A Couple Kinds of Self-Regulation

I decided this morning that I had to finish reading articles about self-regulation today so that I can move on to the million other things I need to do for this project, and after a big push (OK, about 11 hours of high productivity), I did. I also typed up my sources into a bibliography tonight - all 53 of them. I feel a little sorry for the future self that is going to have to attempt to synthesize all that information (though I think I'll do fine in the end; I'm pretty good at this). Verdict: self-regulation working well today.

I think tomorrow I will start writing the results section from my first year project. It'll make a nice change from all this reading.

I also made two decisions tonight:

(1) I can't eat fruit by itself in any kind of appreciable quantity without getting my blood sugar way out of whack. All the berries I've been buying need to be turned into muffins or something that won't cause me to sugar crash later - trembling all over, general weakness, heart palpitations, dizziness.

(2) I need to start waking up early and exercising in the morning before I start work because I simply cannot get the temperature cool enough in my apartment in the evening to use my treadmill comfortably. Tonight, for instance, after 2 hours of full-time A/C blasting, the temperature managed to come down less than 2 degrees. I think every time Robert called me last week, and especially tonight, I felt super-grouchy and didn't want to talk to him because I was feeling so uncomfortable. (I was not to the point of a friend on Facebook who got so hot and miserable on her bike ride - doing one of those bike across the state things - that she cried for an hour, but it's not been good.) The fact that I don't sweat easily is a problem in these situations.

Man, hypoglycemia, blood pressure dropping whenever I get up, problems sweating, pupils poorly responsive to changes in light levels (hence my inability to drive at night), etc., etc. - I really do seem to have an autonomic system problems...which, ironically, indicates that while my controlled self-regulation is working well, my automatic, physiological regulation is not so great. Weird. I guess I know what I'm titling this post now.

And to cap this off, I present to you a lolbun my sister just sent me:



This rabbit's got his self-regulatory act together.

Computer-Aided Self-Regulation

I enjoyed this article from The Economist about some popular software that helps people stay on task by disabling the Internet (or specific, easily-abusable sites like Facebook) or turning your screen into a blank piece of paper for typing on. I agree that the name Freedom for the software that severs your Internet connection for a length of time you specify is brilliant.

On this note, it's time for me to get to work...using the Internet to finish up my search for articles in the self-regulation literature.

Universities by Conference

So with Colorado joining the Pac-10 and Nebraska joining the Big 10, the Big 12 conference (once the Big 8) will become the Big 10 and the Big 10 (actually the Big 11 right now) will become the Big 12. Confused?

Last night, I had to admit to my dad that I am planning to apply to several schools in the Big 10, which would pit my school against his beloved Cornhuskers. Here are my current plans, by conference:

Big 10 - 5 schools
ACC - 2 schools
Pac-10 - 2 schools

Of the remaining Big 10, I am definitely not applying to 2, probably not applying to 1, and possibly applying to 3.

The other schools I haven't decided about yet:

Big 12 - 1
Pac-10 - 3
SEC - 2
ACC - 2
Big East - 1
Other (non-major) - 3

I think the only reasonable thing is for Stanford to admit me right away, so that my father can remain unconflicted and my sister and I could share an alma mater. I was going to emphasize my research interests and experience in my statement of purpose, but for Stanford, I clearly need to play up this peace in the family angle because adcoms are infamously impressed by this sort of logic. Or I could always write the kind of SOP that is generally effective and rely on my mom to call Stanford and explain why I should be admitted.

Note to tone-deaf reader who googled this entry: I am being sarcastic. Parental involvement in your grad school application process is a very bad idea. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. PERIOD. I appreciated this quote from an article on over-involved parents of grad school applicants:

"Derrick Bolton, dean of admissions at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has become immune to parents who want to know what their children should study in high school, to get in to the right college, to get in to the right business school.

“People go to business school to learn to lead other people,” says Mr. Bolton, who views the application process as a proxy for the rest of life. “And if they’re not taking ownership of the application process, it makes you wonder — is this person going to take ownership in life, without someone pushing him or her?”

That is, if they can’t apply without Mommy, how will they hold a quarterly earnings conference call with hostile investors, or argue a case in front of a judge?"

Denver Trip

LivingDeb gives a good overview of Tam's graduation weekend with some photos (including window bunny art).

I will say that I did look up the weather before I left, but still did not pack enough warm (and water-resistant) clothes to deal with going into the mountains. (It did not occur to me that people would want to do such a thing when it is 35 degrees up there and raining/hailing, but apparently so.) Anyway, nobody has room in these days of the $25 per checked bag fee to pack big fuzzy fleece jackets in their carry-on luggage; it's a given that I will be borrowing this kind of gear from my host.

It was established once again that I would rather be right than happy.

There was a hell of a lot of riding in Tam's rented white van of doom. It worked out that Tam's own vehicle held the religious vegetarians and the van carried the irreverent omnivores. (I think RB managed to wear only T-shirts with vegetarian/carnivore themes over the weekend.)

Robert established himself as the king of all things sports trivia. My favorite was when people were marveling over his knowledge of Babe Zaharias (a person that nobody else knew of but me because I remembered her from the US stamp and because Robert had talked about her before as one of the best, most versatile female athletes in modern history), he offered that she went to school in the Houston area. When asked where exactly, he said he didn't know because he didn't know all that much about her. (Um, yes, except for the 47 million things he did know.)

At the graduation party, I think I could have eaten my weight in butter drenched mushrooms on small sourdough rounds, but I'm glad I didn't because the actual meal was really good, too. As were the various wines and the grappa. And though I still don't have a working elevator speech (a 2-minute synopsis of my research), I got to try out a made-up-on-the-spot (5-minute? 10-minute?) half-drunken dinner party speech, which I think was at least reasonably coherent based on the questions I was asked about it.

Now that Frontier and Midwest airlines have merged, you can fly on a plane with a cute animal on the tail while eating complementary, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. (You can also be glad that you have a 3 hour layover in Milwaukee when your first flight leaves 90 minutes late.) On the way back to NC, once we were going into our descent, I looked down and was like, Oh my god, we're home - look at all the trees! I know MV was glad to be in Colorado again and out of the actual desert where he lives, but Colorado was like a desert to me.

Psychology and Proverbs: Nothing New Under the Sun

I found the examples for hindsight bias (the tendency to believe that you've always believed what you believe now or to find things obvious in retrospect without remembering that you didn't know it before) in this post quite strange.

The author shows the results of two fake studies (with the conclusions "you can't teach a dog new tricks" and "you're never too old to learn") and says in effect, Gotcha - you believed both of them, didn't you! You're not so smart! He suggests this as an explanation: "Both of those fake studies seemed probable because when you learn something new you quickly redact your past so you can feel the comfort of always being right."

This is an odd take for several reasons, including fact that most people started reading this post already believing that both statements are true. I don't think that reading about these studies caused most of us to "learn something new" at all (though we were not familiar with the specific research that supported these beliefs, neither idea is novel).

He points to an actual study in which people read contradictory proverbs and evaluated them as true, e.g. that both "love is stronger than fear" and "fear is stronger than love" are true. He suggests that this provides evidence for hindsight bias.

It is a common observation that people often think that the science of psychology (particularly social and personality psychology) doesn't tell us anything we don't already know - that it's basically all "common sense."

In some cases, this probably is a matter of hindsight bias. For example, the Asch conformity experiments (people give incorrect answers to an easy visual perception task because other participants gave that answer), the Milgram experiment (people are willing to give others levels of electric shock they believe are lethal when instructed to by an experimenter), and studies of the bystander effect (a person in trouble is less likely to get help the more observers there are) give classic examples of counter-intuitive findings from social psychology. Once people become familiar with these findings, they may forget that they ever believed anything to the contrary.

However, I think finding contradictory statements from psychological research both true and obvious demonstrates a different kind of common effect: the illusion of explanatory depth.

People think they know more about things than they actually do. We often think we know how something (such as a machine) really works, but when challenged to explain it, it is clear that our understanding is rudimentary and facile at best. We have only the most cursory, simplistic understanding of a lot of things yet think of ourselves as very knowledgeable, hence, our sense of having "explanatory depth" is illusory. (For empirical research on people's understanding of how objects work, see: Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26, 521-562.)

I believe the same illusion is at work with people's understanding of psychological processes and thus their evaluation of psychological research as only demonstrating ("proving") the obvious. I think part of this illusion arises from the fact that most people view psychological research in terms of establishing various facts, such as that birds of a feather flock together and that opposites attract. But figuring out the "what" is just a small part of the scientific enterprise. We're also very interested in "how" (understanding the mechanisms of the process in detail), "when" (what are the boundary conditions on the effect - i.e., under what parameters do the claims hold), and sometimes "why" (what purpose does it serve). People often conflate description with explanation, perhaps not even realizing that there are other levels of understanding beyond the one they have.

In the introduction to my undergraduate social psychology textbook, the author describes the kinds of responses he gets when people at a party ask him what he does and he says that he is a social psychologist. In addition to the Fraidy-Cats who get frightened that he is going to try to "psych" them out and the Know-It-Alls who proclaim formal psychology to have no bearing on the Real Social World, he has to deal with Mini-Experts who "take the opportunity to instruct me in their favorite theories of why various parts of the social world do or do not function effectively; unfortunately, this is often about as illuminating as hearing a medieval monk discuss the workings of the modern automobile." (Schneider, D. J. (1988). Social psychology.)

Of course, people's understanding of psychology is much worse, even at the basic factual level, than they think it is. The recent book 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (a book I have not seen or read, but want to read) outlines these errors. How many of these ideas do you (or did you, if you can overcome the hindsight bias) believe? I have believed a lot of them.

1 Most People Use Only 10% of Their Brain Power
2 Some People Are Left-Brained, Others Are Right-Brained
3 Extrasensory Perception Is a Well-Established Scientific Phenomenon
4 Visual Perceptions Are Accompanied by Tiny Emissions from the Eyes
5 Subliminal Messages Can Persuade People to Purchase Products

6 Playing Mozart’s Music to Infants Boosts Their Intelligence
7 Adolescence Is Inevitably a Time of Psychological Turmoil
8 Most People Experience a Midlife Crisis in Their 40s or Early 50s
9 Old Age Is Typically Associated with Increased Dissatisfaction and Senility
10 When Dying, People Pass through a Universal Series of Psychological Stages

11 Human Memory Works like a Tape Recorder or Video Camera, and Accurately Records the
Events We’ve Experienced
12 Hypnosis is Useful for Retrieving Memories of Forgotten Events
13 Individuals Commonly Repress the Memories of Traumatic Experiences
14 Most People with Amnesia Forget All Details of Their Earlier Lives

15 Intelligence Tests Are Biased against Certain Groups of People
16 If You’re Unsure of Your Answer When Taking a Test, It’s Best to Stick with Your Initial Hunch
17 The Defining Feature of Dyslexia Is Reversing Letters
18 Students Learn Best When Teaching Styles Are Matched to Their Learning Styles

19 Hypnosis Is a Unique "Trance" State that Differs in Kind from Wakefulness
20 Researchers Have Demonstrated that Dreams Possess Symbolic Meaning
21 Individuals Can Learn Information, like New Languages, while Asleep
22 During "Out-of-Body" Experiences, People’s Consciousness Leaves Their Bodies

23 The Polygraph ("Lie Detector") Test Is an Accurate Means of Detecting Dishonesty
24 Happiness Is Determined Mostly by Our External Circumstances
25 Ulcers Are Caused Primarily or Entirely by Stress
26 A Positive Attitude Can Stave off Cancer

27 Opposites Attract: We Are Most Romantically Attracted to People Who Differ from Us
28 There’s Safety in Numbers: The More People Present at an Emergency, the Greater the Chance that Someone Will Intervene
29 Men and Women Communicate in Completely Different Ways
30 It’s Better to Express Anger Openly to Others than to Hold It in

31 Raising Children Similarly Leads to Similarities in Their Adult Personalities
32 The Fact that a Trait Is Heritable Means We Can’t Change It
33 Low Self-Esteem Is a Major Cause of Psychological Problems
34 Most People Who Were Sexually Abused in Childhood Develop Severe Personality Disturbances in Adulthood
35 People’s Responses to Inkblots Tell Us a Great Deal about Their Personalities
36 Our Handwriting Reveals Our Personality Traits

37 Psychiatric Labels Cause Harm by Stigmatizing People
38 Only Deeply Depressed People Commit Suicide
39 People with Schizophrenia Have Multiple Personalities
40 Adult Children of Alcoholics Display a Distinct Profile of Symptoms
41 There’s Recently Been a Massive Epidemic of Infantile Autism
42 Psychiatric Hospital Admissions and Crimes Increase during Full Moons

43 Most Mentally Ill People Are Violent
44 Criminal Profiling Is Helpful in Solving Cases
45 A Large Proportion Of Criminals Successfully Use the Insanity Defense
46 Virtually All People Who Confess to a Crime Are Guilty of It
Skills and Pills: Myths about Psychological Treatment
47 Expert Judgment and Intuition Are the Best Means of Making Clinical Decisions
48 Abstinence Is the Only Realistic Treatment Goal for Alcoholics
49 All Effective Psychotherapies Force People to Confront the "Root" Causes of Their Problems in Childhood
50 Electroconvulsive ("Shock") Therapy Is a Physically Dangerous and Brutal Treatment

Constitutional Ambiguity

Of course, sometimes the US Constitution can be really hard to interpret, and basically it means what the Supreme Court decides that it means. Guns, abortion - this stuff is complicated. But I don't see what's so difficult about Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the Unites States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

What drugs are the lawmakers of Arizona on that they think denying citizenship to so-called "anchor babies" (a derogatory term for children of Hispanic illegal immigrants) would not be an obvious violation of the Constitution?

I agree with the representative quoted as saying that the intent of the amendment was not to provide citizenship to illegal aliens. (I don't believe there even was a distinction between legal and illegal immigration in 1868 when the amendment was ratified. The purpose was to ensure that black ex-slaves would not be denied citizenship.) But I find it basically impossible to imagine that the Supreme Court will be swayed by his reasoning.

Self-delusion

One thing struck me about this scenario:

"Imagine you are very good at a particular game.

Pick anything – chess, Street Fighter, poker – doesn’t matter.

You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament.

You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round.

It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature."

It reminds me of the 8 gazillion grad school applicants who do not seem to understand that even though they write good Jane Austen essays by the standards of undergrads at Random State University, they really don't have a chance at a top tier PhD program.

I'll also just note that there is a debate in this literature about whether some (or all) of the finding that the least competent tend to be over-confident about their ability or knowledge and the most competent tend to be under-confident arises due to a statistical or methodological artifact of the research. My guess is that even when you correct for unreliable measurement, regression to the mean, etc., there is still a tendency for the big fish in the small pond to fail to recognize just how small that pond really is. But I am less willing than the author to endorse the proposition that this effect is a basic element of human nature. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what this relative lack of certainty indicates about my knowledge of judgment and decision-making vis-a-vis his. Hah.

My brother in law made me aware of this blog through this post. I thought it was interesting, and I agree with the general premise that people compete for status through their purchasing behavior and that counter-cultural tastes do not buck capitalism in any way. I did find it rather quaint (read: dumb) to believe that back in the good old days, "there was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used and lived in" because stuff was made by hand (I like making stuff by hand, but hellooo magical thinking), and I couldn't see how this was relevant to the larger point of the article.