., & DiYanni, C. (2005). Intuitions about origins: Purpose and intelligent design in children's reasoning about nature. Journal of Cognition and Development, 6(1), 3-31.
⁵Evans, E. M. (2001). Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: Creation versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 217-266.
⁶Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, Cambridge, 179Ã?–195 .
⁷Gelman, S.A., & Markman, M. (1986). Young children's inductions from natural kinds: The role of categories and appearances. Child Development, 58, 1532-1541.
⁸Keil, F.C. (1989). Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
⁹Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21-59.
¹⁰Shtulman, A. (2006). Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 52, 170-194.
¹¹Preston, J., & Epley, N. (2005). Explanations versus applications: The explanatory power of valuable beliefs. Psychological Science, 18, 826-832.

Koufax Voting

2006-03-10T23:10:00.000-06:00

I'd completely forgotten that I'd been nominated for a Koufax Award until I noticed someone coming from that page tonight. Voting is open. As promised, I voted for Real Climate. I said it before, and I'll say it again, those guys are seriously smart. I suggest you all go vote for one of the science blogs. And if you're doing things just because I told you to, then you should vote for either Real Climate or a cognitive science blog. There are two, and since I really don't feel like I'm at all in the same category as most of the blogs on that list, you should vote for the other one (Cognitive Daily).

Cynical from a Young Age

2006-03-10T22:55:00.000-06:00

The research mentioned in yesterday's post shows that children may display altruistic behavior at a much earlier age than previously thought. To continue with that theme, I thought I'd post on some research by Candice Mills and Frank Keil¹ showing that children may display cynicism at a much earlier age than previously thought, as well. In both lines of research, interesting aspects of children's theory-of-mind are demonstrated. And in both cases, we may have to change the way we think about children's social cognition. Children, it turns out, may be a bit more sophisticated than we usually give them credit.

Historically, young children have been thought to be extremely naive and gullible, in part because people thought they had to be. Here's how Richard Dawkins put the traditional position²:

When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort. (pp. 13-14)

But we already know that children are much better at distinguishing fantasy from reality than most had previously thought. And in two experiments, Mill and Keil have shown that they're also pretty cynical when deciding whether people might be telling the truth, when they might not, and why they might or might not be telling the truth.

In the first experiment, participants in three age groups (kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade) were trained on a 5-point rating scale (described below), and then read twelve short stories (about four sentences long). There were four different kinds of stories, and each child heard three of each. The first two types of stories involved a situation (e.g., a race) in which, if the main characterachievedd a certain outcome, he or she would win a prize. Thus, in these stories the main character had a specific personal interest, namely winning the prize. In one version of each of these stories (with self-interest version), the main character stated that he or she hadachievedd the outcome required to win a prize. In this case, then, the character's claims were consistent with his or her self-interest. In the other version of these stories (against self-interest version), the character stated that he or she had notachievedd the required outcome. Thus in this version the characters' statements were against his or her personal interests. The other two conditions were included as controls. In these stories, the outcome was known. In the true version of the story, the character correctly stated that he or she had won the prize. In the false version, the character incorrectly states that he or she had not won the prize. After each story, the children were asked to rate how much they believed the character on a 1 to 5 scale, with one indicating that they don't believe the character at all, and 5 indicating that they believe him or her completely.

As we would expect, for all ages, children's ratings of their belief of the character in the true version were much higher than their ratings of their belief of the character in the false version. This indicates both that they understand how to use the ratings, and that they are not simply more likely to disbelieve someone who says he or she won, or to believe someone who says he or she lost. The interesting results, however, occurred for the with self-interest and against self-interest versions. Kindergarten children were significantly more likely to believe that the characters were telling the truth in the with self-interest condition. Second and fourth graders, however, were significantly more likely to believe that the characters were telling the truth in the against self-interest condition. This is the way adults tend to answer in similar experiments, also³. Thus, the data from this first experiment indicates that between kindergarten age and second grade, children began to develop adult-like cynicism.

In the second experiment, children from the same three age groups, along with a group of six graders, were read stories similar to those from the first experiment. In each of these stories (six in all), the characters made incorrect statements. In half of the stories, the incorrect statements were consistent with the personal interests of the character, and in the other half, they were against those interests. The children were then asked to indicate what they thought was the best explanation for the incorrect statement: the character was lying, the character was biased, or the character made a mistake. The results were as follows: for kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade children, incorrectstatementss that were consistent with the character's self-interest were most often explained as lies, while incorrect statements that were inconsistent withtheh character's self-interest were most often explained as mistakes. Sixth graders gave similar explanations, except that they listed bias as an explanation for incorrect statements consistent with the character's self-interest about as often as they listed lying. Mill and Keil explain this small difference between the younger children and the six graders by noting that in the literature, young children have been shown to underestimate or ignore the role of interpretation in people's thinking⁴.

Thus, children as young as 7 (second graders) believe that people's self-interest affects their honesty, and children as young as 5 kindergartenerss) believe that when people make incorrect statements that are consistent with their self-interests, they probably did so intentionally (or because they are biased, for sixth graders). Young children appear to be cynics pretty early on, then. By the second grade, they're approaching full-fledged adult cynicism, and are not the gullible information-sponges that many believe them to be.

¹Mills, C., & Keil, F.C. (2005) The Development of Cynicism. Psychological Science, 16, 385-390.
²Dawkins, R. (1993). Viruses of the mind. In B. Dahlbom (Ed.), Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind. Oxford, England:
Blackwell, pp. 13Â27, as quoted in Mills & Keil (2005).
³Murukutla, N., &Armor, D.A. (2003). Illusions of objectivity in the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Unpublished
manuscript, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
⁴Carpendale, J.I., & Chandler, M.J. (1996). On the distinction between false belief understanding and subscribing to an interpretive theory of mind. Child Development, 67, 1686Â1706.

Human Infant and Chimpanzee Altruism

2006-03-09T16:40:00.000-06:00

Some of you may have read in the popular press about the study recently published in Science, by Felix Warneken and our old friend Michael Tomasello, in which both human infants (18 months) and young chimpanzees displayed altruistic behavior. The display of altruistic behavior is interesting, but what I find even more interesting is the level of theory of mind capabilities displayed by the young chimps. Here's how the experiments work (there are a few variations):

An experimenter is holding or trying to do something with an object (e.g., a marker or a sponge), while the infant or chimp is watching. At some point, the experimenter drops the object out of his reach (or the objects he needs to complete his task are out of reach), and makes a big deal of trying to reach it but failing. The infants and chimps then go to get the object and bring it back to the experimenter. If the experimenter drops the object in such a way that it was clear that he did it on purpose, however, neither the child or the chimp tended to help him retrieve it.

Unfortunately, the paper is only accessible with a subscription, so I can't link you to it (the reference is below, if you have a subscription or want to take a trip to the library). However, at Warneken's website, you can actually view clips from the experiments with both infants and chimps. So you can see how these things work.

Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311(5765), 1301-1303.

Supplement to the Last Post

2006-03-08T17:37:00.000-06:00

As promised, here is the list of metaphorical expressions of the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent metaphors, from part 1 and 2 of Appendix 1 of the Cienki paper (citation in previous post), and taken from Lakoff's Moral Politics:

1. Metaphors in the "Strict Father" (SF) model:

I. Moral Strength

BEING GOOD IS BEING UPRIGHT
BEING BAD IS BEING LOW
DOING EVIL IS FALLING
EVIL IS A FORCE (either internal or external)
MORALITY IS STRENGTH

II. Moral Authority

A COMMUNITY IS A FAMILY
MORAL AUTHORITY IS PARENTAL AUTHORITY
AN AUTHORITY FIGURE IS A PARENT
A PERSON SUBJECT TO MORAL AUTHORITY IS A CHILD
MORAL BEHAVIOR BY SOMEONE SUBJECT TO AUTHORITY IS OBEDIENCE
MORAL BEHAVIOR BY SOMEONE IN AUTORITY IS SETTING UP STANDARDS AND ENVORCING THEM

III. Moral Order

THE MORAL ORDER IS THE NATURAL ORDER

IV. Moral Boundaries

RIGHTS ARE PATHS

V. Moral Essence

A PERSON IS AN OBJECT
HIS ESSENCE IS THE SUBSTANCE THE OBJECT IS MADE OF

VI. Moral Wholeness

MORALITY IS WHOLENESS
IMMORALITY IS DEGENERATION

VII. Moral Purity

MORALITY IS PURITY
IMMORALITY IS IMPURITY

VIII. Moral Health

MORALITY IS HEALTH
IMMORALITY IS DISEASE

Priorities of the SF Model: STRENGTH, then SELF-INTEREST, then NURTURANCE

2. Metaphors in the "Nurturant Parent" (NP) model:

I. Morality as Empathy

MORALITY IS EMPATHY

II. Morality as Nurturance

THE COMMUNITY IS A FAMILY
MORAL AGENTS ARE NURTURING PARENTS
PEOPLE NEEDING HELP ARE CHILDREN NEEDING NURTURANCE
MORAL ACTION IS NURTURANCE

III. Morality as Social Nurturance

MORAL AGENTS ARE NURTURING PARENTS
SOCIAL TIES ARE CHILDREN NEEDING CARE
MORAL ACTION IS THE NURTURANCE OF SOCIAL TIES

IV. Moral Self-Nurturance

MORALITY IS NURTURANCE [OF ONESELF]

V. Morality is Happiness

MORALITY IS HAPPINESS

VI. Morality as Self-Development

MORALITY IS SELF-DEVELOPMENT

VII. Morality as Fair Distribution

MORALITY IS FAIR DISTRIBUTION

VIII. Moral Growth

THE DEGREE OF MORALITY IS PHYSICAL HEIGHT
MORAL GROWTH IS PHYSICAL GROWTH
MORAL NORMS FOR PEOPLE ARE PHYSICAL HEIGHT NORMS

IX. Moral Self-Interest

WELL-BEING IS WEALTH

X. Moral Strength to Nurture

BEING GOOD IS BEING UPRIGHT
BEING BAD IS BEING LOW
EVIL IS A FORCE (EITHER INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL)
MORALITY IS STRENGTH

Priorities of the NP model: NURTURANCE, then SELF-INTEREST, then STRENGTH.

Do People Actually Use the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" Models?

2006-03-08T14:28:00.000-06:00

I've talked about Lakoff on this blog a lot. Way, way, way too much. But in talking about him incessantly, I've focused on conceptual metaphor theory in general, and ignored one of his more widely known, and controversial claims in his political writings: the existence, and use, of the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" metaphorical models. These models get a lot of talk elsewhere in the blogosphere and popular press, though, and while the status of these models, and conceptual metaphor theory, is independent of the status of framing analysis in general, people often seem to form their opinion of framing analysis based on their opinion (often negative) of the two metaphors. So, I've been looking for an excuse to talk about the metaphorical models themselves, and the recent publication of a paper on them has given me just such an excuse. So, here goes.

When evaluating the claims of cognitive linguists in the conceptual metaphor tradition, it's not always clear how you should go about it. There are two main problems. First, there's not a whole lot of empirical evidence for most, if not all of the bigger claims, which makes it difficult to know exactly what you should be evaluating. Second, from the start of the conceptual metaphor paradigm, there have been serious reservations about its methodologies¹, among psychologists and linguists, which makes it difficult to know just how to take the evidence that does exist. When evaluating Lakoff's political writings, it's easy to be completely overwhelmed by both problems. For his larger claims, such as that the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" metaphorical models serve as prototypes, or idealized cognitive models, Lakoff provides very little evidence, and what evidence he does provide is in the form of a few linguistic examples that have been analyzed by one person, Lakoff himself. This raises two problems. The first is the common problem of circularity in linguistic analysis. The cognitive linguistic argument says, in essence, that metaphors in language are evidence of metaphors in thought, and this is evidenced by the existence of metaphors in language (see Murphy, 1996, citation in footnote 1). The second problem, raised by Sandra and Rice (see footnote 1), is that it's not clear whether the metaphors that cognitive linguists discover through their linguistic analysis are in the minds of the producers of the utterances in which the metaphors were found, or in the minds of the linguists who found them.

The simple answer to all of these problems would be to run carefully designed experiments to test specific predictions of conceptual metaphor hypotheses. And a very, very few such experiments have been run, mostly in the lab of one psychologist, and in one domain: the domain of time-space metaphors². And even these are open to very plausible alternative explanations. But as of yet, there is absolutely no experimental evidence for the existence, much less the use, of metaphorical models like the "Strict Father" and Nurturant Parent" models, and aside from the tiny amount of linguistic evidence that Lakoff presents in Moral Politics, there's no non-experimental evidence that they exist, either. Lakoff, of course, is not worried by this. In that book, he readily notes that the existence of metaphorical models "does not have the degree of confirmation that one would expect of more mature theories" (p. 158, or, I would say, preliminary working hypotheses!), and goes on to blame this not on the theory itself, but on the available methodologies, writing:

No experimental paradigms of the complexity needed to test this hypothesis now exist.

and

Survey research has not yet developed an adequate methodology to test for the presence of complex metaphorical cognitive models such as these.

And of course, he's right: there are no experimental paradigms or survey research methods of sufficient complexity to test his hypotheses. The reason no such paradigms or methods exist is that we haven't yet learned how to test hypotheses that make no predictions! Fortunately for us, though, one researcher didn't see the lack of straightforward predictions from the hypothesizing of metaphorical models as a problem, and actually went out to look for the models in actual speech. The study is primarily in the form of linguistic analysis, which means that it could potentially suffer from the problems mentioned above, but the researcher, Alan Cienki, used techniques designed to avoid them. But I'll get to all of that in a moment. First, a refresher course on the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models (SF and NP respectively, from here on out).

The Strict Father and Nurturant Parent Metaphors

Good summaries of the two metaphors can be found at the Rockridge Institute, Lakoff's think tank. The two metaphors are both instances of the larger "Nation as a Family" metaphor. Here is how the SF model is described at Rockridge:

The father's job is to protect and support the family. Children are to respect and obey him. The father's moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong, with punishment that is typically physical and can be painful when they do wrong. It is assumed that parental discipline in childhood is required to develop the internal discipline that adults will need in order to be moral and to succeed. Morality and success are linked through discipline. This focus on discipline is seen as a form of loveÂ"tough love."

The mother is in the background, not strong enough to protect and support the family or fully discipline the children on her own. Her job is to uphold the authority of the father and to care for and comfort the children. As a "mommy," she tends to be overly soft-hearted and might well coddle or spoil the child. The father must make sure this does not happen, lest the children become weak and dependent.

Competition is necessary for discipline. Children are to become self-reliant through discipline and the pursuit of self-interest. Those who succeed as adults are the good (moral) people and parents are not to "meddle" in their lives. Those children who remain dependentÂwho were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrantÂundergo further discipline or are turned out to face the discipline of the outside world.

When everyone is acting morally and responsibly, seeking their own self-interest in a self-disciplined fashion, everyone benefits. Thus, instilling morality and discipline in your children is also acting for the good of society as a whole.

The political implications of this metaphor, from the same Rockridge article, are as follows:

Protect the country and its interests in a dangerous world by maximizing military and political strength;
Promote unimpeded competitive economic activity so that both the disciplined moral people and the undisciplined immoral ones are able to receive what they each deserve, based on their own choices;
Maintain order and discipline, through severe enforcement of the rules if necessary

Examples of metaphors within the SF model, from Moral Politics, include (with examples given in the book) MORALITY IS STRENGTH ("having the moral fiber to resist evil"), BEING GOOD IS BEING UPRIGHT ("an upstanding citizen"), and MORALITY IS PURITY (undesired behaviors are seen as "unclean").

The NP model is described at Rockridge as:

In the Nurturant Parent family, it is assumed that the world is basically good. And, however dangerous and difficult the world may be at present, it can be made better, and it is your responsibility to help make it better. Correspondingly, children are born good, and parents can make them better, and it is their responsibility to do so. Both parents (if there are two) are responsible for running the household and raising the children, although they may divide their activities. The parents' job is to be responsive to their children, nurture them, and raise their children to nurture others. Nurturance requires empathy and responsibility.

The political extensions for this model listed at Rockridge are too numerous to include in this post, but you can check out the link to learn about them. Central metaphors in this model (again from Moral Politics) include MORALITY IS EMPATHY, MORAL ACTION IS NURTURANCE, and MORGROWTHOTH IS PHYSICAL GROWTH.

It is very important to understand, both when trying to evaluate the models themselves, and for understanding the study I'm going to describe in a minute, that neither the SF or NP models are supposed to exist, in their entirety, in any single person's head (except Lakoff's). Instead, they are meant as prototypes, around which liberal (in the case of the NP model) and conservative (in the case of the SF model) world-views cluster in a family resemblance fashion. Liberals may represent some features of the NP model, and some of the SF, but overall they will tend to represent more features of the NP model than the SF model. The reverse is true of conservatives. This is why the two models may seem a bit like caricatures: they are, in fact, meant to be caricatures of a sort.

The Study

Cienki's study, published last year in the journal Cognitive Linguistics, went looking for the use of these two models in the speech of the two candidates in the 2000 presidential election, using their three televised debates as a corpus³. He gives four reasons for using the debates as data for his analysis (pp. 283-284):

"They not only consist of spoken data from Bush and Gore on the same subjects, they provide approximately the same amount of linguistic output from each."
"The lexical density [the number of different words] per debate did not differ statistically between Bush and Gore."
"The debates took place late in the campaign. By this time the positions of the candidates had become more fixed, and so the debates can be seen as fair representations of the candidates' views."
"They consist of a variety of speech genres, from the more formal and serious to the occasional joking, and from statements which were more prepared and often re-used to responses which were more spontaneous."

The first stage of the study consisted in looking for instances of specific SF and NP metaphors, which were taken from Lakoff's own list in Moral Politics (I'll put a list of the metaphors, from the appendix of the paper, in the next post). Here are examples of metaphors from the debates, as listed in the paper (p. 287):

IMMORALITY IS IMPURITY. Gore: "By giving parents the tools to protect their children against culturpollutionion."

ACTION IS THE NURTURANCE OF SOCIAL TIES. Bush: "And that's a case where we need to use our influence to have countries in Africa come together and help deal with the situation.

In order to overcome the problem in linguistic analysis, described above, of finding only metaphors that exist in the linguist's head, rather than the speaker's, two researchers coded the debates, and their agreement was high (near 100%). Here is Cienki's description of the results (p. 287):

What is noteworthy is that the central conceptual metaphors of the SF and NP models were expressed so seldom through metaphorical language in the debates. In the approximately 41,000-word corpus, there were only 48 expressions in total which directly expressed any of the 43 metaphors in the Appendix [see the next post]. The paucity of these metaphoric expressions contributed to their salience when they did occur, which is likely a factor in the very high agreement reached between coders.

In all, Bush used 29 expressions of the 43 metaphors, seven of which were from the NP model, and 22 from the SF model. Gore used a total of 19 expressions of the metaphors, 14 of which were from the NP model, and 5 of which were from the SF model. So, it appears that while the models' metaphors are rarely used, they are used in a pattern consistent with liberals (in this case, Gore) being more inclined to the NP model, and conservatives (Bush) being more inclined to the SF model.

Now, a skeptic like me would take the extreme paucity of metaphorical expressions from the two models as evidence that they are, in fact, not the models that shape the world views of liberals and conservatives. I certainly can't imagine how the data above could be taken as evidence for their existence. But Cienki doesn't want to let them go, writing that "the explanatory power provided by the models and their comprehensivenedeterter one from jumping to such conclusions." He argues that metaphors can exist at different levels of "schematicity," by which he means "the range of source or target domain concepthataht are consistent with a given metaphorical mapping" (p. 288). Put differently, metaphors exist at different levels of abstraction. Metaphors also differ in their productivity, by which Cienki means "the number of roughly synonymous expressions by which the metaphorical mapping is manifested, that is, how successful a schema is in manifesting its generality in linguistic expressions" (p. 289). In other words, how many linguistic expressions you can get from a particular metaphor. Cienki argues that the reason behind the dearth of metaphorical expressions from the SF and NP models may be that the models are high in schematicity, but low in productivity. That means they subsume a lot of other metaphors, but they don't allow for the production of many particular metaphorical expressions directly from the models themselves. In short, if the first prediction you come up with from a metaphorical models hypothesis doesn't work out, come up with a new one.

In order to test this new prediction, the second part of the study consisted of a search for "expressions in the corpus which do not directly reflect the central SF or NP metaphors, but which logically follow from the SF or NP model, that is, they may be entailed by them" (p. 289). The new prediction is thus that we'll find a lot of entailments, both metaphorical and non-metaphorical, and that this will indicate the presence of the SF and NP metaphors themselves in the minds of the speakers. If you're like me, you're probably thinking that we're getting further away from any possibility of non-circularity, by undertaking this type of analysis, but the results are worth looking at. Here are examples of the entailments (both metaphorical and non-metaphorical) found in the debates (pp. 290-291):

SF metaphorical entailment. Bush: "I think it's important for NATO to be strong and confident."
NP metaphorical entailment. Gore: "So I want proceedced carefully to cover more people."
SF non-metaphorical entailment. Bush: "We need to send five percent [of tax revenues] back to you that pay the bills.
NP non-metaphorical entailment. Bush: "There needs to be more community health clinics where the poor can go get health care."

The explanations of theexamplesles are as follows (from p. 291). For example 1., "The phrase supports the SF ideal of individual self-reliance, and in this case, the organization is metaphorically an individual person." For example 2, "This is consistent with the NP priority of nurturance, and also of fair distribution." Example 3 "reflects the emphasis on the importance of individual control of one's well-being; managing one's money is thus a matter of individual responsibility, and taxation is viewed as government interference." And example 4 "reflects the concern for others typical of the NP priorities of empathy and fair distribution." In all, very few metaphorical entailments were found. Bush used a total of 48 metaphorical entailments, 27 from the SF model, and 21 from the NP model, while Gore used a total of 45, 12 from the SF model, and 33 from the NP model. As with the direct metaphorical expressions of the model, both candidates used more metaphorical entailments from the model consistent with their political ideology than with their opponent's, though both used some of each, and Bush's totals from both models were pretty similar. Non-metaphorical entailments were a little more frequent. Bush used a total of 469 non-metaphorical entailment expressions, 269 from the SF model and 200 from the NP model, while Gore used 276 total, 68 from the SF model and 208 from the NP model. Once again, both used entailments from both models, but used more from the model consistent with their political ideology. However, Bush's ratio of SF to NP entailments was small in this case as well.

Again, if you're a skeptic like me, you'll note two things about this data. First, in a 41,000 word corpus, there were, again, very few metaphorical entailments, and many more non-metaphorical ones than metaphorical ones. This implies two things to me. One, it looks like people aren't using metaphors with the frequency that conceptual metaphor theory would have us believe, and two, it doesn't look like conceptual metaphors are structuring the way people talk, and given the linguistic arguments, think about political issues. Second, we again run into the inherent problem of circularity in using the non-metaphorical expressions, hese are simply expressions of political ideology, and Lakoff's analysis came up with the metaphors from similar expressions, meaning, in the end, that the argument from non-metaphorical expressions is that we see the positions in people's speech because the metaphorical models exist, and we know the metaphorical models exist because we see the positions in people's speech. So I'm not sure that it's actually possible to interpret this data, and I'm pretty damn sure that it's not possible to interpret it as supporting the existence of the SF and NP models, or conceptual metaphor theory in general.

In discussing these results, Cienki notes that neither candidate seems to be "very prototypical adherent[s] to either the SF or NP model" (p. 293). In fact, one of the interesting features of these results, in my mind, is the fact that Bush used both models frequently (his ratio of SF to NP was around 1.3:1 for both metaphorical and non-metaphorical entailments), whereas Gore's was at least 3:1 for both). This seems to be inconsistent with one of Lakoff's more practical claims, namely that conservatives have done a better job of framing issues in their language, and that, in fact, Bush is a master of this. Here he appears to be framing the issues in both conservative and political language (according to the SF and NP models), while Gore is much more consistent.

The final part of the debate is meant to get past this circularity. Instead of looking at speech, it looks at gestures. The argument is, if we find the use of the metaphors in gestures, then we have evidence that lies outside of the linguistic circle. Nevermind the fact that in doing so we create a new circle, and thus have cognitive linguists twirling hoops on both arms. At least the evidence isn't linguistic! The methods for the gestural analysis are kind of complex, and I don't want to try to explain them in detail here (this damn post is long enough as it is). Instead, I'll just give you a few examples of gestures described in the paper, and then the overall results of the gestural analysis. Here are two examples (from pp. 298-301; the gestures are described in bold below the statements during which they occurred, and Cienki's explanations are listed in italics beneath those descriptions; {} are placed around the words that occurred "during the main stroke of the gestures"):

Bush: "If we're a humble nation, but {strong}, they'll welcome us in.
2 hands barrier, fingers spread, bounce forward from self.
Consistent with source domains of the SF metaphors... (such as STRENGTH, WHOLENESS, and BEING UPRIGHT).

Gore: "The power of example is America's {greatest power} in the world."
2 hands palms up, cupped.
No metaphorical description given.

The results of the analysis showed that Bush used many more "metaphoric" gestures than Gore (43 and 13, respectively), and that each candidate used more gestures when using expressions entailed by the metaphorical model consistent with their political ideology. I'll be damned if I know what that means, and I doubt anyone does, but Cienki takes it as evidence of the existence of the two models.

Overall, I think you have to give Cienki a pat on the back for even attempting something like this. Elsewhere (e.g., in this manuscript), he continues to search for methods to test for the existence and use of political metaphorical models. Unfortunately, the paper described in this post contains the only data published thusfar. But you have to respect a guy who attempts to test a theory that doesn't provide any testable predictions, even if that means that when one prediction doesn't pan out, he has to come up with new ones (which may even be inconsistent with the first prediction) to continue testing the theory. Of course, if you're a fan of the SF and NP models, the data in this paper cannot be encouraging. The models were rarely used, metaphorical entailments were rarely used, and the non-metaphorical entailments that were found in the speech of the two candidates can only be used to argue for the existence and use of the metaphorical models through circular reasoning. The gestural analysis, while interesting, doesn't seem to say much of anything. Plus, as I said above, Bush's use of entailments from both models with near equal frequency argues against one of Lakoff's central claims about "what conservatives know that liberals don't."

My sincere hope is that, given the complete lack of evidence for the SF and NP models, people stop trying to use them for now, and instead focus on integrating the basics of framing analysis, with insights from research on knowledge representation, into their political speech. I know Lakoff won't stop peddling them, but a lack of evidence has never stopped him (as his quotes above indicate). We're simply going to have to ignore him for a while, until he, Cienki, or someone else, comes up with some data thunequivocallybly supports the existence and importance of these two metaphorical models. I know I'm not holding my breath. I don't think you should be either.

¹E.g., Murphy, G. 1996. "On metaphorical representation", Cognition 60: 173-204; Sandra, D., & Rice, S. (1995). Network analyses of prepositional meaning: Mirroring whose mindÂthe linguistÂs or the language user's? Cognitive Linguistics, 6, 89-130.
²E.g., Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75, 1-28.
³Cienki, A. (2005). Metaphor in the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(2), 279-312.

Happiness Is a False Memory

2006-03-07T16:18:00.000-06:00

Nietzsche once wrote, "[W]ith the smallest and with the greatest good fortune, happiness becomes happiness in the same way: through forgetting"¹. It turns out that happiness may be associated with memory in another way: happiness makes us more likely to make memories up, at least relative to when we're depressed. In fact, it might be better to say that depression makes memory more accurate. That's the gist of what a recent study on mood and false memories by Justin Storbeck and Gerald Core found. And aside from some interesting theoretical implications about both affect and memory, the study is sexy enough for a blog post.

Here's the backstory. Memory involves two main stages: encoding and retrieval. Encoding involves storing information in memory, and retrieval is the name for taking it back out (i.e. remembering). It's widely believed that there are two ways of encoding memories: item-specific encoding and relational encoding. Item-specific encoding is just what it says: individual items are encoded separately, with attention to their specific properties. Relational encoding is a little more complex. In essence, it involves encoding items through the activation of information already and memory, such as concepts or schemas. When information is encoded in an item-specific fashion, particular features of the instance are encoded, whereas when relational encoding occurs, the gist of the information is stored in memory to the detriment of particular features of the instance.

One interesting difference between the two types of encoding is that item-specific encoding tends to produce accurate memories about particular instances, whereas relational encoding can produce memory intrusions, or false memories. For example, in one of my favorite experiments of all time, Sulin and Dooling² gave participants bibliographical stories in which the main character was given either a famous name (Helen Keller or Adolph Hitler) or an unfamiliar name (Carol Harris or Gerald Martin). After reading the stories, participants read a list of three types of sentences: 1.) sentences from the original stories, 2.) sentences about the famous characters that were not in the original stories, and 3.) sentences that were unrelated to the famous characters and were not in the stories. Participants were asked to indicate which of the sentences they had previously read. Participants who'd read the stories with unfamiliar names were unlikely to say that they had seen sentences of type 2 or 3, but participants who had read the same stories with the famous names were almost as likely to say that they had seen sentences of type 2 as they were to say they had seen sentences of type 1. In other words, they were almost as likely to mistakenly remember seeing true sentences about the famous person as they were to remember sentences they had actually seen. The reason is that reading the famous name activated the knowledge of that person in their memory, and the story was encoded relationally, whereas reading a story about an unfamiliar person caused participants to focus on the particulars of the study.

Several recent studies have shown that affect can influence the type of encoding. Specifically, positive affect (a good mood) seems to enhance relational processing, while negative affect leads to more item-specific encoding³. For example, in one set of studies, Storbeck and Clore found that in several different kinds of semantic priming tasks (tasks that involve using priming words or objects with similar meanings to test objects), priming occurred for participants with a positive mood, but participants with a negative mood were much less likely to exhibit priming⁴. If positive affect leads to more relational processing, and negative affect leads to more item-specific encoding, and if relational encoding leads to more false memories, then we can predict that happy people will be more likely to produce false memories than depressed people.

In order to test this prediction, Storbeck and Clore used the now common Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. This paradigm involves presenting participants with lists of words that are all highly associated with another word (the "critical lure") that is not on the list. After reading the list, participants are asked to recall as many of the words on the list as possible, or are given another list of words and asked to indicate which had been on the list. In both cases, participants are likely to mistakenly remember having seen the critical lure. The task is sort of like the Sulin and Dooling task, in that when a concept is activated (by reading several words associated with the concept), relational processing occurs, and participants are likely to produce false memories.

To induce a positive or negative affect in participants, the experimenters played either Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, which has been shown to produce a positive affect, or Mahler's Adagietto, which has been shown to produce a negative affect (I think we all know that Mahler is depressing, anyway), while participants read the DRM list. After completing the study, participants' mood was tested in a questionnaire, and only the data from participants whose moods were significantly above the median mood score (in the positive mood condition) or below it (in the negative mood condition) were kept. There was also a control group, which heard no music while completing the task.

The main findings in their two experiments were these: participants in all three conditions(positive mood, negative mood, and control) recalled words that were on the list with equal accuracy, while participants in the positive mood and control conditions produced many more false memories (recalling the critical lures) than participants in the negative mood condition. There was no difference between the number of false memories produced by participants in the positive mood and control conditions. Even when participants were asked to list any words that were not on the list, but that came to mind during the recall task (a common procedure designed to test whether the critical lures were activated during encoding even if participants are aware that they weren't on the list), the participants in the negative mood condition were significantly less likely than participants in the other two conditions to list the critical lures. This implies that the lures were not activated during encoding, and supports the hypothesis that negative mood induces item-specific encoding. The fact that there was no difference between the false memory production in the positive mood and control conditions implies that we may generally encode information relationally, and negative mood causes a shift away from our normal encoding processes toward more item-specific processes.

It would be natural to ask whether these findings might have clinical implications for people suffering from depression, and the answer is, I don't know, and the authors of the paper don't discuss clinical issues. It is interesting to note that we've known for some time that traumatic events often induce increased accuracy for the details (e.g., specific perceptual details) of the event, while memories for the overall gist of traumatic events tends to be poor. It's generally believed that this is because higher levels of arousal lead to more detailed processing and encoding of information. Based on the results of the Storbeck and Clore study, it may be that the negative affect produced by traumatic events also helps to produce more accurate recall for details, and less accuracy for the gist of the events.

¹In "On the use and abuse of history for life."
²Sulin, R. & Dooling, D. (1974). Intrusion of a thematic idea in retention of prose. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 103, 255-262.
³E.g., Gasper, K. & Clore, G. L. (2002). Attending to the big picture: Mood and global vs. local processing of visual information. Psychological Science, 13, 34-40; Isen, A., & Daubman, K. (1984). The influence of affect on categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1206Â1217; Bless, H., Clore, G.L., Schwarz, N., Golisano, V., Rabe, C., & Wolk, M. (1996). Mood and the use of scripts: Does a happy mood really lead to mindlessness? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 665Â679; Storbeck, J. & Clore, G. L. (Submitted Manuscript). Mood governs implicit processes: Affect, priming, and false memories.
⁴Storbeck & Clore (Submitted).

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

2006-03-05T13:51:00.000-06:00

This post has nothing to do with cognitive science, but I found the article that I'm reprinting below so fascinating, and horrifying, that I just had to share it. Since I can't find it on google, and it was written by a somewhat obscure theologian some 135 years ago, I suspect that most people who are reading this post haven't seen it before. I won't bore you with the story of how I came across it, largely because it would reveal how seriously geeky I am. The article, written by R. L. Dabney, who, among other things, was Stonewall Jackson's official biographer and taught philosophy at the University of Texas, is titled “Women's Rights Women,” and was published in the March, 1871 issue of The Southern Magazine (pp.322-334 ). It's a sarcastic, vitriolic, and downright disturbing attack on the women's rights movement in the U.S. in the mid-19th century, and women's suffrage in particular. What I find so fascinating about it is how incredibly similar it is to much of what you hear and read from cultural conservatives today, on issues ranging from homosexuality to, well, women's rights, while at the same time it's very different from anything you might read today. The similarities will be obvious to most. In the article you'll find the common “women's rights women are socially unsuccessful/ugly” attack (in the first paragraph!); hints that women's rights will make women sluts; the claim that independent women will be less attractive to men, and that women will be less able to please men if they have equal rights; the assertion that giving women rights will harm (or even signal the end of) the family, Christianity, and society as we know it (this one isn't uncommon in social conservative arguments about gay rights these days, either); the belief that he and those of a like mind aren't trying to harm women, but to help them, by limiting their rights, because men know what's best for women; along with the usual stereotypes of sex differences in reasoning, emotionality, etc. I've highlighted (in bold; all other emphasis is Dabney's) some of the passages that I noticed are similar to what you might hear today from social conservatives, even if the wording is different. I'm sure I missed some, though. You can play “How are today's social conservatives like racist, sexist social conservatives in the 19th century American South” and find your own, if you like.

The differences might be even more obvious. I haven't heard anyone claim that the women's rights movement is a result of evil abolitionism, lately, and you won't find many of the arguments about women ruining society by voting irrationally these days (oh wait, yes you will, but then again, you'll also find many of the racist and secessionist arguments in the article on that author's blog, too). You're unlikely to find this level of anger and spite directed at the North in contemporary social conservative commentaries, either (though you might find a similar level of vitriol leveled at the West cpast or the Atlantic Northeast, or just at universities). Clearly, Dabney was bitter about the way the war went, and writing this only six years after its end, and while in the midst of the nasty Reconstruction, he made sure to blame the evil women's rights movement on the Yankees.

Anyway, I the article offers a nice window into the thinking of southern conservatives at the time, and how much, and more importantly, how little, that thinking has changed. I should warn you up front that you will find in the article a level of explicit racism that can be hard to stomach at times. So read at your own risk. I know it's long, but I think it's worth it.

Women's Rights Women by R. L. Dabney

IN our day, innovations march with so rabid a stride that they quite take away one's breath. The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be to-morrow the accomplished fact. Such has been the history of the agitation for “women's rights,” as they are sophistically called in this country. A few years ago this movement was the especial hobby of a few old women of both sexes, who made themselves the laughing-stock of all sane people by the annual ventilation of their crotchet. Their only recruits were a few of the unfortunates whom nature or fortune had debarred from those triumphs and enjoyments which are the natural ambition of the sex, and who adopted this agitation as the most feasible mode of expressing their spitefulness against the successful competitors. To-day the movement has assumed such dimensions that it challenges the attention of every thoughtful mind.

If we understand the claims of the Women's Rights women, they are in substance two: that the legislation, at least, of society shal disregard all natural distinctions of the sexes, and award the same specific rights and franchises to both in every respect; and that woman while in the married state shall be released from every species of conjugal subordination. The assimilation of the garments of the two sexes, their competition in the same industries and professions, and their common access to the same amusements and recreations, are social changes which the “strong-mined expect to work, each one for herself, when once the obstructions of law are removed from the other points.

One result of the reflection which we have been able to give this movement, is the conviction that it will prevail in the so-called “United-States.” This is foreshadowed by the frantic lust for innovation which has seized the body of the people like an epidemic. It is enough with them to condemn any institution, that it was bequeathed by our forefathers' because it is not the invention of this age, it is wrong, of course. In their eyes no experience proves anything, save the experience which they have had themselves. They do not suppose that our fathers were wise enough to interpret and record the lessons of former experiences. That certain things did not succeed in our forefathers' hands is no proof that they will not succeed in our hands; for we are “cute,” we live in an enlightened age, and understand how to manage things successfully. The philosophy of the Yankee mind is precisely that of the Yankee girl who, when she asked for leave to marry at seventeen, was dissuaded by her mother with the statement that she “had married very early and had seen the folly of it.” “yes, but, Mamma,” replied the daughter, “I want to see the folly of it for myself.” Your Yankee philosopher is too self-sufficient to be cautioned from the past. He does not know history; he would not believe its conclusions if he did; he has no use for its lights, having enough “subjective” light of his own¹. To such people the fact that a given experiment is too absurd to have been ever tried before, is an irresistible fascination: it is a chance not to be neglected.

The symptoms of approaching success which already exist are such as may well cheer the advocates of the new revolution. They who a few years ago counted their adherents by scores, now have tens of thousands. They are represented by their own press. They have received the support of at least one religious journal, which presumes to call itself Christian and is the organ of numerous domination-- the New York Independent. They receive the obsequious homage of the demagogues of the day. They have already engrafted a part of their ideas upon some State constitutions². Their apostles are invited to lecture before “Christian Associations” (of that peculiar kind which enumerate billiard and card-tables among the means of grace), and before the United States Congress. And last, a kindred cause, that of indiscriminate divorces, is making such progressin many of the States that it will soon be able to lend a strong helping-hand to its sister. Now it is by just such steps that Radicalism grew from its despised infancy in this country. It was just thus that Abolitionism grew. It is thus that all things grow on the American soil which ripen their harvests of evil³.

The advocates of these “women's rights” may be expected to win the day, because the premisses from which they argue their revolution have been irrevocably admitted by the bulk of the people. Now this popular mind may not be consciously or intentionally consistent and logical. It may jump to many conclusions without much analysis of the steps by which they are reached. It may deliberately harbor the most express purpose to be guilty of any logical inconsistency, however outrageous, in pursuing its supposed interests; and may have its mind ever so clearly made up to eat its own words and principles whenever its convenience prompts that measure. But still the Creator has made man, in spite of himself, a logical animal; and consequences will work themselves out, whether he designs it or not, to those results which the premisses dictate. History will write out the corrolaries of the theorems whether the projectors wish to stop for them or not. Now, false principles are already firmly planted from which the whole “Women's Rights” claim must follow. If we look at the coarser, more concrete, and popular form in which the consequence is drawn, we find the argument for the popular, Radical mind perfectly unanswerable. “It has been decided that all negro men have a right to vote: is not a Yankee white women with her 'smartness' and education as good as a stupid, ignorant, Southern black?” We should like to see the answer to that logic from that premiss which a Northern Radical mind could be made to appreciate. An unanswerable point thus perpetually made upon the mind of the public, will impinge at last.

Or if we examine the argument in its more exact and logical form, we shall find it, after the established (false) premisses are granted, equally conclusive for the educated. The very axioms of American politics are now that “all men are by nature equal,” that allareinalienably “entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and that “the only just foundation of government is in the consent of the governed.” There was a sense in which our fathers propouned these statements; but it is not the one in which they are now held by Americans. Our recent doctors of political science have retained these formularies of words as convenient masks under which to circulate a set of totally different, and indeed antagonistic notions; and they have succeded perfectly. The new meanings of which the “Whigs” of 1776 never dreamed are now the current ones. Those wise statesmen meant to teach that all men are morally equal in the sense of the Golden Rule: that while individual traits, rights, and duties vary widely in the different orders of political society, these different rights all have some moral basis; that the inferior has the same moral title (that of a common humanity and common relation to a benignant Heavenly Father) to have his rights -- the rights of an inferior -- duly respected, which the superior has to claim that his very different rights shall be respected⁴. The modern version is that there are no superiors or inferiors in society; that there is a mechanical equality; that all have specifically all the same rights; and that any other constitution is against natural justice. Next: when our wise fathers said that liberty is an inalienable, natural right, they meant by each one's liberty the privelege to do such things as he, with his particular relations, ought to have a moral title to do; the particular things have righteous, natural limitations in every case, and much narrower limits in some cases than in others. Radical America now means by natural liberty each one's privelege to do what he chooses to do. By the consent of the governed our forefathers meant each Sovereign Commonwealth's consenting to the constitution under which it should be governed: they meant that it was unjust for Britain to govern America without America's consent. Which part of the human beings living in a given American State should constitute the State potentially, the populus whose franchise it was to express the will of the commonwealth for all -- that was in their eyes wholly another question, to be wisely decided in different states according to the structure which Providence had given them. By “the consent of the governed” it would appear that Radicalism means it is entirely just for Yankeedom to govern Virginia against Virginia's consent, and that it is not just to govern any individual human being without letting him vote for his governors⁵. The utter inconsistency of the two parts of this creed is not ours to reconcile. It is certain that both parts (consistent or not) are firmly held as the American creed. The version given to the maxim as to individual rights is universally this: that natural justic requires that suffrage shall be coextensive with allegiance, except where the right has been forfeited by some crime (such as that which the men of 1861 committed in presuming to act on the principles of the men of 1776). To these errors the American people are too deeply committed to evade any of their logical applications. For the sake of these dogmas they have destroyed one Federal and eleven other State constitutions, have committed a half million murders, and (dearest of all) have spent some seven thousand and millions of dollars. Repudiate these maxims now! Never! This would be to dishonor the ghosts of all the slaughtered Union-Savers, to shame the sacrifices of all the “Trooly Lo'il” during the glorious for years, to dim the very crown of martyrdom upon the brow of the “late lamented,” and worst of all, to outrage the manes of all those departed dollars.

Now then, when Mistress Amazona Narragansett steps forward and having vidicated her claim to have belonged always to the true Israel of the “unconditional Unionists,” demands a simple and obvious application of these honored maxims to her own case, how can she be gainsaid? Hitherto the State has governed her without asking her consent at the ballot-box. This is self-evidently against the immortal truth that “all just government is founded on the consent of the governed.” The State has restrained her natural liberty of doing as she chose, compelling her to pay a great many dollars in taxes which she would rather have chosen to expend in crinoline, and forbidding her to do a great many other little acts, such as bigamy, etc., which might have been her preference (and therefore her natural right); and all this without even saving the State's credit and manners by asking her consent at the polls to the laws made for her. And last: the State has committed the crowning outrage and inconsistency of not letting her be a man because God made her a woman! What an outrage this to be committed on so frivolous a pretext! Be consoled, Mistress Amazona; it is simply impossible that such abuses can stand much longer in the full light of this reforming age. “The school-mistress is abroad.” That mighty tide of progress which has already swept away the Constitution, and slavery, and States' rights, and the force of contracts public and private, with all such rubbish, will soon dissolve your grievance also. Has not the Radical version of the political gospel said, “All men are by nature mechanically equal”? And “man,” Mistress Amazona (as you will know when you acquire the virile right of learning Latin) here means, not vir, but homo; the species irrespective of sex. It means that a woman has a natural right to do all the particular things that a man does (if she can), to sit on juries and shave her beard, to serve in the army and ride astraddle, to preach sermons and sing bass⁵.

But seriously: a woman is a human being, and a grown woman is an adult. She is treated, and must be treated, by all governments as a citizen owing allegiance and subject to law. On those principles, which are the first principles of Radicalism, it is impossible to deny her right to vote and to participate in all franchises of men. Her exclusion is a glaring instance of “class legislation”--that odious thing which Radicalism so strongly condemns as contrary to equality. To subject women to these disabilities is even a more glaring injustice than was the exclusion of the negro from American citizenship because he was “guilty of a skin”; for here the exclusion from natural rights is grounded on the sole fact taht a woman is “guilty of a sex.” And especially are all those laws unnatural and inexcusable iniquities which subject the person or property of the wife to any marital authority. What is such marriage but a species of (white) domestic slavery? Nor is it any excuse to say that in American no woman enters the married state save at her own option; for to that state the most commanding insticts of woman's being impel her; and it is but a mocking tyranny to impose this slavery on the married state of woman, and tell her then that she need not submit to the yoke if she chooses to avoid it by sacrificing the chief insticts of her being. Why, it may be even said to the galley-slave that he need not be a slave, provided he is willing to disregard that other primal instict, the love of life: suicide will set him free!

Such is the logic of the Women's Rights party, from Radical premisses. Its prospect of triumph is greatly increased by this, that its Northern opponents (the only ones who have any power to oppose) have disabled themselves from meeting it by their furious Abolitionism. The premisses of that doctrine, to which they are so irrevocably committed, now shut their mouths. It is vain for the rabid negrophilist, Dr. Horace Bushnell, to write a book at this date against Women's Rights as the “Reform against Nature.” He cannot consistently oppose it; he has himself naturalised the false principles from which that “reform” will flow. The true principles from which its folly might have been evinced, the principles held by us “Rebels,” he has trampled down with the armed heel, and drowned in blood and buried under mountains of obloquy and odium and slander. he cannot resort to those sound premisses. To meet the argument of these aspiring Amazons fairly, one must teach, with Moses, the Apostle Paul, John Hampden, Washington, George Mason, John C. Calhoun, and all that contemptible rabble of “old fogies,” that political society is composed of “superiors, inferiors, and equals”; that while these bear an equitable moral relation to each other, they have very different natural rights and duties; that just government is not founded on the consent of the individuals governed, but on the ordinance of God, and hence a share in the ruling franchise is not a natural right at all, but a privilege to be bestowed according to a wise discretion on a limited class having qualification to use it for the good of the whole; that the integers out of which the State is constituted are not individuals, but families represented in their parental heads; that every human being is born under authority (parental and civic) instead of being born “free” in the licentious sense that liberty is each one's privelege of doing what he chooses; that subordination, and not that license, is the natural state of all men; and that without such equitable distribution of different duties and rights among the classes naturally differing in condition, and subordination of some to others, and of all the law, society is as impossible as is the existence of a house without distinction between the foundation-stone and the cap-stones. No words are needed to show hence that should either the voice of God or of sound experience require woman to be placed for the good of the whole society in a subordinate sphere, there can be no natural injustice in doing so. But these old truths, with their sound and beneficent applications, have been scornfully repudiated by Abolitionism and Radicalism. The North cannot, will not, avow and appeal to them, bwecause that would be to confess that the injured South was all the time right in its opposition to Abolition; and the conquerors will rather let all perish than thus humble their pride to the poor conquered victims.

It may be inferred again, that the present movement for women's rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservativism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservativism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservativism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. it is worthless because it is the conservativism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. it intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always--when about to enter a protest--very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservativism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforeward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the ingtegrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to assessuffrage⁷. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

Indeed, as De Tocqueville predicted, innovation in the direction of extensions of suffrage will always be successful in America, because of the selfish timidity of her public men. It is the nature of ultra democracy to make all its politicians time-servers; its natural spawn is the brood of narrow, truckling, cowardly worshippers of the vox populi and of present expediency. Their polar star is always found in the answer to the question, “Which will be the more popular?” As soon as any agitation of this kind goes far enough to indicate a possibility of success, their resistance ends. Each of them begins to argue thus in his private mind:--”The proposed revolution is of course preposterous, but it will be best for me to leave opposition to it to others. For if it succeeds, the newly enfranchised will not fail to remember the opponents of their claims at future elections, and to reward those who were their friends in the hour of need.” Again: it has now become a regular trick of American demagogues in power to manufacture new classes of voters to sustain them in office. It is presumed that the gratitude of the newly enfranchised will be sufficient to make them vote the ticket of their benefactors. But as gratitude is a very flimsy sort of fabric among Radicals, and soon worn thread-bare, such reliance only lasts a short time, and requires to be speedily replaced. The marvellous invention of negro suffrage (excogitated for this sole purpose) sufficed to give Radicalism a new for years' lease on life' but the grateful allegiance of the freedmen to their pretended liberators is waxing very thin; and hence the same expedient must be repeated, in the form of creating a few millions of female votes. The designing have an active, selfish motive for pushing the measure; but its opponents will without fail be paralysed in their resistance by their wonted cowardice; so that success is sure.

This expectation is greatly confirmed by a review of the history of past innovations. They have all been carried against the better judgement of the class in the country to whom the Constitution commmitted the power of deciding for or against them. In 1829-1830, the State of Virginia took her first departure from the old principle of freeholders' suffrage. in 1851 she completed that revolution (as well as introduced sundry other Radical features) by extending the right to vote indiscriminately to all white males. In both instances it was hard to find a freeholder, not a demagogue, who could avow a hearty preference for the change. They were carried against the convictions of the voters by the influences which have been above described. it is most probable that the same thing was true in every State which adopted universal suffrage. The coercive measures of the Federal Government were undoubtedly predicipated against the convictions of the majority of the Northern people. So the war was transumted into an Abolition measure under the same circumstances. And last: negro suffrage was undoubtedly introduced against the better judgement of nearly all by the selfish arts of the demagogues; and as there was neither party nor statesman that had the nerve to head the almost universal opposition, the decision went by default. Nor will there be, under any future circumstances, either leader or party that will risk the odium of a movement to take away suffrage from the incompetend hands of the blacks, however clearly it may appear that they are using it for the ruin of themselves and the country. Thus it is the destiny of the Yankee people to commit a species of political Hari-kari with its own unwilling hands. The crowning element of despair is in the enforced consolidation of the Government. There are no reserved rights of States. The mad innovation which is adopted by a majority of them is enforced upon all; so that no place of refuge is left in the whole land where the right principles and usages might find sanctuary, and abide as the wholesome example and recuperative power for reform.

What then, in the next place, will be the effect of this fundamental change when it shall be established? The obvious answer is, that it will destroy Christianity and civilisation in America. Some who see the mischievousness of the movement express the hope that it will, even if nominally successful, be kept within narrow limits by the very force of its own absurdity. They “reckon without their host.” There is a Satanic ingenuity in these Radical measures which secures the infection of the reluctant dissentients as surely as of the hot advocates. The women now sensible and modest who heartily deprecate the whole folly, will be dragged into the vortex, with the assent of their now indignant husbands. The instruments of this deplorable result will be the (so-called) conservative candidates for office. They will effect it by this plea, that ignorant, impudent, Radical women will vote, and vote wrong; whence it becomes a necessity for the modest and virtuous women, for their country's sake, to sacrifice their repugnance and counterpoise these mischievous votes in the spirit of disinterested self-sacrifice. Now a woman can never resist an appeal to the principle of generous devotion; her glory is to crucify herself in the cause of duty and of zeal. This plea will be successful. But when the virtuous have once taste the dangerous intoxication of political excitement and the power, even they will be absorbed; they will learn to do con amore what was first done as a painful duty, and all the baleful influeces of policial life ill be diffused throughout the sex.

What those influences will be may be learned by every one who reverences the Christian Scriptures, from this fact, that the theory of “women's Rights” is sheer infidelity⁸. It directly impugns the authority and the justice of these Scriptures. They speak in no uncertain tones. “The husband is the head of the wife” (EPH v:23). “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (v. 22. “The man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man” (I COR. II:9). “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection: but I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence: for Adam was first formed, then Eve: and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was the transgression” (I TIM. II: 11-14). They are to be “discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands,” etc. (TITUS II:5). How utterly opposed is all this to the levelling doctrine of your Radical. Women are here consiged to a social subordination, and expressly escluded from ruling offices, on grounds of their sex, and a divine ordination based by God upon a transaction which happened nearly six thousand years ago! The woman's sphere is expressly assigned her within her home, and she is taught that the assumption of publicity is an outrage against that nature with which she is endowed. Now the politics which denounce all this as a natural injustice and self-evident folly cannot be expected to reverence these Scriptures; they must and will flout their whole authority. We must then make up our minds in accepting Women's Rights to surrender our Bibles, and have an atheistic Government. And especially must we expect to have, presiding over every home and rearing every group of future citizens, that most abhorrent of all phenomena, an infidel woman; for of course that sex, having received the precious boon of their enfranchisement only by means of the overthrow of the Bible, must be foremost in trampling upon this their old oppressor and enemy. Its restoration to authority is necessarily their “re-enslavement,” to speak to language of their party.

Second: these new excitements and temptations will utterly corrupt the character and delicacy of American women. It is indignantly asked, “Why should politics corrupt the morals of women more than the 'lords of creation'?” Suppose now we reply: American politics have corrupted the morals of the men? suppose we argue that this retort is so true and just and the result has actually gone to so deplorable an extent, that were the female side of our social organization as corrupt as the male side has already become, American society would crumble into ruin by its own putrescence? it is better to save half the fabric than to lose all. And especially is it better to save the purity of the mosthers who are, under God, to form the characters of our future citizens, and of the wives who are to restrain and elevate them, whatever else we endanger. Is it argued that since women are now confessedly purer than men, their entrance into politics must tend to purify politics? We reply again that the women of the present were reared and attained this comparative purity under the Bible system. Adopt the infidel plan, and we shall corrupt our women without purifying our politics. What shall save us then?⁹

But there is another reply to this retort. Political excitements will corrupt women tenfold more than men; and this, not because women are naturally inferior to men, but because they are naturally adapted to a wholly different sphere. When we point to the fact that they are naturally more emotional and less calculating, more impulsive and less self-contained, that they have a quicker tact but less logic, that their social nature makes them more liable to the contagion of epidemic passions, and that the duties of their sex make it physically impossible for them tto acquire the knowledge in a foreign sphere necessary for political duties, we do not depricate woman; we only say that nature has adapted her to one thing and disqualified her for the other. The violent would wither in that full glare of midsummer in which the sunflower thrives: this does not argue taht the violet is the meaner flower. The vine, left to stand alone, would be hurled prone in the mire by the first blasts of that wind which strengthens the grasp of the sturdy oak upon its bed: still the oak may yield no fruit so precious as the clusters of the vine. But the vine cannot be an oak; it must be itself, dependent, clinging, but more precious than that on which it leans or it must perish. When anything inmate or inanimate, is used for a function to which it is not adapted, that foreign use must endamage it, and the more the farther that function is from its own sphere. So it will be found (and it is no disparagement to woman to say) that the very traits which fit her to be the angel of a virtuous home unfit her to meet the agitations of political publicity and passion will speedily deflower her delicacy and sweetness¹⁰. Those temptations, which her Maker did not form her to bear, will debauch her heart, developing a character as much more repulsive than that of the debauched man as the fall has been greater. The politicating woman, unsexed and denaturalised, shorn of the true glory of her femininity, will appear to men as a feeble hybrid mannikin with all the defcts and none of the strength of the man. Instead of being the dear object of his chivalrous affection, she becomes his importunate rival, despised without being feared.

This suggests a third consequence, which some of the advocates of the movement even already are bold enough to foreshadow. “Women's Rights” mean the abolition of all permanent marriage ties. We are told that Mrs. Cady Stanton avowed this result, proclaming it at the invitation of the Young Men's Christian Association of New York. She holds that woman's bondage is not truly dissolved until the marriage bond is annulled. She is thoroughly consistent. Some hoodwinked advocates of her revolution may be blind to the sequence; but it is inevitable. It must follow by this cause, if for no other, that the unsexed politicating woman can never inspire in man the true affection on which marriage should be founded. Men will doutless be still sensual' but it is simply impossible that they can desire them for the pure and sacred sphere of the wife. Let every woman ask herself: will she choose for the lord of her affections an unsexed effeminate man? No more can man be drawn to the masculine woman. The mutual attraction of the two complementary halves is gone forever. The abolition of marriage would follow again by another cause. The divergent interests and the rival independence of the two equal wills would be irreconcilable with domestic government, or union, or peace. Shall the children of this monstrous no-union be held responsible to two variant coördinate and supreme wills at once? Heaven pity the children! Shall the two parties to this perpetual co-partnership have neither the power to secure the performance of the mutual duties nor to dissolve it? It is a self-contradiction, an impossible absurdity. Such a co-partnership of equals with independent interests must be separable at will, as all other such co-partnerships are. The only relation between the sexes which will remain will be cohabitation continuing so long as the convenience or caprice of both parties may suggest; and this, with most, will amount to a vagrant concubinage.

But now, what will be the character of children reared under such a domestic organisation as this? If human experience has established anything at all, it is the truth of the principle announced by the Hebrew prophet when he declared that the great aim of God in ordaining a permanent marriage tie between one man and one woman was “that He might seek a godly seed.” God's ordinance, the only effective human ordinance, for checking and curbing the first tendencies to evil, as domestic, parental government. When the family shall no longer have a head, and the great foundation for the subordination in children in the mother's example is gone; when the mother shall have found another sphere than her home for her energies; when she shall have exchanged the sweet charities of domestic love and sympathy for the fierce passions of the hustings; when families shall be disrupted at the caprice of either party, and the children scattered as foundlings from their hearthstone,--it requires no wisdom to see that a race of sons will be reared nearer akin to devils than to men. In the hands of such a bastard progeny, without discipline, without homes, without God, the last remains of social order will speedily perish, and society will be overwhelmed in savage anarchy.

Last: it would not be hard to show, did space permit, that this movement on the part of these women is as suicidal as it is mischievous. Its certain result will be the re-enslavement of women, not under the Scriptural bonds of marriage, but under the yoke of literal corporeal force. The woman who will calmly review the condition of her sex in other ages and countries will feel that her wisdom is to “let well enough alone.” Physically, the female is the “weaker vessel.” This world is a hard and selfish scene where the weaker goes to the wall. Under all other civilisations and all other religions than ours woman has experienced this fate to the full; her condition has been that of a slave to the male--sometimes a petted slave, but yet a slave. In Christian and European society alone has she ever attained the place of man's social equal, and received the homage and honor due from magnanimity to her sex and her feebleness. And her enviable lot among us has resulted from two causes: the Christian religion and the legislation founded upon it by feudal chivalry. How insane then is it for her to spurn these her two bulwarks of defence, to defy and repudiate the divine authority of that Bible which has been her redemption, and to revolutionise the whole spirit of the English common law touching woman's sphere and rights? She is thus spurning the only protectors her sex has ever found, and provoking a contest in which she must inevitably be overwhelmed. Casting away that dependence and femininity which are her true strength, the “strong-minded woman” persists in thrusting herself into competition with man as his equal. But for contest, she is not his equal; the male is the stronger animal. As man's helper, woman is his equal, his superior, his glory. As man's rival, she is a pitiful inferior, a sorry she-mannikin. It is when she brings her wealth of afection, her self-devotion, her sympathy, her tact, her grace, her subtle intuition, her attractions, her appealing weakness, and place them in the scale with man's rugged strenth and plodding endurance, with his steady logic, his hardihood and muscle, and his exemption from the disabling infirmities of her sex, that he delights to admit her full equality and to do glad homage to her as the crown of his kind. All this vantage-ground the “Women's Rights women” madly throw away and provoke that collision for which nature itself has disqualified them. They insist upon taking precisely man's chances; well, they will meet precisely the fate of a weak man, among strong ones. A recent incident on a railroad train justly illustrates the result. A solitary female entered a car where every seat was occupied, and the conductor closed the door upon her and departed. She looked in vain for a seat, and at last appealed to an elderly man near her to know if he would not {”surrender his seat to a lady.” He, it seems, was somewhat a humorist, and answered, “I will surrender it cheerfully, Madam, as I always do, but will beg leave first to ask a civil question. Are you an advocate of the modern theory of women's rights?” Bridling up with intense energy, she replied, “yes, Sir, emphatically; I let you know that it is my glory to be devoted to that noble cause.” “Very well, Madam,” he said, “then the case is altered: you may stand up like the rest of us men, until you can get a seat for yourself.” This was exact poetic justice; and it foreshadows precisely the fate of their unnatural pretensions. Men will treat them as they treat each other; it will be “every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.” There will be of course a Semiramis or a Queen Bess here and there who will hold her own; but the general rule will be that the “weaker vessels” will succumb; and the society which will emerge from this experiment will present woman in the position which she has always held among savages, that of domestic drudge to the stronger animal. Instead of being what the Bible makes her, one with her husband, queen of his home, reigning with the gentle sceptre of love over her modest, secluded domain, and in its pure and sacred retirement performing the noblest work done on this earth, that of moulding infant minds to honor and piety, she will reäppear from this ill-starred competition defeated, and despised, tolerated only to satiate the passion, to amuse the idleness, to do the drudgery, and to receive the curses and blows of her barbarized masters.

Thus will be consummated that destiny to which so many gloomy prognostics point as the allotment of the North American continent to the accursed field for the final illustration of the harvest of perdition, grown from the seeding of the dragon's teeth of infidel Radicalism. God gave the people of this land great and magnificent blessings, and opportunities and responsibilities. They might and should have made it the glory of all lands. But they have betrayed their trust: they have abused every gift: above all they have insulted Him by flaunting in His face an impudent, atheistic, God-defying theory of pretend human rights and human perfectibility which attempts to deny man's subordination, his dependence, his fall and native depravity, his need of divine grace. It invites mankind to adopt material civilisation and sensual advantage as their divinity. It assumes to be able to perfect man's condition by its political, literary, and mechanical skill, despising the Gospel of Christ, which is man's only adequate remedy. It crowns its impiety by laying its defiling hnds upon the very forms of that Christinaity, while with the mock affection of a Judas, it attempts to make it a captive to the sordid ends of Mammon and sense. Must not God be avenged on such a nation as this? His vengance will be to give them the fruit of their own hands, and let them be filled with their own devices. he will set apart this fair land by a sort of dread consecration to the purpose of giving a lesson concerning this godless philosophy, so impressive as to instruct and warn all future generations. As the dull and pestilential waves of the Dead Sea have been to every subsequent age the memento of the sin of Sodom, so dreary tides of anarchy and barbarism which will overwhelm the boastful devices of infidel democracy will be the caution of all future legislation. And thus “women's rights” will assist America “to fulfil her great mission,” that of being the “scarecrow” of the nations¹¹.

¹Doesn't this look like the 1871 version of a charge of “postmodernism?” Apparently dismissing one's opponent's views like this is a time-honored tradition.
²I think this statement is particularly telling, both of the view of many southern conservatives in the 19th century, and many religious conservatives in the 20th and 21st centuries. It shows what they mean by “leave it to the states to decide.” In essence, they mean, “Leave it to the states to decide, so long as they decide in the way that I think they should.” In fact, you can still see this attitude towards women's rights today, particularly on the issue of abortion.
³This is but the first of Dabney's comparisons of abolitionism and women's rights, both of which he thinks are evil. Later, he blames the latter's increasing popularity on the former.
⁴This is a particularly interesting version of Originalism isn't it?
⁵Man, losing that war sucks!
⁶Notice the setting up of the straw man still commonly used today, that “Women's Rights,” or feminism, essentially stands on the premise (or premiss) that there are absolutely no differences between men and women.
⁷Ah, the slippery slope! That favorite fallacy of the cultural conservative for many centuries past, and many centuries to come.
⁸It's all about sex.
⁹This is just one instance of the deplorable, and still common argument that the limiting of women's rights (e.g., in the form of reproductive rights, today) is done in their best interests, because we men know what's best for them.
¹⁰I.e., if women can think for themselves, they'll be no fun for us men anymore. A common sentiment today, though it's rarely put so succinctly in contemporary discourse.
¹¹This paragraph could easily have been written today, perhaps by someone like Pat Robertson, and the blaming social and political progression on atheists and secularists is a hobby of many social conservatives.

Koufax

2006-02-16T19:23:00.000-06:00

So I discovered a little while ago that Mixing Memory has been nominated for a Koufax Award for Best Expert Blog. I'm pretty sure I have Coturnix to thank for that, so thank you. Anyway, despite my huge ego, I don't feel like I could compete with, well, any of those other blogs. I know I, for one, will be voting for RealClimate, because those guys are seriously smart, and their posts are always informative. It's nice to know that someone (i.e. Coturnix) has a high opinion of this blog, though, and it's nice to be mentioned along with some of those other blogs.

What Framing Analysis Is

2006-02-13T00:48:00.000-06:00

I've reached a point at which I cringe every time I see the words "framing" or "Lakoff" in the blogosphere or mainstream media, and when I see them together, I damn near have a seizure. Two things are clear to me now:

Most people don't really feel the need to actually read something about frame analysis, even if it's only Lakoff, before they develop opinions about its worth.
Lakoff himself hasn't done a very good job of explaining what frame analysis is, because even the people who do appear to have read him usually don't get it.

Three cases in point: The comments to this post by Amanda at Pandagon (I think Amanda actually has a pretty good grasp on the basics of framing, but many of her commenters do not), the comments to this post at Pharyngula, and this monstrosity (developments in GEM are widely followed by scienitists? huh? find me 20 scientists who even know what the hell that is!).

Several misconceptions reappear, again and again. For example, "Lakoff is a postmodernist." If we put aside for a moment the fact that I haven't the slightest idea what that means, I can't imagine that if we compared Lakoff to many of the thinkers who are labeled "postmodernists" in more serious circles, we'd find a whole hell of a lot in common. I mean, sure, Lakoff readily admits to being a "relativist," but the sort of relativism he's talking about is probably not all that common among analytic philosophers, and I know it's not uncommon among cognitive scientists, and I don't think we can count many in either of those crowds as members of "postmodernist" schools of thought. The "relativism" of Lakoff, and many other cognitive scientists, simply says that our background knowledge influences our understanding and interpretation of facts and language. And that, in a nutshell, is what frame analysis is about.

Another common misconception is that framing is just a marketing tool. To be fair, I don't think that Lakoff has done a particularly good job of dispelling that notion, as when he talks about who should be the spokesperson for evolutionary science. And it's certainly true that framing is often used for marketing purposes, both in advertising and in political rhetoric. But that's not all it is. Frame analysis is a tool for interpreting discourse, and a tool for more effective communication. The goal of framing doesn't have to be convincing, it can simply be understanding.

A related misconception is that the purpose of framing is to manipulate or trick people into taking your side. Again, it can be used for that purpose, but I've never gotten the impression that Lakoff is advocating that type of use, and that's certainly not what frame analysis is about.

So, since my frustration has peaked, I thought I'd attempt to provide a very brief explanation of frame analysis, with the hope that it will clear up those misconceptions and others. This is all ground I've covered before, but what the hell? I'll cover it again.

First, what is a frame? Frames are essentially schemas in the head, or words and phrases used to elicit schemas in the head (follow the last link for more technical definitions). When referring to frames that are in people's heads, we're talking about knowledge structures in long-term memory that are used to interpret incoming information, and to reason. An example of a mental frame might be the FANCY RESTAURANT frame. You have specific knowledge of the order of events to expect in a fancy restaurant (the order of the courses, when the check comes, and even how often the server should check up on you), how to behave in a fancy restaurant (you don't eat with your hands, for example), and so on. When you're actually in a fancy restaurant, the frame serves to highlight certain information and create expectations (which is why you get pissed off if the server leaves your drink near empty or watered down for too long), while it causes you to ignore other information (like, say, the color of the plates, unless you're just really into plates). Frames in language are designed to take advantage of those representations or change them, by highlighting certain parts of them or additional facts or associations, and perhaps ignoring others.

So frame analysis will consist of three stages (maybe only two, if you're a linguist... sorry, I couldn't resist that little jab):

1.) Discovering the mental frames that people already have. If you don't do this, you won't know what information you should highlight or add, or what information you should de-emphasize.

2.) Developing an understanding of what it is you want to communicate. What do you want to make more salient in people's mental frames, and what do you want to add to their knowledge?

3.) Framing your speech and writing in such a way that it accomplishes the goals from 2) given 1).

That's it, really. You're just developing an understanding of how people are representing something, deciding what you want to communicate, and choosing your wording based on the combination of those two things. There's nothing inherently postmodern or manipulative (I think that some people mean "manipulative" when they say "postmodern") about any of that, and the potential uses of it extend well beyond simple marketing. In fact, it's a good idea to do those three things anytime you want to communicate effectively. Of course, in practice, all three of those things can be very difficult, particularly when your audience is diverse and/or your message is complicated. And it's important that you go into the process with a good understanding of how people represent information in general, and how they reason. And that's a large part of Lakoff's point, even if he really has no clue how people actually represent information or reason. But at least he's trying.

Happy Darwin Day, Sort Of

2006-02-12T12:02:00.000-06:00

So now we're celebrating Darwin's birthday as Dawrin Day, partly because his ideas have been so important, and partly to help us to educate people about evolution (though holding it on a Sunday probably doesn't serve to facilitate that purpose), but mostly, I think, to stick it to creationists (and holding it on Sunday definitely facilitates that purpose). And believe me, I'm all for sticking it to the creationists. I can even show you where on creationists I want to stick it, if you'd like.

Just ask me where on this diagram of a creationist I would like to stick it.

But is calling it Darwin Day really the ideal way to stick it to them, or to faciliate evolution education? I mean, haven't biologists and others who are pro-science and know anything whatsoever about contemporary biology been trying to shed the silly label "Darwinists?" Because let's face it, modern biologists aren't really Darwinists, in the same sense that modern physicists aren't Keplerians. Biology has actually produced some advancements in the last 150 years. Wouldn't it be better to call it something like Evolution Day, then? That way, we don't look like we're Darwinists worshipping at the alter of Darwin. We could still hold it on Darwin's birthday, or maybe the closest weekday (the Friday before or the Monday after, giving science teachers a chance to reiterate the importance of evolution to their students). But the name itself would help to convey the fact that we're not celebrating a 150 year old theory, because we're celebrating a very contemporary theory; one that continues to, for lack of a better word, evolve, just as any good scientific theory does.

So Happy Evolution Day,everyone, and may you have many more.

Moral Psychology III: Social Intuitionism, or The Rise of the Intuitive Lawyers

2006-02-08T14:28:00.000-06:00

Last summer, I started a series of posts on moral psychology, but never got to finish, for various reasons. This post represents the third installment in that series, and presents what are to me the most interesting developments in moral psychology. These developments have wide-ranging implications for philosophy, politics, and communication in general, and I hope to get to those in a later post.

As I said at the beginning of the last post on moral psychology, things have been changing in the study of moral psychology. Part of the motivation for the change has been the work of neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio that was described in the first post, which has shown that primarily rationalist theories like those of Kohlberg and his descendents simply aren't sufficient to account for human moral judgments and behavior. For the rationalists, moral behavior is the largely the product of deliberative, consciously-available reasoning. For Damasio, you may recall, feelings or emotions are by and large guiding our reasoning, rather than the other way around. Furthermore, they are doing so below the level of what Damasio calls extended consciousness, which is what most of us would simply call consciousness¹. There have been other motivations for the change, though. For some, those motivations have to do with the differences in learning and processing involved in the symbolic architectures of old-school cognitive science and connectionist models. For others, the motivations have come from the increasingly popular belief among social psychologists that most social cognition is automatic and unconscious. Whatever the motivations, the results are pretty much the same: shedding the emphasis on conscious moral reasoning, and instead focusing on automatic and unconscious moral judgments. Since I covered the work of Damasio and other neuroscientists in the first post, I'll focus on the connectionists and the social psychologists in this one. In particular, I'll describe the theories of Paul Churchland and his colleagues (most notably, Andy Clark), and the social intuitionist model of Jonathan Haidt, along with related work.

Prototypes and Exemplars vs. Rules

"Stateable rules are not the basis of one''s moral character. They are merely its pale and partial reflection at the comparatively impotent level of language." - P.M. Churchland²

That quote pretty much sums up the recent connectionist-inspired position on moral reasoning. There hasn't been a great deal of empirical research or modeling of moral reasoning, to date, but the theoretical position has been supported by the work that I'll discuss in the next section. The basic idea is this: we know, the argument goes, from research on categorization and concepts, that categories are not represented as statements and definitions, as once thought, but as similarity-based structures such as prototypes and exemplars³. On this view, categorization is, in essence, pattern recognition, and the use of categories is largely associative (here is a short primer on connectionism to help explain how these processes work). Because of this, using morprinciplesles that are stated in rule-form will not work, because the representational material needed to do this is absent.

Instead, these theorists argue, moral reasoning uses a moral state space, within which a wide range of situation types are represented⁴. Within this state space, those situations will be represented as prototypes, with prototypical features of those situations encoded in the representation. This has the implication that we will recognize, and react to, moral situations by relying on a few prototypical features. Obviously, this is sub-optimal, in that situations that are highly similar to certain prototypes, i.e., situations that have many of the prototypical features of a particular type of moral situation, will activate moral emotions or intuitions associated with those situations, even if those emotions and intuitions are not relevant for the particular situation.

This means that the study of moral psychology should focus not on rule-based reasoning, which insufficiently captures the ways in which we make moral judgments, and may in fact be irrelevant (at least in a description of those judgment processes, though it may be relevant to the ways in which we communicate our moral intuitions). Instead, we should focus on moral intuitions and their associated emotions. This is, in fact, what social psychologists have begun to do, led in particular by the work of Jonathan Haidt.

Social Intuitionism

Haidt describes his social intuitionist model (all page numbers will refer to the manuscript in the link)as a dual process model⁵. In dual process models⁶ there are, as the name suggests, two types of processes, Process I and Process II, which may run in parallel to each other. Process I is the intuitive process. It is automatic, and requires little effort. Often it occurs below the level of awareness. Process II is effortful, and usually occurs within consciousness. The social intuitionist model posits that in morjudgmentsnts, Process I is privileged, while Process II's purposes is largely to supplement and/or justify Process I.

What does it mean for moral judgments to be intuitive? It might help to think in terms of heuristics. This is, in fact, how Cass Sunstein describes them in a recent Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article⁷. He uses as an example the Asian disease problem, which goes like this (from the article, p. 9 of the linked manuscript):

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.

If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.

Which of the two programs would you favor?

When given these two choices, people almost always pick Program A. However, when given the following two choices (p. 9-10):

If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die.

If Program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

People usually choose Program D. Look closely at the four Programs. You should notice that the difference between Program A and Program C is only in the wording, as is the difference between Program B and Program D. Why is it that when the exact same situation is worded one way (Program A), people prefer it to an alternative (Program B), while when it is worded in another way (Program C), people don't prefer it to the same alternative worded differently (Program D)? Those of you familiar with the work of Kahneman and Tversky will immediately recognize this as an issue of framing. Changing the way you frame the options changes the heuristics we use to make decisions. In this case, the choice of A but not C, and D but not B, is an instance of Kahnemen and Tversky's "risk aversion" heuristic⁸.

Another way of thinking about moral intuitions is in terms of an innate "moral grammar," similar to the innate moral grammar of Chomsky's generative linguistics. This is how John Mikhail describes them in an unpublished paper on research he has conducted. Using famous moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem, he shows in several experiments that children as young as eight years old appear to be using two intuitive moral principles: the prohibition of intentional battery and the principle of double effect. Here are his descriptions of the two (p. 11):

The former is a familiar principle of both common morality and the common law proscribing acts of unpermitted, unprivileged bodily contact, that is, of touching without consent. The latter is a complex principle of justification, narrower in scope than the traditional necessity or "choice of evils" defense, which in its standard formulation holds that an otherwise prohibited action may be permissible if the act itself is not wrong, the good but not the bad effects are intended, the good effects outweigh the bad effects, and no morally preferable alternative is available.

He shows, as others have, that as in the Asian disease problem, people's responses to these sorts of dilemmas is not predictable from traditional moral rules, and that their justifications for their choices are not consistent with their actual choices over several problems. Instead, he believes, they demonstrate the existence of the two moral principles above. He argues that this implies the principles are intuitive, and furthermore, because they are not taught (since we're not actually aware of them), and appear at a young age, they may be innate. This Thsi is, in essence, a poverty of stimulus argument for moral judgment.

Haidt himself focuses more on the role of emotion. Drawing on the work of Damasio described in the first post (linked above), Haidt argues that moral judgments consist, largely, of pattern recognition of the sort described by connectionist models, combined with the automatic associative activation of affective states. As evidence of the role of emotions in mjudgmentement, Haidt describes two experiments. In the first, conducted by Baston et al.⁹, participants were hooked up to machines that they were told would measure their bodily reactions, and listened to stories in which core values (freedom or equality) were violated. As they listened to the stories, were given false feedback about their physical reactions to the stories. The participants were then asked which of the values (freedom or equality) should be used as the theme for a series of events at their university. Most participants chose the value that they had been told elicited the strongest physical reaction.

In the second experiment Haidt describes, Wheatley and Haidt¹⁰ hypnotized "highly hypnotizable" participants and suggested that when they heard one of two target words ("take" or "often") that would ordinarily elicit feelings of disgust, they would feel disgusted. Participants then read six stories, each of which contained one of the two target words, and were asked to rate their disgust level and moral condemnation of the actors in the stories. They found that participants gave higher disgust and moral condemnation ratings for stories containing the word suggested to cause disgust.

These pieces of evidence, along with Damasio's research, lead Haidt to believe that affective reactions are the driving force behind moral evaluations. In his discussion of these reactions, he focuses on what he calls the "moral emotions", though he recognizes that any emotion can affect mjudgmentement. He describes two features of moral emotions¹¹:

Disinterestedseted inhibitors: Moral emotions can and frequently are triggered "even when the self has no stake in the triggering event" (p. 853).

Prosocial action tendencies: Moral emotions elicit behaviors that "benefit others or else uphold or benefit the social order" (p. 854).

He evaluates several emotions on these two dimensions, and comes up with a list of moral emotions that includes gratitude, shame, embarrassment, contempt, and perhaps most importantly, disgust.

So, there are three ways of thinking about moral intuitions: heuristics, moral grammar, and affect-driven responses to patterns in the environment. All three are automatic, in the sense that we don't purposefuly activate them, they occur below the level awareness, meaning that we may not even be aware of their existence, and they require little effort.

The second type of process, Process II, in Haidt's dual process model is the conscious reasoning that we usually associate with moral judgment. However, unlike traditional moral theories in psychology and philosophy, Haidt believes that moral reasoning is largely post hoc, and meant to justify our moral beliefs and actions that are caused by intuitive moral processes. This is where Haidt's theory might become counterintuitive (pardon the pun) for some of us. While I imagine we've all experienced immediate, gut reactions to moral situations that did not take any deliberation, I doubt that many of us have seen our moral reasoning as strictly post hoc. But Haidt argues this is what it in fact is. As he puts it, we are more like "moral lawyers" than "moral scientists."

Haidt provides a few different lines of evidence for the post hoc nature of moral reasoning. First he discusses motivations that influence the reasoning process, but which serve more to justify our beliefs than to provide arguments for them. He discusses relatedness motives, which involve the desire for our beliefs and actions to be consistent with our social goals ( e.g., agreeing with people we like), coherence motives, which involve the desire for our beliefs and actions to be consistent with our self-image and with each other (think of cognitive dissonance). These types of motivations influence the sort of information or evidence we will consider when reasoning about our moral judgments. He also points to the literature on the "my-side" bias, which shows that people generally only consider evidence on one side of an issue -- their own side¹². The my-side bias is so deeply entrenched that, even when we're evaluating the arguments of people who disagree with us, we'll rate them as better arguments if they only discuss evidence on one side of the issue. In other words, the my-side bias appears to be an integral part of how we think reasoning should be¹³. It is so persistent, in fact, that when we are searching for evidence for our position, we will often stop after finding a single piece of evidence¹⁴.

Haidt also discusses evidence from nonmoral domains that shows people using post hoc reasoning when the processes involved in causing a behavior or belief are automatic and unconsciouscious, as Haidt believes they are in moral judgment. He cites a famous experiment by Nisbett and Schachter¹⁵ in which they gave participants in two conditions electric shocks as an illustration. Participants in the first condition received a pill, a placebo, and were told that the pill caused the same symptoms as electric shock. Participants in the second condition received no such pill. Participants in the first condition, amazingly, were able to stand four times as much electric shock as the participants in the second condition. When asked to explain why they could take more shock, the majority of the participants in the pill condition never mentioned the pill, but instead came up with post hoc explanations such as the idea that since they had an experience with electric shock at some point earlier in their life, and had thus built up a tolerance. In other words, they weren't aware of the reason for their increased tolerance, so they made reasons up.

When we combine the evidence for the role of intuition, particularly intuitive affective reactions, in moral judgment, and the evidence for the frequently post hoc functioning of conscious reasoning, Haidt believes we have strong evidence for his dual process theory of mjudgmentement. He then goes on to discuss the possible origins of moral intuitions. He cites de Waal's research¹⁶ on what Haidt calls "primate proto-morality." de Waal argues that nonhuman primates are the only nonhuman species who show evidence of "prescriptive" social rules, and Haidt believes that the affective and cognitive mechanisms that underlies these rules, combined with our superior communication abilities, also underlie human's more sophisticated moral behavior. This is not to say that human and nonhuman primate moral systems are at all equivalent. Haidt writes (p. 18):

The above considerations are not meant to imply that chimpanzees have morality, nor that humans are just chimps with post-hoc reasoning skills. There is indeed a moral Rubicon that only Homo Sapiens appears to have crossed: widespread third party norm enforcement. Chimpanzee norms generally work at the level of private relationships, where the individual that has been harmed is the one that takes punitive action. Yet human societies are marked by a constant and vigorous discussion of norms and norm violators, and by a willingness to expend individual or community resources to inflict punishment, even by those who were not harmed by the violator.

Thus, the difference between human and nonhuman primate prescriptive social rules and behaviors appears to lie in the social and communicative aspects of our moral beliefs and behaviors. This leads Haidt to the "social" aspects of the social intuitionist model. In his model, cultural influences pick and choose from our innate moral repertoir. He writes (p. 19):

Shweder''s theory of the ""big three"" moral ethics¹⁷ proposes that moral "goods"" ( i.e., culturally shared beliefs about what is morally good and valuable) generally cluster into three complexes, or ethics, which cultures embrace to varying degrees: the ethic of autonomy (focusing on goods that protect the autonomous individual, such as rights, freedom of choice, and personal welfare); the ethic of community (focusing on goods that protect families, nations, and other collectivities, such as loyalty, duty, honor, respectfulness, modesty, and selfcontrol); and the ethic of divinity (focusing on goods that protect the spiritual self, such as piety, and physical and mental purity). A child is born prepared to develop moral intuitions in all three ethics, but her local cultural environment generally stresses only one or two of the ethics.

In addition to large-scale cultural influences on moral development, through socialization, Haidt notes that it is the social aspect of moral belief and behavior that often motivates the post hoc reasoning processes in moral judgment. In many instances, the only time that we will feel the need to provide arguments and evidence for our moral beliefs is that others have challenged them. Consciously reasoning about them not only provide justifications for ourselves, but also with the material with which to communicate our justifications. Finally, as Pizarro and Bloom have noted in their commentary¹⁸ on Haidt's social intuitionist theory, taking the perspective of others, an ability that is likely uniquely human, can also influence our moral beliefs. Perspective-taking essentially provides us with new schemas and categories on which our intuitjudgment judgment processes can operate. So, their are multiple avenues through which social interactions can influence our moral beliefs.

That, then, in a pretty long nutshell, is Haidt's social intuitionist model. If you've read the post on the rationalist theories in moral psychology, you'll quickly see how starkly this model contrasts with them. And the implications of this sort of intuitionist moral theory are quite different from those of rationalist theories. For example, while Haidt emphasizes the social aspect and third-person focus of intuitive moral beliefs, it is likely that automatic, unconscious moral processes will tend to be more egocentric than someone like Kohlberg believed higher-stage moral reasoning would be. Epley and Caruso¹⁹, for example, have argued that since taking a first-person perspective requires far fewer resources than taking a third-person perspective, most of our automatic judgment processes will be egocentric. It is only when we have the time and cognitive resources to reevaluate our egocentric reactions to moral situations that we can think in more other-focused terms. Another implication is that moral communication will be designed not so much to convince people through reasoning, or even to provide them with arguments for their positions, but to pass to others representations that will induce certain kinds of moral reactions. If this is the case, then people like George Lakoff, in his political writings, are moving in the right direction in analyzing discourse not in order to be able to argue better, but in order to be able to utilize and create certain representations in listeners and readers.

There are, of course, many more implications of this sort of perspective on moral psychology, but since this post is already reaching book length, I think I'll save a discussion of those for future posts. If you find these issues interesting, though, feel free to check out the references below (if I haven't provided a link to a paper, write me and I will try to get you a copy), or ask me about some of the other people doing theoretical and empirical work along these lines. Moral psychology has become a hot topic in cognitive science and social cognition, so there is no shortage of good reading material.

¹In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio describes two kinds of consciousness. The first, basic consciousness, is more primitive, and we share it with many nonhuman animals. It iawarenessawareneses of our bodies and surroundings, and is free of all of the trappings of complex concepts of self, history, and effortful reasoning. The second is extended consciousness, which is where we experience a sense of self, autobiographical memories, language, and so on.
²Churchland, P. M. (1996). "The Neural Representation of the Social World". In L.May, L. Friedman, & A. Clark (Eds.) Mind and Morals MIT Press: 91-108.
³Recent reseach has, of course, challenged the strict similarity-based views of concepts, but connectionists still treat concepts as prototypes or exemplars almost exclusively.
⁴Clark, A. (1996). Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem Solving. In L.May, M.Friedman and A.Clark (Eds.) Mind And Morals, MIT Press: 109-127.
⁵Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834.
⁶Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002) Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, Cambridge University Press.
⁷Sunstein, C.R. (2005). Moral heuristics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(4), 531-542.
⁸Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1991). Loss aversion in riskless choice: A reference-dependent model. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(4), 1039-61.
⁹Batson, C. D., Engel, C. L., & Fridell, S. R. (1999). Value judgments: Testing the somatic-marker hypothesis using false physiological feedback. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1021-1032.
¹⁰Wheatley, T., & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotically induced disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16, 780-784.
¹¹Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R.J. Davidson, K.R. Scherer, & H.H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of Affective Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 852-870.
¹²E.g., Baron, J. (1995). Myside bias in thinking about abortion. Thinking and Reasoning, 1, 221-235.
¹³Ibid.
¹⁴Perkins, D. N., Allen, R., & Hafner, J. (1983). Difficulties in everyday reasoning. In W. Maxwell (Ed.), Thinking: The Frontier Expands. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 177-189.
¹⁵Nisbett, R. E., & Schacter, S. (1966). Cognitive manipulation of pain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 227-236.
¹⁶de Waal, F. (1996). Good Natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
¹⁷Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity), and the "big three" explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and Health, New York: Routledge, 119-169.
¹⁸Pizarro, D.A., & Bloom, P. (2003). The intelligence of moral intuitions: Comment on Haidt. Psychological Review, 110(1), 193-196.
¹⁹Epley, N., & Caruso, E. M. (2004). Egocentric ethics. Social Justice Research, 17(2), 171-187.

Innate Grammatical Categories Evident in Home Sign?

2006-02-07T00:41:00.000-06:00

A paper from an issue of PNAS from late 2005 argues that evidence of the existence of the grammatical subject in deaf Nicaraguan users of "home sign," which is sign language used in the home, but not based on official sign languages, and generally developed with no other linguistic input, is evidence of the innateness of the grammatical subject category. Here is the paper's abstract:

Language ordinarily emerges in young children as a consequence of both linguistic experience (for example, exposure to a spoken or signed language) and innate abilities (for example, the ability to acquire certain types of language patterns). One way to discern which aspects of language acquisition are controlled by experience and which arise from innate factors is to remove or manipulate linguistic input. However, experimental manipulations that involve depriving a child of language input are impossible. The present work examines the communication systems resulting from natural situations of language deprivation and thus explores the inherent tendency of humans to build communication systems of particular kinds, without any conventional linguistic input. We examined the gesture systems that three isolated deaf Nicaraguans (ages 14–23 years) have developed for use with their hearing families. These deaf individuals have had no contact with any conventional language, spoken or signed. To communicate with their families, they have each developed a gestural communication system within the home called ‘‘home sign.’’ Our analysis focused on whether these systems show evidence of the grammatical category of Subject. Subjects are widely considered to be universal to human languages. Using specially designed elicitation tasks, we show that home signers also demonstrate the universal characteristics of Subjects in their gesture productions, despite the fact that their communicative systems have developed without exposure to a conventional language. These findings indicate that abstract linguistic structure, particularly the grammatical category of Subject, can emerge in the gestural modality without linguistic input.

After reading the paper, I couldn't help but feel that while the data is interesting, it doesn't speak to the issue of innateness. Because the home sign systems were developed in collaboration with family members, it is entirely possible that those family members naturally include at least some of their grammatical categories in their signing, and thus that their deaf family members picked it up from them. Maybe I'm missing some aspect of the data, however, not being a linguist. If you're interested in language acquisition, check out the paper, and if you see something that argues against my interpretation, let me know.

Speaking of Numbers

2006-02-03T22:28:00.000-06:00

Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence reminded me, in comments to the post on categorizing fish, of this paper published a little over a year ago in Science. It's an interesting description of what can best be described as preliminary or pilot research on the relationship between number words and number concepts in a culture with only three number words: one, two, and many. Here's a description of the population from the paper (p. 469):

The Pirahã... live along the banks of the Maici River in the Lowland Amazonia region of Brazil. They maintain a hunter-gatherer existence and reject assimilation into mainstream Brazilian culture. Almost completely monolingual in their own language, they have a population of less than 200 living in small villages of 10 to 20 people. They have only limited exchanges with outsiders, using primitive pidgin systems for communicating in trading goods without monetary exchange. The Pirahã counting system consists of the words hói (falling tone = ‘one’) and hoí (rising tone = ‘two’). Larger quantities are designated as baagi or aibai (= ‘many’).

Perhaps more interesting than the lack of number terms for amounts greater than 2, the Pirahã use their word for one, "hói," to refer to any small quantity, sort of like English speakers use "a couple" to mean something in the neighborhood of two.

The author of the paper, Peter Gordon, visited the Pirahã three times, and after becoming interested in the question of how their verbal number system might affect their numerical concepts, conducted several pseudo-experiments (no, that's not a derogatory term, it just means that they weren't proper experiments from which we can infer causation) designed to explore Pirahã counting abilities. Several of the studies involved presenting the Pirahã participants with an array or cluster of familiar objects, and asking them to produce an array with the same number of objects. In another study, the participants were presented with line drawings and asked to draw the same number of lines (a task that was apparently very difficult for the Pirahã participants, because drawing is something they never do). In a third type of study, participants watched as the experimenter put nuts into a can, and then removed them, and were asked to report when they thought the can was empty. For each type of task, the Pirahã participants' performance dropped significantly for numerosities greater than 2 or 3 (up to about 10).

Gordon argues that these studies provide at least preliminary evidence for a strong version of the Sapir-Whorfy hypothesis. This strong version is generally called linguistic determinism (as opposed to the weaker version, linguistic relativity). He believes that the Pirahã are able to count small numbers (less than 3), perhaps by subitizing, and that they can also use analogue representations (e.g., lines whose length represent a quantity) for larger numbers (techniques which are inherently less accurate). These are both skills that appear to be present in all cultures, and even in some nonhuman animals. However, he believes that the evidence from his studies indicate that the Pirahã are not capable of more sophisticated counting techniques for numbers above three, and that this is due to the lack of number terms in their language.

There are several problems with these studies. The most obvious is that Gordon makes a causal inference from pseudo-experiments, which is a methodological no-no. There are no control conditions, no comparisons with similar populations, and no testing of different causal explanations. As Daniel Casasanto points out in a letter to Science in response to Gordon's paper, one could predict Gordon's data with either the linguistic determinism hypothesis or with its exact opposite. It could be that the environment and cultural practices of the Pirahã make the learning of number concepts over and above numerosities of 2 or 3 unnecessary, and that this in turn has led to the absence of terms related to these concepts in the Pirahã language. Gordon replies (in the same pdf file, just read to the end of Casasanto's letter) that he's not actually making a firm statement of cause, but when someone argues for "linguistic determinism," it's hard to interpret it any other way.

Speaking directly to these issues is another paper that appeared in the same issue of Science as Gordon's paper. That paper presents experiments (real experiments, this time, though they’re very limited) conducted with speakers of the Mundurukú language, who also live in the rainforests of Brazil. Here's a description of the speakers and their language from the paper (p. 500):

Here, we studied numerical cognition in native speakers of Mundurukú, a language that has number words only for the numbers 1 through 5. Mundurukú is a language of the Tupi family, spoken by about 7000 people living in an autonomous territory in the Pará state of Brazil.

So, the Mundurukú language has more number terms than the Pirahã, but is still much more limited in its number terms than Western languages. Furthermore, the Mundurukú do not use numbers in exact ways, or in counting, but instead use them to approximate numeroisities.

In several tasks requiring Mundurukú speakers to compare the numerosity of large arrays of dots (20 to 80), they performed well but slightly worse than a French-speaking control group. They also performed as well as the French-speaking participants on an arithmetic task that required only approximating numerosities. However, when they were required to perform an arithmetic task that required giving exact answers (a subtraction task), they performed significantly worse than the French controls, particularly as numerosities increased.

The authors of this paper argue that their results provide evidence against the strong determinism view advocated by Gordon. Instead, they write:

What the Mundurukú appear to lack, however, is a procedure for fast apprehension of exact numbers beyond 3 or 4.

In other words, the lack of a counting system, not the lack of numerical terms, appears to be the primary cause of the difference between Mundurukú and French-speakers performance on the subtraction task. Since the Pirahã don't have procedures for counting, either, this may underlie their difficulty with large numbers as well.

The picture I'm trying to paint with these two sets of studies is just how messy research on language and thought really is. Even the studies with the Mundurukú speakers, though they are proper experiments involving experimental and control groups, are at best preliminary explorations into the numerical knowledge of Mundurukú speakers, and the causes of differences between their numerical abilities and those of speakers of languages with larger sets of number terms. Figuring out whether language, as opposed to other cultural and/or environmental variables are responsible for differences in cognition is damn near impossible to do with any certainty. But the research is fun anyway.

100,000

2006-02-02T14:52:00.000-06:00

I didn't mention it the other day, but Mixing Memory received its 100,000th visitor earlier this week. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to say thanks to everyone whose visited, especially those of you who visit regularly, and extra especially to those who comment.

As always, if there's something on which you'd like to see me post, let me know.