Book/Life Congruence

Friday is my "light" day, on which I don't have any classes of my own to go to; I try to get a jump start on the crushing work for the next week, though, and this is easier when I get to school early and stay later, even though my only commitments are from 11-1. I have a pretty good handle at this point on what work I am more efficient with / find it easier to make myself to do when I'm at school and what kind of work I do well with from home.

I got to my office by about 8:30 and worked solidly until 11:00 on re-reading and takes notes on my computer from my neuro book, catching up to the chapter we just did this week! This was great, beyond my expectations and goals for the day, and I planned to do the readings for next week's neuro class when I got back at 1:00.

Today's undergrad research methods lecture was not particularly boring, but since I had (for the first time in a little while) an unsatisfactory quality of sleep last night, and I was suffering a bit from a low-pressure-system headache, I had the worst time just trying to stay awake. (Thankfully I sit in the very back row and thus do not set a bad example.) After class, I went back to my office to do the reading.

Still feeling almost overwhelmingly sleepy, I opened the book to the chapter, topic: attention, and tried really hard to focus on the material but not as successfully as I would have liked. I had to read the section on the reticular activating system and its role in arousal and alertness a couple of times since I kept half-dozing off while my eyes went through the motions of reading. The irony of the situation was not, however, lost on me. Eventually, I did become slightly more alert and I decided that it was an appropriate time to bust out one of the 45-calorie mini-packs of raisins I carry around for emergency situations (as Sun-Maid tells us, they're good for "quick energy," whereby energy = calories from sugar). Whether the infusion of sugar helped or it just had a placebo effect, I can't say, but I did manage to work my way through the material with a reasonable level of attention.

Then I came home and took a delicious, rather long nap, though I screwed up my eating schedule a bit and woke up with a stomach ache that didn't go away for some time after eating dinner.

Anyway, the odd congruence between my reading material and the immediate conditions of my life this afternoon reminds me of a story I don't think I've told on this blog:

Last year some time, during that period when I was going to the college library every morning and reading through books on psychology / economics / etc., I was in the library reading when I heard a girl scream from somewhere in the stacks behind me. The approximately 8 of us seated at tables in the immediate vicinity all looked up with surprise and then looked at each other with confusion. About 15 seconds later I'm guessing (though it felt like minutes), the girl came out from the stacks laughing really hard into her cell phone, and everyone realized, "OK, she was shrieking with laughter" and went back to their work.

At this point, I resumed my reading of what must be, at this point in my life, my dozenth description of the bystander effect, which refers to the tendency for people to be less likely to offer help in an emergency when there are other people present, and felt sort of dismayed that even being not only knowledgeable about this phenomenon but having this knowledge as the most salient thing in my brain at the time of this girl screaming, I still reacted this useless way. And I could definitely feel that it was not a diffusion of responsibility issue (I did not just assume that somebody else would help) but that I wasn't sure what the situation really was and so fell into the trap of social proof (since nobody else was doing anything, action mustn't be warranted). Ugh.

What's with the Kink?

The last two British mystery programs I watched had kinky sex elements central to the plotline.

This included a Wire in the Blood episode in which a serial killer, who picks up submissive women online and then kidnaps/rapes/murders them, is revealed by his casual use of the term "vanilla." Ah yes, linking this stuff to psycho killers does great things for the public perception.

But it also included an episode of Midsomer Murders that ends with the policeman's very straight-laced wife commenting, as they are lying in bed and she is lowering her sleeping mask, apropos of the case that he just solved that involved three women who offered sex fantasies for sale, that though she has no interest in playing the "good wife" or the "damsel in distress," dishing out discipline she could do. The policeman, clearly surprised, says "Really?" and, smiling, enthusiastically snaps his book closed. Joyce and Tom Barnaby's marriage has hidden depths.

I also want to give a shout out to the British actor (Stuart Milligan, says IMDB) who played the American customer of the dominatrix on this show who also was the magician Jonathan Creek worked for in seasons 2 through whatever, not to be confused with the actor who played the magician during the first season of JC who was also Giles on Buffy.

Recreational Reading

I checked out Anna Karenina from the school library last week, finally succumbing to Tam's urging that I simply must read this book. Fortunately grad students get to keep library books for three months because I am making progress along the lines of a handful of pages per day and this is not a short book. (Note: this handful is a number that can be counted on hand, so 1-5.)

This week I watched the movie Scenes from a Marriage (by Ingmar Bergman) and strongly recommend it to Tam if she hasn't seen it already - it's a must for people interested in complex adult relationships.

Where Am I?

Walking down the hall today from my office to the bathroom, I was surprised and confused when I heard a bunch of students (undergrads) talking on the floor below, then I remembered, "Oh, right, this isn't merely my place of work; it's a building with rooms for students to come take classes in." (I take classes in the building, too, of course, but they feel enough like work meetings I have to prepare for that it trips me up.)

It's actually a pretty building. This is the atrium. My office is on the 4th floor (the lower of the two in this photo).

Nice Mental Health Break Video

I enjoyed watching this video about Christian the lion. Maybe you will too. (Though in my opinion they do have much to answer for in the selection of the Aerosmith song.)

According to Snopes, this story is legitimate.

Another Long Day

UPDATE: This recipe for southwest pork chops & rice turned out well - easy and pretty tasty. I cut the meat off the bone (I had 3 large chops) and just mixed it together with the rest of the ingredients after cooking rather than serving the whole chop. I sprinkled the cheese on top after reheating a serving in the microwave tonight. I am a sucker for spicy, brown-rice-based one-dish-meals and am happy I now have lunches ready for M-W this week.

It's weird how moving to a different part of the country, you have to get accustomed to different local chains. While you can expect Wal-Mart, Target, McDonalds, Subway, etc., to be everywhere (and they are here in NC), I've been boggling a bit about things like grocery stores (Food Lion, Lowe's Foods) and fast food restaurants (Bojangles - fried chicken & biscuits, Jersey Mike's - sub sandwiches) that are totally unfamiliar.

Yesterday I woke up finally sick of my longer hair and decided to get it cut. I typically use Super (Cheap) Cuts, since my "style" is about as easy as it gets, but googling it for W-S, there wasn't one at all near me, and it appeared that there were only two for the entire city. But looking in the phone book, I discovered a bunch of entries for a chain called Great Clips and found that there were about 3 of them within ~3 miles of my apartment. It turned out that the easiest one to get to, navigation-wise, was also only about 1 block from the Wal-Mart I wanted to go to for decongestant and various supplies anyway.

There was only about a 5 minute wait for my haircut (which I got on the too-short side) but my luck ran out at Wal-Mart where (1) for the second week in a row they did not have my desired brand, style, color, and size of underwear and (2) I got in a line that was short (too short) but took forever to get out of.

It feels funny, in a way, that I get this sense of complaint about them not having precisely the type of underwear I want, given that my preferences were so terribly specific. (They had a pack that fit the bill except for having a multi-color combination rather than white.) It makes me remember my dad talking about teaching and coaching in a small town in Nebraska where all the boys in the locker room would have underwear in different weird colors because that was what the town's general store would stock. On the other hand, I was at a store on Hanes Mill Road (not to be confused with Hanes Mall Road or all the other X Mill Roads) but was unable to secure my desired type of Hanes underwear. (It occurs to me on preview that it is inaccurate to say this is the second week in a row I couldn't get my desired type; last week, I purchased the last remaining package, but I have wanted to purchase about 3 packages total.)

The experience at the check-out was strange. (It definitely provoked counterfactual thinking while I stood there - "I should have known this line was too short, that a woman buying plants would have problems, I should found another line," etc.) All went well until the checker was presented with a giant gourd - giant as in a 12 pound gourd. A 12 pound gourd with no price tag. After much discussion between the clerk, the customer, and a guy in the produce department, they elected to sell it to her as though it were a pumpkin. (I say "much" but it probably took all of 5 minutes; it just felt like longer as I stood there, getting hungry, alternating between looking at the King Size Reese's Cups on one side and a women's magazine promising that you absolutely will lose weight following these tips, one of which no doubt should have been not to eat anything at all like the world's best macaroni and cheese proudly depicted on the cover.)

I spent most of the afternoon reading articles about self-regulation and persuasion. I enjoyed these quotes from Baumeister & Vohs (2007), Self-regulation, ego depletion, and motivation, Social and Personality Psychology Compass:

In the "it shouldn't surprise me someone has studied this but" category: "Nonetheless, not only do priests masturbate more than nuns (Sipe, 1995)...."

"At the height of passionate love, partners might be willing to sacrifice their lives for each other, whereas several years down the road they might not even bother to bring the partner the remote control."

"Choosing the lesser of two evils is thus apparently a stressful dilemma, even for rats."

This week I was able to make myself stay on in my office and continue working to good effect, and I place at least some of the credit for that with whoever stocked the student lounge with a large bowl of pink lady apples. When I felt myself flagging about 3:00 p.m., having an apple (thereby replenishing my supply of sugar) did make it a lot easier to keep going.

Oh, and Robert will perhaps be amused to know that I finally made the pork chop recipe on the back of the empty shredded cheese package that has been sitting on my counter for several weeks now. It looks tasty. Of course, the package is still sitting there, awaiting my decision to type up the recipe for future use or to discard the recipe forever.

Screwy Statistical Reasoning

As a break from mocking economists for their silly notions, a favorite past-time, it's time to get real on this: psychologists suck at statistical reasoning.

Consider this:

"Oakes (1986, p. 82) reported that 96% of academic psychologists erroneously believed that the level of significance specifies the probability that the hypothesis under question is true or false" (Gigerenzer, "The Superego, the Ego, and the Id in Statistical Reasoning").

Note that I don't have immediate access to the Oakes reference to see what this sample of "academic psychologists" consisted of and so forth, but still, it blows my mind.

What's happening here (presumably) is a serious misunderstanding of conditional probabilities. (A conditional probability is the likelihood of something being true, given that something else is true.)

Here's an example of some conditional probabilities:

(1) What is the probability that a creature is named Leopold Rex, given that the creature is a rabbit?

vs.

(2) What is the probability that a creature is a rabbit, given that the creature is named Leopold Rex?

Now, we don't know the probability of a creature being a rabbit or being named Leopold Rex with any precision, but it seems reasonable to believe that there are a lot of rabbits and not very many Leopold Rexes. So for (1), we'd expect that the probability of a rabbit being named Leopold Rex is pretty small (after all, most rabbits in the world don't have any "name" in the human sense at all). But for (2), once we know we're dealing with a Leopold Rex (a rare thing), the probability that he is a rabbit may be pretty good.

Even though we can't say a lot about these two probabilities, we should be able to fairly easily see that the probabilities are not going to be the same, or at least aren't the necessarily the same. If we were able to determine that 33% of all Leopold Rexes are rabbits, we certainly can't then say that 33% of rabbits are Leopold Rexes.

The fact that the two probabilities aren't the same is even more striking when you compare:

(1) What is the probability of a creature being my pet, given that he's a rabbit?

vs.

(2) What is the probability of a creature being a rabbit, given that he's my pet?

The probability in (1) is vanishingly small, since I have one pet and the world is full of rabbits. But the probability in (2) is 1 - since I have only one pet, once we know we're talking about my pet, we know for certain that the creature is a rabbit.

But it's also not the case that you can say that if 33% of Leopold Rexes are rabbits, then 67% of rabbits are Leopold Rexes. It's even more obvious that if 100% of my pets are Leopold Rexes that it can't be that 0% of Leopold Rexes are my pet. However, it appears that a lot of academic psychologists get this all mixed up in their heads when thinking about their hypotheses and their data.

The p-value only tells you the probability of having gotten the data given that the null hypothesis is true (i.e. that the effect you were looking for isn't there). This does not magically morph into telling you the probability of the hypothesis being true given your data, even though that's what you really want to know.

Lately I've been thinking about how relatively unprepared psychology students (even masters/PhD students) are mathematically. I have not been able to find (in my very cursory search thus far) any information on what the math background of the typical experimental psychology PhD student is, but given how little math prep is expected of even the very good programs, I believe that it isn't very much - possibly not enough to complete undergrad-level stats courses that demand mathematical rigor. And while I believe that it is possible to develop good statistical reasoning / intuition without having the math chops to prove the central limit theorem, etc., I do suspect that it's harder to understand this stuff without a reasonably solid grasp on the basic underlying mathematical concepts.

Of course, according to Gigerenzer, it's the writers of the psychology research methods/stats textbooks and the people teaching these classes who are largely to blame for the faulty reasoning since they either explicitly misrepresent what the p-values are, etc., or do not bother to be clear, thus inviting misunderstanding. (Sadly, they don't appear to be doing as well as to invite confusion.) Maybe they themselves are confused, and maybe it's easy to slip into error when you're trying to address an audience who isn't really mathematically up to the job of understanding what the hell you're talking about.

I know it's easy for me to say this, since I'm decent at math, but it seems that psychology as a discipline would benefit from requiring more mathematical talent and preparation among those entering graduate programs in research-based subdisciplines. (I would like to say that I can't see how it's relevant to the large number of psych students in the practioner-oriented fields and programs, but as Robert has pointed out, if there is any famously and dangerously statistically-incompetent profession in the world, it's medical doctors. Whether people doing marital counseling need the same level of statistical sophistication as doctors, I couldn't say.) There are already approximately a gazillion people who want to get a PhD in psychology, so reducing that number to those who are capable of and willing to get a higher level of math preparation wouldn't decimate the field. It's a separate question whether increasing the math skill requirements would cut out too many people with high levels of creativity as researchers and theorists, but an economist might note that psychology has too many theories already, and I would suspect that many-to-most of these theorists whose work has proven to be important would have been capable of more math had it had been asked of them.