Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Rationality and the compatibility of preferences

In political science, there are a huge number of models of individual and group behaviour that are predicated on the assumption of rationality: basically, that people have a set of preferences about how the world and their lives should be and they make choices that raise the odds of outcomes they favour while reducing the odds of outcomes they oppose.

There is probably an even larger literature pointing out the flaws in this categorization. People don’t know everything, and even the information they do have is costly to acquire. It can be empirically demonstrated that people sometimes have sets of preferences that are not neatly ordered (they may prefer A to B and B to C, yet somehow prefer C to A). Many quirks of human psychology have been demonstrated, in which small or irrelevant details affect the choices people make.

Another important challenge to rational accounts is uncertainty about the compatibility of objectives. Wanting to live an open and flamboyantly homosexual lifestyle may be obviously incompatible with wanting to run for office as a conservative Republican in some jurisdictions, but there are many possible preferences for which it isn’t clear if achieving objective X necessarily requires sacrificing objective Y. That uncertainty is overlaid upon uncertainty about which objectives you actually can achieve (you may be unable to become an international swimming champion, even if you do sacrifice your aspiration to go the medical school in order to raise the odds). In many cases, outcomes could go either way. Maybe implementing an ambitious climate change agenda will doom your odds of re-election… or maybe it will improve them.

None of this is to say that rational models of decision-making are necessarily useless, or that they have no place in political analysis. Nonetheless, bearing these limitations in mind may contribute to a useful form of humility.

Anything but comp prep

Partly because of its supposed effectiveness in countering stress, spending moderate amounts of time at the gym falls within what I consider acceptable procrastination. It certainly helps that the Hart House gym has pretty good hours and is only a four minute walk from my bedroom (as well as the libraries where I should generally be embedded for the next month).

Generally, I do 25 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine, run a lap, do another 25 minutes of cardio, run another lap, and then row for 2000 metres. Even with my new glasses, I don’t find that I can effectively read during any of these activities, so it’s also a chance to catch up on Planet Money, This American Life, The Current (I tend to avoid the most depressing stories), and the Savage Lovecast (abrasive, but a useful source of perspective – like his long-running column). I wish Stephen Fry released his podgrams much more often (the one on language is wonderful, and an antidote to pedantry).

When working on exceptionally daunting and unpleasant tasks, I have to suspend the rules of my normal procrastination flowchart, since following it would easily allow me to cut study time to nothing. Beyond the gym, a few forms of acceptable non-study activity include corresponding with friends and family members (though I am still well behind); dealing with especially time-sensitive 350.org tasks; purchasing, cooking, and eating brain-sustaining food; taking and posting photos of the day; and doing a quantity of paid work that reduces the rate at which my savings are depleting.

Less justifiable activities that sometimes sneak in are the occasional ladder game of Starcraft II (seems to raise wakefulness as much as a large cup of coffee, without insomniac side-effects), reading materials unrelated to the comp, and ongoing endless correspondence with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Living with a fifth limb

Both to feel a little less surveilled and to be subjected to fewer deviations from whatever stream of thought is ongoing, I often choose to leave my cell phone at home when going out.

The choice does serve those purposes but, whether my phone-side pocket is empty or stocked with some less intrusive object, I nonetheless feel periodic spontaneous sensations which can be interpreted as the buzz of text messages or email. It’s somewhat akin, perhaps, to the phantom limb syndrome experienced by those who have lost arms, legs, or digits. Once the brain has come to expect sensations from a particular part of the peripheral nervous system, it will sometimes introduce them by its own invention whether the genuine form is present or not.

Insurgent motivations in El Salvador, 1987-96

“My insurgent informants made it clear to me that moral commitments and emotional engagements were principal reasons for their insurgent collective action during the civil war. Before the war, many participated in a social movement calling for economic reform and political inclusion because they had become convinced that social justice was God’s will. As government violence deepened, some rural residents supported the armed insurgency as an act of defiance of long-resented authorities and a repudiation of perceived injustices (particularly brutal and arbitrary state violence). Participation per se expressed outrage and defiance; its force was not negated by the unlikeliness of victory and in any case was not contingent on one’s participation. Through rebellion, insurgent residents asserted their dignity in the face of condescension, repression, and indifference. As state terror decreased, insurgent collective action spread across most of the case-study areas once more as residents occupied properties and claimed land for insurgent cooperatives. They did so despite their already having access to abandoned land because they took pride, indeed pleasure, in the successful assertion of their interests and identity, what I term the pleasure of agency. To occupy properties was to assert a new identity of social equality, to claim rights to land and self-determination, and to refute condescending elite perceptions of one’s incapacities. In short, insurgent supporters were motivated in part by the value they put on being part of making history.” p. 119-20 (paperback)

Wood, Elizabeth Jean. “Ethnographic Research in the Shadow of Civil War” in Schatz, Edward. Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Regarding ‘exit’

When voice fails to convince the client to support the analyst’s policy choice, the issue advocate may be forced to turn to exit as his only means of influence. He may seek other, more receptive, clients in the bureaucracy or he may leave the bureaucracy in order to be able to promote his policies from outside provided, of course, that the exit option is not too expensive. In any case, for the issue advocate, keeping one’s bags packed may be an ethical imperative.

Jenkins-Smith, H. C. (1982). “Professional roles for policy analysts: A critical assessment.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2(1): 88-100.

Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada

Yesterday, a friend and I visited Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, a new privately-run aquarium located beside the CN Tower in Toronto. I have uploaded some of the photos already, with more to come.

It’s certainly a spectacle, both in terms of the species on display and the layout of the facility. A big portion consists of tunnels of plexiglass through large underwater habitats, allowing visitors to see many species arrayed around them at once.

I am, however, left somewhat divided about how to feel about the place. Their website says that they have a “Comprehensive Environmental Purchasing Policy”, but it remains the case that the facility is an artificial hotspot of biodiversity, drawn together from around the world and presented for the entertainment and education of paying guests.

I’m open to the argument that people need to see nature and biodiversity in order to value them, and the aquarium does make some allusions to the harm humanity is doing to the global ocean through over-fishing, pollution, and climate change. It’s plausible that some aquarium guests will come away from the experience with a greater appreciation for marine biodiversity, and perhaps a greater willingness to play a role in protecting it.

At the same time, there is a degree to which the aquarium is nature in a box for the privileged. The habitats are full of artificial coral and kelp, and ecological themes are mentioned more than emphasized in the surrounding documentation. The “[p]olicy banning staff use of plastic water bottles on site” seems inadequate compared with the main environmental impacts of the facility, both in terms of the acquisition of so many species – some explicitly labelled as endangered – and in terms of the huge power and water usage the facility clearly requires.

The aquarium was full of beauty and biological novelty and I was grateful to go. I would encourage others to do so as well, though it is probably worth thinking about what such places imply for the human relationship with the rest of nature, as well as the contrast between the energy and expense we are willing to devote to showcasing the diversity of life, at the same time as our large-scale choices are rapidly causing that diversity to diminish in the wild.

Bounded rationality and policy agendas

If individuals have limited attention spans, so must organizations. The notion of policy agendas recognizes the “bottleneck” that exists in the agenda that any policy-making body addresses (Cobb & Elder 1972). These attention processes are not simply related to task environments — problems can go for long periods of time without attracting the attention of policy makers (Rochefort & Cobb 1994). A whole style of politics emerges as actors must strive to cope with the limits in the attentiveness of policy makers — basically trying to attract allies to their favored problems and solutions. This style of politics depends on connections driven by time-dependent and often emotional attention processes rather than a deliberate search for solutions (Cohen et al 1972, March & Olsen 1989, Kingdon 1996, Baumgartner & Jones 1993).

Because attention processes are time dependent and policy contexts change temporally, connections between problems and solutions have time dependency built into them. As an important consequence, policy systems dominated by boundedly rational decision makers will at best reach local rather than global optima. Because of the time dependence of attentional processes, all policy processes will display considerable path dependence (March 1994).

– Jones, Bryan D. “Bounded Rationality.” Annual Political Science Review. 1999. 2:297-321.