With the Intro Psych course, we have the ability to save lives. For example, our discussion of attention may help students stay off their phones while driving or help students refuse to ride with someone who talks on their phone while driving. Our discussion of stress and evidence-based coping strategies may help students find ways to reduce stress or cope better with their stress, leading to healthier outcomes in both the short- and long-term. I had another example just this week. After covering sleep, one of my students is encouraging his father to get screened for sleep apnea. Here's another way that Intro Psych can save lives that I just learned about from the February 2023 issue of Scientific American (Kwon, 2023). Of those diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, up to 80% will be diagnosed in 10 to 12 years with a neurodegenerative disease, most commonly Parkinson’s disease. When the common symptoms of Parkinson’s appear—such as hand tremors (although hand tremors do not appear in everyone with Parkinson’s)—over 40% of the dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra of the basal ganglia are gone (Ohtsuka et al., 2013). (I’ve also seen medical websites say 50% and 80%, but they don’t site a source.) Let’s just say that bunches of neurons have been lost before the traditional symptoms appear. MRI can be used to detect the loss of neurons in the basal ganglia (Bae et al., 2021), but, of course, most people don’t get an MRI until they show symptoms. Earlier detection means being able to start interventions earlier which may slow the progression of the disease (Prashanth & Dutta Roy, 2018). During REM sleep (and for most of us), our major muscle groups are turned off. In REM behavior disorder, the major muscle groups remain online resulting in an acting out of the dreams. Alan Alda was being chased, so he picked up a sack of potatoes and threw them at his attacker. When Alda awoke, he saw that he had thrown a pillow at his wife. Alda had seen a 2015 news story about the emerging evidence of REM behavior disorder being a marker for the potential development of Parkinson’s. A brain scan confirmed it; Alda had Parkinson’s (Kwon, 2023). There is evidence that neurodegeneration and a buildup of a protein called synuclein (click for pronunciation) within the pons and medulla (both within the brainstem) play a role in REM behavior disorder (Chiaro et al., 2018). One possibility is that, over time—say, 10 to 12 years—the synuclein protein clusters spread up into the basal ganglia, damaging those neurons. When enough of those neurons are damaged, we may begin to see Parkinson’s symptoms, such as hand tremors. But here’s the fascinating part. A person with Parkinson’s who experiences slowed muscle movement, rigid muscles, and tremors while awake, has these symptoms seemingly vanish when showing symptoms of REM behavior disorder. While the symptoms of Parkinson’s are due in large part to damage within the basal ganglia, REM sleep bypasses the basal ganglia. While acting out a dream, full movement returns. This raises an interesting possibility. Could treatments bypass the basal ganglia when the person is awake? In the meantime, researchers are looking for ways to reduce synuclein before it does so much damage, and a diagnosis of REM behavior disorder may be one way to identify people at risk but before significant neuron loss occurs (Kwon, 2023). REM behavior disorder has an estimated prevalence of 1% (Haba-Rubio et al., 2018) in the general population. If you teach 200 Intro Psych students annually, and each student has, on average, 10 relatives (totally made up number; I have over 60 relatives, including siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews), sharing this information on the relationship between REM behavior disorder and Parkinson’s with your students could reach 2,000 people.  At 1% prevalence, we would expect 20 of them to have REM sleep disorder. If 80% are expected to develop Parkinson’s (or similar disease) in 10 to 12 years, that would be 16 of them. If those 16 were diagnosed early, the progression of Parkinson’s could be slowed. Your math may vary, but the result is the same. What you cover in Intro Psych could save lives.   References Bae, Y. J., Kim, J.-M., Sohn, C.-H., Choi, J.-H., Choi, B. S., Song, Y. S., Nam, Y., Cho, S. J., Jeon, B., & Kim, J. H. (2021). Imaging the substantia nigra in Parkinson disease and other Parkinsonian syndromes. Radiology, 300(2), 260–278. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2021203341 Chiaro, G., Calandra-Buonaura, G., Cecere, A., Mignani, F., Sambati, L., Loddo, G., Cortelli, P., & Provini, F. (2018). REM sleep behavior disorder, autonomic dysfunction and synuclein-related neurodegeneration: Where do we stand? Clinical Autonomic Research, 28(6), 519–533. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10286-017-0460-4 Haba-Rubio, J., Frauscher, B., Marques-Vidal, P., Toriel, J., Tobback, N., Andries, D., Preisig, M., Vollenweider, P., Postuma, R., & Heinzer, R. (2018). Prevalence and determinants of rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder in the general population. Sleep, 41(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsx197 Kwon, D. (2023, February). When dreams foreshadow brain disease. Scientific American, 328(2), 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0223-56 Ohtsuka, C., Sasaki, M., Konno, K., Koide, M., Kato, K., Takahashi, J., Takahashi, S., Kudo, K., Yama**bleep**a, F., & Terayama, Y. (2013). Changes in substantia nigra and locus coeruleus in patients with early-stage Parkinson’s disease using neuromelanin-sensitive MR imaging. Neuroscience Letters, 541, 93–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2013.02.012 Prashanth, R., & Dutta Roy, S. (2018). Early detection of Parkinson’s disease through patient questionnaire and predictive modelling. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 119, 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2018.09.008     ... View more

In December 2022, I wrote about the new AI tool for generating writing, ChatGPT. Since then, the technology behemoths Microsoft and Google have rushed their own chatbots to public release. Unfortunately, neither were ready for primetime as both were reported to have delivered inaccurate information in their debut. In the meantime, discussion within the academy has exploded about the impact AI writing tools will have on education. Such discussions are often accompanied by much hand-wringing. Some instructors insist that their assignment prompts are not ChatGPT-able because, for example, the prompt asks for personal examples or personal opinion. Other instructors have embraced ChatGPT as a learning tool where they ask students to start with ChatGPT text, critique said text, and then edit it. Perhaps the biggest tell that a particular text was written by ChatGPT is that the references are bogus. The references look legitimate, but a quick Google search will reveal that the AI made them up. Making up references is academic dishonesty. A cloze test would provide further evidence that the student did not write the text. In a cloze test, the instructor removes every, say, fifth word from the text in question, and the student is asked to supply the missing words. A student who wrote the text will have an easier time supplying the missing words than a student who didn’t. This online cloze test generator will create a cloze test based on the supplied text and your parameters. The latest participant in the AI-generated text wars is Edward Tian, a Princeton grad student. During his winter break in Toronto, he spent time in a coffee shop writing code for a computer program that could detect AI-written text. He called it GPTZero (Kidson, 2023), and he has made it freely available. Paste in your text or upload a file, check the box saying you agree to the (pretty generic) terms of service, and click the “get results” button. Tian’s rationale was that since ChatGPT uses an algorithm to write text, code that is based on that same algorithm can detect that same text. For example, ChatGPT writes text by using what the next word in a sentence is most likely to be. Humans, however, tend to be less predictable in our writing. GPTZero uses a similar algorithm to ChatGPT’s to detect the predictably of each word in a sentence. The more predictable the words are, the greater the likelihood the text was writing by AI. For example, this human-written sentence has words that are, well, less predictable: The deliciousness of a Cosmic Crisp apple is to the fruit world what a fine Swiss chocolate is to the confectionary world. Tian and his colleagues are working a new version of their software called GPTZeroX (Kidson, 2023). This version is made for educators and will include a plagiarism score, highlighted sentences that were likely generated by AI, and the ability to upload multiple files (say, from the same class) at once. While they don’t say it, I fully expect learning management system integration is coming. On the GPTZero website, click the “join the product waitlist” button and fill out their form. Now, how long until we see the first case of academic dishonesty where a student used AI to generate their master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation? I predict it will be this calendar year.   Reference Kidson, R. (2023, February 17). Princeton student creates ChatGPT detector. GHacks Technology News. https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/princeton-student-develops-gptzero-software-to-detect-plagiarism-by-ai-language-model-chatgpt/   ... View more

For the first half of my career, I didn’t cover sleep in Intro Psych. And then I noticed how sleep-deprived my students were. The research on the importance of sleep is pretty clear. Your Intro Psych textbook likely does a fine job covering the topic, so I’m not going to rehash it here. In the February 2023 issue of Scientific American, the editors have written a short (and freely available) article on how adolescents tend to have a circadian rhythm set to a later sleep time and later waking time (Scientific American Editors, 2023). They write, “Despite decades of research, thousands of publications and clear science, schools in only a few states and the District of Columbia have pushed their start times to 8:30 A.M. on average, which researchers say is a compromise—a better time would be closer to 9 A.M.” Here's a short writing activity that will help Intro Psych students learn more about the importance of sleep while also empowering them to make a difference. ***** For this assignment, read this short Scientific American article (Scientific American Editors, 2023). Your task is to write a letter to a school board and superintendent encouraging them to shift the school start time to later in the morning. You do not have to send the letter, but if you feel like teenagers would benefit from the change, I hope you would send it. Choose the school district. This may be the school district for the high school you graduated from or, for dual enrollment students, where you still attend. If you have children or other young relatives, you might choose their school district. Do a little Internet research to get the mailing address and email address for the school board and superintendent for your chosen school district. Include this information at the top of your assignment. Use the following format: Dear [school district name] school board members and Superintendent [last name], I am writing to encourage you to [be specific about what action you would like them to take.] [Note: If this is one of the few school districts that has made the change, use this opportunity to thank them.] As a [student, alum, parent of a student, relative of a student] of this school district, this topic is particularly important to me. [Next, share a personal story. It could be about your own struggles with sleep when in high school, or it could be about what you saw in your high school friends, or it could it be in what you see in your high school-attending relatives.] The research on teenagers, sleep, and early school start times is clear. [Identify three to five points from the Scientific American article you read that you found to be particularly persuasive. List these as bullet points.] [Important research information one] [Important research information two] [Important research information three] [Important research information four (optional)] [Important research information five (optional)] Please [reiterate the action you’d like them to take from your first paragraph]. Thank you for your consideration, [First name and last name] Class of [year of graduation; or if writing to a relative’s school district, ‘In the interest of [first name of student], class of [year of anticipated graduation]]   Reference Scientific American Editors. (2023, February). Let teenagers sleep. Scientific American, 328(2), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0223-8   ... View more

I’ve been thinking once again about, well, let’s call them age cohort differences. Eleven years ago, I wrote about how reading time on analog clocks is becoming a lost skill. I doubt that that trend has changed. Perhaps this is why no one has bothered to replace the batteries in my classroom clock. I’d do it myself, but I need a ladder to reach it. Also, when I’m standing in the front of the room, to see the clock, I need to look a little past 90 degrees to my left and into a dark corner to see it. My analog watch works just fine. Also, the students packing up their stuff—based on the time showing on their phones—gives me a five-minute warning. As I predicted in that analog clock post, clockwise and counterclockwise continue to fade away. In PowerPoint, for example, we now rotate our images 90 degrees left or right. In PDF24, my go-to pdf editor, I can still rotate pages clockwise and counterclockwise, but large icons show the direction of rotation. A friend who recently had a neurological exam told me that the clock-drawing test is still in use. (See this article, for example). I wonder if discussions are underway for a possible replacement for this task, because the clock is ticking, so to speak, on its utility as a cognitive test. And then there’s cursive. I wrote about that just this past September. To be clear, I’m not arguing that school children should learn cursive. Rather, for instructors who write in cursive, be aware that your students may not be able to read what you write, no matter how beautiful your Palmer penmanship. Which I never had. More recently, my wife sent me this 2021 article from Office Watch about young people (and not so young people) wondering what’s up with the design of the save icon that is common in so many computer apps. (Translation: apps = programs.) Some perceive the save icon as a vending machine dispensing a soda. (Visit the article to see the particular icon they’re talking about. Here’s another example.) The save icon, who don’t know, is a leftover graphic. Decades ago, this icon was an excellent way to represent save because it looked like a 3.5 inch floppy disk, a common external storage device. Think usb flashdrives, but with much less storage capacity. Also, they weren’t floppy at all. That was leftover terminology from the 3.5 inch’s predecessors—the 8 inch and the 5.25 inch—which really were floppy. Okay, they were actually more bendy than floppy. Here’s a photo of the 3.5 inch disk from the Computer History Museum. Or email me for photos. The last time I cleaned out my office, I still couldn’t bear to toss my disks—which is different than tossing one’s cookies, but feels eerily similar. I have no way to read these disks, of course. Maybe they’ll come back like vinyl records have. No, I’m not holding my breath. I’m still waiting for the return of 8-tracks. One more sidenote to add to this entire paragraph of side notes. The Internet tells me that in some parts of the world, the 3.5 inch disk was called a stiffy. Share that tidbit at your next cocktail party. No need to credit me. In fact, I’d prefer that you didn’t. And one very last sidenote. Do people still throw cocktail parties? If not, then shouldn’t we change the name of the cocktail party effect? In addition to analog clocks, Here's one more possible age cohort difference. This one I did not see coming. In the learning chapter, I have an assignment that asks students to identify the learning principles illustrated in a few different comic strips. I had a student message me about this part of the assignment. She did just fine, but she was not confident that she understood what was happening in the comic strips. She wrote, “I'm just not very familiar with reading comics.” I grew up reading comic strips in newspapers. I still get a newspaper. Just this morning I walked 100 yards up our driveway in 17 degree temperature (-8 Celsius) to retrieve the paper so that I could read it over breakfast. The more serious news is read with my egg and veggie sausage; sports and comics are read with my English muffin. My digital newsfeed on my tablet always starts with a banana. (Steve Chew: More trivia fodder for NITOP. You’re welcome.) Growing up, my hometown newspaper probably didn’t have more than a dozen daily comic strips. The big colorful comics spread that came with the Sunday paper was pure joy for my 9-year-old self. I enjoyed the Sunday comics even more if I had new Silly Putty for copying and stretching Snoopy, Woodstock, or whatever other Peanuts characters were featured that week. The newspaper of my new hometown does not have many comic strips, either, so I supplement with having hand-selected comic strips come into my news feed. Silly Putty doesn’t work as well on a tablet. Since the message from my student who struggled to understand the comic strips, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around not growing up with comic strips. With print newspapers going the way of the paper office memo and printed student assignments, I can see where whole swaths of young people would not have experience with comic strips. While graphic novels are a thing, their long-form design is a different read than a one to four panel comic strip. History departments will need to teach students how to read cursive if their students are going to be able to read original historical documents (that have not been translated into printed text). Perhaps those same departments will need to teach students how to read historical comic strips that are chockful of references to everyday life and politics. Or maybe my student’s experience is a one off? Maybe she is the only student I’ve had this year who is unfamiliar with reading comic strips. Maybe, but student questions like this feel iceberg-like. If one student is holding her hand up above the water, there are many more students who are keeping their hands below the surface. ... View more

The following would fit well with a discussion research methods, but would also work as a research methods booster in the social or emotion chapters. In a series of studies conducted under different field and lab conditions, researchers gave participants opportunities to engage in random act of kindness to evaluate the impact that kindness had on both the giver and the recipient (Kumar & Epley, 2022) (freely available). For the purpose of this blog post, I want to focus on study 2a: hot chocolate at the skating rink. After reading several of Kumar and Epley’s studies in this article, it makes me want to do random acts of kindness research. I want to spend a chunk of my day brainstorming random acts of kindness that I could encourage participants to do. I’m picturing Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley sitting around on a cold day, and one of them saying, “You know what makes me happy? A hot beverage on a cold day.” And the other saying, “Especially if I’m really cold and the hot beverage is extra tasty.” It’s a short leap from there to an outdoor skating rink and hot chocolate. With the permission of the skating rink operators, researchers approached people, told them that they were conducting a study, and gave them a choice. Here’s a cup of hot chocolate. You can keep it for yourself or you can point out anyone here, and we’ll deliver it to the person. The researchers made deliberate use of demand characteristics to encourage giving away the hot chocolate. I’m picturing something like this spiel, “The entire reason we’re out here, bub, is to investigate the effects of random acts of kindness, so we’d really love it if you’d give this hot chocolate away. But, hey, if you want to keep it, you selfish lout, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Okay, they probably didn’t call them selfish louts, although that would have upped the demand characteristics ante. While 75 people agreed to give the hot chocolate away, nine (very cold people with low blood sugar perhaps) opted to keep it. The givers each identified one person at the outdoor skating rink to receive a hot chocolate delivery. For the dependent variables, each hot chocolate donor was asked three questions: how big do they think this act of kindness is (scale of 0 to 10), what’s your mood now having made the decision to give away the hot chocolate compared to normal (-5 to +5, where 0 is normal), and what they thought the mood of the recipient would be upon receiving the hot chocolate (same scale, -5 to +5 where 0 is normal).   Next, the researchers approached the identified recipients, explained that they were conducting a study, and that they gave people the choice to keep or give away a cup of hot chocolate. They further explained that a person chose to give away their cup of hot chocolate to them. At this point, I’m a little sorry that this was not a study of facial expressions. I would imagine that looks of confusion would dominate, at least at first. Imagine standing at an outdoor ice skating rink when a complete stranger comes up to you, says they’re conducting a study, and, here, have a cup of hot chocolate. After confusion, perhaps surprise or joy. Or perhaps skepticism. The researchers did not report how many hot chocolate recipients actually drank their beverage. Also no word on how happy the researchers were since they were the ones who were actually giving away hot chocolate. After being handed the cup of hot chocolate, each recipient was asked to rate how big this act of kindness was (0 to 10 scale) and to report their mood (scale of -5 to +5, where 0 is normal). The design of this study makes the data analysis interesting. The mood of the givers and the mood of the recipients was each treated as a within participants comparison. The reported mood (-5 to +5) was compared against 0 (normal mood). The givers, on average, reported a net positive mood of +2.4 (with +5 being the maximum). The recipients, on average, reported a net positive mood boost to +3.52. In a between participants comparison, givers and recipients were compared on the mood of recipients. When the givers were asked what the mood would be of the participants, they underestimated. They guessed an average of +2.73 as compared the actual rating the recipients gave their own mood of +3.52. As another between participants comparison, the ratings of how big the givers thought their act of kindness was (3.76 on an 11-point scale) were compared to how big the recipients thought the act of kindness was (7.0 on an 11-point scale).   Studies reported later in this article provide evidence that suggests that the difference in perspective between the givers of a random act of kindness and their recipients is that the givers attend to the act itself—such as the value of the hot chocolate—and not on the additional value of being singled out for kindness, no matter what that kindness is. To give students some practice at generating operational definitions, point out that Kumar and Epley operationally defined a random act of kindness as giving away hot chocolate. Ask students to consider some other operational definitions—some other ways Kumar and Epley could have created a random act of kindness situation but using the same basic study design. Point out that researchers could use these other operational definitions to do a conceptual replication of this study—same concepts, but different definitions. Maybe some of your students will even choose to engage in some of those random acts of kindness.   Reference Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001271   ... View more

During college, one of my professors advised the class to find interest in whatever we were learning, no matter the course. If I remember correctly, the advice was given as a way to better remember course content, but I now also recognize it as a way to be less miserable. It’s a nice reframing. Thinking “Oooo, that’s interesting!” is a clearer path to happiness than thinking, “Why do I need to learn this?!” But it’s even more than that. “Each day is an opportunity to learn a little more” (Peters-Collaer, 2023, p. 210). Curiosity could be defined, in part, as finding interest in, well, whatever. I like to think that I came to college with a strong sense of curiosity, but since I still remember my professor’s advice almost 40 years later, his words must have had some impact on my desire to learn. My sense of curiosity has certainly served me well. At root, I want to know how stuff works, whatever that stuff might be. As a psychology professor, I want to know how the mind works, but that’s only one example. In a completely different domain, I’m a big fan of industrial tourism. One of my favorite tours was of a wastewater treatment plant. (Steve Chew, you are welcome to use that tidbit in NITOP trivia.) What I learn in one domain may connect to another domain, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, as you may or may not recall from a recent blog post, I learned that the opening line to the song Jolene was the result of maintenance rehearsal. Maybe my professor’s advice just opened my mind to one of the great benefits of a liberal arts education. Exposure to a lot of different ideas in a lot of different domains can lead to novel ideas or novel solutions to problems. As I think about curiosity and how much we value it as a trait in our psychology majors (American Psychological Association, 2013), I wonder if we could be more explicit about what it means to be curious. Stephen Peters-Collaer, a Ph.D. student in forest ecology at the University of Vermont wrote a one-page essay in Science (freely available) on how curiosity has served him well in his education (2023). Invite your students to read his essay, and then ask students to respond to the following questions as part of an in-class discussion, an asynchronous online discussion, or a short writing assignment. The article author, Stephen Peters-Collaer, found his fieldwork crew leader’s enthusiasm for the natural world infectious. Have you had someone in your life have such enthusiasm for something that you found yourself becoming similarly enthusiastic? Please describe. Peters-Collaer writes, “Each day is an opportunity to learn a little more.” How might holding such an attitude help a college student? The author describes some of the strategies he uses to stay sharp in his more sedentary work. Describe some of the strategies you use to stay mentally sharp. The author closes the article with this statement, “I remind myself that any task can present an opportunity to learn—as long as I am open to it.” Would you describe the author as someone who is curious? Why or why not?   References American Psychological Association. (2013). APA Guidelines for the undergraduate psychology major: Version 2.0. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/about/psymajor-guidelines.pdf Peters-Collaer, S. (2023). Stay curious. Science, 379(6628), 210.   ... View more

When I discuss experimental design in Intro Psych, I usually focus on the independent variable and dependent variable and how they are operationally defined as well as design considerations such as the experimenters and participants being blind to conditions. (I’ve read some articles where the authors say that the experimenters and participants were blinded. It brings me up short every time.) It wouldn’t hurt me to spend a little time talking about external validity, especially how we may sacrifice external validity in a lab study as a sort of proof of concept, and then follow up with a study that has more external validity. A recent JAMA article provides a nice illustration of how this can work—and gives students some experimental design practice. After covering experimental design, describe this freely available study on fast food menu choices (Wolfson et al., 2022). The researchers hypothesized that the study “participants would be more likely to select sustainable options when viewing menus with positive or negative framing compared with control labels.” In an online questionnaire, 5,049 “[p]articipants were shown a fast food menu and prompted to select 1 item they would like to order for dinner.” The independent variable was menu labeling. “Participants were randomized to view menus with 1 of 3 label conditions: a quick response code label on all items (control group); green low–climate impact label on chicken, fish, or vegetarian items (positive framing); or red high–climate impact label on red meat items (negative framing).” The primary dependent variable was the number of participants who selected a menu item that was not red meat. In the control condition, 49.5% of participants selected something other than red meat. In the positive framing condition (green labels on non-red meat items), 54.4% selected something other than red meat. In the negative framing condition (red labels on red meat items), 61.1% selected something other than red meat. All differences were statistically significant. In the limitations section of the article, the researchers acknowledge that this study assessed hypothetical food purchases rather than actual food purchases. As such, the study lacks external validity. They also acknowledge that social desirability may have also influenced the results, but they think that the anonymity of the online study may have mitigated the effects. I’m less convinced. Participants may have been more likely to select non-red meat options partly to look like better people to themselves and partly because they guessed the hypothesis and wanted to help out the researchers. In any case, this study found positive results that may be worth investigating further. The challenge for your students is to design a study that has greater external validity. How could the same research hypothesis be tested in real world conditions? Give students a couple minutes to think about this on their own and then ask students to discuss in small groups. What problems can students envision in conducting such a study? For example, would a local fast food restaurant be okay with putting red or green labels on their menu boards? One last comment about social desirability. In a real fast food restaurant, if someone chose to order a green-labeled item, for the purpose of the hypothesis, does it matter if they ordered it because they wanted to have a positive impact (or less negative impact) on the planet, because they wanted to think of themselves as a good person, or because they wanted to look good to others?   References Wolfson, J. A., Musicus, A. A., Leung, C. W., Gearhardt, A. N., & Falbe, J. (2022). Effect of climate change impact menu labels on fast food ordering choices among US adults: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 5(12), e2248320. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.48320     ... View more

My favorite version of Jolene is Dolly Parton performing with Pentatonix. I know I’m not alone in thinking that. They won the 2017 Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance for it. Or perhaps your favorite is this one by Parton’s goddaughter Miley Cyrus. Or maybe it’s this Parton/Cyrus duet. Or maybe your new favorite is the Parton/Cyrus duet from Cyrus’s recent New Year’s Eve party. Or maybe you prefer Parton’s 1974 performance on the Porter Wagoner Show. Maybe not, but it’s worth a watch just to see how Parton’s stage presence has developed. The words night and day come to mind. If you can find it, check out the Parton/Cyrus/Pentatonix performance of Jolene on The Voice. What I recently learned was that the lyric “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene” was the result of maintenance rehearsal. Parton writes: There was a little girl at one of the shows when I was touring with Porter [Wagoner in the early 1970s]. We used to sign autographs after the shows. She came up to the stage and said, "Would you sign this 'To Jolene'?" I said, "Jolene, that's a beautiful name. I bet you're named after your daddy. Is his name Joe?" She said, "No, it's just Jolene." I said, "Well, I love that name, and if you ever hear a song with it, you'll know it's about you." So I just kept it in my mind. To remember the name, I went "Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene" until I could get back to the bus and write it down. Which is when I thought, "I'll just start the song like that, because that's how I remembered the name, and I'll add to that." So then I came up with a story that I knew women could relate to (Parton & Oermann, 2020). Parton’s initial remembering of the name Jolene took maintenance rehearsal, but as my wife observed, “I’m pretty sure she remembers it now.” It has been stored in Parton’s—and our—long-term memory for quite some time. As a side note, it’s entirely possible that Parton wrote I Will Always Love You and Jolene on the same day. Parton said that when they were going through her old cassettes of her working recordings to digitize them they found a cassette where she recorded those two songs back to back. Dolly Parton turns 77 later this month. Reread my last blog post on ageism in emotion research, and then rewatch Parton/Cyrus duet from Cyrus’s New Year’s Eve party of two days ago.   Reference Parton, D., & Oermann, R. K. (2020). Dolly Parton, songteller: My life in lyrics. Chronicle Books.         ... View more

“Older adults report surprisingly positive affective experience. The idea that older adults are better at emotion regulation has emerged as an intuitively appealing explanation for why they report such high levels of affective well-being despite other age-related declines” (Isaacowitz, 2022). Our schemas and the assumptions that come with them influence how we see the world and, in turn, influence how we talk about the world. As instructors and researchers we need to consider how our assumptions can weasel their way into what we say and what we write. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ageism. Certainly, how we think about aging varies by culture. In some cultures, for example, elders are revered for their knowledge and wisdom. In others, aging is viewed as a gradual decline into an inevitable physical and cognitive wasteland. Unfortunately for me, my dominant culture is the latter. This schema that has been drilled into my head, however, has amassed so many exceptions that I’m not sure that I still have the schema. I have many friends who are in their 70s and 80s. They are all physically active and intellectual powerhouses. Every one of them. When I read the opening two sentences of Isaacowitz’s aging and emotion regulation article in Perspectives on Psychological Science quoted at the beginning of this blog post, I was first puzzled. “Older adults report surprisingly positive affective experience.” Surprisingly? You’re surprised that older adults are happy? Why is this surprising? “The idea that older adults are better at emotion regulation has emerged as an intuitively appealing explanation for why they report such high levels of affective well-being despite other age-related declines.” Oh. You’re surprised because you believe that older adults live in a physical and cognitive wasteland, so how could they possibly be happy. This needs an explanation! It even has a name: the paradox of aging. “There is an extensive, robust literature suggesting that older adults self-report quite positive emotional lives; sometimes they even report being more emotionally positive than their younger counterparts” (Isaacowitz, 2022). [Gasp!] The question is not why younger people aren’t happier. The question is why older adults are. Some researchers think that older adults are happier because older adults are better at regulating emotions. Isaacowitz’s article provides a nice summary of the research into this explanation and concludes that the evidence is inconclusive. The article ends with this: “the robust finding of older adults’ positive affective experience remains to be well-explained. This is a mystery for future researchers still to unravel” (Isaacowitz, 2022). This article was a nice reminder for me to consider my own schemas and assumptions when I talk with my students about any psychological topic. For example, I knew an instructor who would talk about people who were diagnosed with a psychological disorder as suffering from the disorder. I know people with a variety of diagnoses who manage, live with, and experience psychological disorders. The word suffer brings with it a set of assumptions that I don’t share. I admit that I have my own baggage here. I have a chronic physical condition that if not well-managed could kill me which I manage, live with, and experience. I most certainly do not suffer from it. Maybe we should be also asking how I—a person with such a condition—could possibly be so gosh darn happy. If in the Intro Psych research methods chapter you discuss how a researcher’s values affect the topics they choose to research, discussion of this article may be a good example. It’s a nice illustration of why researchers from a diversity of backgrounds is so important to science. Would, for example, a researcher from a culture that reveres older adults wonder why older adults are happy? If you’d like to explore more about cultural ageism and its impact, I highly recommend Becca Levy’s 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code. It will change how you think about—and talk about—aging.   Reference Isaacowitz, D. M. (2022). What do we know about aging and emotion regulation? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1541–1555. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059819   ... View more

I think of the Intro Psych course as an owner’s manual for being human. Throughout the course, we explore the multitude of ways we are influenced to think, feel, or behave a certain way that happens without our conscious awareness. Here’s one such example we can use to give our students some experimental design practice. It’s suitable for the methods chapter or, if you cover drugs, in that chapter after discussing caffeine. Caffeine, as a stimulant, increases arousal. It’s plausible that consumers who are physiologically aroused engage in more impulsive shopping and, thus, spend more money than their uncaffeinated counterparts. Give students this hypothesis: If shoppers consume caffeine immediately before shopping, then they will spend more money. Ask students to take a couple minutes thinking about how they would design this study, and then invite students to share their ideas in pairs or small groups. Ask the groups to identify their independent variable (including experimental and control conditions) and their dependent variable. If you cover operational definitions, ask for those, too. Invite groups to share their designs with the class. Emphasize that there is no one right way to conduct a study. Each design will have its flaws, so using different designs to test the same hypothesis will give us greater confidence in the hypothesis. Share with students the first two of five experiments reported in the Journal of Marketing (Biswas et al., 2022). In study 1, researchers set up a free espresso station just inside the front door of a store. As shoppers entered, they were offered a cup of espresso. The experiment was conducted at different times of day over several days. At certain times, shoppers were offered a caffeinated espresso. At other times, they were offered a decaffeinated espresso. As the espresso drinkers left the store after having completed their shopping, researchers asked if they could see their receipts. Everyone said yes. Researchers recorded the number of items purchased and the total purchase amount. (Ask students to identify the independent and dependent variables.) As hypothesized, the caffeinated shoppers purchased more items (2.16 vs. 1.45) and spent more money (€27.48 vs. €14.82) than the decaffeinated shoppers. Note that participants knew whether they were consuming a caffeinated or decaffeinated beverage, but did not know when they accepted that they were participating in a study. There are a few ethical questions about study 1 worth exploring with your students. First, this study lacked informed consent. Participants were not aware that they were participating in a study when they accepted the free espresso. As participants were leaving, it became clear to them that they were participating in a study. Given the norm of reciprocity, did participants see not handing over their receipts as a viable option? Lastly, the researchers expected that caffeine would increase consumer spending. In fact, it nearly doubled it. Was it ethical for the researchers to put unwitting shoppers in a position to spend more money than they had intended? In study 2, students from a marketing research class “in exchange for course credit” were asked to recruit family or friends to participate. The volunteers, who were told that this was a study about their shopping experience, were randomly assigned to an espresso or water condition which were consumed in a cafeteria next to a department store. After consuming their beverages, the volunteers were escorted to the department store and were asked to spend two hours in the store “shopping or looking around.” As in study 1, caffeinated shoppers spent nearly twice as much money (€69.91 vs. €39.63). Again, we have the ethical question of putting unwitting shoppers in the position to spend more money than they would have. We also have the ethical question of students recruiting friends and family to participate as course requirement. And then from a design perspective, how certain can we be that the students didn’t share the hypothesis with their family and friends? Is it possible that some of the students thought that if the study’s results didn’t support the hypothesis, their grade would be affected? As a final ethics question, what should we do with the knowledge that we are likely to spend (much) more money when shopping when we are caffeinated? As a shopper, it’s easy. I’m not going stop on the coffee shop on my way to the store. For a store manager whose job it is to maximize, it’s also easy. Give away cups of coffee as shoppers enter the store. The amount of money it costs to staff a station and serve coffee will more than pay for itself in shopper spending. Here’s the bigger problem. Is it okay to manipulate shoppers in this way for financial gain? Advertising and other persuasive strategies do this all the time. Is free caffeine any different? Or should coffee cups carry warning labels? To close this discussion, ask students in what other places or situations can impulsive behavior encouraged by being caffeinated be problematic. Casinos come readily to my mind. Are caffeinated people likely to bet more? Would that study be ethical to conduct?   Reference Biswas, D., Hartmann, P., Eisend, M., Szocs, C., Jochims, B., Apaolaza, V., Hermann, E., López, C. M., & Borges, A. (2022). Caffeine’s Effects on Consumer Spending. Journal of Marketing, 002224292211092. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221109247   ... View more

Men in the United States are four times more likely to die by suicide than are women (Curtin et al., 2022), and men are almost half as likely to receive mental health treatment than are women (Terlizzi & Norris, 2021). This is seriously problematic, as pointed out by a December 2022 New York Times article (Smith, 2022). In the Intro Psych therapy chapter, share the above statistics with students. Ask your students to discuss in small groups why they think men are less likely to receive mental health treatment. (While what is described here is for a face-to-face class, the discussion can be adapted for asynchronous discussions.) To take away some of what could be very personal, ask students to consider why their male friends or male relatives might not be inclined to seek mental health treatment. If your male students choose to share their own thoughts, that’s fine; just don’t pressure them to do so. Invite the groups to share the reasons they generated with the class. Record the reasons in a way that students can view them. Next invite your students to visit the Man Therapy website (mantherapy.org). What are their favorite article titles? I’m partial to “Sometimes a man needs a pork shoulder to cry on” and “Anxiety: When worry grabs you by the [nether parts]” with an honorable mention for “Sleep: When catching z’s is harder than catching a 20lb trout.” Do your students think that the messaging about mental health on this website would resonate with the men in their lives? Why or why not? Do your students think different messaging would work better for different cultural or ethnic groups? If so, what might that look like? If you’d like to extend this discussion, ask students if they were interested in sharing the mantherapy.org link with their male friends and relatives. For your students who are game, ask them to send out texts right now while in class. If texts come back while you are still in class, invite students to share them. Check back in with students during the next class for reactions that students received after class. If time allows and you are so inclined, ask students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would evaluate the effectiveness of a website such as mantherapy.org. What would their hypothesis be? What would be their measure of effectiveness? What would be their control condition? How would they identify and recruit participants. If your class, department, psych club, or psych honor society thinks that mantherapy.org could be effective at increasing men’s access to mental healthcare, you can “become a champion” by visiting this page and completing the form at the bottom. You will receive a “shipment of printed collateral including posters, wallet cards, and stickers to help get the word out and drive traffic to the site.” There is no mention of a cost for these materials.   References Curtin, S. C., Garnett, M. F., & Ahmad, F. B. (2022). Provisional numbers and rates of suicide by month and demographic characteristics: United States, 2021 (No. 24). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr024.pdf Smith, D. G. (2022, December 9). How to Get More Men to Try Therapy. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/well/mind/men-mental-health-therapy.html Terlizzi, E. P., & Norris, T. (2021). Mental health treatment among adults: United States, 2020 (NCHS Data Brief No. 419). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db419.pdf       ... View more

Many of us who have been around psychology for a while remember ELIZA (or at least remember learning about ELIZA), arguably the first chatbot. Jumping ahead a few decades, with paraphrasing tools users copy/paste text into the tool, click a button, and the words—after being hammered by a thesaurus—are spun into new text. The tools have been marketed to freelance writers. The freelance writer can write one article, copy/paste it into the tool, click the button to get their next text, then tweak the new text to make sure it sounds good. They now have a new-enough article they can sell to someone else without it being picked up by plagiarism detectors as duplicated content. Some of our students have been using these same paraphrasing tools, although sometimes without the proofreading and tweaking. The results can be, frankly, hilarious. My favorite is a history essay that kept referring to President Shrub. Computing technology, however, continues to march on. And now we have AI tools that will write a pretty good essay based on a sentence fragment. We even get fake references. Plagiarism checker tools will not flag the content because the sentences have been newly generated. Just not by a human. The newest tool is called ChatGPT. Anyone can try it out, although at the time of this writing, the website says, “We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems.” While we wait for them to have enough servers to handle the demand (from our students?), read an essay that Mike Sharples had the ChatGPT tool create on learning styles (Sharples, 2022). Sharples gave the AI this prompt: “The construct of ‘learning styles’ is problematic because.” Here’s a paragraph from that AI-generated essay—and, yes, the Dunn and Dunn reference is fake, although it is based partially on fact. In a review of this research, Dunn and Dunn (1997) found that the evidence does not support the idea that people have a particular learning mode that is dominant or that they process information in a particular way. In their study, the authors found that when students were given a particular instructional treatment, they could be classified in a particular learning modality category. But when they were given a different instructional treatment, they were classified in a different category. In a follow-up study in which they gave students a number of instructional treatments, Dunn and Dunn found that students could be placed in a particular category in some treatments, but not others (Sharples, 2022). As I pasted in that paragraph from a four-paragraph essay, I wondered if I would be violating copyright law for the amount that I was using. And then I thought, “Wait! No one actually wrote this!” Surely if a monkey does not own the copyright to their selfies (Nauro, et al. V. David John Slater, et al., 2016), then a computer program does not own the copyright to their generated text. To make this even creepier, Sharples writes, “’Just as a student can generate an essay in seconds, so a teacher can assess it. Add ‘Here is a short assessment of this student essay:’ to the end of the text and GPT-3 writes a review.” Now that I’ve concluded that a computer cannot hold the copyright, I have no qualms sharing the entire AI-generated review with you. The essay discusses the idea of learning styles, and how they may be developed over time. It cites research by Dunn and Dunn which suggests that learning styles are not fixed, and that people can learn in different ways depending on the situation. The essay is well-organized and flows smoothly. It makes a clear argument and supports it with evidence from research. One potential criticism is that the essay does not discuss the implications of learning styles research, or how this research can be used to improve learning. However, this is not necessarily a flaw, as the essay is only meant to be a brief overview of the topic (Sharples, 2022). Sharples suggests that instructors use AI writing tools as a teaching tool rather than struggling to find ways to detect or counter their use. I’m less optimistic. Stephen Marche, writing in The Atlantic, also has concerns. “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up… Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout” (Marche, 2022). I have lots of questions and no answers. What have we done to create a generation of students who are more interested in completing an assignment for a course grade than learning? What happens when college degree recipients hit the workforce and are unable to write? Will the AI tools cover for them there, too? Does writing make us better thinkers? What happens if we stop writing? Is this the beginning of the end of online education? Are we going to turn back the clock and return to in-class, hand-written assessments? If so, will cursive writing make a comeback because it’s a faster way to hand-write? And if we all return to the classroom, what are the implications for who has and who does not have access to higher education? Or will we require students to do a Cloze test on all of their assignments to prove that they did indeed write them themselves—or at least were able to memorize their AI-generated essay well enough to convince their instructors that they wrote it? Or will we do what Sharples suggest, such as use AI to generate essays, and then ask students to critique the essays and then edit them so they are better (Sharples, 2022)? Lots and lots of questions. No answers.   References Marche, S. (2022, December 6). The college essay is dead. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/ Nauro, et al. V. David John Slater, et al., No. 24, 28 (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California January 28, 2016). http://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.orrick.com/files/naruto-v-slater-motion-to-dismiss-feb-2016.pdf Sharples, M. (2022, May 17). New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment. Impact of Social Sciences. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/05/17/new-ai-tools-that-can-write-student-essays-require-educators-to-rethink-teaching-and-assessment/     ... View more

Physicist Jessica Wade noticed a lack of Wikipedia pages for underrepresented scientists. In 2018, she began writing one Wikipedia page a day devoted to a woman scientist who did not have a Wikipedia page. Wade has created nearly 1,800 pages (including this one for Kim Cobb, a climate scientist) (Silva, 2022). The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has encouraged psychological scientists and their students to write or edit Wikipedia pages on psychological concepts since 2011 when APS president Mahzarin R. Banaji issued the challenge (Bender, 2012). While it is still important to make sure the psychological knowledge on Wikipedia is solid, Jessica Wade has a point. The people matter, too. Part of it is recognizing people for their work, but mostly it’s about our students (and the general public) seeing the diversity of the psychological community. The Women in Red WikiProject is devoted to turning Wikipedia’s red links for women into blue ones. The red links are for content that should have a wiki page but don’t. At least not yet. The project editors note that as of November 2022 “of 1,913,852 biographies [on Wikipedia], only 371,041 are about women” (Wikipedia, 2022). For those of you reaching for your calculators, that is almost 20%. The Women Scientists WikiProject has a similar goal specifically for scientists. If anyone is interested in creating a WikiProject specifically for psychologists/psychological scientists/cognitive scientists/behavioral scientists who are from underrepresented groups, this Wikipedia page explains how to go about it. However, one may certainly create pages without participating in a WikiProject. If you’d like to put your students to work creating biographies, there is no shortage of candidates. Some of APA’s presidents have Wikipedia pages, but many do not, such as Frank Worrell (2022), Jennifer F. Kelly (2021), Sandra L. Shullman (2020), Rosie Phillips Davis (2019), and Jessica Henderson Daniel (2018). Similarly, some of the APS presidents do not have Wikipedia pages, such as Barbara Tverksy (2018-2019). While presidents of these organizations may be a fine starting place, APA and APS award winners—particularly the lifetime achievement recipients—are worth a look. Perhaps there are rock stars at your institution or in your field who are deserving of a Wikipedia page. If you would like to build a Wikipedia biography assignment into one or more of your courses, I encourage you to start with APS’s Wikipedia Initiative page. While the focus here is on classroom assignments, I imagine that if your psychology club or honor society wanted to build pages, that would work, too! References Bender, E. (2012). Papers with a purpose: The APS Wikipedia Initiative’s first year. APS Observer, 25. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/papers-with-a-purpose Silva, C. (2022, November 15). Meet the person who added 1,767 underrepresented scientists to Wikipedia. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/small-talk-jessica-wade Wikipedia. (2022). Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red&oldid=1124298018 ... View more

I read with increasing horror a New York Times article describing how college and university athletic departments have partnered with sportsbooks to encourage betting among their students. (The legal betting age in the U.S. varies by state. In ten states the minimum age is 18, in Alabama it is 19, and in all of the rest—including D.C.—it is 21. See the state list. In Canada, the age is 18 or 19 depending on province. See the province list.) “Major universities, with their tens of thousands of alumni and a captive audience of easy-to-reach students, have emerged as an especially enticing target” for gambling companies (Betts et al., 2022). While what I’d like to write is an opinion piece about the financial state of colleges and universities (how is it that public funding has evaporated?), how athletic departments have come to operate outside of the college and university hierarchy (why does my $450 airfare to travel to a professional conference have to be signed off on by a raft of people, but an athletic department can sign a $1.6 million dollar deal without the university’s Board of Regents knowing anything about it?), and the ethically-suspect behavior of a college or university using their student contact information—such as email addresses that the institution provides to them and requires them to use for official communication—to encourage those students to bet on sports. But I’m not going to write that opinion piece. At least not in this forum. Instead, I am going to write about what I know best: teaching Intro Psych. If our colleges and universities are going to encourage our students to gamble on sports, psychology professors need to be more explicit in discussing gambling. Within casinos, slot machines are the biggest gaming moneymaker (see this UNLV Center for Gaming Research infographic for an example). For everything you could possibly want to know about slot machines, I highly recommend Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, cultural anthropologist at New York University. Slot machines and sports betting are similar in that they both pay out on a variable ratio schedule. People play slot machines to escape; they are powered by negative reinforcement, not positive. Each win provides the ability to play longer, and thus to spend even more time not thinking about problems at school, at work, at home, or in the world. The goal of the slot machine manufacturer and casino is to get you to stay at the machine longer. Having recently visited a casino, I was impressed by some of the newer innovations designed to do just that, such as comfy seats and phone charging pads built into the slot machine itself. While sports betting may—initially at least—be driven by positive reinforcement. Each win feels good and apparently outweighs the punishment of a loss. However, like slot machines, sports betting can become an escape. The time spent planning bets, placing bets, monitoring the games and matches one has put money on, and then trying to find ways to fund the next round of bets can be time not spent thinking about problems at school, at work, at home, or in the world. Since we’re talking about decision making, cognitive biases are also at play. For example, the availability heuristic may have us give undue attention to the big betting wins our friends brag about. Are our friends telling us about their big losses, too? If not, we may feel like winning is more common than losing. We know, however, that winning is not more common. Every time someone downloads the University of Colorado Boulder’s partner sportsbook app using the university’s promo code and then places a bet, the university banks $30. If the sportsbook is giving away $30 every time, how much money in losing bets per person, on average, must the sportsbook be collecting? While there are many topics in the Intro Psych course where sports betting can be discussed, I’ll suggest using it as an opener for discussion of psychological disorders. To be considered a psychological disorder, a behavior needs to be unusual, distressing, and dysfunctional (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Ask students to envision a friend who lies about how much they are gambling, who has wanted to quit or greatly reduce how much they are betting but can’t seem to be able to, and who is using student loans to fund their betting. Do your students think their friend meets the criteria for a psychological disorder? Why or why not? If you’d like, have students discuss in small groups, and then invite groups to share their conclusions. Gambling disorder is a DSM-V diagnosis categorized under “Substance Use and Addictive Disorders.” In previous editions of the DSM, it was called “gambling pathology” and was categorized as an impulse control disorder. Also in previous DSMs, illegal activity was a criterion for diagnosis; that has been removed in DSM-V. To be diagnosed with gambling disorder, a person must—in addition to impairment and/or distress—meet at least four of the following criteria: Requires higher and higher bets to get the same rush Becomes irritable during attempts to cut back on gambling Has been repeatedly unsuccessful when trying to cut back or stop gambling Spends a lot of time thinking about gambling When stressed, turns to gambling as an escape Chases losses (for example, after losing a $20 bet, places an even higher bet to try to get the $20 back) Lies about how much they are gambling Gambling interferes with their performance in school or in a job or has negatively affected interpersonal relationships Gets money from others to support their gambling Poll your students—even by a show of hands—to find out if they know someone, including themselves, who meet at least four of these criteria. For help with a gambling problem, residents of the U.S., Canada, and the U.S. Virgin Islands can contact the National Problem Gambling Helpline by calling or texting 1-800-522-4700 any day at any time. For those who prefer chat, visit this webpage. For additional peer support, recommend gamtalk.org. References American Psychiatric Association (Ed.). (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (5th ed). American Psychiatric Association. Betts, A., Little, A., Sander, E., Tremayne-Pengelly, A., & Bogdanich, W. (2022, November 20). How colleges and sports-betting companies ‘Caesarized’ campus life. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-betting-universities-colleges.html ... View more

In the days before learning management systems, my students would take exams in class and submit hard copies of their assignments. I would write carefully crafted comments on these documents before returning them to the students in class. Some students would read my comments immediately. Some students would tuck their papers into their book or notebook, and I would fool myself into thinking that each of these students would give my comments careful consideration when they were in a quiet place and could give my comments the attention they deserved. And some students would toss the papers into the trashcan on their way out the door at the end of class—my carefully crafted comments never so much as even glanced at. Now in the age of course management systems, my carefully crafted comments are digital. I cannot see if my students are reading my comments or not, but I am confident that the percentages are not all the different from the days of paper. I can see why students would read their professors’ comments, because I was that type of student. I did well in school, so if I missed a question or didn’t earn a perfect score on a paper, I wanted to know why. What to make of those students who don’t read their professors’ comments, who toss their papers in the trash? I made a they-don’t-care-about-school attribution and gave it no more thought. And then some years ago Roddy Roediger pointed out that students who found taking the test or writing the paper aversive were disinclined to revisit the experience. In other words, if they hated doing the test/paper in the first place, why would they want to spend even more time thinking about it? That was a true “doh!” moment for me. If I really wanted students to learn from their mistakes, I was going to have to provide an incentive for revisiting these aversive events. To that end, I began using an assignment wrapper (this earlier blog post describes what I do). This is not the only time I’ve thought about failure—or, more generally, about being wrong. Author Adam Grant told a story about giving a talk and having Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman who was in the audience come up to him afterward and say, “That was wonderful. I was wrong.” (See a longer description of Grant and Kahneman’s interaction and my thoughts on it in this blog post.) With all of that floating around in my head, I read Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach’s (2022) Perspectives on Psychological Science article on learning from failure. They argue that there are two big reasons we tend not to learn from failure: emotional and cognitive. The emotional reason is that we want to feel good about ourselves. As a general rule, reflecting on where we have gone wrong does not tend to produce happy feelings about ourselves, therefore we prefer not to engage in such reflection. There appear to be two cognitive reasons why it is hard for us to learn from failure. Confirmation bias causes us to look for information that aligns with our view of ourselves as a person who is correct. We focus on all of the times when we have been correct and dismiss the times when we have been incorrect. The second reason is that it is cognitively easier to learn from our successes than our failures. When we succeed, we can simply say, “Let’s do that again.” When we fail, we have to figure out why we failed and then develop a different course of action. That takes much more effort. Based on their summary of why learning from failure is hard, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach have some suggestions on how to encourage others—in this case, our students—to learn from failure. Of course, I don’t mean failure defined as scoring below standard on an assessment. I mean failure in a more general sense, such as missing items on an exam or losing points on an assignment. First, let’s look at their suggested interventions designed to counter emotional barriers to learning from failure. Rather than having to address our own failures, we can observe and learn from the failures of others. Instructors who go over the most commonly missed exam questions in class, for example, are taking this approach. When giving instructions for an assignment, some instructors will create an example with many common errors and then ask students to work in small groups to identify the errors. Creating some emotional distance between ourselves and our failures can help us look at our failures more objectively. One strategy would be to ask myself “Why did Sue fail?” rather than ask “Why did I fail?” While I can see why that would work in theory, I’m having a hard time picturing how to explain it to students in such a way that would minimize eyerolling. Asking students to give advice to other students can help students learn from their failure while at the same time turning the failure into a source of strength. For example, immediately following receiving exam scores, ask students to take a minute to reflect on what they did in studying for the test that worked well and what they would do differently next time. Ask them to write their advice—just a couple sentences—in whatever format is easiest for you to collect. For example, you could distribute blank index cards for students to write on, collect the cards, shuffle them, and then redistribute them. If you’d like to screen them first, collect the cards, read them, and then redistribute the next class session. Or you can make this an online class discussion where the initial post is the student’s advice. Remind students that they have abilities and skills, that their education is important to them (commitment), and that they have expertise. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach tell us that experts have an easier time learning from failure than do novices. Experts are committed to being experts in their field. To be an expert, they know that they have abilities and skills, but to get even better, they have to be able to learn from failure. Perhaps this is one reason it is easier for Daniel Kahneman to accept being wrong—every time he is, he learns something new and is now even more of an expert than he was before. While our students may not (yet) be Nobel Prize winners, they do have reading, study, and social skills that they can build on. Remind students that they are not born with knowing psychology, chemistry, math, history, or whatever, nor are they born knowing how to write or how to study. Knowledge and skills are learned. You probably recognized this as fostering a growth mindset. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach also have five suggested interventions that address cognitive barriers to learning from failure. Being explicit about how failure can help us learn can reduce the cognitive effort to learn from failure. For example, if your course includes a comprehensive final, point out to students that if they take a look at the questions they missed on this exam, they can learn the correct information now, and that will reduce how much time they need to study for the final. While this may seem obvious to instructors, to students who are succumbing to confirmation bias and cognitive miserliness, it may not occur to them that reviewing missed questions will save them time in the long run. We seem to have an easier time learning from failure when our failure involves the social domain. “An adult who loses track of time and misses a meeting with friends may tune in and learn more from this failure than an adult who loses track of time and misses a train” (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2022, p. 1517). I wonder if a jigsaw classroom, small group discussions, or study groups would address this. If a student is accountable to others, are they more likely to learn from their errors? It’s an interesting question. If having enough cognitive bandwidth is a barrier to learning from failure, then providing time in class for students to learn from failure may be time well spent. When I gave in-class multiple choice exams, students would take the test themselves first. After they submitted their completed bubble sheets, they got a new bubble sheet, and students would answer the same questions again, but this time it was open note, open book, and an open free-for-all discussion. The individual test was worth 50 points, and the wide-open test was worth 10 points. So much learning happened in that wide-open test that if I were to go back to multiple-choice tests, I’d make the wide-open test worth 25 points. Most students discussed and debated the answers to the questions. Even the students who were not active participants were active listeners. While the students hadn’t received their exam scores back yet, I’d hear students say, “AH! I missed that one!” They were learning from their failures—and in a socially supportive atmosphere. The more practice we have at a skill, the fewer cognitive resources we need to devote to it, and so the easier it is to learn from our failures. One approach would be to encourage students to add tools to their study skills toolbox. The LearningScientists.org study posters are a great place for students to start. The more tools they have, the easier it will be for them to choose the best one for what they are learning. By analogy, if all they have in their toolbox is a hammer, that hammer will work great when a hammer is called for. But if they have a situation that calls for a screwdriver or pliers, they might be able to make the hammer work, but it will take much more effort and the outcomes will not be that great. Picture hammering in a screw. Once students are well-practiced at using a number of different study skills, it will be easier for them to see where a particular study skill did not serve them well for a particular kind of test. What they learn from their failure, perhaps, is to implement a different study skill. We can work to create a culture that accepts failure as a way to learn. This can be a challenge with students who have been indoctrinated to see failure as a reflection on who they are as human beings. Standards-based grading, mastery-based grading, and ungrading are all strategies for embracing failure as an opportunity to learn. In each case, students do the work and then continue to revise until a defined bar has been reached. In these approaches, failure is not a final thing; it is merely information one learns from. Of the instructors I’ve known who have tried one of these techniques, the biggest challenge seems to come from students who have a hard time grasping a grading system that is not point based. Being able to learn from failure is a lifelong skill that will serve our students well. If you try any of these strategies, be explicit about why. And then tell students that in their next job interview when they are asked about their greatest strength, their greatest strength may very well be learning from failure. It’s the rare employer who would not love hearing that.   Reference Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You think failure is hard? So is learning from it. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511–1524. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059817     ... View more