Category Archives: Psychology

The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar

“In order to choose, we must first perceive control is possible.” – Sheena Iyengar

For those who haven’t heard of the jam experiment, researchers set up two jam-tasting stalls at a luxury grocery store. One offered 6 flavours of jam to sample from, while the other offered 24. More passersby chose to stop at the wide-choice stall, and on average, people tasted two jams at either stall. In the end, however, 30% of people who stopped at the limited choice stall bought a jam: only 3% of people facing 24 options did.

Sheena Iyengar conducted this experiment in an effort to show that though small increases in choice can be a strict improvement, large amounts of choice can actually make us worse off. In her book, The Art of Choosing, she examines the idea of choice and how it affects our lives. Choice, and even more so believing we have choice, is integral to the human experience. Even animals in zoos apparently develop neuroses in its absence, as happened to Gus, a 700 pound polar bear in New York City Zoo who started swimming endless laps in his pool. It being New York, however, they brought in a therapist and he recovered.

Our affection for choice can lead us into trouble, however. Even when having extra choices actually makes us worse off, we still pursue them, and, as Gus demonstrates, when we don’t have enough choice we can struggle psychologically. Fortunately, how much choice we have is usually a result of narratives we construct for ourselves, both when we have too few and too many. Retirees given a plant and told to care for it themselves, as opposed to being given a plant and told the nurse would care for it, showed marked health improvements despite the fact that a plant was given to them in both cases. Similarly, Japanese students believed they had made far fewer choices in a given day than American students, since the Americans counted things like brushing their teeth or hitting the snooze button as choice while the Japanese students did not.

Though filled with interesting experiments and ideas, The Art of Choosing can sometimes feel somewhat oversimplified. It is made up largely of stories and anecdotes rather than analysis, and so will appeal largely to readers who prefer that style of book. For myself, I preferred Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice as an introduction to choice, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for self-constructed narratives, and Malcolm Gladwell if you’re looking to accumulate stories for cocktail parties. Still, if choice is something that interests you, the book is worth the read, and even more so is Iyengar’s original work on jam.

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The Clock of the Long Now – Stewart Brand

“How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?”

Stewart Brand is a worried man. Earthquakes, war, murder, the burning of libraries; bad things happen fast, he argues. Good things, in contrast, like reforestation, the growth of a child, the maturing of an adult, or the building of library, happen slow. Today’s world though happens on a faster and faster time scale – our “now” is a smaller and smaller increment of time. How, he wonders, can we make our society see the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week? How, in other words, can we give ourselves a long now?

The Clock of the Long Now is a collection of essays by Brand about this topic. Brand is an ecologist and environmental activist, including running the Whole Earth Catalog and being instrumental in having NASA release the first picture of Earth as seen from space, believing it could symbolize our shared destinies. Today, he is a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, devoted to the issues The Clock of the Long Now raises.

For our world to survive, he argues, we must think and compete on 6 different time scales. Over the scale of years, individuals compete; over decades, families; over centuries, tribes or nations; over millennia, culture; over tens of millennia, species; and over eons, the whole web of life on our planet. Thinking on these scales means we can identify and work to preserve what really matters.

Unfortunately, as he points out, “the great problem with the future is that we die there.” It can be difficult to mentally immanentize the future. To help, he has a number of suggestions, including writing dates in five digits (02013, not 2013), increasing history education among all professions, and following James Lovelock’s proposal of writing a start-up manual for civilization, from making fire through ancient genetic design to modern biotech.

As with any collection of essays, any given reader will like some essays and dislike others. Overall, however, this book, and Brand’s foundation, form a powerful message. We can still read Galileo’s technical correspondence from the 1590s, but not the correspondence that launched AI research in the 1960s, because the electronic storage has decayed. What does that say about what we’re leaving to future generations? I’m not sure Brand knows the answer, and I certainly don’t, but the question is one that is too often lost in the babble of the present.

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What Intelligence Tests Miss – Keith Stanovich

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. – Albert Einstein

When people criticize IQ, they often argue that personality and character are equally important, as indeed they are. For Stanovich, however, even those critics give too much credence to intelligence. Not only are there many non-cognitive factors that matter, he argues, but IQ does not even capture cognitive ability: it measures intelligence, narrowly defined, but not what he calls rationality.

Intelligence, he suggests, is the ability to achieve a specific task or objective, as measured by IQ tests. Rationality, in contrast, is the ability to select goals and objectives. It is divided into instrumental rationality, which helps you achieve what you want for the minimum resources, and epistemic rationality, which ensures your beliefs actually correspond to reality.

The distinction is one any video-gaming teenager could tell you; characters in video games have both wisdom and intelligence, and absent-minded professors have only one of the two. To make the general case, Stanovich points to individuals given problem solving tasks. When given clear directions on how to solve the problem, high-IQ people do better: without directions, IQ appears to give little advantage in figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place.

Perhaps Stanovich’s most useful insight though is that of mindware. No matter how intelligent or wise you are, he points out, if you haven’t been taught probability you will struggle with some problems. “Installing” mindware like probability theory, expected utility, and others is essential. All of us benefit from focusing not just on learning knowledge, but on developing approaches and mental models that can serve us in a variety of situations. We can also benefit from reducing contaminated mindware: mindware that reduces our ability to think critically or analyze problems effectively, be those instinctive biases or taught ideologies.

There’s no denying that intelligence tests miss a phenomenal amount of what is important, and anything that contributes to our understanding is helpful. This doesn’t mean IQ tests are meaningless, of course; simply that they should be treated as one, very limited, piece of the puzzle. What Intelligence Tests Miss is by no means the final word on this subject, but it’s a good attempt on a very complicated issue.

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The Invisible Gorilla – Chabris & Simons

“It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.”

In what is perhaps one of the best known psychology experiments conducted, subjects are asked to carefully count the passes of a basketball made between a team wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. About half the subjects fail completely to notice when a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and walks off!

The authors of the experiment, Chabris and Simons, argue in The Invisible Gorilla that this captures a cognitive illusion, a situation in which our intuition leads us astray. In this case, almost all of us believe that were such a situation to happen to us, we would notice the gorilla. In reality, they suggest, looking does not imply seeing if our attention is directed elsewhere. The same problem occurs when we talk on cell phones while driving: we all believe we will still see what is going on in front of us, when in reality we emphatically do not.

They list several such illusions, including attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. We do not see everything we look at or remember everything we have seen; we massively overestimate our abilities, particularly those of us who are worst at something; we say we could explain how a zipper works or why the sky is blue, but when asked cannot; we believe spurious causation claims with no grounding in evidence, as in the case of autism and vaccinations; and we believe there must be an easy way to unlock vast abilities in our brains.

We tend to intuitively believe in our abilities, whether multitasking or memory, yet experiments like the invisible gorilla or one in which 50% of subjects failed to notice when experimenters replaced their conversational partner with a different person while they were distracted cast significant doubt on these claims. Intuition, Chabris & Simons argue, may well be useful in the Gladwellian sense, but the only way to know whether it is accurate or illusory is to conduct randomized experiments. In this sense, they are firmly on the side of Banerjee and Duflo, though in a different context.

At heart, though, their book is one of stories; for every claim they make they tell multiple stories of experiments run and demonstrations seen, and so the book is both entertaining and educational. Our intuitions can guide us well, often for reasons unknown to our conscious selves, but a little humility would do us all good, instead of assuming our intuitions will always steer us correctly.

Looking to understand more of the psychology of illusions? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff

“It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Early post this week: I’m in the air on Sunday, so won’t be able to post. I deny any irony in early-posting a review about bringing everything into the present.

Information can be either a storage or flow. Twitter is a flow: there is no point in going back and rewatching twitter feeds, because once it loses its present immediacy, it loses impact. We cannot catch up with it. Books, on the other hand, are storage, and can be returned to repeatedly. The problem with modernity is that we confuse the two, scanning a digital article with the same focus as we give our facebook news feed, and missing out on much of its value.

Rushkoff argues that we have begun to experience life as one long moment, always in the present, with no beginning and no end. As a result, we have stopped emphasizing narratives in our movies and tv shows; we attempt to be everywhere at once both in attention and physically; we try to make everything happen now rather than waiting; and we oversee patterns due to an overdose of data points. It is an interesting and compelling point, that we are placing less and less emphasis on things that are not happening now, and are overwhelmed by everything that supposedly is.

Beyond that (admittedly interesting) claim, however, I don’t find the rest of his thesis convincing. His argument that we no longer value narrative arcs, supposedly evidenced in flashback heavy Family Guy episodes, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Modern life is certainly accelerated, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book Future Shock, and it seems that the faster it gets, the faster we demand it goes. It seems to me though that we show just as much need for narrative arcs as ever, though perhaps less patience for long ones. Family guy still has a story – it’s just short and shallow.

Despite being on a fascinating topic, Present Shock didn’t add as much as I had hoped to the discussion, introducing few new ideas or ways of thinking about the world. Yes, multi-tasking brains do worse on almost every measure, but that’s fairly well recognized. His discussion of moon phases affecting chemical balances in the body, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like junk science, and the fact that he doesn’t provide any actual evidence for it suggests there may not be much. There is interesting information in Present Shock, but it is overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the unlikely to be causal.

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Why Introverts are Awesome – Quiet by Susan Cain

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.” – Susan Cain

Action. Boldness. Charisma. Harvard Business School and modern society are unanimous on the importance of these values. Not achieving them, therefore, signals failure: that we are too introspective, too reflective, and too contemplative. Susain Cain disagrees, and in Quiet argues that society grossly undervalues introversion. Choosing not to go to the party, or indeed to hide in the bathroom when you’re at the party, is not a sign of weakness: rather, it’s simply a preference for a life with less external stimulation, a model society might do well to learn from.

To understand introversion, she traces it back to childhood. Highly reactive children, ones who respond strongly to stimulus, are actually more likely to be introverts than low reactive children. It is people who find external stimulation overwhelming who therefore seek to limit that stimulation, and so become more inwardly focused. For Cain, it’s a biological difference, not disadvantage.

Studying fish, she points out that bold fish are more likely to rush into traps and get caught than shy fish, but once in captivity, bold fish start eating the food earlier than shy fish and have a much higher survival rate. For humans, introversion predicts academic success in university better than cognitive ability, and an introvert’s focus on reflection means that in the lab they spend longer on tasks and do better at them. A world with less decisiveness and more forethought, therefore, might well be a better world. There is, after all, “zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

As befits a book written for introverts, Cain has written a book inspiring both action and reflection. At times it reads as a cheerleader for self-conscious introverts, encouraging them to be proud of their status, but it also relies on theories of learning and child-development to understand possible benefits to introversion and how people develop such traits. Of course, in serving as cheerleader for introversion, her examples of extraverted individuals can sometimes feel caricatured, and her description of introverts can sometimes feel like it includes all possible virtues. A few sections can also feel a bit slow, not contributing much to the thrust of the argument. Still, for any introvert feeling self-conscious in a world of extroverts, the book is a must read.

Want to learn more about the advantages of introverts? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Using Games in Life? Reality is Broken by McGonigal

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” – Brian Sutton-Smith

When was the last time you leveled up? Found a power up? Got a wisdom +1? These motivate us in video games, and Jane McGonigal argues in Reality is Broken that actual reality needs more of them. Millions of people use games to escape reality – why, she asks, can’t we use games to improve reality?

McGonigal thinks games can confer an evolutionary advantage on those who play them, helping us develop our strengths, treat depression and obesity, foster collaboration, increase democratic participation, fix education, and maximize our potential as human beings. As a result, Reality is Broken is stuffed full of interesting examples and facts, and the book shines because of them.

Whether discussing poker in graveyards to remind ourselves of our own mortality; Chorewars creating quests like doing the laundry; Quest to Learn as the framework for a charter school (with among other things students teaching concepts to AI avatars as quizzes); or God games like the Sims, Black and White, and Spore fostering the long view and developing ecosystems thinking, the games she analyzes are exciting. 69% of heads of household in the US play video games, and 97% of youth; this is a resource, she argues, we need to tap.

I’m always a little nervous about these kinds of claims; they remind me of Play Pumps, the systems installed in parts of Africa in which children playing could pump water. When the children bored of the idea, women were left to turn roundabouts by hand, making their task even more laborious. That said, games also have enormous potential to change our lives for the better.

My takeaway though is optimism about humanity. Whether in games or in real life, it’s inspiring to see millions of people seek out challenges to test their limits, working together to build things larger than themselves. World of Warcraft Wikis may not be what all of us would choose to build, but it is nonetheless a common project, and in scale an awe-inspiring one.

Want more games in your own life? Keep reading (or order from the UK or Canada).