I read Factfulness over the summer, the posthumously published book by Hans Rosling (coauthored with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling). The book is an easy and entertaining read. You may know some of these authors’ work from  their TED talks – and the book does justice to the message and entertainer quality of the Rosling team. 

Factfulness is a strong manifesto for combating ignorance with data. The idea that evidence-based decisions are needed to improve living conditions around the world may seem a truism but the Roslings really bring the message home by, first, letting readers assess their own ignorance (readers are asked to do an initial quizz that is likely to make one feel rather ignorant about demographics, living conditions, and other aspects of life around the world). Second, the Roslings list “heuristics” that both experts and laypeople may use to make sense of the world from their rather limited knowledge (labelled Gap, Negativity, Straight Line, Fear, Size, Generalization, Destiny, Single, Blame, and Urgency) and that they suggest we must keep in check by considering (up to date) data. As a psychologist, one may wonder whether these “heuristics” are actually used or what the cognitive mechanisms underlying the discussed phenomena really are but, that aside, the 10-point program works to keep us engaged and figuring out how data (when visualized appropriately) can help correct false assumptions. 

On this note, I recently found a worthy initiative that seems to embody the “factfulness” spirit: Our world in data. The initiative led by Max Roser, University of Oxford, is to use “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”. Our World in Data publishes short online “articles”, each focusing on a specific topic and typically providing a mix of review and many visualisations of (mostly publicly available) data. One particularly interesting piece I read recently was “Does the news reflect what we die from?”

The piece reports analyses of the causes of deaths in the USA (from public records), Google search trends for causes of deaths, as well as mentions of causes of deaths in the New York Times and The Guardian. As you can see in the figure below, “the news doesn’t reflect what we die from” and this of course has implications for issues of risk perception and communication: If the public is given wrong (non-representative) information, can we expect public opinion to have adequate preferences for action concerning these causes of death? 

Of course, knowledge isn’t everything. After all, many people know that smoking and sugary drinks are bad for one’s health but this does not keep many individuals from cigarettes and soda. Be that as it may, some more factfulness in our lives is probably a good thing and it’s good to see the social sciences make use of data to understand the world.

Every fall, I cover some ideas on philosophy of science and epistemology in the lecture Geschichte der Psychologie; this year I read, as preparation, two autobiographies (Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend) and an autobiographical interview (Thomas Kuhn) as way to source the origins of these authors’ ideas.

I found myself thinking how much of how these authors’ personalities poured into their work and autobiographical narratives. Popper: the logician, always interested in demarcation and a clear line of argument for his work as much as his life. Feyerabend: the nazi war-hero that stumbled into philosophy, self-absorbed, forever in opposition, restless and unstructured. Kuhn: the “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes”, clearly preoccupied with the solving of (scientific/sociological?) puzzles, perhaps taking himself less seriously than the other two, but equally ambitious and preoccupied with making a mark on science/history/philosophy. 

For the authors themselves autobiographies are, I imagine, a way of coming to terms with one’s own life, building a narrative, taking stock. For the reader, autobiographies offer a window into someone’s mind, they help put authors’ work into as much as historical as a personal context, and to see science as an all too human enterprise. After all, how much “ego” does it take to write an autobiography in the first place? How much modesty is compatible with success in science or art?

I would venture that few academics share F.W. Bernstein’s (tongue in cheek?) self-deprecation…

Bilanz

Hab keine Romane geschrieben,

keine einzige Sinfonie.

Mein Umsturz ist Stückwerk geblieben,

wie meine Tanztheorie.

Nicht eine Kathedrale!

Kein Dachgeschoss ausgebaut!

Und wenn ich mal male,

wird’s Mist!

Nie im Puff und keine Visionen,

kein Sieg, keine Oper, kein Mord.

Kein Starkult und keine Millionen,

kein Hit, kein Hut, kein Rekord.

Nobelpreis? Nix draus geworden.

Kein Kriegsheld, Konzernherr, null Orden.

Tor des Monats, Befreiungskampf, Geige?

Macht? Schönheit? Genie? Fehlanzeige.

Nur dieses kleine Gedicht,

Reicht das nicht?

I just read Mary Beard’s Women & Power and – ouch…

Beard traces the silencing and neglect of female voices from classical antiquity to today’s meeting rooms: She’s seamlessly able to link Ms Triggs (see cartoon below) to Telemachus’ shushing of his mother, Penolepe, in Homer’s Odyssey. Misogyny, it appears, goes way back.

Let’s make sure we don’t perpetuate this in our meeting rooms. The NYT piece by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on speaking while female offers a couple of examples for changes in meeting culture that could help.

The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen is a biography of the friendship between David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), two prominent figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The infidel in the title referes to Hume because of his staunch skepticism (atheism), perhaps best illustrated by his attempt to explain how central psychological needs (the need for identifying causes or the need to assuage fear and anxiety in the face of mortality) can lead humans to ascribe God a central role in human affairs. In turn, Smith was a well-respected professor of moral philosophy, being responsible for teaching advanced students about religion and ethics (along with political economy). A friendship between such two apparently opposing figures seems unlikely but Rasmussen uses the surviving correspondence between the two and analysis of their work to provide not only a picture of their intellectual influence on each other but also a fascinating account of their friendship. For example, Rasmussen argues convincingly that many of Smith’s points in his The Wealth of Nations were influenced or preambled by Hume. 

The final chapters covering Hume’s death are most touching and the book also contains Hume’s short autobiography as an appendix. Hume completed the short piece “My Own Life” a few months before dying of colon cancer, and he wanted to have it published as a preface to all future editions of his works. Both Hume and Smith seem to have wanted to have Hume’s last days accurately described and ensure people knew the “infidel” was able to keep his good spirits without need for spirituality. As a consequence, Smith volunteered to give an account of his friend’s final days in a letter to Hume’s editor that typically accompanies Hume’s autobiograhy. 

I really enjoyed the book and was surprised to learn about Hume and Smith’s deep interest in psychological accounts of human behaviour and its consequences for history and economics. Perhaps one can even see Hume and Smith’s friendship as the embodiment of a common birthplace of psychology and economics.

A short (and sweet) introduction to intelligence research by Stuart Ritchie – I can highly recommend it to my students in Kognitionspsychologie II.

I read Andrea Wulf’s “The Invention of Nature” over the summer and I can highly recommend it!  The book covers Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769-1859) life and work and is part biography, travel writing, and popular science book. It gives a good feel for Humboldt’s personality, and, perhaps more importantly, the influence that his views and writing led to a new understanding of nature. According to Wulf, one of Humboldt’s key contributions was his comparative approach to understanding nature and the realisation that, due to similar ecological factors (e.g., weather, altitude), there are striking similarities between the flora and fauna of, say, the Swiss Alps, South-Americas’ Andes, or Asia’s Ural mountains. This realization led to an understanding of nature as an interconnected whole that is not chaotic (and had to be made orderly by man, as some at the time argued) but, rather, is ruled by systematic principles that can be understood by observation and measurement.

Humboldt initially acquired his fame after burning through his inheritance to fund his exploration of South America. His book “Personal Narrative” describing his travels, merged literature with scientific report, and was immensely popular: “Personal Narrative” was a main inspiration to Charles Darwin and may have been instrumental in Darwin taking up exploration and ultimately boarding the Beagle. One impressive aspect of Wulf’s account is that she dedicates specific chapters to figures that were influenced by Humboldt’s writings and those chapters really give a good impression of the reach of his ideas and contribution to evolutionary thinking (Darwin, Haeckel), but also literature (Goethe, Thoreau), and conservationism (Muir).

Humboldt was immensely popular in his days and seem to have worked as a hub in the budding scientific networks of his time. His public lectures were attended by hundreds wherever he went and his name has baptised educational institutions, monuments, and locations (particularly in the Americas). Yet, Wulf notes, Humboldt is relatively unrecognised today in comparison to some of the people he influenced. Wulf devotes only a few lines to the world’s forgetting of Humboldt but boils it down to anti-German sentiment after the first and second world wars. One may ask how this squares with much wider recognition of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Plank or other German figures. Perhaps Humboldt was instrumental in “inventing” a particular way of looking at nature but it was the people he influenced that weaved into our collective minds – perhaps an example of Stigler’s law.

Regardless of the reasons for us having forgotten Humboldt, Wulf’s account portraits both the man and a time in which key scientific disciplines were being forged that makes for very good reading to anyone interested the emergence of ecological and evolutionary thinking – as perhaps any good student of psychology should be!

I read “Smarter, faster, better” by Charles Duhigg over the summer (which is a bit ironic given that I had other goals in mind other than finding “The secrets of being productive”). The book is a bit of a hodgepodge of research on productivity with each chapter covering a different topic (e.g., motivation, bayesian forecasting, team work). The most interesting chapter, I found, was the one on team performance, in which Duhigg gave an overview of research done at Google. You can read a version of his account from a piece of his in the New York Times or an overview from Google directly.

I found it particularly interesting that Google’s People Analytics team (aka HR) went through a lot of work to gather objective and subjective measures of performance, social interactions, and much more to gather a comprehensive view on teams’ composition, work, and output. Yet, they had a hard time finding important predictors of team productivity, in particular, concerning those factors that would be most intuitive, such as the individual performance of each team member, their personality, or decision-making styles. Rather, team members’ “feeling safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other” seemed to matter most. This work is somewhat in line with a study by Woolley et al. (2010) showing that group productivity is a function of social rather than individual intelligence:

“Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.”

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193147

Anyway, if you’re looking to improve your team’s productivity, Google suggests that this tool could help!

Will bots rule the world? According to Jerry Kaplan, the question is ill posed. In his book, Humans need not apply, Kaplan makes the case that it is a matter of when, not whether artificial intelligence will radically change the way we live and make a living. In fact, the revolution has begun: Algorithms invest side-by-side with humans in the stock market, decide what ads we consume online, and predict the prices we are willing to pay for goods on Amazon. The impact of this trend will be felt most and hardest, argues Kaplan, as more and more jobs are automatised and wealth is accumulated by the lucky few at the top that can capitalise on these advances.

But what does this mean for Psychologists? In a working paper, The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?, Frey and Osborne (2013) estimate the likelihood that over 700 jobs can “be sufficiently specified, conditional on the availability of big data, to be performed by state of the art computer-controlled equipment” and argue that about 50% of today’s employment in the US is at risk due to automatisation. However, their estimates suggest that Psychologists may not be affected by automation: Frey and Osborne establish a ranking of occupations and the Clinical, Counseling, and School Psychologists category ranks 24 out of 702 in the ranking of jobs least likely to be automatised, while Industrial-Organizational Psychologists and Psychologists, All other… rank 57 and 17, respectively.

The title of Kaplan’s book is borrowed from an equally sobering 15-minute video by CGP Grey that illustrates the broader issue of automatisation in the world of work and is available here.

I’ve finished reading Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and can highly recommend it to those interested in the issues of well-being. The substantive issues discussed concerning health and wealth inequality make it an important read but there are other aspects that add to its appeal.

First, I particularly enjoyed that Deaton actually discusses data(!) and presents it in a very clear visual manner (yay for bubble charts). Second, I found it reassuring that Deaton seems simultaneously a strong advocate for the behavioural sciences while at the same time having a clear understanding of their limitations. For example, when discussing the theory and practice of survey design in measuring poverty, Deaton discussed the use of retrospective reports, in particular, questioning individuals about their household consumption in the past 30, or, alternatively, 7 days. Deaton makes clear that these small differences lead to very different reports and, consequently, very different conclusions about poverty in a country (India). Soberingly, Deaton concludes “To put it more brutally, the truth is that we have little idea what we are doing, and it is certainly a mistake to let anything important depend on such numbers.”

More research is needed.

I’ve been reading up on well-being research in preparation for the lecture Urteilen & Entscheiden taking place in the spring semester. One of the books I’ve just read is Measuring Happiness by Joachim Weimann, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, which asks the question “Does money bring happiness?”

The book offers a good overview of work on well-being done in the past decades by both economists and psychologists. I found the discussion about measurement and difficulties of ensuring that subjective scales mean the same thing across cultures, individuals, and time particularly interesting. We’ll definitely discuss these issues in the lecture and I’ll recommend the book to my students!

Here’s MIT Press’ overview of  Measuring Happiness:

Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In the West after World War II, happiness seemed inextricably connected to prosperity. Beginning in the 1960s, however, other values began to gain ground: peace, political participation, civil rights, environmentalism. “Happiness economics”—a somewhat incongruous-sounding branch of what has been called “the dismal science”—has taken up the puzzle of what makes people happy, conducting elaborate surveys in which people are asked to quantify their satisfaction with “life in general.” In this book, three economists explore the happiness-prosperity connection, investigating how economists measure life satisfaction and well-being. The authors examine the evolution of happiness research, considering the famous “Easterlin Paradox,” which found that people’s average life satisfaction didn’t seem to depend on their income. But they question whether happiness research can measure what needs to be measured. They argue that we should not assess people’s well-being on a “happiness scale,” because that necessarily obscures true social progress. Instead, rising income should be understood as increasing opportunities and alleviating scarcity. Economic growth helps societies to sustain freedom and to finance social welfare programs. In this respect, high income may not buy happiness with life in general, but it gives individuals the opportunity to be healthier, better educated, better clothed, and better fed, to live longer, and to live well.

Richard Thaler‘s new book Misbehaving is a good read and a very entertaining account of the development of behavioural economics, from rogue subdiscipline to integral part of mainstream economics. The book reads like a memoir of Thaler’s life and career, beginning with Thaler’s start as a promising graduate student in Economics, up until he became a key policy advisor (think Nudge and “Nudge Unit“) and president of the American Economic Association.

The book could be a good Christmas gift to those interested in the (short) history of the behavioural sciences and the marriage between psychology and economics!

Do we achieve our best outcomes by competing or by cooperating? This question has fueled a long-running debate. Some have argued that humans are fundamentally competitive and that pursuing our self-interest is the best way to get ahead. Others argue that humans are hardwired to cooperate and that we are most successful when we collaborate with others.

In FRIEND AND FOE, researchers Galinsky and Schweitzer explain why this debate misses the mark. Rather than being hardwired to compete or cooperate, humans have evolved to do both. It is only by learning how to strike the right balance between these two forces that we can improve our long-term relationships and get more of what we want.

Galinsky and Schweitzer draw on original, cutting edge research across the social sciences to show how to to maximize success in work and in life by deftly navigating between cooperation and competition. They offer insights into topics ranging from how to get and keep power, how to recognize deception and build trust, how to turn our weaknesses into strengths, and when to begin a negotiation to get the best outcome – while ensuring that our counterparts walk away wanting to negotiate with us down the road.

And along the way, they pose and offer surprising answers to a number of perplexing puzzles: when does too much talent undermine a team’s or company’s success; when can acting less competently help you gain status, why many gender differences in the workplace may simply be power differences in disguise; why ending an auction at 2am can get you the best outcome; how our best intentions can ironically make us appear racist; and why husbands gain weight during pregnancy.

We perform at our very best when cooperation and competition are held in the right balance. This book is a guide for better navigating our social world by learning when to cooperate as a friend and when to compete as a foe—and how to be better at both.

Maurice Schweitzer and Adam Galinsky discuss their new book in a videocast.

Table of contents

Shelf number: ig 48596

See you at the library!

I’ve recently heard an NPR radio piece and read the associated biography on Roger Barker, the founder of ecological (environmental) psychology, and was fascinated by his efforts to study the “naturally occurring behaviour” of “free-ranging persons”.

In 1947, Barker took a job at the University of Kansas, moved to the nearby small town of Oskaloosa, and dedicated himself (and almost a 1 million USD in research funds) to uncovering the contextual nature of human behaviour.  The radio piece and book are a nice entry point to those interested in ecological perspectives on human behaviour so I’ll definitely recommend this to my students taking the seminar Ecological and Web Assessment. The book, however, also raises other interesting questions, such as the role of  exploratory and theory-driven research in behavioural sciences, or the causes leading to the popularity of specific theories and approaches in psychology.

All in all, I can highly recommend both the book, The Outsider, by Ariel Sabar, and the podcast Human Spectacle, This American Life, National Public Radio:

Human Spectacle

“Writer Ariel Sabar tells the story of Roger Barker, a psychologist who believed that humans should be studied outside the lab. So Barker dispatched an army of graduate students to follow the children of Oskaloosa, Kansas, and write down every single thing they did.”

The phlogiston theory was first stated in the 17th century and postulated a fire-like element, phlogiston, contained in combustible bodies and released during combustion. For example, according to the theory, substances that burned well would be said to be rich in phlogiston. The theory met its demise when scientists showed that some metals actually gained mass when they burned (even though they suposedly lost phlogiston). Nowadays, the phlogiston theory represents a good example of the ability of science to update our knowledge of the world based on systematic testing of hypothesis.

A group of economists, Daniel Friedman, Mark Isaac, Duncan James, and Shyam Sunder, recently wrote a book claiming that risky curves are like phlogiston!

By risky curves, Friedman et al. mean the Bernoullian-type curves usually used to describe subjective utility (see the figure below from Bernoulli’s 1738 paper Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk) as well as neo-bernoullian variants, like prospect theory.

The main argument presented in the book is that Bernoulli-type theories and associated measures have not been successful at capturing either individual or institutional risk preferences that are predictive across situations or tasks. For example, Friedman et al. provide an overview of different elicitation methods for risk preferences (described gambles, auctions, etc.) and how these lead to inconsistent (uncorrelated) risk preferences across methods.

The review of the empirical literature is not complete. For example, risk preference measures that are popular in Psychology and their links to Bernoulli-type theories are not reviewed (e.g., self-report, behavioural games). Regardless, the skepticism about representations of risk and utility capturing reliable individual differences that are predictive across situations and in real-world settings gives food for thought – the book is well worth a read for those of us interested in measuring and predicting decisions under risk!

Friedman, D., Isaac, R.M., James, D., & Sunder, S. (2014). Risky curves: On the empirical failure of expected utility. New York: Routledge. 

There’s a new book out on aging and decision making that gives a good overview of current work on this topic. You can find a TOC here.

A plaidoyer for educating teachers and policy makers about the genetics of cognitive ability and achievement. The summary of the literature is useful but only as a starting point for more reading…

A first-hand account of how traumatic brain injury led to significant changes in a man’s (Jason Padgett) spatial/math abilities.

http://www.struckbygenius.com