Cognitive Dissonance & Choice Rationalization Revisted

John Tierney has a good piece in the NYtimes on Yale economist Dr. Chen's recent findings that suggest some of the older psychology experiments which showed choice rationalization were really just showing the Monty Hall phenomenon:

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real phenomenon, but he maintains that there’s a fatal flaw in the classic 1956 experiment and hundreds of similar ones. He says researchers have fallen for a version of what mathematicians call the Monty Hall Problem, in honor of the host of the old television show, “Let’s Make a Deal".

Link to Monty Hall game.

Rocks & Thoughts

Mindhacks has a brilliant post up on his blog that unites elements of psychology with a personal observance that he had (and which I have certainly shared) while rock climbing. Make sure you check it out.

Bringing TOM to Monkeys

The Smithsonian had a fairly interesting piece, profiling Laurie Santos, a psychologist at Yale, who studies rhesus macaques on the island of Cayo Santiago, just off the coast of Puerto Rico. Santos has created a number of interesting experiments that exploit the monkeys' natural tendency to steal in order to asses whether or not they have a theory of mind--that another agent (in this case us) has thoughts similar to them. It is an incredibly difficult thing to test for in monkeys, but I think Santos is on the right thinking track.

Anyways check out the piece by clicking here.

Trial 1: The experiment relies on one of the most predictable traits of rhesus monkeys: their tendency to steal food at every opportunity. Santos discovered this a few years ago when she and her colleagues were running experiments in cognition and tool use involving lemons, and frequently had to quit early because the animals stole all the fruit. The island's monkeys are supplied with food, of course, and they also forage, but to leave so much as a raisin unguarded is to invite larceny; the researchers eat their own lunches inside a locked cage of cyclone fencing.

The theory-of-mind experiment is designed to test whether the monkeys, who obsessively guard their own food, assume that people do the same. If so, Santos reasons, they should prefer to steal from people who are looking away. So Santos enlists Olivia Scheck and Katharine Jan, Yale student volunteers here for the month. They are dressed alike in blue slacks and white shirts to minimize any confounding effect from their appearance—although there are differences Santos cannot do anything about, because Olivia is several inches shorter than Katharine, and blond, where Katharine is dark-haired. In general, Santos has found, rhesus macaques prefer to steal from the shorter person, although top-ranking dominant males sometimes do the opposite, apparently just to show off.

Is Denying Denial Still Denial?

NYtimes has an interesting article up about denial.

"recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people."


On a tangential denial topic...

I can remember after my sister died a lot of people informing me about the stages of grief, the first being denial, and thinking at the time that denial was a pretty stupid term since I didn't deny what had happened, but it seemed applicable in that I wasn't quite ready to say that I had accepted what had happened. The days following her death felt very surreal and it took me a long time to get through the denial stage and in some ways I guess I felt better in the denial stage because it offered sanctuary from the acceptance stage that almost inevitably follows (as it is incredibly difficult to maintain the mask of denial in the ugly face of reality). When, every morning their missing from the breakfast table, everyday they're not at school with you, every afternoon they don't come home, and every evening they're missing from the dinner table and their seat sits empty and stares blankly back at you.

For me I felt like I wasn't emancipated from this type of grief until I accepted the fact that what had happened happened and now belonged to the past, and not to the forefront of my thoughts. If you don't relegate these traumatic experiences to memory I think it really afflicts your daily activities and the overall outcome of each and every day. You start to feel like every today is the same as yesterday, and the day before, and every tomorrow will be like today, so you sort of have nothing to look forward to because you feel like your future has been taken away. You become a resentful resistentialist, shrewd and even misanthropic, unable to change your ways and not willing to try. Until you realize that sorrow and despair are two very useless emotions...which certainly don't lead to happiness, but instead lead to the cessation of activity, which can be very dangerous indeed. But it took me sometime before I realized this.

As it became clearer and clearer to me that I was not making much progress on the happiness front I attempted to radically change my thinking and engage in more activities--preoccupations to take my mind off my grief. It works, but its a damn slow process. Taking up an interest in the world and trying to figure it out was what helped stimulate me most, but I'm sure its not the same for everybody. But if you can find some hobby, some activity that you find enjoyable or pleasurable that's key, because it's something that you control and something that can never be taken away. That was how I escaped the gravity of grief, but some aren't as lucky and others cannot relate, because for some it is simply biological, while others psychological, but it seems like everyone has to deal with depression to some extent and sharing personal experiences and offering solutions I think is worthwhile. We shouldn't isolate our experience thinking that we alone bear a certain burden, rather we should share it with others and try to provide (silly metaphor alert) road maps from our own bush whacking experience of personal exploration that can help others navigate the rough terrain much better. Anyways that's just my two cents.

United (with Xenophobia) We Stand

Tartarize has a good post up on his blog commenting on (what I thought was) a very interesting article recently published in SciMag: The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War.

I highly recommend reading the article, however if you are pressed for time/don't have a subscription Tartarize has a pretty good--more laymen's argot/pragmatic--translation of what the article is basically saying:

"promoting a sort of tribalism and intergroup warfare, rejection, fear, and non-cooperation between the groups, the intragroup altruism becomes much more likely to be returned to the benefit of everybody (within the group). If you can isolate your group with respect to other groups, you both need to work together in order to succeed in these conflicts and can work together due to the much greater assurance that your gesture will be reciprocated...[sic]From a state of nature, where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short to a more peaceful altruistic world--the best path is via a small warring group where everyday is the day after 9/11. Where everybody is xenophobic and altruistic. Where you love your neighbor as yourself, but take slaves "of the strangers that do sojourn among you."

The best way to build up some trust within a group larger than your family is by forming a group, go around murdering other people, enslaving them and insuring xenophobia. This, oddly, leads to altruism. You keep people out and help people in, and can succeed in tough times and help in good times, and your entire group will be the better for it."

Though this trend is sad and unfortunate, if you look at it amorally it appears, undoubtedly, to be the very mechanism in history that has slowly united us together into everlarger groups.

Which is why I'm (perhaps a little naively) optimistic about the future. I feel that as our enemies turn into frenemies, and our frenemies into friends, we have been slowly inching towards the end of war. Globalisation (with its economic incentive for peace) has forced us to reconcile our differences and we are slowly realizing that working together is undeniably the most optimum pursuit for everybody.

Which leads us to my subscription to the utopian dream of One. I would argue (somewhat confidently) that our historical directional arrow appears to be pointing this way. Whether or not, in the end, it will be a mutually respecting consensus of states who give fair and equal concern and respect to their citizens or a hegemonic ruling of one state over the rest, or worse the failure of either resulting in the extinction of our species and even planet via nuclear weapons, I have no clue, but I can only hope for the former, and end with the annoyingly true adage: "only time will tell."

You Become What You Think About

Depression, to me, is a lot like gravity. Some individuals are fortunate enough to go about their daily lives without paying much attention to it and clearly do not feel its heavy presence lurking over their shoulders throughout the day, while other, less fortunate individuals conscientiously endure it and battle to ignore it every single day. They feel it every waking morning of their lives (and at times it is so powerful that it keeps them in their beds). And for this latter category of people the only form of escape is temporary, like a quick trip to outer space, that is usually drink or drug induced, which only leads to a greater degree of overall unhappiness since contemporary law does not look very favorably towards these desperate acts of behavior, these attempts of escape.

It may sound odd but depression truly is an addiction. Because once you get in the habit of it, and the longer you indulge yourself in its sorrowful clasps, the harder it becomes to emancipate yourself from its shackles. But I believe that there is a way out, a way to break this habit, because it is an addiction, I believe that it is ipso facto a choice. When someone tells you that the best way to stop smoking is to simply quit, a very simple solution, you scoff because while true, that choice does not seem remotely attainable. The same applies to depression. It is a choice that you make, a way you perceive the events that take place in your life, and the organization of those events that I believe triggers the emotional and psychological side affects of depression.

The best way, I think, to illustrate this is by analogy. I actually owe this train of thought to an ‘intuitive trick’ that one of my ex-girlfriends used to perform. Her claim was that whenever she looked at the clock the numbers signifying the hours would be various but the numbers that represented the minutes would always be ‘39’. She would prove her thesis to me time and time again and pretty soon I found that I too had acquired this peculiar habit. However, I must now confess that our little intuitive trick is not so much magic as it is a cognitive habit of memory.

If I hold the belief that I see the clock every 39th minute, then every time I do see the clock at this time I will recall my belief and purport it to be true. Even though I continuously glance at the clock, all the times it is not 39 is trivial to me, it is when 39 appear s that a memory neuron sparks and I proclaim, ‘hey its 39!’ in my head, reminding myself of my weird trick.

Another example of this habit, in case the analogy above does not make sense, is the new car-every car phenomenon. After you purchase your brand new (whether actually new or just new to you) car you suddenly observe that your car is everywhere. You drive down the highway and you keep seeing your car wizzing by in the opposite lane. All of a sudden it seems like everyone followed your expert purchase and bought themselves the very same car, when in fact you are just more inclined to notice this make and model of car, because you have a reason to notice it now (as opposed to all the other cars zooming by).

This very same phenomenon applies to depression. Depression is created out of the belief that the world is inherently against you. You believe that the things or events which have taken place in your life clearly justify this belief—your future optimism is raped by your past tragedies. People who actually have had rather significant personal tragedies in their lives, such as the loss of a parent or sibling or friend, or even other significant psychological or emotional events to that individual, have a higher tendency of noticing, constantly, the gravitational force of depression. They feel it is inescapable and no matter how fast they run or how high they jump, in the end, gravity will always win. Because they believe this they very often give up and subscribe to the ‘fuck it’ attitude of life, in which they believe nothing they do really matters. It is a self-destructive stance and it obviously only leads the individual's belief that the world is against them to be exponentially increased and justified.

This is my own, personal, theory of depression but a recent study, courtesy of the blogger over at Cognitive Daily, on facial emotion recognition seems to support my suspicions.

From the link:

The students who had heard the depressing music rated ambiguous, less intense faces significantly higher for rejection and sadness than those who heard the happy music. They rated clear, less intense faces significantly higher in fear and lower in invitation / elation than those who listened to the happy music.

So overall people who are feeling more depressed are likely to see more negative emotions and less positive emotions, even in schematic faces, especially when the faces are ambiguous or less intense.

Bouhuys et al. suggest that this phenomenon might make clinical depression self-reinforcing. Depressed people see more negativity even in benign facial expressions, which in turn leads to more depressed emotions.