idiolect

Catching up with my journal abstracts, I noticed this:

Rotteveel, M.; Phaf, R.H. (2004). Loading working memory enhances affective priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11. 11, 2, 326-331(6).
Abstract: Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy,neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.

Which I can’t help thinking implies: if you want to pull people’s emotional strings (without them knowing it) then you should keep them busy.

Call me a social-control conspiracist, but i think this is another good reason for us all to spend more time sitting down with a cup of tea and less time working to keep the economy going

Quoting Slovic et al (1982), Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk:

…Sowby (1965) provided extensive data on risks per hour of exposure, showing, for example, than an hour of riding a motorcycle is as risky as an hour of being 75 years old.

Refs:

A neat little effect:

Moore says,

If two successive sounds are heard as fused, the location of the total sound is determined largely by the location of the first sound. This is known as the “precedence effect”, although it has been called the “Haas effect”…

This, among other things, stops you getting confused when a sound comes at you from two speakers at once.

Now, if you drop something and record the sound, and then play it back backwards, you can hear the echos that are normally masked.

(Thanks to Nicol, and his supervisor, for the info)

There is more, of course, in the book

Ref:
B.C.J. Moore, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th Ed., Academic Press, San Diego (2003).

What has psychology done? A challenge to silence the doubters comes from the BPS in this Month’s issue of The Psychologist

The Society’s Publications and Communications Board would like to produce a new document to complement the Annual Report, focusing on psychology rather than the Society. This report would outline significant scientific research developments and practical applications from the discipline in the last year.The aim is to promote the usefulness of the discipline to an external audience of research councils, politicians, civil servants, employers and journalists. Before potentially producing this as a separate document in 2006 we would like to pilot the project as a special feature in The Psychologist. Your contributions are sought. We are looking for brief descriptions of:

published research from the last year

partnerships between academia and the public or commercial sector leading to new products or applications of psychological knowledge; or

new professional developments which will have a significant impact on the lives of others.
…you could even just send one sentence on what has been found, one on why it is important in terms of understanding people or making a difference to their lives, plus the reference. Material has to be intrinsically relevant and interesting to an extremely wide audience with little or no background knowledge of the area, and written in a way that makes it more so. It is a tough task, but this is a great opportunity to show what psychology has been up…This is your chance to silence the psychology doubters by showcasing interesting and useful research from the last year, so get writing. Send your contribution to jonsut@bps.org.uk by Monday 15 November. Feel free to get in touch before then if you have any questions about the process or the suitability of material. [my emphasis]

Real laziness here, stealing notes from a review of a book that I can’t be bothered to read
The Book: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few by James Surowiecki
The Review: London Review of Books. The Notes: gyford.com

Phenomenon: For many decisions the average of many judgements is often better than the judgement of a single, albeit expert, individual. Example: judging the number of jellybeans in a jar – typically even individuals who have previously been most accurate (‘the experts’) will be outperformed by the average answers.

Seems analogous to the ‘less is more’ effect. This is, roughly, that sometimes an overabundance of information can distract you from applying an on-average-correct heuristic. Example: Answer this question Which city has more inhabitants: San Diego or San Antonio?. Who should do better at this question, Germans or Americans? The Germans, typically, have little knowledge of the size of American cities. So when given this pair they guess that the one they have heard of is larger (San Diego), and they are correct. The Americans know lots about American cities. They try to use all the information they have to make a correct decision. Which is more politically important? Which has more people I know living in it? Which felt bigger when I visited? Sometimes this information is helpful, sometimes it is distracting. Sometimes decision making based on more knowledge is outperformed by that based on less knowledge (here the analogy with the wisdom of crowds i guess). In one study [1] the German group using their simple recognition heuristic scored 100%. More generally, often neither method/group is always correct, but the simple, one criterion, rule can often be more correct.

So one mechanism by which the wisdom-of-crowds effect works is probably just reducing the level of knowledge that is contributing to the decision. A dumb kind of wisdom!

But crowds can often be dumb-dumb too, especially when they become herds. What are the conditions under which they keep their dumb-wisdom, the conditions when a mixture is better than the best expert?

Quoting gyford.com

Requires certain conditions for the crowd to make good decisions: members of group must be willing to think for themselves; they must be mostly independent of each other; must be reasonably decentralised; must be some means of aggregating opinions into a collective judgement. If people start second-guessing each other, or following each other, the crowd becomes a herd and herds are bad at decision making…Crowds do not do well the question is not a straight-forwardly cognitive one. They are not good at moral judgments.

You might argue that a group of people which are all thinking for themselves isn’t really a crowd. You might also argue that the wisdom of crowds doesn’t apply to moral judgements because individual judgements are non-commensurable in so many ways, not just because they are subject to lots of weird biases. If the choice is the same, but the individuals are making different decisions (e.g. they have access to contradictory information and/or they are using different criteria to select what a ‘good’ answer is) then aggregation isn’t possible.

I think a more helpful book would not be The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the Many are Smarter than the Few but The Wisdom of Crowds – How the Many can be Smarter than the Few. Anyway, good to have some starting notes on when crowd decisions will outperform individual decisions – and when ’emergent’ decisions will be herd-like and unproductive.

Refs

[1] Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition
heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90. Online here