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

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

Originally posted on March 11, 2016. It was, as our NYC-bred presidential candidates would say, “yuge” news, both in and beyond psychological science: When 270 researchers in an “Open Science Collaboration” network redid 100 recent studies from three leading journals, only 36 percent of the findings replicated. Ouch! But now another research team, led by Harvard social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, has reanalyzed the data and arrived at a radically different conclusion...to which the OSC group has offered a rejoinder, the Gilbert group a rebuttal, and the conversation continues. Boiling the controversy down to the fewest possible words, the Gilbert group offers this elevator speech synopsis: OSC: “We have provided a credible estimate of the reproducibility of psychological science.” US [Gilbert et al.]: “No you haven’t, because (1) you violated the basic rules of sampling when you selected studies to replicate, (2) you did unfaithful replications of many of the studies you selected and (3) you made statistical errors.” OSC (& OTHERS): “We didn’t make statistical errors.” Stay tuned: this debate is in process, as a disagreement among mutually respectful colleagues. The exchanges bring to mind the words of David Hume: “The truth springs from arguments amongst friends.” Whatever the outcome, the “reproducibility crisis” debate is the free marketplace of ideas in action as diverse scholars 1)     aim to discern and give witness to truth, 2)     contribute their findings and conclusions to the public sphere, while welcoming others doing the same, and then 3)     debate their differences, in the confidence that, in the end, greater wisdom ultimately will emerge. ... View more