Overheard: Converting common knowledge into scientific knowledge

Because they are so familiar, it is easy to assume that category labels drawn from everyday language are self-evidently the correct way to describe emotion. However, transforming everyday categorical descriptions into an effective research tool is at the least a challenge.

Cowie & Cornelius (2003) Describing the emotional states that are expressed in speech. Speech Communication 40, 5-32.

Understanding and Curing Myopic Voting

The abstract from a recent talk by Gabriel Lenz of MIT:

Retrospective voting is central to theorizing about democracy. Given voters’ ignorance about politics and public policy, some argue that it is democracy's best defense. This defense, however, assumes citizens are competent evaluators of incumbent politicians' performance. Although little research has investigated this assumption, voters' retrospective assessments in a key domain, the economy, appear flawed. They overweight election-year income growth in presidential elections, ignoring cumulative growth under the incumbent. In this paper, I present evidence that this myopia arises from a more general “end bias” in retrospective assessments. Using a three-year panel survey, I show that citizens' memories of the past economy are inconsistent with their actual experience of the economy as they reported it in earlier interviews. They fail to remember the past correctly in part because the present shapes their perceptions of the past. I then show similar behavior in the lab. When participants evaluate economic and crime data, I again find that election-year performance shapes perceptions of overall performance, even under conditions where the election year should not be more informative. Finally, I search for and appear to find a cure. Presenting participants with cumulative information on performance (e.g., total income growth or total rise in murders during incumbents’ terms) cures this myopia. On one hand, these results are troubling for democracy because they confirm citizens’ incompetence at retrospection. On the other hand, they point to a remedy, one that candidates and the news media could adopt.

That's a remedy as long as the candidates and news media don't simply lie about the fact. Good luck with that one.

Overheard: Scientific Prejudice

A senior colleague recently attended an Autism conference. Language is frequently impaired in Autism, and so many of the neuroscientists there were trying to look at the effects of their animals models of Autism on language.

Yes, you read that correctly: animal models of language. In many cases, rats.

This colleague and I both believe in some amount of phylogenetic continuity: some aspects of language are no doubt built on mechanisms that existed in our distant ancestors (and therefore may exist in other modern-day animals). But given that we have, at best, a rudimentary understanding of the mechanisms underlying language in humans -- and certainly little or no agreement in the field at present -- arguing that a particular behavior in a rat is related to some aspect of language is at best wild-eyed conjecture (and I say this with a great deal of respect for the people who have been taking this problem seriously).

Unfortunately, this colleague didn't get very far in discussing these issues with these researchers. One, for instance, said, "I know rat squeaks are related to language because they're auditory!"

Sure, so's sneezing:

The problem with such conversations, as this colleague pointed out, is that neuroscientists often don't take us cognitive types seriously. After all, they work on a "harder" science. (For those who haven't seen it yet, read this by DrugMonkey -- tangential but fun.) A friend of mine, who is a physicist, once told me that he wasn't sure why psychology was even called a "science" since psychologists don't do experiments -- never mind that I was IMing him from my lab at the time (which he knew).

When I applied to graduate school, I applied to one interdisciplinary program that included cognitive people and also physiology folk. During my interview with one professor who worked on monkey physiology, he interrupted me as I was describing the work I had done as an undergraduate. "Nothing of value about language," he told me, "can be learned by studying humans." When I suggested that perhaps there weren't any good animal models of language to work with, he said, "No, that's just a prejudice on the part of you cognitive people."

Keep in mind that there were several faculty in his department who studied language in humans. This is why such mixed departments aren't always particularly collegial places to work.

I bring this up not to rag on neuroscientists or physicists, but to remind the psychologists in the audience that we have this exact same problem. I don't know how many people have told me that linguistics is mostly bullshit (when I was an undergraduate, one professor of psychology told me: "Don't study linguistics, Josh. It will ruin you as a scientist.") and that philosophy has nothing to offer. When you talk to them in detail, though, you quickly realize that most of them have no idea what linguists or philosophers do, what their methods or, or why those fields have settled on those methods. And that's the height of arrogance: linguists and philosophers incude, in their numbers, some of the smartest people on the planet. It only stands to reason that they know something of value.

I'm not defending all the methods used by linguists. They could be improved. (So could methods used by physicists, too.) But linguists do do experiments, and they do work with empirical data. And they're damn smart.

Just sayin'.



Photos: mcfarlando, Jessica Florence.

Overheard: The Prodigal Academic

I recently started reading The Prodigal Academic, a blog by a professor recently returned to academia after 7 years away. Lately she's written a number of useful posts about academia as a career. See these posts on spousal hiring, search committee dynamics, interviewing for tenure-track jobs, and women in science.

Mind and Brain

In periodic posts, I've been trying to lay out the modern scientific consensus on the mind/brain problem, with mixed success. If I had come across the following passage, from Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture, a bit earlier, I might have saved some trouble, since I feel it is one of the clearest, most concise statements on the topic I have seen:

The predominant view is a strict materialism, in which consciousness is taken to be an emergent property of brains that are undergoing certain sorts of activity.

Although the distinction is not usually made explicit, one could assert the materialist position in either of two ways. The first would be 'methodological materialism': let's see how far we can get toward explaining consciousness under materialist assumptions, while potentially leaving open the possibility of an inexplicable residue. The second would be 'dogmatic materialism,' which would leave no room for anything but materialist explanation. Since we have no scientific tools for any sort of nonmaterialist explanation, the two positions are in practice indistinguishable, and they lead to the same research...

Of course, materialism goes strongly against folk intuition about the mind, which concurs with Descartes in thinking of the conscious mind as associated with a nonmaterial 'soul' or the like... The soul is taken to be capable of existence independently of the body. It potentially survives the death of the body and makes its way in the world as a ghost or a spirit or ensconced in another body through reincarnation... Needless to say, most people cherish the idea of being able to survive the death of their bodies, so materialism is more than an 'astonishing hypothesis,' to use Crick's (1994) term: it is a truly distressing and alienating one. Nevertheless, by now it does seem the only reasonable way to approach consciousness scientifically.