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I have just read an awesome psychology paper, Cognitive Consequences Of Forced Compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; FG59). For the interested reader, the main results from this paper have been explained in this article and I would recommend that everybody reads it, it’s really interesting. FG59 contained details of the first experiment to show that cognitive dissonance is a real effect. Cognitive dissonance is defined to be what happens:

when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and values, and persuasive information that calls these into question. The discrepancy causes psychological discomfort, and the mind adjusts to reduce the discrepancy.

Various examples of cognitive dissonance are given in this article, titled “How and Why We Lie to Ourselves”, for example:

• When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.
• People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
• People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that “Everyone does it” so they would be losing out if they didn’t, or alternatively that “I’m underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side.”

I’m trying right now to think of episodes of cognitive dissonance in my own life and am struggling very much. The obvious thing should be that I *ahem* ‘infringe copyright’ occasionally. I have heard all sorts of justifications from people who want to download free things (”It doesn’t hurt anybody”, “Information wants to be free, man”), but inside have never been able to shake the feelings of guilt. I also try in my professional life to remain as impartial and unbiased as possible, and to give every idea a hearing. Who knows, perhaps I succeed, perhaps I fail.

late edit: i fail

NEWSFLASH! Men prefer attractive women!

That, folks, is the sort of groundbreaking, cutting edge, novel, and unexpected result that wins Nobel prizes.

I have recently been reading about some research carried out on where people’s eyes go when asked to look at different things. Here is the average distribution of gazes when people are confronted with webpages (orange = spent a lot of time looking there)

It’s a bit disheartening in that most people only read the first paragraph in a page, although it’s good to know it’s therefore important to get all of the information in quickly. Secondly I saw this:

This compares what the eyes do between an artist (right) and a ‘normal person’ (left). It’s quite neat that the eyes of the artist take in the whole scene, whereas the the eye that hasn’t been trained to do so fixates on the ‘interesting’ bit of the scene. Finally, I’ll leave you with this. The distribution of male and female gazes when asked to identify a sportsman:

I’m going to have nightmares now about walking into rooms full of men and knowing that they’re all staring at my crotch.

I was reading the other day about the following criminal case (link)

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again.

I find this case very interesting. It has always been one of the central tenets of our judicial system that people are personally responsible for their actions and may therefore be punished on this basis. With cases like this and recent discoveries relating genetics to behaviour, including that concentrations of particular messenger molecules in the brain are congenital and also predispose you to a violent temper we begin to blur the line between free-will and that awful 1960’s B. F. Skinner style behaviourism. It seems clear now that there are a whole host of factors that can affect how people respond to certain stimuli

Genetic: It is pretty undeniable that our genetics alter everything, from our propensity for violence to our risks of going mad. Is it fair to lock up a high risk offender before they do anything? The UK government certainly thinks it might be

Social: The other half of the nature-nuture debate is [more/less/equally as] important as genetics. From talking to Gem (who, for those that don’t know is a metal health nurse) about personality disorders. If, through therapy we can ‘cure’ somebody of their behavioural issues how should they be punished?

Biological: As in the pedophilia case discussed above if somebody is being controlled by outside influences, for example a brain tumour or perhaps a parasite, then if these factors can be removed, how should they be punished?

Personal: To what extent, considering the points above, is an individual responsible for their actions? Hell, is there even such a thing as free will or are we really just the sum of our genetics and experiences.

Much of our response to these questions rests upon our attitudes to punishment. Is it main purpose retribution? vengeance? deterrence? rehabilitation? safety? enforcing morality? all of the above? none of the above?

Unfortunately the answer, as is so often the case, isn’t black and white. There are elements of each of the points above in our attitudes towards jail. As science marches inexorably forward it provides us with many interesting moral dilemmas. Can we lock up high risk offenders, before they commit a crime? How should we punish people that have been cured of their violent nature? (as per usual Richard Dawkins argues most eloquently about these points)

I just hope we don’t end up seeing court cases end in the following way:

“Mr. CMB, of the crime of writing a shitty blog you are found guilty. 23% of the blame is found to lie with your genetics, 45% may be accounted for by your upbringing and current mental state, and 32% is due to your own free will. You will therefore undergo a course of personal therapy, a course of genetic treatment and serve 32% of your sentence in jail. This course of treatments is expected to bring you up to the minimum social, moral and ethical standards expected in today’s society.”

p.s. No wordless wednesday this week. My funny pictures folder is on the computer at home

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I was recently reading about the placebo effect. I’m sure most of us have seen various news articles about how massively effective a placebo can be. This paragraph nicked from the wiki gives a quick intro:

Beecher (1955) reported that about a quarter of patients who were administered a placebo, e.g. against back pain, reported a relief or diminution of pain. Remarkably, not only did the patients report improvement, but the improvements themselves were often objectively measurable, and the same improvements were typically not observed in patients who did not receive the placebo.

Because of this effect, government regulatory agencies approve new drugs only after tests establish not only that patients respond to them, but also that their effect is greater than that of a placebo (by way of affecting more patients, by affecting responders more strongly or both). Such a test or clinical trial is called a placebo-controlled study. Because a doctor’s belief in the value of a treatment can affect his or her behaviour, and thus what his or her patient believes, such trials are usually conducted in “double-blind” fashion: that is, not only are the patients made unaware when they are receiving a placebo, the doctors are made unaware too. Recently, it has even been shown that “mock” surgery can have similar effects, and so some surgical techniques must be studied with placebo controls (rarely double blind, due to the difficulty involved). To merit approval, the group receiving the experimental treatment must experience a greater benefit than the placebo group.

So the placebo effect is pretty powerful. Even having read a bit about faith healings and how “fake surgeries” can make a patient feel better (see the character of Andy Kaufmann played in “The Man in the Moon”) I wasn’t expecting to find this brilliant paper (Blackwell et. al. 1972), which discusses giving placebos of different colours to some patients. Their results are startling:
"The colour of a placebo can influence its effects. When administered without information about whether they are stimulants or depressives, blue placebo pills produce depressant effects, whereas red placebos induce stimulant effects"

It really highlights how our expectations about things affect what really happens. I vividly remember when I was little going for two injections. During one of them the doctor got me to close my eyes and look the other way. I clenched up, ready to have some sort of knitting needle jammed straight through my arm, and sure enough it bloody well hurt. I came out of there in tears. One week later I needed another injection and was absolutely terrified. When I got in there, the doctor told me that it would sting a little bit, but was nothing to be scared of. Then he distracted me by asking what I learnt at school today and the injection was over before I even noticed. It seems that expectation is everything.

One one last note, this talk about red and blue pills got me thinking about the matrix

The red pill and the blue pill. I’m sure it happened subconsciously but it was written that the blue pill lets you live out the rest of your life in ignorance and safely. The red pill is the one full of excitement and danger.

Just like the placebo effect.

Say hello to the uncanny valley:

I guess this graph (with annotation like “zombie” and “bunraku puppet”) deserves a bit of explanation. We are looking at a plot of “how much a person empathises with a machine” (or familiarity) as a function of “how much like a human it appears”.

Imagine an industrial machine, it has no human features and we don’t feel anything for it, it’s just a machine.

Moving further along the x-axis we get to cuddly toys and dolls, they definitely have human-like features. Big cute eyes, big heads, little limbs. Just the right combination of almost-human stuff to make you say “Awwww”.

So why, if we keep on making things more realistic is it thought that people will begin to dislike them again. I’ll let wikipedia speak for me here:

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

With that in mind watch this video. Does it (she?) look human? What is wrong? What is right?

This thing definitely feels like the uncanny valley to me, at times I can almost believe that it is human, but then the way it jerks around when bending and the lack of motion in its fingers just screams BAD!, and I think that it would actually be quite unpleasant to be around.

I have recently been reading the book “How the Mind Works” by Stephen Pinker. It feels like there are revelations about little facets of the human condition on every page, From why Jews don’t eat pork, the purpose of fashion, emotion and marriage to why we like music and art. I’m having a great time reading it and would heartily recommend it to others.

One passage I particularly enjoyed is where Pinker discusses fear. It’s not something I had really given much thought to before, but we really are wired up in quite a clever way, as evidenced by how we react to different stimuli:

The psychiatrist Isaac Marks has shown that people react in different ways to different frightening things, each reaction appropriate to the hazard. An animal triggers an urge to flee, but a precipice causes one to freeze. Social threats lead to shyness and gestures of appeasement. People really do faint at the sight of blood, because their blood pressure drops, presumably a response that would minimize the further loss of one's own blood. The best evidence that fears are not just bugs in the nervous system is that animals that have evolved on islands without predators lose their fear and are sitting ducks for any invader--hence the expression dead as a dodo

But can we be scared of anything, or is there some sort of underlying pattern that describes why some things are intrinsically more scary than others? One particularly cruel chap decided to find out:

[the scientist] came up behind an eleven month old boy playing with a tame white rat and suddenly clanged two steel bars together. After a few more clangs, the boy became afraid of the rat and also other white furry things, including rabbits, dogs, a sealskin coat, and Santa Claus

And after trying the same thing out on a whole bunch of other kids, decided that

in fact creatures cannot be conditioned to fear any old thing, children are nervous about rats [...] before any conditioning begins, and they easily associate them with danger. Change the white rat to some arbitrary object, like opera glasses, and the child never learns to fear it. [...] The psychologist Martin Seligman suggests that fears can be easily conditioned only when the animal is evolutionarily prepared to make the association

Lots of time to kill at the moment so I’m catching up on a lot of reading. One thing that I’m plowing my way through is The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. The thesis of the book is as follows:

What is the truth about human nature? Are we each born a blank slate upon which experience is written? Steven Pinker argues that our usual explanations of human behaviour - stated most clearly in the human sciences of psychology, ethics and politics - tend to deny what is now undeniable: the role of an inherited human nature. Differences in personality or achievement, whether seen among races, ethnic groups, sexes or individuals, are routinely explained away as due not to differences in innate constitution but differences in experience. This work argues otherwise.

One thing that really stood out to me as very interesting is
Donald E. Brown’s List of Human Universals. This is a list of all known characteristics common to every single human culture ever discovered. Some of the entries in the list are quite interesting:

• snakes, wariness around - interesting to note that cultures otherwise isolated from all of snakekind are still wary around them.
• conflict - In fact every known culture has weapons exactly as sophisticated as their technology allows, no noble savages here.
• males, on average, travel longer distance over lifetime - never knew that.
• Oedipus complex - haha what the fuck?

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