Don’t panic but psychology isn’t always a science

Every so often, the ‘is psychology a science?’ debate sparks up again, at which point, I start to weep. It’s one of the most misplaced, misfiring scientific discussions you can have and probably not for the reasons you think.

To understand why it keeps coming around you need to understand something about the politics of studying things.

Science has higher status in academia and industry than the humanities so suggesting to a practitioner that “they’re not a scientist” can be the equivalent of suggesting “you’re not as valuable as you make out”.

This plays in out in two ways: less scientific disciplines get less funding and people start being knobs at parties. The second is clearly more serious.

Probably every psychologist has had the experience of someone coming up to them and drunkenly suggesting that psychology is ‘all made up’. Psychiatrists get the same sort of crap but in the ‘you’re not a real doctor’ vein from other medics.

This makes people who work in psychological disciplines a bit insecure, so they’ll swear blind that ‘psychology is a science’.

Psychology, however, is not a science. It’s a subject area. And you can either study it scientifically or non-scientifically.

I’m going to leave aside the debate of what defines science, which has been better covered elsewhere. No, there isn’t a strict definition of science, but the “you know it when you see it” approach is sufficient if we want to see if something can be widely considered scientific.

I’m also going to leave aside the debate about whether you can study mind and behaviour scientifically. It’s clear that you can, even if some areas are harder to measure than others. This is what is usually meant by the “is psychology a science?” debate. I consider this to be a settled issue but it is also where the debate usually misfires.

In other words, psychology can be a science, but it isn’t only a science.

There are many folks who do legitimate psychology research who are not doing science. It’s not that they think they are but really aren’t (pseudoscience) or that they’re doing it so poorly it barely merits the name (bad science). It’s that they don’t want to do science in the first place.

Instead, they are doing qualitative research, where they intend to uncover patterns in people’s subjective impressions without imposing their own structure onto it.

Let me give you an example.

Perhaps I want to find out what leads victims of serious domestic violence to drop a prosecution despite the abuser already being safely in jail, pending trial.

I could come up with a list of motivations I think might be plausible and then find a way of testing whether they are present, but essentially, no matter how rigorous my methods, the study still depends on what I think is plausible to begin with.

This could be a problem because I may not know a whole lot about the area. Or worse, I may think I do, but might largely be basing my assumptions on prejudice and what passes for ‘common sense’.

Qualitative methods get at how people understand the situation from their own perspective and it looks at common themes across what they say.

In this case, the study by Amy Bonomi and colleagues applied a kind of qualitative analysis called grounded theory to transcripts of jailhouse phone calls between victims of domestic violence and the abusers.

Here’s what they found:

…a victim’s recantation intention was foremost influenced by the perpetrator’s appeals to the victim’s sympathy through descriptions of his suffering from mental and physical problems, intolerable jail conditions, and life without her. The intention was solidified by the perpetrator’s minimization of the abuse, and the couple invoking images of life without each other.

Once the victim arrived at her decision to recant, the couple constructed the recantation plan by redefining the abuse event to protect the perpetrator, blaming the State for the couple’s separation, and exchanging specific instructions on what should be said or done.

There is no pretence that this study has discovered what happens in all cases, or even if these are common factors, but what it has done is shown how this works for the people being studied.

This is massively useful information. If you’re a scientist, suddenly you have a whole bunch of hypotheses to test that are drawn from real-life situations. If you’re not, you understand one instance of this situation in a lot more detail.

The reason that human psychology can be studied both scientifically and non-scientifically is that the object of study can be objectively observed and can describe their own subjective experience.

This doesn’t happen with electrical impulses, enzymes or subatomic particles.

I’m a neuropsychologist by trade, perhaps the most clearly scientific of the psychological disciplines, but I’m not going to pretend that qualitative research psychologists aren’t doing important work that makes psychology more valuable, not less.

So psychology is not just a science, and is better off for it.

Oh yeah, and the drunk guy at the party? He’s like someone who thinks a screaming orgasm is only a drink. I’m laughing at you chump, not with you.

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Is social psychology really in crisis?

My latest ‘behind the headlines’ column for The Conversation. Probably all old news for you wised-up mindhacks.com readers, but here you go:

The headlines

Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology

Replication studies: Bad copy

The story

Controversy is simmering in the world of psychology research over claims that many famous effects reported in the literature aren’t reliable, or may even not exist at all.

The latest headlines follow the publication of experiments which failed to replicate a landmark study by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis. These experiments are examples of what psychologists call “social priming”, which is a phenomenon where people who are exposed to ideas unconsciously incorporate them into their behaviour. So people who are reminded of old age are reported to walk slower, and people asked to think about university professors do better on a trivial pursuit knowledge test.

What they actually did

The first of Dijksterhuis’ original experiments asked people to think about the typical university professor and list on paper their appearance, lifestyle and behaviours. After this they answered 42 questions taken from Trivial Pursuit.

The experiment found that people who had thought about professors scored 10% higher than people who hadn’t been primed in this way. In this latest report, David Shanks, Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London and colleagues tried to replicate this effect in nine separate experiments. They didn’t find the effect in any of their experiments, which they suggest calls into question the validity of the original research.

How plausible is it

It’s extremely plausible that people are influenced by recent activities and thoughts – the concept of priming is beyond question, having been supported by decades of research.

What’s less established is whether these effects are really “unconscious” (whatever that means) and whether sophisticated concepts like intelligence can really worm their way into our behaviour in such a profound way.

Tom’s take

The headline reporting of this spat is misleading – there’s nothing worrying about disputed results for social psychology. The process of affirming, disputing and denying results is part of the normal part of science. What is worrying is that this failed replication comes on top of other failed replications of famous social priming results and after the discovery of some high profile frauds in psychology, such as Diederik Stapel.

This has led some to talk of a crisis in experimental social psychology, centring on whether standards of research in the area have slipped enough to allow false results to become easily accepted.

The whole situation is a wonderful opportunity to see “under the hood” of science and see how it really works (rather than how we’re taught it should work). Everything is in the mix: fundamental conceptual disagreements (about the nature of unconscious processing), disciplinary tribalism (between cognitive psychologists and social psychologists), big dog personalities and emotions running high, academic fashion creating a scientific “bubble” (this is that bubble bursting) and soul-searching questions about whether our methods as researchers are fit for purpose.

My guess is that, when the dust settles, we’ll find out that priming effects can work – but they aren’t as strong or common as reported. I have faith that most effects reported in the literature will turn out to true in some form – the vast majority of psychologists are honest and methodical – but we also know for sure than some effects will turn out to have been chimeras, we just can’t say for sure in advance which.

The really interesting aspects to the debate, from my point of view, is going to be clarifying exactly how unconscious these effects are. My prejudice is that social psychologists have been overly casual about using that word, using it in circumstances which would contradict the way most people use it, whether they’re psychologists or not.

Read more

Shanks, D. R., Newell, B. R., Lee, E. H., Balakrishnan, D., Ekelund, L., Cenac, Z., Fragkiski, K. & Moore, C. (2013). Priming Intelligent Behavior: An Elusive Phenomenon, PloS one, 8(4), e56515.

Ed Yong on Bargh’s response to another failure to replicate

Rolf Zwaan on the theory of social priming

Rolf Zwaan on replication done right

Tom Stafford does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

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The psychology of energy savings: Talking behavioral economics with Alex Laskey and Sendhil Mullainathan

Business Alex Laskey of Opower shows the amount of coal that should be able to power a lightbulb for a year. But because of massive energy waste, ten timess as much coal is needed. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“For the past five years we’ve been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world,” says Alex Laskey in today’s TED Talk, given at this year’s 2013 conference in Long Beach. “And, it’s working.”

Alex Laskey: How behavioral science can lower your energy billLaskey’s company Opower partners with utility companies to deliver personalized home energy reports, all based off the insight that people are more inclined to take action on an issue when they think other people are doing better than they are. People’s energy consumption changes for the better after receiving these reports — either in the mail or through their app and website — and the effects appear to be long-lasting. This year, Laskey says, Opower expects to inspire 2 terawatt hours (TWh) in saved electricity. That’s enough to power a city of more than a quarter million people for a year.

This idea was sparked by a study run a decade ago by Arizona State University psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, who conducted an experiment to see what might make people turn off their air conditioner, and turn on their fan. Might money persuade them? Or an appeal to their better selves? Or the thought of saving the planet? Nope, nope and nope. Turns out, the one surefire way to get people to do something was to tell them their neighbors were already doing it. As Laskey comments in his talk, “Social pressure is powerful stuff.”

Sendhil Mullainathan: Solving social problems with a nudgeThat’s why Laskey and his team at Opower have partnered with behavioral scientists, including Cialdini, to experiment with different types of insights and, in doing so, try to make a dent in the giant energy problems facing the world. One of their unofficial advisers is Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of economics at Harvard and founder of Ideas42, a company “using behavioral economics to do good.” (Watch Mullainathan’s 2009 TED Talk from TED India, Solving social problems with a nudge »)

We got both Laskey and Mullainathan on the phone to talk about this fascinating field of the little things that make a person conserve energy. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Alex, how did you come across behavioral economics, and why did you think it might provide a solid foundation for a company?

Alex Laskey: I came across it accidentally. Dan Yates and I had the notion that a utility bill is a wasted opportunity, and that if we had better information about energy consumption we could do something. We knew how energy efficient our cars are, for instance, and we thought it would be great to know how efficient our homes are. We were introduced to Bob Cialdini, one of the grandfathers of this field and one of the most cited behavioral economists. We didn’t know who Bob was, but we met with him in Phoenix and then he decided to take sabbatical and spent a year working with us to make sure we didn’t screw up. So that was my first introduction to behavioral science and economics. Since then, I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to this work and now embraced by this community of talented thinkers.

How did you two come across each other?

AL: Todd Rogers, who now teaches at the Kennedy School, introduced us because they are jointly involved in Ideas 42. Sendhil came to see us in DC a number of years ago, when we were about 35 people. My read was that he was excited about all the data we had and the opportunities we had to run experiments. For economists, it can be hard to get hands on a lot of data and find people willing to do innovative experiments.

Sendhil Mullainathan: To add to that, it’s also the case that in some sense the behavioral space has grown faster than reality. People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it’s touted as some big solution. For me what’s amazing about Opower is precisely that it’s not a tiny study. This is a live operation using the principles at unimaginable scale. Opower is the best example of seeing how powerful behavioral economics can be and seeing this operate at scale.

So what has been the impact of this kind of thinking for Opower?

SM: The impacts are strikingly large. And it’s really interesting how persistent and stable they are years on out. It’s not a blip. Capital One does experiments to open credit card mailings, and they might work for one or two months, but after that, the novelty usually wears off. Here, the effects last for years, and they remain even when the intervention is removed. It’s stable behavioral change.

Why do you think that is?

SM: The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. “Big data” is terrific, but it’s usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work. To guess, one possible candidate is that people aren’t changing behavior, they’re changing equipment. Better light bulbs lead to energy saving permanently.

AL: There’s a good chance that if we stopped sending, there’d be degradation. Our longest running programs are five years old, and it seems that savings persist as long as you communicate with customers. People do revert back to their old ways, and habits do need to be reinforced to sustain them longterm. But I’m optimistic. By and large people want to do the right thing. They want to save energy, they don’t want to waste it. They want to eat healthily, to exercise, give money to charity and so on. It’s hard to get people to do something they don’t want to do, and we’re nudging people to do something they do want to do. We’re bringing their attention in a new way that’s empowering and motivating. And I suspect energy is just one area where one could see these kinds of effects.

SM: That’s a really good point. More broadly, when people think of behavioral interventions, they think they are aimed at getting people to do things they don’t want to do and it’s some kind of mind control. But as Alex says, it’s very hard to get people to do what they want to do, let alone what don’t want to do! Most of these interventions are about translating intentions into behavior. They can appear to an outsider as if it’s about changing behavior, but it’s perhaps better thought of as realizing intentions.

What experiments are you looking to try next?

AL: We’re increasingly experimenting with different channels. Mail is expensive to send out, and we have nearly nine million households getting mail, so we’re trying to see what we can do digitally, with email, text or automated phone calls. We will run around 250 experiments this year. Some of them are quite modest, small experiments, but there are a lot of bigger experiments too. One I’m excited about is a big project this summer which is focused on very near-time actions. Historically we try to motivate people to save energy, period. But for the utilities market and grid, what’s more valuable is getting people to save energy at important times. So on a hot day, everyone turns on their AC and a utility has to fire up more expensive, often dirty power plants. So this summer in Baltimore we’re rolling out a program to 300,000 customers so they can earn a rebate on their utility bill if they save energy during key four-hour blocks, ten times through the summer.

How will that work?

The utility will notify you that the next day is a peak event via text message, email or phone, and remind you that you can earn up to $20 if you save energy between noon and 4. Then, at the end of that time, we’ll do the calculation and notify you of your savings by 6pm. So you saved $12, the average customer in the area saved $8, while the biggest saver earned $20. It’s a different problem to solve so I’m interested to see how that changes the experiment. What communication is needed to get people to do something urgently and quickly? We’ll have results in the fall.

Sendhil, any thoughts or advice on how to make this work?

SM: I’ve learned not to give advice on the fly! But there is a lot of interesting stuff around urgency and what you do to create it. Tangentially related, there are great findings in behavioral science around couponing. If you send out one coupon with a deadline of a week and another that must be used within the next month, you end up having more redemptions with the one week deadline. It’s really amazing. With the month deadline you have four times as much time, but people tend to say they’ll use it in a few weeks’ time and then they don’t do it. Urgency is a very interesting topic.

AL: We’d also love to figure out how to do this without offering financial reward. I’d love to get your take on it as we progress, Sendhil. In fact, one thought to leave you with — how about asking the TED community to design experiments we can run on real world energy consumers? We feel like we’re just scratching surface of what can be accomplished and would love to get creative, talented people to help designing interventions.

A look at some of Opower’s existing platforms, which will inspire 2 terawatt hours of saved electricity this year.

View the original article here

Disaster response psychology needs to change

I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about how disaster response mental health services are often based on the erroneous assumption that everyone needs ‘treatment’ and often rely on single-session counselling sessions which may do more harm than good.

Unfortunately, the article has been given a rather misleading headline (‘Minds traumatised by disaster heal themselves without therapy’) which suggests that mental health services are not needed. This is not the case and this is not what the article says.

What it does say is that the common idea of disaster response is that everyone affected by the tragedy will need help from mental health professionals when only a minority will.

It also says that aid agencies often use single-session counselling sessions which have been found to raise the risk of long-term mental health problems. This stems from a understandable desire to ‘do something’ but this motivation is not enough to actually help.

Disaster, war, violence and conflict, raise the number of mental health problems in the affected population. The appropriate response is to build or enhance high-quality, long-term, culturally relevant mental health services – not parachuting in counsellors to do single counselling sessions.

Link to article on disaster response psychology in The Observer.

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The psychology of everything in 48 minutes

Psychologist Paul Bloom has made a fantastic video for Big Think that introduces pretty much the whole of psychology in 48 minutes.

It’s a brilliant and engaging introduction to the science of mind. Highly recommended.

Link to ‘Paul Bloom: The Psychology of Everything’ on YouTube.

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BBC Column: auction psychology

My BBC Future column from last week. The original is here

The reason we end up overspending is a result of one unavoidably irrational part of the bidding process – and that’s ourselves.

The allure and tension of an auction are familiar to most of us – let’s face it, we all like the idea of picking up a bargain. And on-line auction sites like eBay cater for this, allowing us to share in the over-excitement of auction bidding in the privacy of our homes. Yet somehow, despite our better judgement, we end up paying more than we know we should have done on that piece of furniture, equipment or clothing. What’s going on?

One estimate states that about half of eBay auctions result in higher sale prices than the “buy it now” price. This is a paradox. If the people going into the auction really wanted the item so badly, why didn’t they get it for less by paying the “buy it now” price?

This has nothing to do with the way the eBay bidding system works. In fact, unlike most auctions, the eBay auction process is actually perfectly designed to allow rational outcomes. By allowing you to set a private “maximum bid” in advance, eBay auctions are better for individual buyers than public auctions where everyone has to shout out their bid in public. No, the reason auctions – both on and offline – produce higher sale prices than any bidder originally imagined they would pay is because of one irreducibly irrational part of the bidding process: the bidders themselves.

Auctions push a number of our psychological buttons, and in fact the phenomenon of “auction fever” is well documented. They are social occasions, with lots of other people around, and this tends to increase your physiological arousal, an effect called social facilitation. As your adrenaline pumps, your heart beats faster, and your reactions quicken. This is ideal for something like sports, but makes cool rational decision making harder. The very rich often send delegates to auctions, and as well as avoiding the paparazzi I suspect this is also a strategy to combat the over-excitement induced by being physically present in the situation.

On top of this, auctions are time pressured, and – by definition – you’re bidding on something you value highly. These factors create excitement whether you are in the room or not.

Persuasive powers

Another psychological bias that operates in auctions is the endowment effect, where we tend to over-value things we already possess. By encouraging us to connect the bid (our money) with the sale item, bidding on items lets us fantasise about owning them – stimulating a kind of endowment effect. This is why the auction catalogue (or the item picture and description on a website) is so important. This forms part of the psychological journey the seller wants you to go on to imagine owning this item in advance, so you’ll place a higher value on it, and so pay more to make imagination reality.

Persuasion plays a huge part here, and the best book you can read on the psychology of the subject is Robert Cialdini’s Influence. Cialdini is a Professor of Social Psychology at Arizona State University, and he lists six major ways you can make yourself persuasive. Auctions hit at least two of these six principles square on the nose.

First, auctions use the principle of scarcity, whereby we overvalue things that we think might run out. Auction items are scarce in that they are unique (only one person can have it), and scarce in time (after the bids are finished, you’ve lost your chance). Think how many shop sales successfully rely on scarcity heuristics such as “Last day of sale!”, or “Only 2 left in stock!”, and you’ll get a feel for how powerful this persuasion principle can be.

The other principle used by auctions is that of “social proof”. We all tend to take the lead from other people; if everybody does something, or says something, most of us join in before we think about what we really should do. Auctions put you in intimate contact with other people who are all providing social proof that the sale item is important and valuable.

A final ingredient in the magic-spell cast by auctions was uncovered by researchers from Princeton. Their experiments asked volunteers to play on-line auctions with different rules. Some of these auctions had rules that encouraged over-bidding (like typical open auctions, which most of us are familiar with from movies), and some had rules that encouraged rational behaviour (like the eBay structure). With enough guidance from the auction rules, the bidders didn’t end up paying much more than they originally thought was reasonable – but only if they thought they were bidding against a computer programme. As soon as the volunteers thought they were bidding against other live humans they found it impossible to bid rationally, whatever the auction rules.

This implies that the competitive element of auctions is crucial to provoking our irrational buying behaviour. Once we’re involved in an auction we’re not just paying to own the sale item, we’re paying to beat other people who are bidding and prevent them from having it.

So it seems Gore Vidal had human nature, and the psychology of auctions, about right when he said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

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Post-sex psychology

Slate has an article covering the growing research on post-sex behaviour – what we do after we’ve got it on and what it might mean.

To be honest, I had no idea that anyone was studying what people do after sex but it sounds like the science is well underway.

Counter to popular opinion, a dated study, and the great wisdom of many lady mags, researchers have not found that men fall asleep faster than women after sex. In fact, according to a recent study [pdf] of heterosexual pairings by Kruger and Hughes, a woman is just as likely as a man to be out first. But — and here’s the interesting part — regardless of gender, the partner who stayed awake longer reported that they weren’t getting enough post-sex hugging, kissing or talking – what evolutionary psychologists call “pair bonding” activities…

And what about the other activities people move on to after sex, like hanging out in bed, ordering Chinese food, or smoking a cigarette? Earlier in 2011 Kruger and Hughes published a report in the Journal of Sex Research, considering a wider range of after-sex impulses. In that case they found that our post-coital behaviors – again considering only heterosexual sex – tend to split along gender lines. Eating, fixing yourself a drink, smoking and asking your partner for favors – all activities that sound pretty good to me – were more likely to be taken on by the men. The women, in this case, placed greater importance on behaviors related to intimacy, like cuddling and “professing their love.”

From reading the article though it’s clearly a fascinating area, even if the research seems only to have looked at heterosexual sex so far.

Apparently though, my preferred behaviour, apologising, seems barely to feature at all.

Link to ‘After the Climax’ from Salon (via @QMUPsychology)

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Escaping from the past of disaster psychology

Scientific American has a useful piece on how the immediate treatment of psychological trauma has changed since 9/11. The issue is interesting because recent progress has turned lots of psychological concepts on their head to the point where many still can’t grasp the concepts.

The article notes that at the time of the Twin Towers disaster, the standard form of treatment was Critical Incident Stress Debriefing – also known as CISD or just ‘debriefing’ – a technique where psychologists would ask survivors, usually in groups, to describe what happened and ‘process’ all the associated emotions by talking about them.

This technique is now not recommended because we know it is at best useless and probably harmful – owing to the fact that it seems to increase trauma in the long-term.

Instead, we use an approach called psychological first aid, which, instead of encouraging people to talk about all their emotions, really just focuses on making sure people feel secure and connected.

Although the article implies that 9/11 was a major turning point for our knowledge of immediate post-trauma treatment, the story is actually far more complex.

Studies had been accumulating throughout the 90s showing that ‘debriefing’ caused harm in some, although it wasn’t until around the turn of the century that two meta-analyses sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, the practice of ‘debriefing’ by aid agencies and emergency psychologists was very hard to change for a number of interesting reasons.

A lot of aid agencies don’t deal directly with the scientific literature. Sometimes, they just don’t have the expertise but often it’s because they simply have no access to it – as most of it is locked behind paywalls.

However, probably most important was that even the possibility of ‘debriefing’ having the potential to do damage was very counter-intuitive.

The treatment was based on the then-accepted foundations of psychological theory that said that emotions always need to be expressed and can do damage if not ‘processed’.

On top of this, for the first time, many clinicians had to deal with the concept that a treatment could do damage even though the patients said it was helpful and were actually and genuinely getting better.

This is so difficult to grasp that many still continue with the old and potentially damaging practices, so here’s a quick run down of why this makes sense.

The theoretical part is a hang-over from Freudian psychology. Freud believed that neuronal energy was directly related to ‘mental energy’ and so psychology could be understood in thermodynamic terms.

Particularly important in this approach is the first law of thermodynamics that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed just turned into another form. Hence Freud’s idea that emotions need to be ‘expressed’ or ‘processed’ to transform them from a pathological form to something less harmful.

We now know this isn’t a particularly reliable guide to human psychology but it still remains hugely popular so it seemed natural that after trauma, people would need to ‘release’ their ‘pent up emotions’ by talking about them lest the ‘internal pressure’ led to damage further down the line.

And from the therapists’ point of view, the patients said the intervention was helpful and were genuinely getting better, so how could it be doing harm?

In reality, the psychologists would meet with heavily traumatised people, ‘debrief’ them, and in the following weeks and months, the survivors would improve.

But this will happen if you do absolutely nothing. Directly after a disaster or similarly horrible event people will perhaps be the most traumatised they will ever be in their life, and so will naturally move towards a less intense state.

Statistically this is known as regression to the mean and it will occur even if natural recovery is slowed by a damaging treatment that extends the risk period, which is exactly what happens with ‘debriefing’.

So while the treatment was actually impeding natural recovery you would only be able to see the effect if you compare two groups. From the perspective of the psychologists who only saw the post-trauma survivors it can look as if the treatment is ‘working’ when improvement, in reality, was being interfered with.

This effect was compounded by the fact that debriefing was single session. The psychologists didn’t even get to see the evolution of the patients afterwards to help compare with other cases from their own experience.

On top of all this, after the ‘debriefing’ sessions, patients actually reported the sessions were useful even when long-term damage was confirmed, because, to put it bluntly, patients are no better than seeing the future than professionals.

In one study, 80% of patients said the intervention was “useful” despite having more symptoms of mental illness in the long-term compared to disaster victims who had no treatment. In another, more than half said ‘debriefing’ was “definitely useful” despite having twice the rate of postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a year.

Debriefing involves lots of psychological ‘techniques’, so the psychologists felt they were using their best tools, while the lack of outside perspective meant it was easy to mistake instant feedback and regression to the mean for actual benefit.

It’s worth saying that the same techniques that do damage directly after trauma are the single best psychological treatment when a powerful experience leads to chronic mental health problems. Revisiting and ‘working through’ the traumatic memories is an essential part of the treatment when PTSD has developed.

So it seemed to make sense to apply similar ideas to those in the acute stage of trauma, but probably because the chance of developing PTSD is related to the duration of arousal at the time of the event, ‘going over’ the events shortly after they’ve passed probably extends the emotional impact and the long-term risks.

But while the comparative studies should have put an end to the practice, it wasn’t until the World Health Organisation specifically recommended that ‘debriefing’ not be used in response to the 2004 tsunami [pdf] that many agencies actually changed how they went about managing disaster victims.

As well as turning disaster psychology on its head, this experience has dispelled the stereotype that ‘everyone needs to talk’ after difficult events and, in response, the new approach of psychological first aid was created.

Psychological first aid is actually remarkable for the fact that it contains so little psychology, as you can see from the just released psychological first aid manual from the World Health Organisation.

You don’t need to be a mental health professional to use the techniques and they largely consist of looking after the practical needs of the person plus working toward making them feel safe and comfortable.

No processing of emotions, no ‘disaster narratives’, no fancy psychology – really just being practical, gentle and kind.

We don’t actually know if psychological first aid makes people less likely to experience trauma, as it hasn’t been directly tested, although it is based on the best available evidence to avoid harm and stabilise extreme stress.

So while 9/11 certainly focussed people’s minds on psychological trauma and its treatment (especially in the USA which is a world leader in the field) it was really just another bitter waymarker in a series of world tragedies that has shaped disaster response psychology.

So unusually for a psychologist, I’ll be hoping we’ll have the chance to do less research in this particular area and have a more peaceful coming decade.

Link to SciAm piece on psychology and the aftermath of 9/11.

View the original article here

Riot psychology

In the coming weeks we can expect to see politicians and pundits lining up to give us their smash-and-grab clichés for the recent urban riots in the UK.

They’ll undoubtedly give a warm welcome to our old friends economic decay, disengaged youth and opportunistic crime, and those of a more psychological persuasion might name-drop ‘deindividuation’ – the process where we supposedly lose self-awareness and responsibility in large crowds.

This belies the fact that crowd behaviour is a complex area that is surprisingly poorly researched.

But what we do know about is the interaction between large crowds and the police and you could do much worse than check out the work of psychologist Clifford Stott who researches how crowds react to policing and what triggers violence.

In his 2009 report on the scientific evidence behind ‘Crowd Psychology and Public Order Policing,’ commissioned by the UK constabulary, he summarises what we know about public disorder and how the authorities can best manage it (you can download it as a pdf).

He notes that the old ideas about the ‘mob mentality’, deindividuation and the loss of individual responsibility are still popular, but completely unsupported by what we know about how crowds react.

People don’t become irrational and they do keep thinking for themselves, but that doesn’t mean that the influence of the crowd has no effect.

In terms of policing, one of the clearest effects to emerge from studies of riots and crowd control is that an indiscriminate kicking from riot police can massively increase the number of people in the crowd who become violent.

This is probably because the social identity of people in a group is fluid and changes according to the relationship with other groups.

For those into academic jargon, this is known as the Elaborated Social Identity Model of crowd behaviour – a well-supported theory with an overly complicated name but which is surprisingly easy to understand.

Imagine you’ve just got on a bus. It’s full of people and you have to jam into an uncomfortable seat at the back. There are people going to work, some vacant students heading home after a night on the beers, some annoying teenagers playing dance music through their tinny mobile phone speakers and some old folks heading off to buy their groceries.

You’re late and you missed your train. You feel nothing in common with anyone on the bus and, to be honest, those teenagers are really pissing you off.

Suddenly, two of the windows smash and you realise that a group of people are attacking the bus and trying to steal bags through the broken windows.

Equally as quickly, you begin to feel like one of a group. A make-shift social identity is formed (‘the passengers’) and you all begin to work together to fend off the thieves and keep each other safe.

You didn’t lose your identity, you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.

The problem police face is that in most large threatening crowds only a minority of people are engaging in anti-social acts. Lots of people ‘go along for the ride’ but aren’t the hardcore that kick-off without provocation.

If the police wade in with batons indiscriminately, lots of these riot wannabes suddenly start to feel like they’re part of the bigger group and feel justified in ripping the place apart, mostly to throw at the coppers.

Suddenly, it’s ‘them’ against ‘us’ and a small policing problem just got much much bigger – like attacking a beehive because you just got stung.

The trick for the police is to make sure they’re perceived as a legitimate force. When they have to charge in, they’re doing so for a reason – to target specific criminals. The ‘them and us’ feeling doesn’t kick in because most individuals don’t feel that the police are targeting them. It’s the other idiots the police are after.

And herein lies the problem. The psychology of crowd control is largely based on the policing of demonstrations and sports events where the majority of people will give the police the benefit of the doubt and assume their status as a legitimate force.

Clifford Stott’s report has lots of advice for forces who want to establish and maintain this impression. The cops should start out in standard uniforms, should be scattered around the crowd and should make an effort to interact. If trouble looks like it’s brewing, non-violent folks should be allowed to leave and the police ‘have a word’ with the specific people involved. Force is only ramped up in proportion to the threat.

I’m no expert and I’ve been watching the UK riots from 5,000 miles away from the safety of Colombia (a sentence I never thought I’d write) but it strikes me that most of the rioters probably never thought of the police as a legitimate force to begin with.

This goes beyond establishing police legitimacy on the day and means many of the standard assumptions of behind crowd control probably don’t work as well.

But the fact that thousands of young people across the country don’t have faith in police is a much deeper social problem that can’t be solved through street tactics.

I have no easy answers and I suspect they don’t exist. Politicians, start your clichés.

Link to homepage of psychologist Clifford Stott.
pdf of ‘Crowd Psychology and Public Order Policing’.

View the original article here

Psychology and its national styles

An interesting paragraph from a 2005 article on the history of psychological concepts.

It tracks how different styles of psychology emerged in different countries depending on the social and political problems active at the time.

In Britain, there was a noteworthy interest in individual differences, the distribution of these differences in the population and the significance of this data in social, educational and political questions. The result was a psychology intimately bound up with statistics.

In France, a clinical method and an interest in the exceptional, perhaps pathological, individual case (the hysteric, the prodigy of memory, the double personality) was characteristic of early work.

In Germany, the dominant academic interest, supported by an experimental methodology adapted from physiology, was in the conscious content of the rational adult mind. This interest interacted with philosophical questions about the foundations of knowledge.

In the United States, a pragmatic temper and the opportunity to obtain funding for a psychology aimed at the solution of social problems directed psychology towards a science of behaviour, with a methodology appropriate for the study of learning and adaptation.

In Russia, stark opposition between a conservative politics of the soul expressed in Orthodox belief and radical materialism led, in the Soviet period, to support for psychology as a theory of ‘higher nervous activity’, in Pavlov’s phrase, which threatened to make psychology part of physiology.

Such generalisations go only so far, but they do make clear the sheer variety and complexity of psychology just at the time when, as convention holds, the modern discipline emerged.

Link to locked article ‘The history of psychological categories’.

View the original article here

The psychology of expert predictions

This week’s edition of BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind has a fantastic section on the psychology of knowledgeable predictions that bursts lots of bubbles about the power of experts but also discusses how to make more accurate predictions.

You can listen to the whole programme online but it seems the crucial section has accidentally found it’s way onto YouTube which you can catch here.

The discussion is with author Dan Gardner and by psychologist Dylan Evans who tackle the links between risk, prediction and knowledge.

It has lots of fascinating insights, including the fact that the fame of experts is inversely related to their accuracy, that US weather forecasters are better than UK forecasters (and not because UK weather is more difficult), and that more confident predictions are more likely to be wrong.

If you want to catch the whole of All in the Mind the section of grief myths is also wonderful.

Link to All in the Mind.
Link to section on expert predictions.

View the original article here

The psychology of the dead in the Amazon

Anthropologist Anne Christine Taylor lived with the Achuar people of the Northern Amazon and described the traditional beliefs about how death causes specific psychological impairments to the deceased although their presence can be experienced through drug-induced visions that form a part of a boy’s voyage into manhood.

In an article on the mourning practices of the Achuar, Tayor describes how the tribe have no concept of an ‘afterlife’ as they make no distinction between planes of existence and believe that the wakan or disembodied essence of the dead still remain in the area.

Strikingly, death is thought to affect the mind of the deceased so that the disembodied person retains sensory perception and some limited understanding but they remain entirely unaware of the nature of their own (un)existence.

This lack of understanding of their new ‘situation’ is thought to cause intense intense loneliness and psychological distress in the dead.

The funeral ceremony serves to inform the deceased that they have died and provides a way of disremembering the deceased. There are no rituals of remembrance, tombs or markers.

In fact, the tribe makes efforts to ensure that the dead are no longer talked about, remembered or memorialised in any way because thinking about the ‘dead’ is thought to be a form of dangerous contact in which the mentally impaired wakan can capture people to alleviate their solitude and anguish.

The wakan do, however, play a part in the rituals of manhood. From the age of about ten or twelve the menfolk of the village go into the forest to drink a mixture of green tobacco juice and datura stramonium – a plant common around the world and known by a list of poetic names such as jimson weed, devil’s trumpet and burundanga.

The plant is highly hallucinogenic and despite the fact that it grows almost everywhere it is rarely used recreationally as it usually leaves the affected person completely delirious and dangerously close to death.

But for the Achuar men, the drink separates the wakan from the body of the drinker, allowing a meeting with a wakan of the dead. Taylor describes the visions:

The apparition eventually comes forth, first in the shape of a huge ball of fire rolling towards the supplicant (the payar or comet evoked in many mourning chants), or of two giant, intertwined anacondas thrashing about in the clearing, or of a huge, dead and blackened tree, a blood-soaked warrior, or possibly a looming, mutilated arm cracking the joints of its fingers. The seeker must then go up to this horrifying vision and touch it with his hand or a stick, whereupon it explodes and disappears.

After this almighty vision, the seeker encounters the wakan of one of the deceased who communicates a verbal message to the seeker which he must never reveal.

The ceremony is repeated throughout the lifespan in order to establish the manhood of the Achuar males and build up both their fighting spirit and self-control.

Link to locked Anne Christine Taylor on mourning in the Achuar.

View the original article here

A connoisseur’s list of essential psychology

Every month since 2008 The Psychologist magazine has run an interview with a leading psychologist where they ask them to name one book or journal article, either contemporary or historical, that all psychologists should read.

The BPS Research Digest has compiled all the answers into handy and fascinating list.

A few of the answers:

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. “You’ll get to understand why hypocrites never see their own hypocrisy, why couples so often misremember their shared history, why many people persist in courses of action that lead straight into quicksand. It’s lucid and witty, and a delightful read,” said Elizabeth Loftus, Oct 08.

“Muriel Dimen’s Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, which offers one feminist’s journey from dualism to multiplicity, questioning and making more complex all the accounts we have of how you grow up to become a sexed person,” said Lynne Segal, Jan 09.

“B.F. Skinner’s The operational analysis of psychological terms (Psychological Review 52, 270–277, 1945) is rarely read and even less often understood. Contrary to some misrepresentations of his position, Skinner never doubted that we can describe internal states such as thoughts or emotions, but he wondered how we are able to do this. His answer was surprising, relevant to the practice of psychotherapy, and a challenge to all those who (like some unsophisticated therapists) assume that we can know our own feelings by a simple process of self-inspection,” said Richard Bentall, Apr 11.

There are many more where they came from to make for an eye-opening and informative list of recommendations.

Link to BPS Research Digest list of essential reads.

View the original article here

The Rough Guide to Psychology

Friend of mindhacks.com and contributor to the original Mind Hacks book, Christian Jarrett has written the “The Rough Guide to Psychology“, published this month, and a right rip roaring read it is too. It’s a whistle-stop tour through all aspects of the science of mind and behaviour, which reveals just how diverse and rich the field of psychology is. From visual perception to intelligence testing, sport psychology and gender differences to developmental disorders – Christian is the consummate guide, introducing the scientific essentials, giving the history of psychological research and highlighting links to the everyday world of our own experiences. The reader gets the benefits of Christian’s unique skills – he’s a fully trained research scientist but also has the jackdaw curiosity of the science journalist, honed by the experience of writing for the BPS Psychologist magazine and Research Digest.

It isn’t possible to download knowledge in the way Keanu does in the Matrix (“I know kung-fu“), but reading the Rough Guide to Psychology feels like the next best thing. Wonderful breadth, impressive depth and fun throughout – the next time someone asks me for an introduction to Psychology I’ll give them this book.

View the original article here

A history of psychology through objects

This is an early Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) machine, from 1945.

Note the incorporation of the telephone dial for controvoling the duration of the shock.

This is a brass observation hole from St. Audry’s Hospital, Suffolk, England, 1851-1900.

Mounted in a door, this peephole allowed doctors and warders to check on a patient locked in solitary confinement.

These, and hundreds of other fascinating objects from the history of psychology and psychiatry, can be seen at the Science Museum’s Brought To Life website. Scroll down to Themes -> Mental Health and Illness for these examples, but keep yours eyes open throughout the exhibit for artifacts which reflect our changing and complex understanding of the mind and its disorders.

While you’re there, don’t miss the interactive Three Psychiatric tests which gives you a chance to see how psychiatrists from the 1930s, 40s and 50s would have used classic psychometric tests to diagnose mental illnesses such as dementia or schizophrenia.

Thanks to Philip Loring, BPS Curator of Psychology at the Science Museum, who gave a talk about this digital exhibition Sheffield last night

View the original article here

The psychology of the 7 deadly sins

The Psychologist has an engrossing article on the psychology behind the ’7 Deadly Sins’ and how they relate to modern life.

The piece is full of fascinating and counter-intuitive snapshots from the science of social emotions. For example:

Whereas the success and status of others can provoke envy, pride is what we feel when the success and status are our own. Pride, like envy is a human universal, and is another of the sins considered by psychology to be an emotion. Darwin categorised it alongside states such as vanity and suspicion as a ‘complex emotion’. He also anticipated contemporary research showing that the expression of pride – head held high, arms raised – is recognised universally across cultures and by children as young as four.

In 2008 Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia and David Matsumoto at San Francisco State University studied congenitally blind Olympic judo competitors and found that they too showed pride in this way, even though they can’t ever have seen a pride display by anyone else.

The BPS Research Digest blog will also be running a ‘sin week’ in the coming week so keep your eye’s peeled for more bad behaviour.

Link to The Psychologist on the deadly sins.

Full disclosure: I am an unpaid associate editor and columnist for The Psychologist although apart from the occasional lie I live entirely free of sin.

View the original article here

Putting Psychology To Work

And Lo! Unto the always excellent BPS Research Digest, a child is born! The BPS Occupational Digest. is new blog which will cover news, reviews and reports on how psychology matters in the workplace. It will be curated by friend of mindhacks.com (and contributor to the Mind Hacks book) Alex Fradera.

Blogging hasn’t started yet at the BPS Occupational Digest, but we’re looking forward to what Alex serves up. Watch this space!

Link to BPS Occupational Digest.

View the original article here

The psychology of shoulder-to-shoulder

The consistently sublime RadioLab has a wonderful programme on the psychology of altruism which manages to capture the psychology of supporting others in gripping stories of human interaction.

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice.

Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

The programme touches on everything from the mathematics of nuclear war to the motivation for heroism and, as always, is really better experienced than described.

But even given the usual exceptional quality of RadioLab, this episode is definitely not one to miss. Fantastic stuff.

Link to RadioLab on altruism.

View the original article here