In a pre-election essay, I contrasted the prognostications of poll-influenced prediction models with the wisdom of the betting crowd. I suspected that bettors—many of whom believed their candidate would win—were overly influenced by the false consensus effect (the presumption that most others see the world as we do). But score this round for the wisdom of the betting crowd, which better anticipated the election closeness, including Trump’s Florida victory. That’s a contrast with Britain’s Brexit vote, where polls indicated a toss-up (a half percent edge for “Remain”) while the betting markets wrongly estimated a 90+ percent Remain chance. The U.S. polls had a rougher-than-usual year, with the final Biden margin likely near 4.5 percent rather than the predicted 8 percent. The pollsters also struggled in key states. On election eve, the average poll gave Trump a 0.8 percent edge in Ohio; he won by 8 percent. In Florida, the polls gave Biden a 2.5 percent edge; he lost by about 3 percent. In Wisconsin, the polls favored Biden by 8.4 percent; he won by less than a percent. With so few people now responding to pollster calls and texts, precision is increasing a challenge (even with pollster adjusting results to match the voting demographics). But lest we dismiss the polls and sophisticated forecasters, let’s grant them three points. First, they got many of the specifics right. FiveThirtyEight, for example, correctly anticipated 48 of the 50 presumed state outcomes. Some of its correct predictions even surprised its creator: Second, polls, as Silver has said , could be worse and they would still greatly exceed conventional seat-of-the-pants wisdom. In a University of Michigan national survey in September, 4 in 5 Republicans incorrectly anticipated a Trump victory. Third, although the models missed on some details, credit them with the big picture. “Biden’s Favored in Our Final Presidential Forecast, but It’s a Fine Line Between a Landslide and a Nail-Biter,” headlined FiveThirtyEight in its final election forecast. And Biden did win. As I write, though, the betting markets —mindful of fraud allegations and legal challenges—still give Donald Trump a 12 percent chance of victory. But this, says Silver , “ is basically a market saying there's a 12% chance that the sky isn't blue.” Consider, say the media analysts who have called the election: How would widespread voter fraud account for Donald Trump’s doing much better than predicted by the historically reliable polls (and for down ballot Republicans doing better yet)? And how could that be so across America in countless local municipalities, including those with Republican-elected officials? Take my community—Holland, Michigan, a historically Republican town where Betsy DeVos grew up and has a home just a bike ride from my own. With a changing demography that now closely mirrors the nation, our last three presidential elections have been razor close, with Donald Trump narrowly edging Hillary Clinton in 2016 . . . but with Biden defeating Trump by 11 percent. Likewise, our surrounding county—one of the nation’s most reliably Republican counties—voted Trump by 30.2 percent in 2016 but only 21.5 percent in 2020. Neighboring Kent County, also leans Republican and is the home of Republican-turned-Libertarian Congressman Justin Amash, gave Biden 50,000 more votes than Clinton received four years ago. Is it conceivable that the Republican-friendly voting officials in countless such places across the U.S. consistently committed Biden-supporting fraud? All in all, it was not the best of years for pollsters and modelers, though it was a worse year for John and Joan Q. Public’s expectations of their candidate’s triumphant success. Winston Churchill once called democracy “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms.” To borrow his sentiment, polls and models are the worst forms of prediction, except for all the other forms. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

“If public health officials recommended that everyone stay at home for a month because of a serious outbreak of coronavirus in your community, how likely are you to stay home for a month?”   When Gallup recently put this question to Americans, 76 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans answered “Very likely.” This partisan gap coheres with an earlier YouGov survey finding (replicated by NPR/Marist 😞 By a 2 to 1 margin (58 percent versus 29 percent), Republicans more than Democrats believed “the threat of coronavirus has been exaggerated.”   The gap extends to mask wearing, with mostly maskless shut-down protestors storming my state’s capitol. Politico headlined that wearing a mask is for smug liberals,” adding “For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously.”   Given how right George W. Bush was to remind us “how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” my social scientist curiosity is tickled:  Why the gap? What is it about being a Democrat that makes one more accepting of disruptive sheltering-in-place and mask-wearing?   It’s not because kindred-spirited Democrats control the White House bully pulpit and the federal agencies that recommended sheltering-in-place.   It’s likely not because Democrats are more submissively docile and obedient of authority.   It’s not because Democrats are more fearful of threatening diseases, or have had more COVID-19-related experiences.   And no, it’s seemingly not because Democrats are more knowledgeable about basic science. When Pew in 2019 gave Americans a science knowledge test, Republicans and Democrats were about equally likely to know, for example, that the tilt of the Earth’s axis determines the seasons, that antibiotic overuse produces antibiotic resistance, and that a control group helps determine the effectiveness of a new drug.   So what gives? And why, in another Gallup survey, is there an even greater political gap in concerns about climate change—with 77 percent of Democrats and only 16 percent of Republicans being “concerned believers”: people who believe that climate warming will pose a serious threat, that it’s human-caused, and that news reports about it are accurate or underestimate the problem.   As one who grew up Republican—my beloved business-owning father was Washington State treasurer of Nixon for President—I scratch my head. Why has the conservative party I associate with family values, low taxes, and business-supportive policies become so unsupportive of people’s right to life under a pandemic and of our conserving the environment for our grandchildren?   One answer, reports University of Montana psychologist Luke Conway, is that conservatives are small government folks. They resist government intervention in their lives.   A second answer comes from another Pew survey . Although telling me your political affiliation won’t clue me to your basic science knowledge, it will clue me to your science attitudes. Should scientists take “an active role in public policy debates?” Yes, say 73 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans. Even among those with high science knowledge, Republicans (64 percent) are much more likely than Democrats (39 percent) to “say scientists are just as likely to be biased as other people.”   Speaking to protestors here in Michigan’s state capitol, David Clarke, a former Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, sheriff, reportedly mocked “bending the curve,” scorned “so-called experts” who created the six-foot social distancing recommendation “out of their rear ends,” and declared the coronavirus death count phony. (Actually, excess mortality data indicate the death count underestimates the toll.)   Conservative commentator Yuval Levin, a former science adviser to President George W. Bush, also notes how social media and the Internet diminish respect for scientific expertise: “People tend to think that the expert is just a person. And so now information is available anywhere. And so anyone can be an expert.” If Levin is right, this is the Dunning-Krueger effect writ large (the least competent people most overestimating their knowledge).   Another source of science skepticism may be the reversal of Republicans being the party of college graduates (as were 54 percent in 1994 versus only 39 percent of Democrats). By 2017 those numbers had exactly flipped. More education used to predict Republican voting. Now it predicts Democratic voting. Highly educated scientists, for example, now identify as Democratic rather than Republican by a 10 to 1 margin (55 to 6 percent).   Does a Democratic-leaning academia—with 6 in 10 college professors identifying as “liberal”—explain why only one-third of Republicans (but two-thirds of Democrats) now perceive colleges and universities having a positive effect “on the way things are going in the country”? And, in addition to valid concerns for jobs and the economy, does Republicans’ suspicion of higher education and the role of scientists in public policy feed their push to reopen the country?   Despite scientists’ progressive leanings, we can credit them with listening to their data and then letting the chips fall. Yes, I know, science is not an utterly neutral, value-free enterprise. But credit science with the pursuit of truth—with giving us research findings that sometimes affirm progressive views (about climate risk, sexual orientation, and socially toxic inequality), but also sometimes affirm conservative views (about the contribution of marriage to human flourishing, the association of religiosity with health and well-being, and growth mindsets that power individual initiative).     And take note of the rising voices within academia who, in the words of the Heterodox Academy movement, believe that “diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research and learning.” As psychologist Scott Lilienfeld declares in a forthcoming special issue of Archives of Scientific Psychology, the welcome mat is now out even for “unpopular ideas.”   If we educators can help people appreciate both the nonpartisan nature of scientific findings and academia’s openness to a free marketplace of ideas, then might we enable tomorrow’s citizens—whether Democrat or Republican—to welcome the wisdom of science?   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... 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Paul Krugman’s Arguing with Zombies (2020) identifies “zombie ideas”—repeatedly refuted ideas that refuse to die. He offers economic zombie ideas that survive to continue eating people’s brains: “Tax cuts pay for themselves.” “The budget deficit is our biggest economic problem.” “Social Security is going broke.” “Climate change is nonexistent or trivial.”   That triggered my musing: Does everyday psychology have a similar army of mind-eating, refuse-to-die ideas?  Here are some candidates, and the research-based findings that tell a different story: People often repress painful experiences, which years later may later reappear as recovered memories or disguised emotions. (In reality, we remember traumas all too well, often as unwanted flashbacks.) In realms from sports to stock picking, it pays to go with the person who’s had the hot hand. (Actually, the combination of our pattern-seeking mind and the unexpected streakiness of random data guarantees that we will perceive hot hands even amid random outcomes.) Parental nurture shapes our abilities, personality, and sexual orientation. (The greatest and most oft-replicated surprise of psychological science is the minimal contribution of siblings’ “shared environment.”) Immigrants are crime-prone. (Contrary to what President Donald Trump has alleged, and contrary to people’s greater fear of immigrants in regions where few immigrants live, immigrants do not have greater-than-average arrest and incarceration rates.) Big round numbers: The brain has 100 billion neurons. 10 percent of people are gay. We use only 10 percent of our brain. 10,000 daily steps make for health. 10,000 practice hours make an expert. (Psychological science tells us to distrust such big round numbers.) Psychology’s three most misunderstood concepts are that: “Negative reinforcement” refers to punishment. “Heritability” means how much of a person’s traits are attributable to genes. “Short-term memory” refers to your inability to remember what you experienced yesterday or last week, as opposed to long ago. (These zombie ideas are all false, as I explain here .) Seasonal affective disorder causes more people to get depressed in winter, especially in cloudy places, and in northern latitudes. (This is still an open debate, but massive new data suggest to me that it just isn’t so.) To raise healthy children, protect them from stress and other risks. (Actually, children are antifragile . Much as their immune systems develop protective antibodies from being challenged, children’s emotional resilience builds from experiencing normal stresses.) Teaching should align with individual students’ “learning styles.” (Do students learn best when teaching builds on their responding to, say, auditory versus visual input? Nice-sounding idea, but researchers— here and here —continue to find little support for it.) Well-intentioned therapies change lives. (Often yes, but sometimes no—as illustrated by the repeated failures of some therapy zombies: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, D.A.R.E. Drug Abuse Prevention, Scared Straight crime prevention, Conversion Therapy for sexual reorientation, permanent weight-loss training programs.) Association for Psychological Science President Lisa Feldman Barrett, with support from colleagues, has offered additional psychology-relevant zombie ideas: Vaccines cause autism (a zombie idea responsible for the spread of preventable disease). A woman’s waist-to-hip ratio predicts her reproductive success. (For people who advocate this idea about women, says Barrett, “There should be a special place in hell, filled with mirrors.”) A sharp distinction between nature and nurture. (Instead, biology and experience intertwine: “Nature requires nurture, and nurture has its impact via nature.”) “Male” and “female” are genetically fixed, non-overlapping categories. (Neuroscience shows our human gender reality to be more complicated.) People worldwide similarly read emotion in faces. (People do smile when happy, frown when sad, and scowl when angry—but there is variation across context and cultures. Moreover, a wide-eyed gasping face can convey more than one emotion, depending on the context.) Westend61 /Getty Images Ergo, when approached by a possible zombie idea, don’t just invite it to become part of your mental family. Apply psychological science by welcoming plausible-sounding ideas, even hunches, and then putting each to the test: Ask does the idea work? Do the data support its predictions?   When subjected to skeptical scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas do sometimes find support. During the 1700s, scientists ridiculed the notion that meteorites had extraterrestrial origins. Thomas Jefferson reportedly scoffed at the idea that “stones fell from heaven.”   But more often, as I suggest in Psychology 13 th Edition (with Nathan DeWall), “science becomes society’s garbage collector, sending crazy-sounding ideas to the waste heap atop previous claims of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer cures, and out-of-body travels. To sift reality from fantasy and fact from fiction therefore requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open-minded but not gullible.”   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .)   ... View more

Bill Gates wants people he hires to read two of his favorite books: The Better Angels of Our Nature , by psychologist Steven Pinker, and Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling.   I, too, have loved these books, which form a complementary pair. Pinker argues—our current malaise notwithstanding—that the world is getting better. World hunger is abating, child labor is disappearing. Murder and wars are less common. Literacy is increasing. Given a choice between living a half-century or century ago or today, any sane person would choose today.   Rosling mined world data to document these trends and many more. And now the Rosling family’s Swedish foundation is offering stunning dynamic graphic displays of world data.   For example, see here and click on the animation for a jaw-dropping depiction of the life-expectancy increase (in but an eye-blink of our total human history).   Today’s average human lives much longer, thanks partly to the dramatic decline in child mortality from a time when nearly half of children died by age 5 (and when there was biological wisdom to having more than two children).   Other show-the-class goodies include:   Increasing gender equality —indexed by the changing girl/boy ratio in schools .   Rising body mass index for men , and for women . . . with richer countries averaging higher BMI.   Declining murder rates across countries .   Increasing age at first marriage (for women). These facts should whet your informational appetite. For more, explore www.gapminder.com/data . “Gapminder makes global data easy to use and understand.”   And then explore www.OurWorldInData.org , founded by Max Roser. This is an Oxford-based source of world data on all sorts of topics. “Our World in Data is about research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.” An example , presenting World Bank/United Nations data on the “missing women” phenomenon in certain countries since the advent of prenatal sex determination: On the commercial side, www.statista.com has a wealth of information—such as, from my recent searching, data on anti-Semitic crime trends, social media use, and dating app usage.   For us data geeks, so many numbers, so little time.   Not everything is “better angels” rosy. In addition to sex-selective abortions, we are menaced by climate change, nationalism, hate speech, and rampant misinformation. Even so, the Pinker/Rosling message—that in many important ways life is getting better—is further typified by these very websites, which provide easy access to incredible amounts of information that our ancestors could never know.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

“Death is reversible.” So began NYU medical center’s director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research Science, Sam Parnia, at a recent research consultation on people’s death experiences during and after cardiac resuscitation. Biologically speaking, he explained, death and cardiac arrest are synonymous. When the heart stops, a person will stop breathing and, within 2 to 20 seconds, the brain will stop functioning. These are the criteria for declaring someone dead. When there’s no heartbeat, no breathing, and no discernible brain activity, the attending physician records the time of death. Yet recent advances in science reveal that it may take many hours for individual brain cells to die. In a 2019 Nature report, slaughtered pigs’ brains, given a substitute blood infusion 4 hours after death, had brain function gradually restored over a 6-10 hour period. For many years now, brain cells from human cadaver biopsies have been used to grow brain cells up to 20 hours after death, explained Parnia. His underappreciated conclusion: “Brain cells die very, very slowly,” especially for those whose brains have been chilled, either medically or by drowning in cold water. But what is death? A Newsweek cover showing a resuscitated heart attack victim proclaimed, “This man was dead. He isn’t any more.” Parnia thinks Newsweek got it right. The man didn’t have a “near death experience” (NDE). He had a death experience (DE). Ah, but Merriam-Webster defines death as “a permanent cessation of all vital functions.” So, I asked Parnia, has a resuscitated person actually died? Yes, replied Parnia. Imagine two sisters simultaneously undergoing cardiac arrest, one while hiking in the Sahara Desert, the other in a hospital ER, where she was resuscitated. Because the second could be resuscitated, would we assume that the first, in the same minutes following the cessation of heart and brain function, was not dead? Of 2.8 million CDC -reported deaths in the United States annually, Parnia cites estimates of possibly 1.1 million attempted U.S. cardiac resuscitations a year. How many benefit from such attempts? And of those who survive, how many have some memory of their death experiences (cognitive activity during cardiac arrest)? For answers, Parnia offers his multi-site study of 2060 people who suffered cardiac arrests. In that group, 1730 (84 percent) died and 330 survived. Among the survivors, 60 percent later reported no recall of their death experience. The remaining 40 percent had some recollection, including 10 percent who had a meaningful “transformative” recall. If these estimates are roughly accurate, then some 18,000 Americans a year recall a death experience. NDEs (or DEs) are reportedly recalled as a peaceful and pleasant sense of being pulled toward a light, often accompanied by an out-of-body experience with a time-compressed life review. After returning to life, patients report a diminished fear of death, a kinder spirit, and more benevolent values—a “transformational” experience that Parnia is planning to study with the support of 17 major university hospitals. In this study, cardiac-arrest survivors who do and don’t recall cognitive experiences will complete positive psychology measures of human flourishing. One wonders (and Parnia does, too), when did the recalled death experiences occur? During the cardiac-arrest period of brain inactivity? During the moments before and at cardiac arrest? When the resuscitated patient was gradually re-emerging from a coma? Or even as a later constructed false memory? Answers may come from a future Parnia study, focusing on aortic repair patients, some of whom experience a controlled condition that biologically approximates death, with no heartbeat and flat-lined brain activity. This version of aortic repair surgery puts a person under anesthesia, cools the body to 70 degrees, stops the heart, and drains the blood, creating a death-like state, during which the cardiac surgeon has 40 minutes to repair the aorta before warming the body and restarting the heart. Functionally, for that 40 or so minutes, the patient is dead . . . but then lives again. So, will some of these people whose brains have stopped functioning experience DEs? One study suggests that at least a few aortic repair patients, despite also being under anesthesia, do report a cognitive experience during their cardiac arrest. Parnia hopes to take this research a step further, by exposing these “deep hypothermia” patients to stimuli during their clinical death. Afterwards he will ascertain whether any of them can report accurately on events occurring while they lacked a functioning brain. (Such has been claimed by people having transformative DEs.) Given that a positive result would be truly mind blowing—it would challenge our understanding of the embodied person and the mind-brain connection—my colleagues and I encouraged Parnia to       preregister his hypotheses and methods with the Open Science Framework.       conduct the experiment as an “adversarial collaboration” with a neuroscientist who would expect a null result.       have credible, independent researchers gather the data, as happens with clinical safety trials . If this experiment happens, what do you predict: Will there be someone (anyone) who will accurately report on events occurring while their brain is dormant? Sam Parnia thinks yes. I think not. Parnia is persuaded by his accumulation of credible-seeming accounts of resuscitated patients recalling actual happenings during their brain-inactive time. He cites the case of one young Britisher who, after all efforts to restart his heart had failed and his body turned blue, was declared dead. When the attending physician later returned to the room, he noticed that the patient’s normal color was returning and discovered that his heart had somehow restarted. The next week, reported Parnia, the patient astoundingly recounted events from his death period. As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple , reflected “It wasn’t what I expected. But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” My skepticism arises from three lines of research: the failure of p arapsychology experiments to confirm out-of-body travel with remote viewing, the mountain of cognitive neuroscience evidence linking brain and mind, and scientific observations showing that brain oxygen deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs can cause similar mystical experiences (complete with the tunnel, beam of light, and life review). Nevertheless, Parnia and I agree with Miss Marple: Sometimes reality surprises us (as mind-boggling DE reports have surprised him). So stay tuned. When the data speak, we will both listen. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) P.S. For those wanting more information: Parnia and other death researchers will present at a November 18 th New York Academy of Sciences symposium on “What Happens When We Die?” (see here and here )--with a live stream link to come. For those with religious interests: My colleagues, British cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves and American developmental psychologist Thomas Ludwig, reflect on the brain-mind relationship in their recent book , Psychological Science and Christian Faith. If you think that biblical religion assumes a death-denying dualism (thanks to Plato’s immortal soul) prepare to be surprised. ... View more

Photo courtesy Virginia Welle At a recent Teaching of Psychology in Secondary Schools workshop hosted by Oregon State University, I celebrated and illustrated three sets of big ideas from psychological science. Without further explanation, here is a quick synopsis. Questions: Which of these would not be on your corresponding lists? And which would you add?   Twelve unsurprising but important findings (significant facts of life for our students to understand 😞 There is continuity to our traits, temperament, and intelligence. With age, emotional stability and conscientiousness increase. Yet individual differences (extraversion and IQ) persist. Specific cognitive abilities are distinct yet correlated (g, general intelligence). Human traits (intelligence, personality, sexual orientation, psychiatric disorders, autism spectrum) are influenced by “many genes having small effects” A pessimistic explanatory style increases depression risk. To a striking extent, perceptual set guides what we see. Rewards shape behavior. We prioritize basic needs. Cultures differ in   how we dress, eat, and speak. values. Conformity and social contagion influence our behavior. Group polarization amplifies our differences. Ingroup bias (us > them) is powerful and perilous. Nevertheless, worldwide, we are all kin beneath the skin (we share a human nature). Eleven surprising findings that may challenge our beliefs and assumptions: Behavior genetics studies with twins and adoptees reveal a stunning fact: Within the normal range of environments, the “shared environment” effect on personality and intelligence (including parental nurture shared by siblings) is ~nil. As Robert Plomin says (2019), “We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.” Caveats: Parental extremes (neglect/abuse) matter. Parents influence values/beliefs (politics, religion, etc.). Parents help provide peer context (neighborhood, schools). Stable co-parenting correlates with children’s flourishing. Marriage (enduring partnership) matters . . . more than high school seniors assume . . . and predicts greater health, longevity, happiness, income, parental stability, and children’s flourishing. Yet most single adults and their children flourish. Sexual orientation is a natural disposition (parental influence appears nil), not a moral choice. Many gay men’s and women’s traits appear intermediate to those of straight women and men (for example, spatial ability). Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) may not exist (judging from new CDC data and people’s Google searches for help, by month). Learning styles—assuming that teaching should align with students’ varying ways of thinking and learning—have been discounted. We too often fear the wrong things (air crashes, terrorism, immigrants, school shootings). Brief “wise interventions” with at-risk youth sometimes succeed where big interventions have failed. Random data (as in coin tosses and sports) are streakier than expected. Reality is often not as we perceive it. Repression rarely occurs. Some surprising findings reveal things unimagined: Astonishing insights—great lessons of psychological science—that are now accepted wisdom include split-brain experiments: the differing functions of our two hemispheres. sleep experiments: sleep stages and REM-related dreaming. misinformation effect experiments: the malleability of memory. We’ve been surprised to learn what works as therapy (ECT, light therapy). what doesn’t (Critical Incident Debriefing for trauma victims, D.A.R.E. drug abuse prevention, sexual reorientation therapies, permanent weight-loss programs). We’ve been astounded at our dual-processing powers—our two-track (controlled vs. automatic) mind, as evident in phenomena such as blindsight. implicit memory. implicit bias. thinking without thinking (not-thinking => creativity). We’ve been amazed at the robustness of the testing effect (we retain information better after self-testing/rehearsing it)   the Dunning-Krueger effect (ignorance of one’s own incompetence).    The bottom line: Psychological science works! It affirms important, if unsurprising, truths. And it sometimes surprises us with findings that challenge our assumptions, and with discoveries that astonish us.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

After elections, people often note unexpected outcomes and then complain that “the polls got it wrong.” After Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 presidential victory, the press gave us articles on “Why the Polls were such a Disaster,” on “4 Possible Reasons the Polls Got It So Wrong,” and on “Why the Polls Missed Their Mark.” Stupid pollsters. “Even a big poll only surveys 1500 people or so out of almost 130 million voters,” we may think, “so no wonder they can’t get it right. Moreover, consider the many pundits who, believing the polls, confidently predicted a Clinton victory. They were utterly wrong, leaving many folks shocked on election night (some elated, others depressed, with later flashbulb memories of when they realized Trump was winning).   So how could the polls, the pundits, and the prediction models have all been so wrong?   Or were they? First, we know that in a closely contested race, a representative sample of a mere 1500 people from a 130 million population will—surprisingly to many people—allow us to estimate the population preference within ~3 percent.   Sounds easy. But there’s a challenge: Most randomly contacted voters don’t respond when called. The New York Times “ Upshot ” recently let us view its polling in real time. This enabled us to see, for example, that it took 14,636 calls to Iowa’s fourth congressional district to produce 423 responses, among which Steve King led J. D. Scholten by 5 percent—slightly more than the 3.4 percent by which King won.   Pollsters know the likely demographic make-up of the electorate, and so can weight results from respondents of differing age, race, and gender to approximate the population. And that, despite the low response rate, allows them to do remarkably well—especially when we bear in mind that their final polls are taken ahead of the election (and cannot account for last-minute events, which may sway undecided voters). In 2016, the final polling average favored Hillary Clinton by 3.9 percent , with a 3 percent margin of error. On Election Day, she won the popular vote by 2.1 percent (and 2.9 million votes)—well within that margin of error.   To forecast a race, fivethirtyeight.com ’s prediction model does more. It “takes lots of polls, performs various types of adjustments to them [based on sample size, recency, and pollster credibility], and then blends them with other kinds of empirically useful indicators” such as past results, expert assessments, and fundraising. Here is their 2016 final estimation : Ha! This prediction, like other 2016 prediction models, failed.   Or did it? Consider a parallel. Imagine that as a basketball free-throw shooter steps to the line, I tell you that the shooter has a 71 percent free-throw average. If the shooter misses, would you disbelieve the projection? No, because, if what I’ve told you is an accurate projection, you should expect to see a miss 29 percent of the time. If the player virtually never missed, then you’d rightly doubt my data.   Likewise, if, when Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com gives a candidate a 7 in 10 chance of winning and that candidate always wins, then the model is, indeed, badly flawed. Yes?   In the 2018 U.S. Congressional races, fivethirtyeight.com correctly predicted 96 percent of the outcomes. On the surface, that may look like a better result, but it’s mainly because most races were in solid Blue or Red districts and not seriously contested.   Ergo, don’t be too quick to demean the quality polls and the prediction models they inform. Survey science still works. (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit   TalkPsych.com ) ... View more

Some fun emails stimulated by last week’s essay on loss aversion in sports and everyday life pointed me to statistician David Spiegelhalter's Cambridge Coincidence Collection, which contains people’s 4500+ reports of weird coincidences. That took my mind back to some personally experienced coincidences . . . like the time my daughter, Laura Myers, bought two pairs of shoes. Back home, we were astounded to discover that the two brand names on the boxes were “Laura” and “Myers.” Or the time I confused our college library desk clerk when checking out after using a photocopy machine. My six-digit charge number was identical to the one-in-a-million six-digit number of copies on which the last user had stopped. Or the day my wife, Carol, called seeking my help in sourcing Mark Twain’s quote, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” After this first-ever encounter with that quote, my second encounter was 90 minutes later, in a Washington Post article. In Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, I report more amusing coincidences. Among my favorites: Twins Levinia and Lorraine Christmas, driving to deliver Christmas presents to each other near Flitcham, England, collided. Three of the first five U.S. Presidents—Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe—died on the same date–which was none other than the 4 th of July. And my favorite . . . in Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46 th word is “shake” and the 46 th word from the end is “spear.” (An even greater marvel: How did anyone notice this?)   What should we make of weird coincidences? Were they, as James Redfield suggested in The Celestine Prophecy, seemingly “meant to happen . . . synchronistic events, and [that] following them will start you on your path to spiritual truth”? Is it a wink from God that your birthdate is buried among the random digits of pi? Beginning 50,841,600 places after the decimal, my 9/20/1942 birthdate appears . . . and you can likewise find yours here. Without wanting to drain our delight in these serendipities, statisticians have a simpler explanation. Given the countless billions of daily events, some weird juxtapositions are inevitable—and then likely to get noticed and remembered (while all the premonitions not followed by an envisioned phone call or accident are unnoticed and fall into oblivion). “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen,” observed statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller. Indeed, added mathematician John Allen Paulos, “the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences.”   Finally, consider: That any specified coincidence will occur is very unlikely. That some astonishing unspecified event will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight. And that is also why we don’t need paranormal explanations to expect improbable happenings, even while delighting in them. ... View more

I love my job as a psychology textbook author—sharing my life-relevant science with millions of students worldwide. Every day I get to play with and organize ideas, make words march up a screen, and then sculpt those words with cadence and imagery that I hope will engage and give pleasure to our student readers.   But before playing with the words, the greater work is the reading—from several dozen psychological science and science news periodicals. Thanks to this continuing education, I am privileged to learn something new nearly every day.   Yesterday, for example, I harvested these gems from the American Journal of Psychiatry: a review of “neurocognitive” investigations of transgender people, a meta-analysis of the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy, a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled drug trials for treating acute schizophrenia, an experiment on bright-light therapy for treating bipolar depression, and a study indicating the effectiveness of ketamine for reducing suicidal ideation.   The latest issue of Nature reported, from an analysis of 1.5 million medical research papers, that women authors are more likely to include sex and gender variables in their analyses. Another Nature study reported that brain imaging can help predict suicidal ideation.   Perhaps most interesting, in today’s climate of political hate speech, was a new Aggressive Behavior report of two large national U.S. surveys. The title says it all: “Exposure to hate speech increases prejudice through desensitization.”   With such information in hand, I then print and file each report in a cubbyhole system organized by our books’ chapter topics. When the time comes to make those words march up the screen for a new edition, most of the needed information will be readily at hand. And then I get to start all over again filling up those cubby holes. What a great job. The accumulated new materials for one recent edition of our Psychology text. ... View more

Walking down the hall to my Holland (Michigan) ear doctor’s office, I pass an office of Neurocore Brain Performance Centers, a company started in nearby Grand Rapids and whose website declares that its Holland Center offers testing and drug-free, science-based treatment options for a number of conditions. These include depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, autism and sleep disorders. Utilizing brainwave analysis [without] using medication, we focus on positive reinforcement and repetition to train your brain to function better and reduce or eliminate the symptoms of ADHD, depression, anxiety or insomnia.   That’s quite a list, with 90+ percent improvement rates claimed for several of them on the Neurocore website . A now-famous local high school grad—Washington Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins—touts Neurocore’s powers.   Such claims evoke déjà vu for quack snake oil regimens which once similarly promised cures for a host of ailments. Is there evidence to support Neurocore claims? Or are they no more credible than those for “brain training,” which psychological scientists have found to be overhyped.   My curiosity about Neurocore was reawakened when its biggest investor, Betsy DeVos (with her husband Dick), became President Trump’s nominee for Education secretary. (Small world: Ms. DeVos is a fellow alum of Kirk Cousins’ local high school, and her parents’ philanthropy enabled our community’s arts center, senior citizens center, and downtown renewal.) The DeVos’s financing of Neurocore led The New York Times to examine Neurocore’s scientific credibility.   So, what has psychological science reported concerning this “science-based treatment” (which has been available since 2004)? My search of the psychological literature, courtesy of PsycINFO, turned up this result:  A search of abstracts (“ab”) in the ProQuest Health and Medicine database yielded the same: According to the Times, Neurocore’s chief medical officer, Dr. Majid Fotuhi, reports that Neurocore will soon be publishing its results in “peer-reviewed scientific” publications.   When faced with questionable claims, science has a simple procedure: test them to see if they work. If its predictions are confirmed, so much the better for the claim. If they crash against a wall of data, so much the worse.   Sometimes, to be sure, the results astonish us. As a treatment for intractable depression, electroconvulsive therapy often works, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand. Who would have guessed? But often, as Nathan DeWall and I report in Psychology, 11 th Edition, science becomes society’s garbage disposal, sending crazy-sounding ideas to the waste heap, atop previous claims of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer cures, and out-of-body travels into centuries past. To sift reality from fantasy, sense from nonsense, therefore requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible.   “To believe with certainty,” says a Polish proverb, “we must begin by doubting.” ... View more

For us educators, few things are more disconcerting than the viral spread of misinformation. Across our varying political views, our shared mission is discerning and teaching truth, and enabling our students to be truth-discerning critical thinkers. We sometimes fail, and we do have our biases. Yet our charge, across our diverse perspectives, is to teach reality-based, evidence-supported thinking.   Thus, we feel distressed when public understandings radically diverge from reality.   Perception: Crime is rising. Seven in 10 Americans believe it, reports Gallup. Donald Trump echoed and reinforced that perception, arguing that “crime is rising” and in inner cities “is at levels that nobody has seen.” Hence, he argued, we need a get-tough response. Fact:           For several decades, crime has been falling. In 2015, violent crime was less than half the 1990 rate. Since 2008, the violent crime rate, as aggregated by the FBI from local law enforcement, is down 19 percent. Property crime is down 23 percent.   Perception: Many immigrants are criminals. Horrific rare incidents feed the narrative, as in the endlessly retold story of the Mexican national killing a young woman in San Francisco. Trumps’ now-familiar words epitomized the perception: “When Mexico sends its people . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Fact:           Immigrants who are poor and less educated may fit our image of criminals. Yet some studies find that, compared to native-born Americans, immigrants commit less violent crime.   Perception: Unemployment has worsened. Especially in the Rust Belt states, such as Michigan where I live, many voters expressed frustration with the loss of good manufacturing jobs. “Our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent,” argued candidate Trump. Fact:           It’s true that the national employment rate includes “underemployed” people—those who are without good jobs and who long for better jobs. Yet the good news fact is that wages are rising, some industries are facing a worker shortage, and today’s 4.9 percent unemployment is sharply less than during the recession-era doldrums of 2009: The Oxford English Dictionary’s just-announced word of the year is post-truth: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” A current New Yorker cartoon captures the post-truth spirit. Facing three contestants on the “Facts Don’t Matter” quiz show, the moderator explains: “ I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.”   My misinformation examples are admittedly partisan (though several analyses, such as here and here, indicate that the top fake news stories of the recent U.S. election were similarly partisan). But the social dynamics that explain widely believed misinformation cross partisan lines. Thus in the United States in the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2010, most Republicans believed that taxes had increased under Democratic president Barack Obama (for most, they had decreased).   Some misinformation is fed intentionally, for profit—“lies in the guise of news,” explained Nicholas Kristof in describing how Macedonian teens built fake news websites that attracted links, and advertising dollars. Nefarious motives, as in reports of Russian-planted fake news, may also have been at work.   Other misinformation is a natural byproduct of the real news we’re fed. If it bleeds, it leads. In 2015, report David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, six of the top ten Associated Press news stories were about gruesome violence. Thanks to the “availability heuristic” (our tendency to judge the frequency of events by how readily available they are in memory), it’s entirely unsurprising that Americans grossly overestimate their risk of being victimized by crime and terror.   Biased information is additionally fed by the echo chambers of today’s social and cable media. As one who cut his eye teeth in psychological science with studies of “group polarization,” I am sheepishly aware of the extent to which most of us (me, too) tend to read blogs and Facebook news from those who think like we do, and to watch news programming (whether Fox or MSNBC) that supports rather than challenges our ideas. What a change from my youth and young adulthood, when news came from three centrist TV networks, and before today’s Internet-facilitated partisan tribalism.   Mindful of this challenging reality, I’m supporting “Better Angels”—a new, ten year initiative aiming to depolarize America. It will take an enormous effort, given the ease and speed of spreading misinformation, and the way the Internet readily connects like-minded partisans and amplifies their shared ideas. But for us educators, the mission of alerting students to the social dynamics of misinformation, and teaching an evidence-based reality, has never been more important. ... View more

Doing science takes humility—an awareness of our vulnerability to error and an openness to new perspectives. If nature, in response to our questioning, doesn’t behave as our ideas predict, then so much the worse for our ideas. As we say in psychology, “The rat is always right.” Indeed, every once in a blue moon, a major new finding overturns what many of us have long believed and taught or read in our textbooks. And so it was when I read in the September Clinical Psychological Science the results of a huge new study of supposed seasonal variations in depression. Auburn University at Montgomery researchers Megan Traffanstedt, Sheila Mehta, and Steven LoBello harvested U.S. data from 34,294 participants in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annual health behavior study. The researchers asked: Was depression, as reflected in people’s interview answers, more common in the days surrounding the December 21st winter solstice? Was wintertime depression greater for those living in higher latitudes? Was depression greater for those living in cloudy rather than sunny communities? For those not experiencing sunlight on the day of the interview? Photo credit:  inakilarrea/ RooM/Getty Images The stunning answers were no, no, no, and no. Moreover, they report, other research confirms that seasonal affective disorder, though “strongly rooted in folk psychology . . . is not supported by objective data.” In northern Norway, for example, the two-month-long “dark period” is accompanied by “no increase in depression.” Science is a self-correcting, ongoing process that often confirms what we have supposed. But occasionally our long-held ideas crash against a wall of fact. That is one reason why, despite the many lessons that have survived scrutiny, our textbooks are always in the process of revision. Doing, teaching, and writing science requires humility. That said, given a) the demonstrated effectiveness of light therapy, and b) the widespread acceptance of what DSM 5 calls depressive disorder “with seasonal pattern,” I suspect we have not heard the last word on this. ... View more

Originally posted on September 11, 2014. In a recent blog essay (here) I advised thinking critically about big round numbers, including claims that the brain has 100 billion neurons, that we use 10 percent of our brains, and that 10 percent of people are gay. Regarding the latter claim, a recent Gallup survey asked 121,290 Americans about their sexual identity: “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” “Yes,” answered 3.4 percent.  And when a new National Center for Health Statistics study asked 34,557 Americans about their sexual identity, all but 3.4 percent of those who answered indicated they were straight. The rest said they were gay or lesbian (1.6 percent), bisexual (0.7 percent), or “something else” (1.1 percent). Questions have recently arisen about another of psychology’s big round numbers—the claim that 10,000 practice hours differentiates elite performers, such as top violinists, from average to excellent performers.  As the distinguished researcher, Anders Ericcson, observed from his study of musicians (here), “the critical difference [is] solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists.” Not so fast, say David Hambrick, Brooke Macnamara, and their colleagues (here and here). In sports, music, and chess performance, for example, people's practice time differences account for a third or less of their performance differences. Raw talent matters, too. Perhaps both are right?  Are superstar achievers distinguished by their unique combination of both extraordinary natural talent and extraordinary daily discipline? ... View more

Originally posted on September 23, 2014. In the September Observer (from the Association for Psychological Science), Nathan explains why “Brain Size Matters.”  He summarizes, and suggests how to teach, Robin Dunbar’s conclusion that “Our brain size evolved to accommodate social groups that contain roughly 150 people.” In the same issue, David’s essay on “Inspiring Interest in Interests” recaps research on the stability and motivational power of career-related interests, and offers students links to inventories that can assess their own interests and well-matched vocations. ... View more

Originally posted on April 2, 2015. Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, are enabling psychologists to mine giant data sets that allow mega-scale naturalistic observations of human behavior. The recent Society of Personality and Social Psychology convention offered several such “big data” findings, including these (some also recently published): “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those of friends, spouses, or family.” That’s how Michal Kosinski, Youyou Wu, and David Stillwell summed up their research on the digital trail left by 86,220 people’s Facebook “likes.” As a predictor of “Big Five” personality test scores, the computer data were more significantly accurate than friends’ and family members’ judgments. (Such research is enabled by the millions of people who have responded to tests via Stillwell’s myPersonality app, and who have also donated their Facebook information, with guarantees of anonymity.) Another study, using millions of posts from almost 69,792 Facebook users, found that people who score high on neuroticism tests use more words like “sad,” “fear,” and “pain.” This hints at the possibility of using social media language analysis to identify people at risk for disorder or even suicide. Researchers are also exploring Smartphones as data-gathering devices. Jason Rentfrow (University of Cambridge) offers an app for monitoring emotions (illustrated here), and proposes devices that can sense human behavior and deliver interventions. In such ways, it is becoming possible to gather massive data, to sample people’s experiences moment-to-moment in particular contexts, and to offer them helpful feedback and guidance. Amid the excitement over today’s big data, psychologist Gary Marcus offers a word of caution: “Big Data is brilliant at detecting correlation....But correlation never was causation and never will be...If we have good hypotheses, we can test them with Big Data, but Big Data shouldn’t be our first port of call; it should be where we go once we know what we’re looking for.” ... View more