Explanation is not a zero-sum game. You can add additional explanations without negating existing explanations. The loss of life after the flooding of New Orleans was due to Hurricane Katrina. And it was due to climate change. And under-investment in the levees. And a history of social exclusion based on race and class. All these explanations are true, there is no explanatory exclusivity.

I am reading Bruno Latour's "Science in Action" where he gives the best (only?) account I have seen of how any explanation can be countered or superseded by subsequent explanations. Scientists seek to settle claims - to generate "black boxes" of fact, in Latour's terms - but the process of scientific debate sees a flux of competing explanations. An experiment by A said X. But two experiments by Y said not-X. But Y isn't using the correct equipment, of course his experiments give the wrong results. But X's equipment is biased to give the answer X, Y has to use non-standard equipment. But Z has shown not-X with A's equipment for sub-case Z. And so on. Explanations seek to settle, but can always be weakened by subsequent explanations which qualify, reframe or negate. It is not just that subsequent claims diminish our confidence that X is the case, on some linear scale where 0>confidence>1. Instead, there is a fundamental uncertainty in the very metrics we are judging.

We seek to define or find (domains) where exclusivity applies. Responsibility and blame feels like a domain where exclusivity applies - almost by definition, because we want it to apply. If it was my fault it is not your fault. We want blame to sum to 1, so that even in complex cases we sort through the responsibility of all involved an apportion a limited amount of blame to each party.

Obviously, when non-exclusive explanations originating from science are used in the moral domain, it is natural for people to interpret them exclusively. If your brain or your environment made you commit a crime, it is not your fault. In a similar way - perhaps essentially similar - freedom of the will is often talked about as an exclusive property. Is your choice at the moment free OR is it pre-determined? This is a fundamental misconception, in my opinion.

You need a tolerance for ambiguity to deal in non-exclusive explanations. Usually we seek to find a restricted domain where we can argue over explanations which are, temporarily, exclusive. Is it nature or nurture? Is dyslexia caused by cerebellar dysfunction or magnocellular pathway dysfunction? For the non-restricted domain the ground can always shift underneath you. Someone can come along a redefine any element of what you are arguing about, including the tools of argument themselves.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), 'Of Beauty'.

• Paying your $12.50 [for a cinema ticket], these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don't know about the headless bodies in Juarez" Rick Moody is uncompromising about Hollywood
• BERG's Matt Jones Gardens and Zoos
• Why Green Electricity Follows The Price Of Brown Electricity
• The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Shalizi reviews Flynn's book)
• Why the Guardian's facebook app is the way it is
• Naming something diminishes its emotional power : Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421 -428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
• Ed Cooke in the Guardian on how to remember names at parties
• How Doctors Choose To Die
• Physical proxomity of collaborators correlates with research quality
• The Unconquered World
• What happens if one of the best musicians in the world busks in the subway? Pearls Before Breakfast
• 'A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong'
• Five cognitive neuroscientists go on a rafting trip to escape the distracting effects of technology

The Department: One of the very best Psychology departments in the UK for research, consistently rated 'excellent' (i.e. the top score) in the Research Assessment Exercises over the last 20 years. In the last RAE the department ranked 6th in the UK in terms of Research Power (i.e., quality × quantity of research activity). We have a strong tradition of interdisciplinary research and you'd be joining at a great time to renew that tradition of cognitive science. We have smart and enthusiastic Undergraduate students, 80% of whom have AAA at a-level (ie the top grades). We have one of the largest number of postgraduate students for any UK psychology department, which includes taught masters courses (I teach on this one) and PhD students. The academic faculty are dedicated and collegiate, small enough in numbers to be friendly, large enough to be a resource for you in your research. We have one of the best staff-student ratios of any UK psychology department...All this, and you get me as a colleague

The University: Times Higher Education University of the Year 2011, and globally one of the best universities in the world. The University of Sheffield has academic departments covering all major disciplines and is a 'research intensive University', meaning you wouldn't spend all your time teaching.

The City of Sheffield. Ah, Sheffield! More parkland within the city limits than any other UK city. 7 trees for every person. The so called "largest village in England", a city renowned for its friendliness, for its sporting links, creative industries and generally too many good things to list here. And it's in the middle of the country, so you can get about easily - two hours from the capital, three from Bristol, four Edinburgh. And cheap - I live in a house which makes my London friends who can't afford a flat sick with jealousy. I can walk to work, or round to friend's houses. I'm talking quality of life here people.

So, please pass the word around that we're looking for psychologists of all types to apply for these positions. If you want to get in touch I'm happy to talk informally to anyone who is thinking about applying. Not that I have any significant power over the hiring decision, but I'm happy to spill the beans over what we're looking for and what the department is like. You can contact me by phone or email.

(In sad, but unrelated news, we lost our Professor of Development Psychology earlier this week. These job adverts are obviously quite separate from this sudden gap we have in Developmental Psychology and about which no plans have yet been made).

I was sad to find out that we won't be hearing any more from Prof Hurley: Obituary by Andy Clark.

Susan L. Hurley (2006). Bypassing Conscious Control: Media Violence, Unconscious Imitation, and Freedom of Speech. In S. Pockett, W. Banks & S. Gallagher (eds.), Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? MIT Press.

Whether in schools or in other public spheres, public intellectuals must struggle to create the conditions that enable students and others to become cultural producers who can rewrite their own experiences and perceptions by engaging with various texts, ideological positions, and theories. They must construct pedagogical relations in which students learn from each other, learn to theorize rather than simply ingest theories, and begin to address how to decenter the authoritarian power of the classroom. Students must also be given the opportunity to challenge disciplinary borders, create pluralized spaces from which hybridised identities might emerge, take up critically the relationship between language and experience, and appropriate knowledge as part of a broader effort at self-definition and ethical responsibility. What I am suggesting here is that public intellectuals move away from the rigid, ideological parameters of the debate about the curriculum or canon. What is needed is a new language for discussing knowledge and authority and the possibility of giving the students a role in deciding what is taught and how it is taught under specific circumstances. The question is not merely, who speaks and under what conditions? It is also about how to see universities (and public schools) as important sites of struggle over what is taught and for control of the conditions of knowledge production itself.

Giroux, H. A. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling: a critical reader. WestviewPress (Boulder, Colo.), p263.

The experiment contained a surprising result, or at least a result that I claim should surprise some decision theorists. We has asked people to make a simple judgement - to name out loud the ink colour of a word stimulus, the famous Stroop Task (Stroop, 1935). We found that two factors which affected the decision time had independent effects - the size of the effect of each factors was not effected by the other factor. (The factors were the strength of the colour, in terms of how pale vs deep it was, and how the word was related to the colour, matching it, contradicting it or being irrelevant). This type of result is known as "additive factors" (because they add independently of each other. On a graph of results this looks like parallel lines).

There's a long tradition in psychology of making an inference from this pattern of experimental results to saying something about the underlying information processing that must be going on. Known as the additive factors methodology (Donders, 1868–1869/1969; Sternberg, 1998), the logic is this: if we systematically vary two things about a decision and they have independent effects on response times, then the two things are operating on separate loci in the decision making architecture - thus proving that there are separate loci in the decision making architecture. Therefore, we can use experiments which measure only outcomes - the time it takes to respond - to ask questions about cognitive architecture; i.e. questions about how information is transformed and combined as it travels between input and output.

The problem with this approach is that it commits a logical fallacy. True separate information processing modules can produce additive factors in response data (A -> B), but that doesn't mean that additive factors in response time data imply separate information processing modules (B -> A). My work involved taking a widely used model of information processing in the Stroop task (Cohen et al, 1990) and altering it so it contained discrete processing stages, or not. This allowed me to simulate response times in a situation where I knew for certain the architecture - because I’d built the information processing system. The result was surprising. Yes, a system of discrete stages could generate the pattern of data I'd observed experimentally and reported in Stafford, Ingram & Gurney (2011), but so could a single stage system in which all information was continuously processed in parallel, with no discrete information processing modules. Even stranger, both of these kind of systems could be made to produce either additive or non-additive factors without changing their underlying architecture.

The conclusion is straightforward. Although inferring different processing stages (or 'modules') from additive factors in data is a venerable tradition in psychology, and one that remains popular (Sternberg, 2011), it is a mistake. As Henson (2011) points out, there's too much non-linearity in cognitive processing, so that you need additional constraints if you want to make inferences about cognitive modules.

Thanks to Jon Simons for spotting the Sternberg and Henson papers, and so inadvertantly promting this bit of research blogging

References

Cohen, J. D., Dunbar, K., and McClelland, J. L. (1990). On the control of automatic processes – a parallel distributed-processing account of the Stroop effect. Psychol. Rev. 97, 332–361.

Donders, F. (1868–1869/1969). “Over de snelheid van psychische processen. onderzoekingen gedann in het physiologish laboratorium der utrechtsche hoogeshool,” in Attention and Performance, Vol. II, ed. W. G. Koster (Amsterdam: North-Holland).

Henson, R. N. (2011). How to discover modules in mind and brain: The curse of nonlinearity, and blessing of neuroimaging. A comment on Sternberg (2011). Cognitive Neuropsychology, 28(3-4), 209-223. doi:10.1080/02643294.2011.561305

Stafford, T. and Gurney, K. N.(2011), Additive factors do not imply discrete processing stages: a worked example using models of the Stroop task, Frontiers in Psychology, 2:287.

Stafford, T., Ingram, L., and Gurney, K. N. (2011), Pieron’s Law holds during Stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making, Cognitive Science 35, 1553–1566.

Sternberg, S. (1998). “Discovering mental processing stages: the method of additive factors,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues, 2nd Edn, eds D. Scarborough, and S. Sternberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 702–863.

Sternberg, S. (2011). Modular processes in mind and brain. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 28(3-4), 156-208. doi:10.1080/02643294.2011.557231

Stroop, J. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. J. Exp. Psychol. 18, 643–662.

I was doing some research the other day, on what questions people ask about psychology. This tends to overlap, but not by much, with the questions that we as professional psychology researchers invesitgate. If you're interested you can look for yourself:

• Yahoo Answers - category: psychology
• Ask Metafilter - tag: psychology
• fluther.com - topic: brain

Very common, it seems, is the question "Am I normal?" or "is this normal?". Did people always ask this question, or is it particularly modern? If you do a google ngram search for the words "strange" and "normal" you get an interesting pattern:

More normal (in red), and less strange (in blue) over the last two centuries. They even appear inversely related at points - notice the damping of 'strangeness' around WWI and WWII and a surge in 'normality'.