Reasoning
May 7, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Reasoning • Research • Social
Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to their parents, as did I -- I just can't remember any of them at the moment (honest!).
Clearly children's conceptions of "acceptable" lies change over time. There must be a time in early childhood where they don't understand what a lie is. Then they learn what a lie is, followed shortly by learning that a lying is wrong. But how do they move from this stage to the more nuanced moral assessment of lying held by most adults?
Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:05 PM • Comments (9)
April 22, 2008
Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their achievements are due to innate ability rather than their own effort, they are less likely to persist at similar tasks in the future. But until recently, no study has attempted to directly study belief in free will and how it affects behavior.
Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler have found a way to study this question (though they can't tell you whether they were predestined to do it or they came up with the idea through their own independent efforts!). They had 30 students read one of two passages by Francis Crick. The first passage argued that most scientists now recognize free will as an artifact of the way the brain works, that free will is simply an illusion and our actions are determined solely by genetics and the environment. The second passage discussed consciousness and did not bring up free will at all. Then the students were given a test to measure their belief in free will versus determinism.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:31 PM • Comments (28)
April 15, 2008
Category: Movement and exercise • Reasoning • Research
Clicking on the link below will bring up an image in a new window (you may need to disable pop-up blockers to do this). The picture contains five rows of asterisks. Your job is to count them as quickly as possible. Try using your finger to point and help keep track.
View image
Now try the same task again, only this time, keep your hands flat on the table while you count.
View image
If you're like most people, this second task was a little more difficult for you. It's not that you need to use your finger to help you count, it just seems to help things along a bit. When you weren't using your finger to point, you may have found yourself nodding your head to help keep pace with all those asterisks.
A team led by Richard Carlson gave 24 tests like this to 17 students, and verified that pointing to help count asterisks resulted in faster and more accurate counts. But why? Maybe the fact that the items being counted are all asterisks tripped up the students, and they had to use their fingers just to keep their place. Carlson's team repeated the study, only using a variety of different symbols, not just asterisks. They found the same result. Even for a simple counting task, pointing at the things we count makes it easier. But once again the question arises: how is it that simply pointing at things helps us count?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:07 PM • Comments (11)
April 3, 2008
Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
"Outing" gays and lesbians has always been a controversial practice, especially when done without the outed person's consent. But even when an individual outs him or herself, some people argue that outing is inappropriate because of the negative stereotypes that are evoked. But there's a subtler sort of outing as well: even if a person is publicly out, not everyone is immediately aware of it. While most Americans know that Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian, fewer people might be aware that Alice Walker is too. While they might know Freddy Mercury was gay, they might not know about Cole Porter.
It might seem rather pointless for every news report about Alice Walker to mention her sexual preferences, but those in favor of this subtler sort of outing suggest that it can improve the public impression of gays and lesbians. Up until now, there hasn't been much science to back that claim. What we do know is that people who have gay and lesbian friends and family members tend to show less bias against them, both overtly and in implicit bias tests. Does simply seeing or learning about famous people who are gay or lesbian also decrease bias?
Nilanjana Dasgupta and Luis Rivera recruited 127 heterosexual people via newspaper ads to participate in a paid study. The participants were divided into two groups: one group viewed pictures and descriptions of 15 flowers, while the other saw photos and short biographies of famous gays and lesbians. They were then given an Implicit Attitude Test.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:05 PM • Comments (12)
March 13, 2008
Category: Language • Reasoning • Research
Psychologists often complain that neuroscientists get a disproportionate share of the glory when the mainstream media reports on their studies. It seems to some that an important new psychology study is often neglected or ignored entirely, while neuroscience studies of similar importance are hailed as "groundbreaking." What is it about pictures of brains that are so appealing?
A while back, were excited to hear of a study which promised to show that people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of research results than nonneural psychology explanations. Paul Bloom's article about the then-unpublished research suggested that even experts were more impressed with explanations of psychological phenomena that included irrelevant references to brain activity.
But the study was unpublished, so we didn't report on the results here. Now, finally, the study has been published by a team led by Deena Skolnick Weisberg. However, the results, though still intriguing, were a little different from what Bloom's account promised.
The researchers began by asking 81 non-experts to read descriptions of 18 different psychological phenomena like Attentional Blink and the Curse of Knowledge. Then they read an explanation of the phenomenon that either included some bit of neuroscience or did not. Here, for example, are two explanations of why the curse of knowledge occurs:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:15 PM • Comments (13)
March 6, 2008
Category: Reasoning • Research
When I write an article for Cognitive Daily, I follow a similar pattern nearly every time. First I carefully read the journal article I'll be discussing. Next I take a break and work on something else. Then I get myself a caffeinated beverage and some kind of sweet treat (usually it's chocolate-covered raisins but today I'm in a coffee shop having just finished a toffee almond bar). Often it won't be until ten or fifteen minutes after I've eaten that I really get into a groove with the writing. Then I write the entire post, usually for an hour or two straight, pausing only to produce the graphics and demos accompanying the story. The hard part is finished, and the final formatting, editing, and posting can be done at leisure, sometimes even while I'm working on other projects or getting the kids started on their homework.
The part that really requires self-discipline is the writing itself. Usually I disconnect the internet in my house, or even head out to a coffee shop (one of the few remaining with no internet access) to remove all possible distractions. The self-control necessary for writing is well-known, and many writers, such as the eminent lexicographer Samuel Johnson, have discussed how excruciating the writing process is for them (Johnson once said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."). But self-control is required for many more mundane tasks as well. Try to watch this silent movie (QuickTime Required) of me reading this post while ignoring the words that flash periodically in the lower-right corner of the screen:
It's not easy, is it? It almost feels like work, just to avoid reading. While reading is a mental process too, it feels like we're expending more energy avoiding reading than we would to do the reading itself.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:11 PM • Comments (16)
March 3, 2008
Category: Language • Reasoning • Research • Social
You might expect someone's cultural background to influence their speech, their appearance, their musical tastes, and the foods they like. You'd probably also expect culture to have an impact on values and beliefs, on stories and traditions. But what about their bodies -- not just physical features like skin color or hair texture, but attitude towards the self? If culture touches on so many aspects of an individual, perhaps it can also impact the subtle ways people think about of their own bodies.
Consider this fairly well-established difference between Euro-Americans and Asian Americans: Euro-Americans tend to believe that they should be concerned primarily with their own self-interest: they should consider their own needs before those of others. Asian Americans tend to believe that they should adapt their actions to the needs of others: they should "harmonize" with those around them. While in some ways this distinction is a stereotype, it has been supported by research -- even if it doesn't apply to every member of each culture.
It's not hard to see how this difference between two cultures might be expressed in Euro-Americans' and Asian Americans' attitudes about their bodies: Euro-Americans might take their own perspective, while Asian Americans might be more likely to take the perspective of others. In English (and many other languages), different language is used depending whose perspective you're taking: From my perspective, you come to my house, but from your perspective, you go to my house.
Angela Leung and Dov Cohen had 131 Euro- and Asian Americans read eight stories sentence by sentence on a computer screen. Half the stories took the perspective of the reader, and half took the perspective of a friend chosen by the reader. Each story had two key sentences involving the "coming/going" (or a similar "taking/bringing") distinction -- an object or person was either depicted as "coming" or "going" towards the protagonist in the story. The researchers measured how long it took readers to read these sentences, and here's what they found:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:06 PM • Comments (9)
February 14, 2008
Category: Language • Reasoning • Research
I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language. That's why the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that language is necessary for conscious thought -- doesn't hold up. But even if language isn't required for some domains, it's still possible that it is required for certain types of mental processes. It may even be required for some thoughts that aren't obviously related to language.
Some research suggests that understanding the thoughts of others -- having a theory of mind -- is one such process. Many children who are late in learning language are also late in developing a theory of mind. This story illustrates the classic theory of mind test:
Mouse nibbles cheese.
Mouse puts cheese under box A
Mouse leaves room
Cat enters room, moves cheese from box A to box B, and leaves.
Mouse returns.
Where does Mouse think the cheese is?
Very young children will say box B, because that's where the cheese is now. But at around age 4, they'll correctly answer box A, since Mouse has no way of knowing that Cat moved the cheese. Older children have successfully developed an important aspect of theory of mind -- they understand that Mouse falsely believes the cheese is in box A. But does understanding false beliefs of others require language?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:17 PM • Comments (38)
February 13, 2008
Category: Memory • Movement and exercise • Perception • Reasoning • Research
Which of these two pictures is more memorable?
The shot on the left is interesting primarily because Nora's in it -- if it was just a picture of a muddy trail, it wouldn't be notable at all to most people. The shot on the right is a dramatic mountain scene that you might remember even though (or perhaps because) there's not a human in sight.
But a seasoned hiker might be more interested in the photo of the muddy trail, which gives more information about the difficulty of the hike than a panoramic shot. Just as expert chess players are good at remembering the position of chess pieces on the board, maybe expert hikers are better at remembering details about trails than novice hikers.
The classic study of expert and novice chess players was conducted in 1973 by William Chase and Herbert Simon, and found that chess experts could remember configuration of chess boards better than novices -- as long as the chess pieces were arranged in a plausible game configuration, and not just randomly arrayed.
Since then, dozens of studies have found that experts in a variety of fields have better memory for things related to their area of expertise, from football formations to chest X-rays. But according to a research team led by Satoru Kawamura, all of these results can be explained by perceptual chunking: Experts are better than novices at lumping information into manageable groups. Hiking scenes, they argue, aren't easily chunked in the same way. Do expert hikers still have better memory for scenes relevant to hiking?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:06 AM • Comments (17)
January 22, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Language • Reasoning • Research
When we first moved to the small suburban town we still live in, we quickly realized we needed to buy a second car. Nora and Jim were just one and two and a half years old, only barely beginning to understand language. After we made our purchase, sometimes we drove in the old car (a Subaru station wagon), and sometimes in the new car (a Plymouth minivan). Since neither child could pronounce words as complicated as "minivan," they had to come up with their own way to refer to the vehicles. They called the Subaru the "red car" and the van the "blue car."
But there were many other ways they could have referred to each vehicle. They could have said "new car" and "old car," "big car" and "little car," or even just "van" and "car." Why did they refer to them by color?
Most research on young children's word choice in ambiguous situations like this has focused on locating objects. Do you say the car is "on the driveway" or "outside the house"? This doesn't address those other possibilities, such as size, shape, or color. One researcher, Graeme Halford, has speculated that children use the words which require simpler reasoning. "The dog is brown" requires simpler logic than "the dog is bigger than the cat." Even more complex is a statement such as "The chair in the living room is softer than the chair in the dining room." Similarly, while Jim and Nora had both learned colors, they hadn't yet learned how to categorize station wagons and minivans. Any object which transported people around on streets was a "car."
Although this explanation seems reasonable, no one had confirmed it experimentally until Jodie Plumert and Penney Nichols-Whitehead asked 3- and 4-year-olds to hide a tiny toy mouse in a dollhouse while a toy troll hid behind the house. The idea was to find out which words the children used to explain to the troll where to find the mouse. Here's a picture of the house:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:55 PM • Comments (10)
January 14, 2008
Category: Movement and exercise • Reasoning • Research • Social
I was a little surprised by an offhand observation Thomas Schubert made in a recent research report. He claimed that while men will commonly make a fist to celebrate a goal in a soccer match or a home run in baseball, it's unusual for women to do so.
I'm sure I've seen both female athletes and fans celebrating with fist pumps. But maybe I only noticed these cases because they were exceptions. Let's see if we can verify Schubert's observation with a little poll.
But there are additional gender dynamics to making fists besides who celebrates that way at a football game. At a minimum, a fist can signal an intent to hit someone (Schubert claims it's an abbreviation for the act of hitting itself). Researchers have found that males usually hit others with the intent to coerce or punish; women, by contrast, are likely expressing distress when they hit others. It's almost the opposite intention: speaking in generalities, men hit to establish their power, while women hit to express their powerlessness.
If hitting has a different meaning for men and women, then it falls to reason that making a fist also has a different meaning -- which might explain Schubert's anecdote about making fists in celebration. But studying body movement and how it affects thoughts and intentions is a tricky business (see, for example, this study on smiling). If you tell someone to make a fist and ask them how it makes them feel, is it the physical fist-making that causes the emotion, or the linguistic term "fist"?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:18 PM • Comments (16)
January 10, 2008
Category: Language • Reasoning • Research
There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled "Moniker Maladies" made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with "K"; Students with the initials "C" and "D" get worse grades than others.
Actually, this effect, known as the "name-letter effect," has been known for several years. If your name -- even your last name -- starts with T, you're more likely to live in Tacoma or Tulsa than San Francisco or Springfield. Chris at Mixing Memory wrote an excellent summary of the research, so I won't repeat it here.
So if the effect has been around for a while, why publish yet another study rehashing an old concept? Actually the researchers have done more than that. Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons did pore over baseball record books since 1913 to find their headline-grabbing result (since K is the symbol for a strikeout, players with that initial strike out more often), but one thing they didn't report on is pitchers. Strikeouts are good for pitchers, so shouldn't Sandy Koufax have more than Nolan Ryan? My guess is that they didn't report on this because the results weren't significant. Why weren't they?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:05 PM • Comments (17)
January 7, 2008
Category: Language • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- stated in its strongest form -- claims that language determines thoughts: if a language doesn't have a means of expressing a particular idea, then people speaking that language can't even conceive of that idea. This strong form has long since been rejected: There are plenty of thoughts we can have without having the words to express them.
But there is also little question that the available words do have an important impact on our thoughts. If a language doesn't have a way to express numbers above 10, for example, then that would probably result in a somewhat different understanding of the world for its speakers compared to speakers of languages with more comprehensive number systems.
It's difficult to demonstrate these kinds of differences in the real world, though. Perhaps the different conception of the world comes more from growing up in a society that doesn't value abstract mathematics than from a particular vocabulary limitation.
Recently researchers have figured out an innovative way around this limitation: They invent entirely new things, and new words to describe them. Take a look at this set of objects, used in a recent study led by Gary Lupyan:
Each object is different, but they all share similar features. We might be tempted to invent just one new word to describe the entire set of objects. Closer inspection reveals that the eight objects on the left share some features which distinguish them from the objects on the right. If we invent one word, "leebish" to categorize the objects on the left, and another, "grecious," to categorize those on the right, will people be better at distinguishing between the two types of objects?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:16 PM • Comments (26)
December 4, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
One of our readers emailed us asking if there has ever been research on whether kids' understanding of numbers -- especially large numbers -- differs from adults. Greta did a little poking around and found a fascinating study on second- and fourth-graders.
In the U.S. (and I suspect around the world), kids this age are usually taught about numbers using a number line. In first grade, they might be introduced to a line from 0 or 1 to 10. In second grade, this is typically expanded up to 100. But what happens when second-graders are asked to place numbers on a line extending all the way up to 1,000?
This happens:
I've placed the 500 (in gray) on these lines for reference; in the real study, conducted by John Opfer and Rober Siegler, the kids used lines with just 0 and 1000 labeled. They were then given numbers within that range and asked to draw a vertical line through the number line where each number fell (they used a new, blank number line each time). The figure above represents (in red) the average results for a few of the numbers used in the study. As you can see, the second graders are way off, especially for lower numbers. They typically placed the number 150 almost halfway across the number line! Fourth graders perform nearly as well as adults on the task, putting all the numbers in just about the right spot.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:43 PM • Comments (28)
November 13, 2007
Category: Emotion • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe people are just intimidated by the color red because that's the color that's always used for grading.
Aren't we just conditioned to see red as threatening? That might be part of it, but in nature red also frequently suggests danger. Many poisonous plants and animals are red. Blood is red. Hot coals and lava are red. It's possible that humans have a biological predisposition to avoid the color red.
In our nonscientific poll conducted yesterday, we asked readers what the dominant color on their computer desktop was. Just 28 out of 550 respondents chose red from our list of 11 colors -- about half of what you'd expect if colors were chosen arbitrarily. It's possible that many computer users simply never change from their computer's default desktop, but someone (at Microsoft or Apple, for example) had to decide on a default, didn't they? Why didn't they choose red?
The team led by Andrew Elliot suspected that avoidance motivated by the color red may be the reason test-takers scored worse on tests marked with red, and they developed an additional two experiments to explore that notion.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:46 AM • Comments (20)
November 12, 2007
Category: Emotion • Learning and testing • Reasoning • Research
One of the things I was taught in English graduate school was never to grade papers using red ink. Students don't respond well to the color red, I was told -- it's intimidating. I always thought this was a little far-fetched, and my instructors couldn't offer a peer-reviewed journal article that definitively answered the question of whether red ink was harmful.
There is some research on the question of whether red is harmful in an academic setting -- but it's inconclusive, with some studies showing harm and others appearing to show a benefit to the color red. For decades, there has been a theoretical argument that red is arousing or threatening, but little data to back it up. A team led by Andrew Elliot argues that what little data exists is problematic. Most of the studies on color suffer from flaws. In many cases, the experimenter was aware of the color condition, and so may have biased research subjects with actions that were themselves seen as intimidating or threatening.
One seemingly contradictory study that found athletes performed better while wearing red could be explained in two ways: either red improves performance because athletes wearing the color win more frequently, or red impairs performance of competitors facing athletes wearing red.
I'm going to talk about Elliot et al.'s study, but first I thought I'd try a little poll. Do CogDaily readers avoid the color red in their workspace? Hide all your windows and look at your desktop background. What's the dominant color in the picture?
If your desktop doesn't include any of those colors, just pick the closest one. We'll soon see if your responses bear any relation to the study results.
Now, on to the study. After a series of six experiments, Elliot's team arrived at the astonishing conclusion that a brief exposure to the color red does indeed impair performance on several different types of tests. Let's break down their methods:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:50 AM • Comments (19)
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