Face Implausibility

Robert sent me the link to a review of a book about decision-making that features the opportunity to take the self-assessment survey featured in the book - how do you rate on the 6 traits they identify as comprising personal decision-making style? There are 5 yes/no questions for each trait.

The test is seemingly pretty bad. I mean, what should we think of things things like:

* The question "Do you always lock your door no matter how long you'll be gone?" somehow measures my short-term vs long-term viewpoint rather than risk while the question "How many speeding tickets have you had in the last five years?" measures risk rather than time preference.

* One of the 5 questions about information use in decision-making is "Do you watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report?"

* Another one for information is "Do you like to try different flavors of ice cream before choosing one?"

* Two of the questions about status-seeking relate to what is culturally rather than personally valued.

* "Enjoying foreign travel" makes me not a loyal person.

Yet we know that face validity is a very poor indicator of whether scales are measuring what people want them to measure. These could be really good questions (in that they are correlated with what we want them to correlate to, don't correlate with what we don't want them to, and predict the right kinds of things) even though they look crappy. Without any information on how these scales were developed and validated, and what the reliability of the scales are, it's hard to know for sure.

But they sure look stupid, don't they? Especially for a mass-market (or perhaps small-business-focused) book, you'd think they could have developed scales that had both decent psychometric qualities and didn't look so idiotic on their face. I mean, we are to believe that one of the best 5 questions for getting at the "using information to make decisions" construct is whether a person tries different flavors of ice cream before choosing one? How often do people even eat ice cream in a place where they can sample ice cream and yet they don't already have a favorite flavor? (And this question doesn't load on the "risk" factor?) It just seems implausible that these scales are doing a very good job of assessing people's preferences, and I think that face implausibility can only hurt their credibility unless it is explained really well in the book why their seemingly dumb questions can yield useful insights.

Paper at a Glance

Please enjoy this summary of my paper for my social psychology seminar, created using a word cloud program. Any ideas on what it's about? (Click on the image for a larger version.)

Getting Close

I still need to turn a series of bullet points into an introduction, replace the words "SAY SOMETHING TO WRAP THIS PUPPY UP!" with an actual final sentence, turn my scribbled-in-pencil drawing of the theoretical model into something on the computer that I can print out, put together the reference list, and make the whole thing reasonably APA-style compatible, but the major content of this paper is done. (I am sort of afraid to read it now and find out, ah, crap, I meant to say XYZ and ABC here needs some work.)

I am glad that I managed to incorporate the phrase "empirical investigations" (though not "empirical question") quite naturally, though ultimately, I could find no place for Cronbach's quote about higher-order interactions of variables as a "hall of mirrors that extends to infinity."

In any event, now, some lunch. My brain is hungry. It's cold in my apartment, and I have chili ready to heat up. Yay.

Oh yeah, and my computer has been asking me every few minutes if it can please, pretty please, no really please I beg you restart itself now? I guess I should let it, before it decides it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Not Found in Translation

From a google scholar search link:

404 – Datei oder Verzeichnis wurde nicht gefunden.

It felt rare to go to a German web site and see actual German language. I've sort of gotten used to this (erroneous) idea that everybody speaks American on the Internet. I actually had to look up the first three words because in English, the message reads that the "file" wasn't found, but in German we had (presumably) file and something else - Babel fish informs me that the file or listing wasn't found.

I hope to get back to more substantive blogging soon, but I am absolutely obsessed with this theoretical model I'm working on. Like, to the point of waking up an hour before the alarm, instantly awake and alert with ideas. I suppose this is a very good thing for my work, but it does rather cut into my life.

And for my stat homework this week, there was a problem (Robert, you may recall the one about fixed versus random effects I showed you) that I kept approaching mathematically (which the prof said not to do, but it's so hard to resist!), but I finally just made myself think really hard about it more conceptually; soon I had a Gleistesblitz that made feel that I was either an inspired genius or a complete moron. In this case, it was more of the former than the latter, fortunately, because after that one idea, I was pretty much thought out.

Acts of Kindness

This is just a shout-out for the customer at the Exxon station who came out to my car and gave me perfect directions to the restaurant where I was supposed to be meeting my classmates for dinner. You're a good guy.

Bad Psychology Joke of the Month

Why did the submissive psychology student so desperately want his mistress to take him to the local BDSM dungeon party?

He learned that being in the presence of coactors increases arousal, which leads to an increase in dominant responses (Zajonc, 1965).

Ba-dum-bum.

Since you ask, why yes, I did make that up during social psychology class. Who knew how useful this stuff would prove to be?

Actually, it was very interesting to realize that perhaps the reason I found myself making completely unplanned jokes during my conference presentation this past summer is that making jokes is a dominant response for me (a very likely action for me to take). It was an odd experience for some control part of my mind to be saying "Wait, what are you doing?" while my mouth went off on its own. Fortunately, jokes about baseball and unexpected self-deprecating remarks went over well with the crowd listening to the final presentation during the final session of the final day of the conference.

It's pretty useful to be aware that this is a likely phenomenon in these situations, since there are times it could be dangerous or in spectacularly bad taste (e.g. testifying in court as to the facts surrounding the death of a child I saw run over by a car, esp. if I was the driver of that car). But I maintain that if my parents did not intend for me to frequently break out with sudden quips and witticisms, they should have named me something else.

Trees

I took these photos at my apartment complex about a week ago. Since then, the trees got even more fantabulously colored, and in last night's windy rain, lost a lot of their leaves. The cars in the parking lot this morning were deeply covered in fallen leaves.

I'm especially fond of the red tree at the right:


The yellow one lost about 90% of its leaves last night.