Zimbardo's Lie

From this week's must-read article: Ben Blum's The Lifespan of a Lie -- The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?:

Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as a “happening.”

A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants. In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

“We discovered that he was privately writing to editors to try to stop us getting published by claiming that we were fraudulent,” Reicher told me.

How good are graduate admission interviews, if job interviews are "utterly useless"?

Faculty members in almost all the Indian institutions are getting ready to interview tens (if not hundreds) of students for a handful (or a few handfuls) of PhD slots in their departments. A recent NYTimes article urges us to be mindful of limitations of this format: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews by Jason Dana.

I realize there are quite a few differences between the kind of interviews Dana describes in his article and the kind we use. For example, his "experimental" interviews were (probably) unstructured, while we may be using something more structured [such as probing candidates specifically in the areas / subfields they say they are strong in]. Also, given the overwhelmingly large number of candidates compared to the number of available slots, there's usually a pre-screening exercise which relies on previous academic record, research experience, scores / ranks in entrance exams, etc.

And yet, this article reminds us some of the pitfalls of the interview process.

Links

• Christian Catalini, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Patrick Gaulé in Vox.eu: Cheaper flights and scientific collaboration

• Noah Smith in Noahpinion: Do economists have physics envy? (Part 2).

• Maria Konnikova in New Yorker: Practice Doesn't Make Perfect.

• Rhaina Cohen in The Atlantic: What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender Pay Gap.

• Gina Kolata in NY Times: Lost in Academia: So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors.

Adversarial Collaboration

David Shariatmadari's profile of Prof. Daniel Kahneman has lots of fascinating details, including some about his childhood years in Nazi-occupied France. In the section on Kahneman's intellectual contributions, we find this episode which I think is fantastic:

... Then there is the concept of adversarial collaboration, an attempt to do away with pointless academic feuding. Though he doesn’t like to think in terms of leaving a legacy, it’s one thing he says he hopes to be remembered for. In the early 2000s Kahneman sought out a leading opponent of his view that so-called expert judgments were frequently flawed. Gary Klein’s research focused on the ability of professionals such as firefighters to make intuitive but highly skilled judgments in difficult circumstances. “We spent five or six years trying to figure out the boundary, where he’s right, where I am right. And that was a very satisfying experience. We wrote a paper entitled ‘A Failure to Disagree’”.

Fortunately, that paper is available online.

LInks

1. Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away Researchers (Mike Ramsey and Douglas Macmillan in WSJ)

2. Deepak Singh in The Atlantic: 'I've Never Thanked My Parents for Anything'. "In America, saying thank you is routine. In India, it can be insulting."

3. Chris Woolston in Nature: Fruit-fly paper has 1,000 authors "Genomics paper with an unusually high number of authors sets researchers buzzing on social media." See also a related story from physics.

4. The Economist: Keeping it on the company campus. "As more firms have set up their own “corporate universities”, they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school."

5. A picture gallery on 150 years of mathematics in the UK in The Guardian

Links: Women in Science Edition

1. Toni Schmader, Jessica Whitehead, and Vicki H. Wysocki: A Linguistic Comparison of Letters of Recommendation for Male and Female Chemistry and Biochemistry Job Applicants.

   Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how recommenders describe female compared to male applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either a chemistry or biochemistry faculty position at a large U.S. research university. Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates.

2. Joan C. Williams in HBR: The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM.

3. Jessica Collett at Scatterplot: Feeling Like a Fraud? You Are Not Alone. A summary of her recent research on the impostor syndrome.

4. Noah Smith in Bloomberg: Bigotry Is Expensive.

   So if a society bases its decisions of who gets which job on race and gender, it’s going to be sacrificing efficiency. If women aren’t allowed to be doctors, the talent pool for doctors will be diluted, and wages will be pushed up too high, choking off output. This would be true even in a bizarro world where every man was a better doctor than every woman! Of course that’s not even remotely true, but the point is, the theory of comparative advantage doesn’t care about average differences in absolute ability. If you’re making rules about which type of people are allowed to do which type of job, you’re hurting the economy.

   Just how big of a difference does this make? A team of top economists has recently studied the question, and their results are pretty startling. In “The Allocation of Talent and Economic Growth,” economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago Booth Business School and Charles Jones and Peter Klenow of Stanford estimate that one fifth of total growth in U.S. output per worker between 1960 and 2008 was due to a decline in discrimination.

Links

1. David Pilling: Lunch with FT: Amitav Ghosh.

2. Ram Guha in HT: The suit might not have suited Gandhi and Patel.

3. Nandini Sundar in The Indian Express: Whose National Interest?

Links

1. Harvard University press release: Cooperation, considered. "New model reveals how motives can affect cooperation". This is based on an interesting game -- a variation of the cooperation game by adding a twist that conveys some information about the first player's motives to the second player.

2. Emily Singer in Quanta: Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question. "A recent solution to the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic game theory scenario, has created new puzzles in evolutionary biology."

3. Clive Thompson in Smithsonian: How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played. A very interesting excerpt about how the US lawmakers viewed "xeroxing":

   “It was really a great moment in the late ’70s when it was a wonderful loosening of copyright,” says Lisa Gitelman, professor of English and media studies at New York University. These days, Congress is working hard­—often at the behest of movie studios or record labels—in the opposite direction, making it harder for people to copy things digitally. But back in the first cultural glow of the Xerox, lawmakers and judges came to the opposite conclusion: Copying was good for society.

Oliver Sacks on His Last Months

He has recently learned that he has "multiple metastases in the liver," the kind of cancer that "cannot be halted." He has a detached, yet touching, article on "how [he plans] to live out the months that remain to me." Here's a section on some of his choices, and the reasons behind them:

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. [...]

Ram Guha on Indian Leaders' Displays of Self-Love

Wow!

In an NDTV opinion piece, he ticks off a whole bunch of India's scientific and intellectual elite -- including C.N.R. Rao, R.A. Mashelkar, Amartya Sen, and Jagdish Bhagwati. If you enjoy people bashing big egos, you will like this one a lot. Guha pulls no punches!

It's not all negative, though. Guha does offer a wonderful positive example: Obaid Siddiqi, the founder of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru. Here's an excerpt from this section:

To be sure, not all Indian scientists are as boastful as Rao or Mashelkar. One of my own intellectual heroes is the late Obaid Siddiqi, who founded theNational Centre for Biological Sciences, arguably India's most high quality scientific laboratory. Siddiqi, who combined intellectual brilliance with personal rectitude, recruited a team of gifted young scientists and then left them the institute to run. He nurtured an atmosphere of egalitarianism in the NCBS, where juniors could fearlessly challenge seniors and where honorifics such as 'Sir', 'Professor'. were rigorously eschewed. Sadly, not many Indian scientists are cut of the same cloth as Obaid Siddiqi. In their youth, C.N.R. Rao and R.A. Mashelkar undoubtedly did first-rate scientific work. But, rather than allow younger people to take over scientific leadership as they themselves grew older, they consolidated their own position and power. Worse still, they encouraged flattery and chamchagiri, as manifested most spectacularly in Rao allowing a circle to be named after him.

Links

1. Amy J. Binder (sociologist at UC-San Diego) in Washington Monthly: Why Are Harvard Grads Still Flocking to Wall Street?. "Students from elite colleges march off to jobs at the big banks and consulting firms less by choice than because of a rigged recruiting game that the schools themselves have helped to create."

2. Claire Cain Miller at The Upshot: The Motherhood Penalty vs. the Fatherhood Bonus. "A Child Helps Your Career, if You’re a Man".

3. Michael Shermer in SciAm: How the Survivor Bias Distorts Reality.

4. Richard Harris in NPR: When Scientists Give Up.

   Ian Glomski thought he was going to make a difference in the fight to protect people from deadly anthrax germs. He had done everything right — attended one top university, landed an assistant professorship at another.

   But Glomski ran head-on into an unpleasant reality: These days, the scramble for money to conduct research has become stultifying.

   So, he's giving up on science. And he's not alone.

Links

1. Mary Beard in CHE: What's So Funny? A neat overview of the history of theories of laughter. I like this line: "Confronted with the product of centuries of analysis and investigation, one is [tempted] to suggest that it is not so much laughter that defines the human species, as Aristotle is supposed to have claimed, but rather the drive to debate and theorize laughter."

2. Here's a big one fit for the Annals of Research Misconduct: SAGE is retracting 60 articles published in their Journal of Vibration and Control [Update: The scandal has now forced the resignation of Taiwan's Education Minister]. Reason? A peer review ring:

   While investigating the JVC papers submitted and reviewed by Peter Chen, it was discovered that the author had created various aliases on SAGE Track, providing different email addresses to set up more than one account. Consequently, SAGE scrutinised further the co-authors of and reviewers selected for Peter Chen’s papers, these names appeared to form part of a peer review ring. The investigation also revealed that on at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he had created.

3. The Philosophers Mail: How we end up marrying the wrong people:

   ... Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

   It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. [...]

4. The Economist: The Digital Degree. "The staid higher-education business is about to experience a welcome earthquake."

Links

1. Heidi Ledford in Nature News: We dislike being alone with our thoughts. "Many people would rather endure physical pain than suffer their own wandering cogitations."

   Here's my cynical take: A fun study makes bold claims in psychology, and gets published in Science. How long will it survive before it gets retracted?

2. Patricia Fara in Nature: Women in science: A temporary liberation:

   The First World War ushered women into laboratories and factories. In Britain, it may have won them the vote, argues Patricia Fara, but not the battle for equality.

3. Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun in Nature: A Test that Fails.

   Universities in the United States rely too heavily on the graduate record examinations (GRE) — a standardized test introduced in 1949 that is an admissions requirement for most US graduate schools. This practice is poor at selecting the most capable students and severely restricts the flow of women and minorities into the sciences.

   We are not the only ones to reach this conclusion. [...]

How many of us are outliers?

1. Must read article of the day (it appeared quite a while ago, though). Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker: Multitask Masters on those truly extraordinary few who are actually good at multitasking, and who actually become better when the tasking becomes more-multi. This is an apt example of exception proving the rule: Most of us mere mortals, on the other hand, are really, really bad at it, even if we are unwilling to accept this sad reality; the article has tons of links to studies cooroborating this finding. Here's an excerpt from the end of the article:

   The irony of Strayer’s work is that when people hear that supertaskers exist—even though they know they’re rare—they seem to take it as proof that they, naturally, are an exception. “You’re not,” Strayer told me bluntly. “The ninety-eight per cent of us, we deceive ourselves. And we tend to overrate our ability to multitask.” In fact, when he and his University of Utah colleague, the social psychologist David Sanbomnatsu, asked more than three hundred students to rate their ability to multitask and then compared those ratings to the students’ actual multitasking performances, they found a strong relationship: an inverse one. The better someone thought she was, the more likely it was that her performance was well below par.

   At one point, I asked Strayer whether he thought he might be a supertasker himself. “I’ve been around this long enough I didn’t think I am,” he said. Turns out, he was right. There are the Cassies of the world, it’s true. But chances are, if you see someone talking on the phone as she drives up to the intersection, you’d do better to step way back. And if you’re the one doing the talking? You should probably not be in your car.

2. Beckie Supiano in CHE: Smart People Go to College, and Other Twists in Measuring the Value of a Degree. An interview of Douglas Webber, an assistant professor of economics at Temple University, whose recent research has been on teasing out the role of the factors that account for the fairly big effect (in the US) of college education on lifetime earnings. This discussion of people's focus on outliers stands out [with bold emphasis added by me]:

   Now everything I’m talking about, I’m using average returns. When I said that higher-ability people tend to go into certain majors, I’m saying that on average. So there are many, many absolutely brilliant people who major in art history, and there are many not-so-brilliant people who major in engineering.

   A lot of times people put too much weight on outliers. They see someone who is really successful, and they think that’s a good path to take. But if you are an average person, then you should be looking at the average return.

   Mick Jagger—and the world—would be much worse off if he had stayed at the London School of Economics and gotten an econ degree instead of dropping out to hang out with Keith Richards. But you know, he’s an extreme outlier.

3. Inside Higher Ed: Study: Web surfing in class hurts top students too: The study challenges the conventional wisdom which "holds that marginal students may pay more of a price for web surfing during class than top students, who are presumed to be better multitaskers."

Implicit Bias and Discrimination against Women

John Bohannon in Science Now: Both Genders Think Women Are Bad at Basic Math.

Study participants of both genders were divided into two groups: employers and job candidates. The job was simple: As accurately and quickly as possible, add up sets of two-digit numbers in a 4-minute math sprint. ... At the end of the experiment, the employers took the Implicit Association Test, which measures unconscious bias by forcing you to quickly group together various words.

The employers had limited information to make their hiring decisions. In some cases, they got nothing but a glance at the candidate—this revealed the candidate’s gender, of course. In other cases, the employers also had the candidate’s self-appraisal of how many problems he or she expected to be able to complete in the 4-minute period. And sometimes, after the employers made their hiring decision, they had a chance to change their minds after they were told by a researcher how the candidates had actually performed on a test run of the math sprint.

Men and women employers alike revealed their prejudice against women for a perceived lack of mathematical ability. When the only information that the employers had was a photograph of the candidate, men were twice as likely to be hired for the simple math job, no matter whether it was a man or woman doing the hiring [...]

Annals of Happiness Studies

Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone in Vox: What Good Are Children?.

Study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Is there something wrong with these empirical analyses? Or is it that happiness measures are unreliable? This column argues that the results are correct but that comparisons of the wellbeing of parents and non-parents are of no help at all for people trying to decide whether to have children.

That intriguing conclusion, according to the authors, is primarily because "non-parents are not failed parents, nor are parents failed non-parents." The happiness (or lack thereof) one group cannot be compared directly with that of the other.

Adding Nuance to the Marshmallow Test

This study is from over a year ago, but I came across it only yesterday. Here's an excerpt from The Marshmallow Study revisited: Delaying gratification depends as much on nurture as on nature.

For the past four decades, the "marshmallow test" has served as a classic experimental measure of children's self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations. [...]

Children who experienced unreliable interactions with an experimenter waited for a mean time of three minutes and two seconds on the subsequent marshmallow task, while youngsters who experienced reliable interactions held out for 12 minutes and two seconds. Only one of the 14 children in the unreliable group waited the full 15 minutes, compared to nine children in the reliable condition.

Michael Bourne's meditation on this study alerts us to the possibility that the way the original study was presented to the public was essentially an appeal to our own tendency towards instant gratification: we are all suckers for simple stories that gel with our own worldview.

Links

1. Sendhil Mullainathan in NYTimes: Get Some Sleep, and Wake Up the G.D.P.. A great essay on the economic consequences of (lack of) sleep; along the way, we get this about the role of technology:

   Technology is an obvious culprit here. Web searching and cellphone use both flourish in the wee hours. Before the dawn of the web, I would stay up watching television. But there is something soporific about television: I would often nod off. Not so when I’m online. As technologies expand, these problems may only worsen.

2. Andrew Anthony in The Guardian: The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness.

3. Ross Pomeroy in Real Clear Science has an example each for scientific articles with the shortest editorial, the shortest abstract, and the shortest paper. I knew about the last one, but the other two are pretty good, too. The one with the shortest abstract has an author from IIT-K.

4. SMBC on Gay Sex and Bad Weather.

"You Complete Me"

What started as a romantic quote, got parodied in several films (e.g. this brilliant scene in The Dark Knight)before graffiti artist Banksy gave it his treatment.

* * *

Banksy is involved in this replication (of sorts) of the Joshua Bell experiment [Hat tip to Michael Nielsen]:

Sendhil Mullainathan on Mental Bandwidth

The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less:

Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve processed only half of what has been said.

Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: “Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it. No, I should be good.”

That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind. [...]

Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain. Psychologists measure the impact of this clogging on various tasks: logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information. Together these tasks measure “bandwidth,” the resource that underlies all higher-order mental activity. Inevitably, dieters do worse than nondieters on all these tasks; they have less bandwidth.