psychology

All posts tagged psychology

Greatness

Posted by Peter on June 23, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Greatness: Who Makes History and Why by Dean Keith Simonton.

This broad and mediocre survey of psychology of people who stand out in history probably contains a fair number of good ideas, but it’s hard to separate them from the many ideas that are questionable guesses. He’s inconsistent about distinguishing his guesses from claims backed by good evidence.

One of the clearest examples is his assertion that childhood adversity builds character. He presents evidence that eminent figures were unusually likely to have had a parent die early, and describes this as the “most impressive proof” of his claim. He ignores the possibility those people come from families with a pattern of taking sufficiently unusual risks to explain that evidence.

In other places, he makes mistakes which seemed reasonable when the book was published, such as “Mendelian laws of inheritance are blind to whether an individual is first-born or later-born” (parental age has a measurable effect on mutation rates).

He avoids some of the worst mistakes that a psychology of history could make, such as trying to psychoanalyze individuals without having enough information about them.

He mentions some approaches to analyzing presidential addresses and corporate letters to stockholders, which have some potential to be used in predicting whether leaders have the appropriate personality for their jobs. I wonder what would happen if many voters/stockholders demanded that leaders pass tests of this nature (I’m assuming the tests can be scored objectively, but that may be shaky assumption). I’m confident that we’d get leaders with rhetoric that passes those tests. Would that simply mean the leaders change their rhetoric, or would it be hard enough to maintain a mismatch between rhetoric and thought patterns that we’d get leaders with better thought patterns?

Money buys happiness?

Posted by Peter on January 31, 2007
Posted in: Economics, Health. Tagged: , , .

There has been a fair amount of research suggesting that beyond some low threshold, additional money does little to increase a person’s happiness.
Here’s a research report (see also here) indicating that the effect of money has sometimes been underestimated because researchers use income as a measure of money, when wealth has a higher correlation with happiness.
There’s probably more than one reason for this. Wealth produces a sense of security that isn’t achieved by having a high income but spending that income quickly. Also, it’s possible that people with high savings rates tend to be those who are easily satisfied with their status, whereas those who don’t save when they have high incomes are those who have a strong need to show off their incomes in order to compete for status (and since competition for status is in some ways a zero sum game, many of them will fail).

No Two Alike

Posted by Peter on October 3, 2006
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris
This book provides a clear theory of what causes the personality differences between people that can’t be explained by genetic differences. She focuses a fair amount on identical twins, because the evidence that their environmentally caused personality differences are the same as ordinary siblings, and the same whether they’re reared together or apart, rules out many tempting theories.
Amazon reviewer Sioran points out an inconsistency – she claims early on that random chance can’t explain all of the variation, but her explanation ends up amounts to saying the causes are ultimately random. I find her early arguments against randomness unconvincing. And her explanation’s reliance on randomness doesn’t imply that her explanation is useless – she rules out most kinds of randomness as a cause, narrowing down the class of random causes to those which affect the person’s view of her status in society (e.g. differences in who outside family the person interacts with, and physical differences such as being tall due to better nutrition).
The most surprising prediction she makes is that mindblind (i.e. most) animals won’t have persistent personality differences that can’t be explained by genetic differences. I’m unsure whether to believe this – it seems that animals should only need to remember differences in how others treat them (rather than have a theory of mind) in order to produce the results we see. She would probably predict that autistic people have no persistent environmentally caused personality differences, but she isn’t clear about that (it may depend on the degree of autism).
One interesting result that she mentions is that autistic children are unable to use the fusiform face area (which in most people is specialized to do good face recognition), and instead seem to recognize faces the same way they recognize ordinary objects. I’m wondering how much this explains about why autism impairs many parts of the mind that deal with relationships.
I’m annoyed by how many pages she spends recounting the reaction to her prior book (The Nurture Assumption, a better book than this). If you’ve read that, most of the first half of this book will be a waste of time.
One interesting piece of evidence she mentions is this paper from the Journal of Political Economy which says that one’s height as a teenager is a better predictor of wages as an adult than adult height.
One small quibble: she says being a firstborn is unimportant (often not even known) outside the home in “contemporary societies — at least those not ruled by monarchies”. Korean society appears to be a clear exception to that claim.

Stumbling on Happiness

Posted by Peter on September 12, 2006
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

This book is a colorful explanation of why we are less successful at finding happiness than we expect. It shows many similarities between mistakes we make in foreseeing how happy we will be and mistakes we make in perceiving the present or remembering the past. That makes it easy to see that those errors are natural results of shortcuts our minds take to minimize the amount of data that our imagination needs to process (e.g. filling in our imagination with guesses as our mind does with the blind spot in our eye).
One of the most important types of biases is what he calls presentism (a term he borrows from historians and extends to deal with forecasting). When we imagine the past or future, our minds often employ mental mechanisms that were originally adapted to perceive the present, and we retain biases to give more weight to immediate perceptions than to what we imagine. That leads to mistakes such as letting our opinions of how much food we should buy be overly influenced by how hungry we are now, or Wilbur Wright’s claim in 1901 that “Man will not fly for 50 years.”
This is more than just a book about happiness. It gives me a broad understanding of human biases that I hope to apply to other areas (e.g. it has given me some clues about how I might improve my approach to stock market speculation).
But it’s more likely that the book’s style will make you happy than that the knowledge in it will cause you to use the best evidence available (i.e. observations of what makes others happy) when choosing actions to make yourself happy. Instead, you will probably continue to overestimate your ability to predict what will make you happy and overestimate the uniqueness that you think makes the experience of others irrelevant to your own pursuit of happiness.
I highly recommend the book.
Some drawbacks:
His analysis of memetic pressures that cause false beliefs about happiness to propagate is unconvincing. He seems to want a very simple theory, but I doubt the result is powerful enough to explain the extent of the myths. A full explanation would probably require the same kind of detailed analysis of biases that the rest of the book contains.
He leaves the impression that he thinks he’s explained most of the problems with achieving happiness, when he probably hasn’t done that (it’s unlikely any single book could).
He presents lots of experimental results, but he doesn’t present the kind of evidence needed to prove that presentism is a consistent problem across a wide range of domains.
He fails to indicate how well he follows his own advice. For instance, does he have any evidence that writing a book like this makes the author happy?

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Posted by Peter on December 13, 2005
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book Review: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things : What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff
I would have found this book well worth reading if I had read it when it was published, but by now I’ve picked up most of the ideas elsewhere.
He does a good job of describing the problems of the classical view of categories. His description of the alternative prototype theory is not as clear and convincing as what I’ve found in the neural net literature.
His attacks on objectivism and the “God’s eye view” of reality are pretty good. I found this claim interesting: (page 301) “to be objective requires one to be a relativist of an appropriate sort”.
The chapter on the mind-as-machine paradigm gives a superficial impression of saying more than it actually does. It discredits an approach to AI that was mostly recognized as a failure by the AI community when the book was published or shortly after that. He could confuse some people into thinking he discredits more than this by his strange use of the word algorithm. He says “Algorithms concern the manipulation of meaningless disembodied symbols”, and admits his arguments don’t discredit connectionism. Yet by the normal computer science usage of “algorithm”, it is quite sensible to say that connectionism uses algorithms to manipulate meaningful concepts.