At the 2016 Stanford Psych One Conference, Linda Woolf (Webster University) suggested that during the Intro Psych learning chapter we talk about Hero Rats. This is a very nice way to help students see an example of the contributions psychological science is making to promote human rights around the world.   After covering operant conditioning, show Bart Weetjens 12-minute 2010 TED talk, How I Taught Rats to Sniff Out Land Mines (below). (Why rats, other than they are easy and cheap to train? They are too light to set off the mines.) In the second half of his talk, Weetjens discusses his new work on training rats to detect tuberculosis.   Video Link : 1669   Alternatively, show students this 11-minute 2007 Frontline segment on Hero Rats. Before you play it, inform students that there is an error in the video. Can they identify it? [In the video, the conditioning is called classical/Pavlovian, but it's actually operant. The rats are clicker-trained. The rats learn that when they hear a click, they can run to a location, such as back to their trainer, to get a tasty treat. The click is a discriminative stimulus - "that sound is my cue to go get a snack".]   This website provides a nice written explanation of the process used to train the rats.   Is your class, psych club, or honor society looking for a project? Consider raising funds to support Weetjeens organization, Apopo.   Besides, Gambian (aka African) pouched rats are pretty darn cute. Even if (or because) their bodies can be a foot and a half long with a tail that matches their body length. (Photo source: Gambian pouched rat - Wikipedia) ... View more

Originally posted on September 24, 2015. This past weekend, I gave myself an odd birthday present. I entered an ultramarathon. If you’ve read my posts, you know I like to run. For my birthday, I wanted to run 100 miles as fast as I could. Luckily, I had a perfect opportunity. There was a 24 hour running race within driving distance of my house. There was a bigger purpose in my run. I could determine whether a recent test of my speed and endurance would replicate. Two weeks ago, I ran 100 miles in 22 hours and 10 minutes. Replication is important. It tells whether repeating the essence of an experiment will produce the same result. The more the same sequence of events produces a similar outcome, the more we can depend on it.  Psychology is embroiled in a current debate about replicability. All psychologists agree that replication is important. That is a requirement before you get your card when you join the psychologist club. The debate centers on the meaning of non-replication. A recent report found that 64 percent of the tested psychological effects did not replicate. Some have declared a war on current scientific practices, hoping to inch the non-replication rate down to a less newsworthy percentage. Others, such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, argue that non-replication is a part of science. It tells us just as much about why things do happen as to why they don’t. My birthday run had everything I needed to make a replication attempt. Nearly everything was identical to the last time I ran 100 miles. The course consisted of a flat, concrete loop that was nearly one mile long. I ate the same foods, drank the same amount of water, and got the same amount of sleep the night before. All signs pointed to an exact replication. Then the race started. The first 50 miles breezed by. I was over an hour faster than my previous run, but I felt pretty good. By mile 65, I was mentally fatigued. By mile 70, my body was exhausted. By the time I hit mile 75, I was done. Less than 16 hours had passed, but I was mentally and physically checked out. No replication. There are at least two ways I can deal with this non-replication. The first is to panic. Either the people who counted my laps at the previous race did something wrong, I reported something wrong, or something else is wrong. It is as if it never happened. The next time someone asks me my personal record, I can tell them. But I must tell them that I don’t trust it. “Probably just a one-off,” I might say. “Tried to replicate it two weeks later and came up short.” A second approach is to try to understand what contributed to the non-replication. Most things were the same. But some things were different, among them the wear and tear that long running has on the body and mind. Maybe I wasn’t fully recovered from the previous race. Maybe I ran too fast too soon. Or maybe I’m just not that fast. Either way, it tells us a different story about replication. Replication science is possible, but we will always have non-replications. And those non-replications aren’t badges of shame. They tell us as much about the complexity of human psychology as the truth about how certain situations make us think, feel, and act. It would be great if psychology’s non-replication rate dwindled to less than 5 percent. I doubt that will ever happen. Humans are squirrely animals. No matter how much we want to do the same thing twice, sometimes it doesn’t happen. ... View more

Originally posted on April 3, 2014. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently (here) chided academics for becoming esoteric and inaccessible to the general public.  He noted that The latest attempt by academia to wall itself off from the world came when the executive council of the prestigious International Studies Association proposed that its publication editors be barred from having personal blogs. The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be less influential!... Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. . . . So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you! Voila!  Here begins an effort to share fruits from psychological science.  With daily reports and reflections, we will share what fascinates our minds, challenges our thinking, or tickles our funny bones.  We aim to “give psychology away” to: teachers seeking to freshen their classes with cutting-edge ideas and discoveries, students eager to learn insights beyond what’s in their textbooks, and any curious person who finds human beings fascinating, and who delights in psychological science efforts to expand our minds and enlarge our hearts. We also aim to offer our reflections in simple prose, believing with Thoreau that “Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language.” Welcome aboard, and please do feel free to invite your students, colleagues, and friends to join us for the ride, and to join the conversation. ... View more

Originally posted on April 3, 2014. My friend Ed Diener, the Jedi Master of happiness research, presented a wonderful keynote talk on “The Remarkable Progress of National Accounts of Subjective Well-Being” at the recent one-day “Happiness and Well-Being” conference.  He documented the social and health benefits of positive well-being, and celebrated the use of at least simple well-being measures by 41 nations as of 2013. In displaying the health accompaniments of positive emotions, Ed introduced me to a 2011 PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) study by Andrew Steptoe and Jane Wardle that I’d somehow missed.  Steptoe and Wardle followed 3,853 fifty-two to seventy-nine year olds in England for 60 months.  This figure displays the number surviving, among those with high, medium, and low positive affect—which was assessed by averaging four mood reports across a single day at the study’s beginning.  Those with a “blue” mood that day were twice as likely as the good mood folks to die in the ensuing five years!{cke_protected_1}{cke_protected_2} ... View more

Originally posted on April 6, 2014. Consider Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg, and John Jones’ 2002 report of wacky associations between people’s names and vocations.  Who would have guessed?  For example, in the United States, Jerry, Dennis, and Walter are equally popular names (0.42 percent of people carry each of these names). Yet America’s dentists have been almost twice as likely to be named Dennis as Jerry or Walter. Moreover, 2.5 times as many female dentists have been named Denise as the equally popular names Beverly and Tammy. And George or Geoffrey have been overrepresented among geoscientists (geologists, geophysicists, and geochemists). I thought of that playful research recently when reading some clever research on black bears’ quantitative competence, co-authored by Michael Beran.  Next up in my reading pile was creative work on crows’ problem solving led by Chris Bird.  Today I was appreciating interventions for lifting youth out of depression, pioneered by Sally Merry. That also took my delighted mind to the important books on animal behavior by Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, and the Birds of North America volume by Chandler Robbins.  (One needn’t live in Giggleswick, England, to find humor in our good science.) The list goes on: billionaire Marc Rich, drummer Billy Drummond, cricketer Peter Bowler, and the Ronald Reagan Whitehouse spokesman Larry Speakes.  And as a person with hearing loss whose avocational passion is hearing advocacy, I should perhaps acknowledge the irony of my own name, which approximates My-ears. Internet sources offer lots more:  dentists named Dr. E. Z. Filler, Dr. Gargle, and Dr. Toothaker; the Oregon banking firm Cheatham and Steele; and the chorister Justin Tune.  But my Twitter feed this week offered a cautionary word about these reported names: “The problem with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they’re true.”  ~ Abraham Lincoln Perhaps you, too, have some favorite name-vocation associations?  I think of my good friend who was anxiously bemused before meeting his oncologist, Dr. Bury.  (I am happy to report that, a decade later, he is robustly unburied and has not needed the services of the nearby Posthumus Funeral Home.) For Pelham and his colleagues there is a serious point to this fun:  We all tend to like what we associate with ourselves (a phenomenon they call “implicit egotism”). We like faces that have features of our own face morphed into them.  We like—and have some tendency to live in—cities and states whose names overlap with our own—as in the disproportionate number of people named Jack living in Jacksonville,of Philips in Philadelphia, and of people whose names begin with Tor in Toronto. Uri Simonsohn isn’t entirely convinced (see here and here, with Pelham’s reply here).  He replicated the associations between people’s names, occupations, and places, but argued that “reverse causality” sometimes is at work. For example, people sometimes live in places and on streets after which their ancestors were named. Implicit egotism research continues.  In the meantime, we can delight in the occasional playful creativity of psychological science. P.S.  Speaking of dentists (actual ones), my retired Hope College chemistry colleague Don Williams—a person of sparkling wit—offers these photos, taken by his own hand: And if you need a podiatrist to advise about your foot odor, Williams has found just the person: ... View more

Originally posted on April 8, 2014. An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times questioned the nearly $1 billion the U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has invested in training and employing officers to identify high-risk airline passengers. In 2011 and 2012, T.S.A. behavior-detection officers at 49 airports “designated passengers for additional screening on 61,000 occasions.” The number successfully detected and arrested for suspected terrorism? Zero. But then again, the number of plane-destroying terrorists they failed to detect was also, I infer, zero. (Wonkish note:  A research psychologist might say the T.S.A. has made no Type II errors.) Regardless, psychological science studies of intuitive lie detection, as the Times’ John Tierney noted in an earlier article, suggest that this has not been a wise billion-dollar investment. Despite our brain’s emotion-detecting skill, we find it difficult to detect deceiving expressions. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo reviewed 206 studies of people discerning truth from lies. The bottom line: People were just 54 percent accurate—barely better than a coin toss. I have replicated this in classroom demonstrations—by having some students either tell a true or a made-up story from their lives. When seeking to identify the liars, my students have always been vastly more confident than correct. Moreover, contrary to claims that some experts can spot lies, research indicates that few—save perhaps police professionals in high-stakes situations—beat chance. The behavioral differences between liars and truth-tellers are just too minute for most people to detect. Before spending a billion dollars on any safety measure, risk experts advise doing a cost-benefit analysis. As I reported in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, some people were outraged when the Clinton administration did not require General Motors to replace ill-designed fuel tanks on older model pickup trucks. The decision spared General Motors some $500 million, in exchange for which it contributed $51 million to traffic safety programs. “GM bought off the government for a pittance,” said some safety advocates, “at the expense of thirty more people expected to die in fiery explosions.” Actually, argued the Department of Transportation, after additional time for litigation there would only have been enough of the old trucks left to claim 6 to 9 more lives. Take that $500 million ($70 million per life)—or the $1 billion more recently spent on behavior detection—and apply it to screening children for preventable diseases (or more vigorous anti-smoking education programs or hunger relief) and one would likely save many more lives. By doing such cost-benefit analyses, say the risk experts, governments could simultaneously save us billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Ergo, when considering how to spend money to spare injuries and save lives, critical thinkers seek not to be overly swayed by rare, dreaded catastrophes. The smart humanitarian says: “Show me the numbers.”  Big hearts can cohabit with cool heads. ... View more

Originally posted on April 14, 2014. A recent New Yorker review (here) questions the famous claim that “38 witnesses” failed to respond to the Kitty Genovese murder and raises questions about the relationship between the media and the social sciences.  Psychologists have known that the New York Times’ original report of 38 witnesses is questionable.  In a 2007 American Psychologist article, Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins reported on “The Kitty Genovese murder and the . . . parable of the 38 witnesses.” Social psychologist Bibb Latané has responded to the New Yorker article, noting that the precise number of witnesses concerns a small “t” truth, with the dynamics of bystander inhibition being the central point of his award-winning research with John Darley.  The dynamic that drove the bystander nonresponse was not “moral decay” but a simple principle:  the “probability of acting decreases with the addition of more people.” Latané’s letter in the April 7th New Yorker is available here, along with his more extensive submitted explanation. ... View more

Originally posted on April 16, 2014. Part of our pleasure in writing psychological science is identifying the big ideas and findings that educated people should know.  Another part of our pleasure is relating these ideas and findings to people’s everyday lives. Our Harvard colleague Steven Pinker, one of psychology’s public intellectuals, has offered—courtesy of the New York Times—a short quiz that invites people to relate some of psychology’s ideas to real life and pop culture.  Perhaps you, or your students, might enjoy some of the quiz items—here. ... View more

Originally posted on April 18, 2014. “The Internet is one big field study,” observed Adam Kramer, a social psychologist and Facebook researcher, at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) presidential symposium on big data.  Some big data factoids, gleaned from the conference: There are, according to Eric Horvitz, Managing Director of Microsoft research, 6.6 degrees of separation between any two people on the Internet. Google has now digitized 6 percent of all published books, creating a huge archive of words that can be tracked over time at https://books.google.com/ngrams.  One can use this resource to answer interesting questions . . . such as: is it true that the term “homosexuality” hardly predates the 20th century, and that “sexual orientation” is a late 20th century concept?  It took me about a second to create this figure of the proportional frequency of these terms over time: On Facebook, Kramer reported Parents and children take an average 371 days to friend one another. Mothers use 10% more nurturing words when communicating with their children. In the 2010 congressional elections, people’s posting their having voted led to 340,000 additional voters among their friends and friends of friends. Positive emotion words in people’s posts are followed, in the ensuing three days, by increased positive emotion words in friend’s posts, and vice versa for negative emotions. A research team led by Blaine Landis at the University of Cambridge analyzed all 30.49 billion international Facebook friendships formed over four years, and reported (in an SPSP poster) that people tended to “friend up.”  Those from countries with lower economic status were more likely to solicit friendship with those in higher status countries than vice versa. ... View more

Originally posted on April 24, 2014. “39-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hears for First Time” headlined Yahoo, in one of the many gone-viral Deaf-can-now-hear videos.  Each depicts the compelling emotions of someone who, thanks to the activation of a new cochlear implant (CI), is said to be hearing sound for the first time—and (in this case) conversing in English!  Was this woman (Joanne) completely congenitally deaf as a result of Ushers Syndrome?  And did she immediately gain, as some media implied, the ability to understand speech on first hearing it? As my brother said in forwarding this, it’s “an amazing story.” The power of CIs to restore hearing is, indeed, amazing, as I can attest from meeting many people with CIs at hearing loss meetings.  As one who is tracking toward the complete deafness that marked the last dozen years of my mother’s life, I anticipate someday benefitting from CIs. Moreover, I appreciate the power of a compelling example, such as the video example I offer (here) of a child’s first experience of a home TV room hearing loop.  And who can suppress a smile when watching this boy’s first experience of a CI? Without disrespecting the Deaf culture (which regards deafness and Sign language as not defects needing fixing), and without diminishing Joanne’s powerful experience, what shall we make of her ability to understand and to speak? Does this video overturn what psychological science has taught us about the critical period for language development during life’s early years?  Is it not important that children receive CIs before language develops?  Haven’t experiments that removed cataracts and “restored vision” to natively blind people taught us that, for normal perceptual experience, the brain must be sculpted by sensory input in life’s early years? I posed these questions to Dr. Debara Tucci, a Duke Medical Center cochlear implant surgeon with whom I serve on the advisory council of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.  Our shared questions:      1. Was Joanne completely deaf from birth?  Has she heard no sound until the moment of this recording?  As I will explain in a future entry, in popular use “deaf” often conflates true and complete deafness with substantial hearing loss.  Some Usher’s Syndrome patients sometimes are born completely deaf, but others experience progressive hearing loss.  With hearing aids, they acquire language early in life.  Joanne’s use of spoken language suggests that she is not hearing speech for the first time in her life.      2. A person who has been completely deaf from birth could potentially lip read.  When testing such patients with newly activated CIs, it would be interesting to know if they can “hear” speech when the speaker’s face is obscured. As a CI provider, Dr. Tucci nevertheless welcomes such videos:  “Even though the history accompanying the video may not be entirely correct, and a little misleading, it is basically a positive thing.  I would rather have 10 people come in and be told they are not a candidate than miss one person who is.  Also, we are implanting long deafened people who don't have speech/language ability not with the thought that they will develop or understand speech, but to increase connectedness and for safety concerns.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 28, 2014. Reports of restored vision in children in India have been confirmed in a new Psychology Science article, summarized here, on “Improvement in spatial imagery following sight onset late in childhood.” The research, led by Tapan Kumar Gandhi of MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, in collaboration with Suma Ganesh and Pawan Sinha, studied children who were blinded from birth by dense cataracts. After surgery removed the cataracts at about 12 to 14 years, the children were no longer completely blind. Their abilities to discern light and dark, enabled some spatial imagery. Practically, I wondered, what does this mean? Doesn’t the brain need to experience normal sensory input early in life in order to produce normal perceptual experience later in life? I asked Dr. Gandhi to explain the children’s post-surgery abilities. Could they potentially ride a bicycle or drive a car? His answer (quoted with permission): The onset of sight is not immediately accompanied by much joy or pleasure, contrary to what is depicted in movies. The child has to get used to the new inputs. Over the first few weeks, the child begins to feel more comfortable with the visual world, even though they might not recognize much of it. Their visual acuity is sub-par, most likely permanently so. But, despite a blurry percept, the brain is able to achieve significant proficiency over the course of the first half year on many visual skills such as face detection, and visually guided navigation. Although driving is well-beyond their economic means, some of the Prakash children have indeed learned to ride a bicycle. We typically find that the children and their parents are in high spirits when they visit us for a clinical follow-up a few weeks after the surgery. ... View more

Originally posted on April 30, 2014. Those of us with hearing loss cheered one of our own, Seattle Seahawks football player Derrick Coleman, as he became a national exemplar in the U.S. for living with hearing loss. We reveled in the Super Bowl Duracell ad chronicling his life story.  And we felt a warm glow when he gifted twin New Jersey 9-year-old sisters with Super Bowl tickets and handwritten encouraging words:  “Even though we have hearing aids, we can still accomplish our goals and dreams!” As 500,000+ Google links to “Deaf Seahawks fullback” testify, Coleman’s story inspires us.  The reports of Coleman’s “deafness” also raise an interesting question:  Who is deaf? By using a combination of hearing aids and the natural lip reading that we all do, Coleman, despite his profound hearing loss, reportedly hears his quarterback call plays amid the din of the Seahawks stadium.  And he converses, as when amiably answering questions at a Super Bowl press session. In doing so, he is akin to millions of others who live well with hearing loss. Without our hearing aids or cochlear implants, some of us among the world’s 360 million people with hearing loss become truly deaf—unable to hear normal conversation.  When I remove my hearing aids before showering in my college gym, the locker room banter goes nearly silent.  In bed at night without my aids, my wife’s voice from the adjacent pillow becomes indecipherable, unless she turns to speak into my ear. So, in his everyday functioning, is Derrick Coleman “deaf”? Am I deaf?  Are my friends in the hearing loss community deaf? Partly out of respect for my nonhearing, signing cousins in the Deaf Culture, my answer is no:  I am not Deaf.  Like Deaf people who fluently communicate with Sign, a genuine language, I am also not disabled or “hearing impaired” (which labels a person).  Rather I am a person with hearing loss.  The Hearing Loss Association of America—“the nation’s voice for people with hearing loss”—offers resources that assist “people with hearing loss and their families to learn how to adjust to living with hearing loss [and] to eradicate the stigma associated with hearing loss”—and thus to live as not-deaf. I asked the Association’s recently retired director, Brenda Battat, whose hearing was partially restored with a cochlear implant, if she considers herself deaf.  “No. From a life experience, functioning, and self-identity perspective I do not consider myself deaf.” Ditto my friend, musician Richard Einhorn, who has a substantial hearing loss and was recently featured in a news story that was headlined: "Hearing Loops Give Music Back to Composer Who Went Deaf in a Day." “The ‘deaf’ label is not accurate,” notes Einhorn, who uses various technologies to hear.  “With a good hearing aid and additional listening technology such as hearing loops, I can hear well enough in most situations to participate fully in conversations and enjoy live music, theater, and films.” Thanks to new hearing technologies, most of us with hearing loss can effectively function as not-deaf.  My state-of-the-art hearing aids amplify sound selectively, depending on my loss at different frequencies.  They offer directionality.  They compress sound (raising soft sound and lowering extremely loud sound).  Via a neck-worn Bluetooth streamer, they wirelessly transmit phone conversation and music from my smart phone to both my hearing aids. And thanks to my favorite hearing technology—the hearing loops that broadcast PA sound wirelessly to my in-the-ear speakers (aka hearing aids)—I hear! Ergo, while most natively Deaf people are served by Sign, the rest of us—the invisible majority with hearing loss—need hearing assistance.  We respect, but live outside of, the Deaf Culture.  We benefit from new hearing technologies.  Lumping all people with hearing loss together as “deaf” respects neither Deaf people nor those with hearing loss.  Here ye, hear ye! ... View more

Originally posted on May 2, 2014. Many faculty fret over students’ in-class use of computers—ostensibly there for note taking, but often also used for distracting e-mail, messaging, and checking social media.  A soon-to-be-published study by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (UCLA) offers faculty an additional justification for asking students not to use computers. In three experiments, they gave students either a laptop or a notebook and invited them to take notes on a lecture (a TED lecture in two of the studies).  Later, when they tested their memory for the lecture content, they found no difference in recall of factual information.  But taking notes in longhand, which required participants to summarize content in their own words, led to better performance on conceptual-application questions. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” is the apt title for their article, to appear in Psychological Science. “Participants using laptops were more inclined to take verbatim notes,” explained Mueller and Oppenheimer.  Better to synthesize and summarize, they conclude:  “laptop use in classrooms should be viewed with a healthy dose of caution; despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.” For one of my colleagues, this study, combined with the unwanted distractions of in-class computer use, inspires a new class policy:  for better learning, no computer use in class. ... View more

Originally posted on May 6, 2014. At the 2012 International Congress of Psychology meeting in Cape Town, I enjoyed a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Loftus, which offered a terrific demo of how memory works.  Loftus showed us a handful of individual faces that we were later to identify, as if in a police line-up.  Later, she showed us some pairs of faces, one seen earlier and one not, and asked us which one we had seen.  In the midst of these, she slipped in a pair of faces that included two new faces, one of which was rather like an earlier seen face.  Most of us understandably but wrongly identified this face as previously seen.  To climax the demonstration, when she showed us the originally seen face and the previously chosen wrong face, most of us (me, too) picked the wrong face!  As a result of our memory reconsolidation, we—an audience of psychologists who should have known better—had replaced the original memory with a false memory. ... View more

Originally posted on May 8, 2014. Knowing that people don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, psychologists have longed for a "pipeline to the heart."  One strategy, developed nearly a half century ago by Edward Jones and Harold Sigall, created a “bogus pipeline.” Researchers would convince people that a machine could use their physiological responses to measure their private attitudes.  Then they would ask them to predict the machine's reading, thus revealing attitudes which often were less socially desirable than their verbalized attitudes.  More recently, psychologists have devised clever strategies for revealing “implicit attitudes,” by using reaction times to assess automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. (In contrast to consciously held “explicit attitudes,” implicit attitudes are like unconscious habits.) A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Katherine Coffman and fellow economists demonstrates a third strategy for getting people to reveal sensitive information—the “Item Count Technique” (ICT). One group was given four simple statements, such as “I spent a lot of time playing video games as a kid,” and then was asked how many of the four statements “apply to you.”  A second group was given the same four statements plus a fifth:  “I consider myself to be heterosexual,” and then was asked how many of the five statements “apply to you.” Although no individual is asked to reveal which specific statements are true of them, a comparison of the two groups’ answers reveals—for the sampled population—the percent agreeing with the fifth statement. Thus, without revealing anyone’s sexual orientation, the ICT aggregate data showed a 65 percent higher rate of non-heterosexual identity than was self-reported among people who were asked straight-out: “Do you consider yourself to be heterosexual?”   But then let’s not discount public surveys.  Nate Silver’s digest of presidential polling data correctly predicted not only the 2012 U.S. national presidential outcome, but also the outcome in all 50 U.S. states.  Specific, explicit attitudes can predict behavior. ... View more