Archive for the 'Psychology' Category

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 9, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Psychology
. 4 Comments

Why do you have the moral beliefs you do? You will probably be able to clearly articulate your beliefs and the reasons you have for holding them—and even to use these reasons to try to persuade others. So you may think that rationality plays a large part in the formation of your moral belief system.

Yet an emerging cross-disciplinary area of study—call it “moral psychology”—is beginning to find empirical support for the proposition that when it comes to morality, it is our emotions in the driving seat rather than our reason—whether we are aware of it or not. In a fascinating web exclusive for Prospect, Dan Jones explains.

Also this week, Shaun Walker, the Independent’s Moscow correspondent, on how the west’s recognition of Kosovo has given fresh impetus to the attempts by Abkhazia, the breakaway province of Georgia, to achieve full independence.

Bipolar disorder comes to Britain

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on March 26, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Psychology
. 10 Comments

The latest trend in American psychiatry—re-diagnosing the clinically depressed as victims of bipolar disorder—is on its way to Britain. Patients previously prescribed drugs like Prozac or Seroxat are trading in their antidepressants for mood stabilisers that level out the emotional peaks and troughs that characterise bipolar. Is this a sign of genuine psychiatric progress, or merely the latest diagnostic fad? Annie Maccoby Berglof, who experienced this “diagnostic shift” herself back in the 1970s in the US, explains in the new issue of Prospect.

Morality and Mortality: our views of animal others

Published
by
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
on December 28, 2007
in Environment, Philosophy, Psychology and Science and technology
. 9 Comments

Whilst working on a long essay for Prospect on bullfighting, I caught a Natural History programme double-bill on BBC Radio 4 devoted to the issue of whaling which has recently returned to the news agenda as Japan has increased both the numbers of whales it is hunting and the number of species, including the ultra-charismatic humpback whale. One of the many things that struck me during the composition of the tauromachia piece was how so many of our views of and dealings with animals (and this goes for both sides of the arguments in this area) are based on an almost incoherent mix of raw emotion, flawed logical steps, ignorance of the facts and a lack of direct experience. However, what struck me even more during the programme’s discussion of whaling by an impressive array of international scientists, conservationists, diplomats and politicians was that whilst it is easy to point out some of the logical inconsistencies, become aware of some of the facts, there is an impossibility – a metaphysical one I would argue – in removing emotion and the need for direct experience of the animals in question and our dealings with them in order to formulate a more correct position in this essentially ethical debate. I thought that I would take advantage of the Prospect blog to expand on this idea that I have, for reasons of concision, left merely gestured at in my essay.

By way of preamble: in 1982 the International Whaling Commission decided to reduce the whaling quotas of the signatory nations to zero – they could neither agree to an outright ban nor even the use of the term ‘moratorium’ – with a view to allowing the populations of these overly hunted species to return to a sustainable level and to review the whaling industry in general to improve its methods so that it would not again put this small but important area of biodiversity in jeopardy. However, the motivating force in this policy shift was the post 1960s rise in profile of both animal welfare and conservation.Public attention was focused on whales by welfare and conservation groups by the simple means of pointing out that whales were not fish but “mammals like us” (of course, fish are ‘animals like us’, but let us leave the emotive, yet biologically vacuous nature of such phrasing to one side). It was further pointed out, with better justification, that the intelligence and sociability of these animals had been hitherto ignored in our attribution of prey-status to them. This was particularly brought home, quite deliberately, with the use of the beautiful and haunting sounds of the humpback whale by the biologists who had first classified them as ‘songs’, Roger Payne and Scott McVay. As Roger Payne acknowledges in the programmes, this provided a suitable audio-reinforcement to the images of Greenpeace’s small, semi-dirigible boats blocking the path of the comparatively vast whaling vessels.

The question which is so seldom met head on in this debate is by what criteria do we, and by we I mean the non-vegetarian/vegan majority, decide that a fellow member of the animal kingdom is fit to be treated in the way we do. To speak in broad generalities, the unspoken consensus certainly used to be, and remains for the vast majority of the developing world, that if it is isn’t human, we can do what we want with an animal. Undoubtedly in the Christian tradition this thinking had a neat theological echo in the division of those beings with souls – i.e. us – and those beings without, although that position has since been mediated. Although I cannot claim any great expertise on Muslim theology, in my travels in Morocco where the treatment of, for example, donkeys is so visibly cruel, I was often confronted with the opinion that not only did Allah give us the right to treat animals as we wish, but that the “Western” habits of keeping animals as pets, allowing them to sleep in our beds (something often brought up) and other attributions of what one might calls traits of ‘personhood’ to animals was a form of idolatory – a rational enough stance, given their views on animals, if you consider how we might view a people who made a bed for their vacuum cleaners, took them for walks, stroked them etc. However, with the withering of religion in ‘the West’, especially in the sphere of policy, our ethics have latched onto other criteria of moral importance, such as sentience and consciousness.

Of course, it was not science that told us that some animals are sentient, e.g. can feel pain. Anyone who has had dealings with dogs or cats, which is most people, is well aware that they are capable of feeling pain. The anatomical discovery that dogs have a central nervous system not wildly different to our own may have helped confirm this in a scientific sense but only in the same pedantic way that knowledge of atomic structure confirms that diamond is hard. However, our knowledge of animals was genuinely increased when the more troublesome question of consciousness, more specifically self-consciousness, was approached by Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., et al (1970), who designed various ‘mirror tests’. The simplest of these involved anaesthetising a subject, placing a dot of coloured, odourless dye somewhere invisible to the animal, e.g. its forehead, and then using this marker as a way to gauge whether the subject could recognise itself in the mirror. Dogs and cats cannot; they are at first disturbed by mirrors, suspecting another animal’s presence, but soon learn to ignore them. Great apes such as the chimpanzee immediately use the mirror to perceive where the dot is on their bodies and then use their hands to try to remove it. Of course, anyone who has spent any time with chimpanzees, as I did at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University in 2001 (which I have written about for the Financial Times), knows that you just have to give a chimp lipstick and a mirror to prove with less rigorous but more humorous results. It should be noted that the same has been shown for dolphins, although in a less dramatic, and perhaps consequently more disputed manner (see, e.g. the psychologist Clive Wynne’s essay in Nature in 2004). Lacking the necessary limbs, the significant behavioural change is how long they spend in front of a mirror showing the marked portion of their bodies rather than other mirrors in the same array which do not. I think that a very important point can be taken out from this. Scientific results can be so dry as to have little effect on our views and most especially what philosophers would call our moral intuitions. Seeing an animal hover motionless in the water in front of one mirror rather than another does little to effect my views of it, whereas seeing one putting on makeup, and being as visibly amused by the results as the observers, is an entirely different matter. For science, although it can be used to confirm our rougher, readier but essentially fuller and more human interactions with animals, cannot override nor replace them. One area in particular that this strikes me is in how animals treat their dead. There is something that happened within me with regards to my view of lions when I observed a lion eating another lion that I had seen it lick in greeting a few days before. Just as there was something in the opposite direction when I read the following passage in In the Kingdom of Gorillas (2001), by the social scientist Bill Weber and the biologist Amy Vedder:

“The day of Quince’s death . . . [the group] made a 180-degree turn and headed rapidly in a direct line toward where they had last seen Quince . . . [we were then] rewarded with an exceptional sight. First Icarus, then Puck, went straight to her nest and placed their faces on the exact spot where Quince had breathed her last. Each then sat back and stared off into space. The two sat side by side as others passed near the nest site. Then the entire family moved off silently into the surrounding forest.”

There can be no denying that the choice of language is unscientific, emotive even, and yet evocative of the sorts of truths which fuel the engine of our ethical judgements which simply will not turn over on cold scientific truths unless they are suitably dramatic. It is the description, as fact-based and unclouded, as is possible, of an emotional being living an experience with these animals – things which are utterly intrinsic to how we judge how we will treat an animal, and it is only in the acceptance of that that any sort of clarity can be brought to the argument of whether or not we should be hunting whales. Although I have not set out to write a piece on whaling, rather a piece going over some of the sources of our moral stance with regards to it, it would be remiss of me not to briefly state my own views.I have spent far too little time with cetacean species to claim sufficient amounts of the sort of direct contact I regard as so necessary - with the one exception of endless, joyful (for me) hours spent as a child entertaining a very bored captive bottlenose dolphin during a week’s stay on an island off the Great Barrier Reef. However, I have picked up more from that surrogate for direct contact: the well-made and honest nature documentary, which is not as easy to find as one might think (I have written on this in a lighter vein in Freize magazine). In theory, these could provide the population at large with the sort of experience in the fuller sense which I regard as a sine qua non for moral judgement, especially when this is backed up by the prima facie morally-neutral, but scrupulously honest scientific data (I highly recommend Cetacean Societies, edited by Janet Mann et al [1999] – although it is a little out of date now missing such fascinating recent research as the 2005 discovery of the transmission of tool-use across generations in dolphins from mother to child [see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]).In the light of this, it would seem to me that the intrinsic cruelty of the practice of commercial whaling - the means of death for an animal of that size killed in the high seas whilst leaving a commercially viable carcass is necessarily prolonged and agonising - and the clear intelligence, sociability, and sensitivity of the animals in question simply outweighs whatever miniscule benefit to humanity in terms of whale-meat or other products there may be in the modern world, although this may not always have been the case.Two caveats: I am aware that many of the examples of intelligence above actually refer specifically to bottlenose dolphins, and that these decisions should be made on a species-by-species basis. Also, arguments from the point of view of sustainable populations and that great engine of conservation, aesthetics (phrases like “majestic” and “largest mammal ever to have lived” spring to mind) are entirely independent of this.

P.S. Joshua Plotnik’s team at Emory showed elephants pass the mirror test late last year (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), whilst the year before Karen McComb’s team observed (in Biology Letters) that elephants not only pay strange and touching attention to their dead but even to the clean skeletons of dead elephants – although the elephants’ graveyard is undeniably a myth. It is worth adding that an excellent description of what these facts translate as in our actual dealings with actual animals is, paradoxically, to be found Ernest Hemingway’s anti-Big Game hunting short fiction, ‘An African Story’.

The diving bias

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 29, 2007
in Psychology and Sport
. 3 Comments

England have lost on penalties at five of the nine last major international football championships. So here’s some interesting news for whoever picks up the poisoned chalice from Steve McLaren—after analysing hours of footage, a team of psychologists in Israel have discovered the optimum strategy for a goalkeeper facing a penalty: don’t move. The team found that keepers who stayed in the centre of the goalmouth saved roughly a third of the penalties they faced, while those jumping to the left or right saved no more than one in eight.

Yet in 94 per cent of the penalties watched by the researchers, the keeper chose to dive left or right. Why do so few choose to follow the optimal strategy? The researchers attribute the failing to a cognitive bias; specifically the well-known omission bias. The effect of the omission bias is that following some kind of negative outcome—like letting in a penalty—we feel worse if we did nothing to stop it happening than if we did something.

This has a superficial plausibility—the effects of cognitive biases on our behaviour can be very powerful, even in instances when they would seem to work against our interests. Yet we are not slaves to our biases, and when the dividend that would accrue from overcoming one—such as a goalkeeper more than doubling his chances of saving a penalty—is sufficiently high, one would expect the motivation to be there.

Perhaps the explanation has more to do with football’s traditional antipathy to stats-based analysis. In stark contrast to baseball, where some managers have managed to revolutionise their team’s performances by basing team selections and match tactics on particular statistics, football seems to have little time for number-crunchers. TV pundits and newspaper reports hurl statistics at us, but rarely make serious attempts to think through the tactical implications of the numbers they produce.

So in three years’ time in South Africa—assuming England make it through—let’s hope to see a little bit less movement from our keepers when they face the inevitable spot-kicks.

Academic spats revisited: one, two, many

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 14, 2007
in Academia and Psychology
. 1 Comment

One of Terry Pratchett’s neatest jokes in the Discworld novels concerns the troll (big creatures made of rock) system of counting, which entails only the words “one,” “two,” “many” and “lots”—a fact often cited by troll-haters as evidence of their stupidity. What the mockers don’t know is that troll numbers in fact follow a perfectly sensible quaternary system which begins “one, two, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one…”

It’s a gag with a real world parallel: the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã, who lack the ability to quantify precisely any group of objects greater than two. And their language, as we’ve discussed in both the magazine and this blog, lies at the heart of a huge debate in modern linguistics, in which nothing less than Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar and the fundamental question of how language and thought relate are at stake.

In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, the noted language and cognition researcher Steven Pinker has now weighed into the debate; and he offers—in my opinion—a brilliantly lucid exposition of just what it means when a remote hunter-gathering tribe cannot subtract three from six.

To conclude that the lack of precise number thoughts among the Pirahã is caused by their lack of precise number words is, Pinker argues, to make “a dubious leap from correlation to causation.” Instead, he points out, we need to realise that the idea of counting is very different to the idea of number:

It’s tempting to equate a use of the number five with the ability to count five things, but they are very different accomplishment. Counting is an algorithm, like long division or the use of logarithmic tables—in this case an algorithm for assessing the exact numerosity of a set of objects.

Thus, Pinker concludes, the fact that these hunter-gatherers have not developed a counting technique is no more a proof that language dictates thought than the fact that they have not developed a technique for building self-supporting stone arches. Indeed, the existence or non-existence of particular words in a particular language is not itself the crucial factor in whether a technique can be used by its speakers:

…the counting algorithm we teach preschoolers, like the more complex mental arithmetic we teach school-age children, co-opts words in the language. But it is not part of the language, like subject-verb agreement, nor does it come for free with the language… The prerequisite for exact number concepts beyond “two” is a counting algorithm, not a language with number words.

Responses will no doubt be pouring in already from those in the language-determines-thought camp. In the politest possible terms, I’m sure.

From the archive

Published
by
Susha
on August 20, 2007
in Psychology
. 0 Comments

Earlier this year in Prospect, psychologist Judith Rich Harris previewed the BBC1 series Child of our Time, due to be broadcast in May. The article attracted quite a lot of coverage at the time, including a response from the executive producer of the series so it was rather a shame when the BBC postponed it, finally showing the first programme yesterday. Rich Harris recently responded to her critics in the Times; you can read more about her in this old New Yorker profile.

CAR Hills sentenced

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on August 10, 2007
in Prospect affairs and Psychology
. 3 Comments

As has been widely reported in the papers over the last few days, Prospect contributor Charles (or CAR) Hills–who wrote a column about life in Clapham for us a few years ago, and has more recently started contributing pieces from Belmarsh prison–has been sentenced to six years in prison for conspiracy to murder his mother’s lover. Friends of Charles have been shocked by the severity of the sentence–he pleaded guilty, and it was thought that his mental health problems would provide grounds for leniency–and by the (inevitably) lurid tone of much of the reporting. It is a sad moment. Charles is a gifted writer, whose life has been blighted by depression and other psychological problems. The one bright spot–for readers of Prospect at any rate–is that it is likely to lead to more of his fascinating dispatches from “the other side” appearing in the magazine. Look out for his account of life on Belmarsh’s hospital wing in the next issue.

RIP Albert Ellis

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 25, 2007
in Inside Prospect and Psychology
. 7 Comments

Albert Ellis, who in the 1950s founded cognitive therapy in the US, died yesterday at home in New York. He was 93. He gave his last interview to Jules Evans, whose portrait of Ellis in this month’s Prospect described a man who remained dedicated to the Stoic values that underpinned his system and to the teaching to which he devoted his life. In his later years, Ellis fell out with the trustees of the institute he founded, who tried to eject him from the board—yet he remained stoical about even this, describing the board members as “fucked-up, fallible human beings, just like everyone else.” You can discuss this article in the comments boxes below.

Did you actually read the book? 1: Moral Minds by Marc Hauser

Published
by
Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein
on May 30, 2007
in Books, Media and Psychology
. 2 Comments

[This is the first in an ongoing series on First Drafts, in which authors are given space to reply to reviews of their books. Here, Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, responds to Jonathan Derbyshire's Guardian review of his Moral Minds.

The argument in Moral Minds is that we have evolved a moral instinct, a dedicated set of neural circuits designed to deliver moral verdicts of right and wrong. The foundation of this moral capacity is a universal moral grammar, a set of principles that assess the beliefs, desires and goals of an agent with respect to his or her actions, and the consequences for the welfare of others. What this thesis suggests is that much of our moral reasoning may be illusory, mediated instead by intuitive and unconscious processes that are, to some extent, immune to cultural influences.]

Though much of Jonathan Derbyshire’s review captures much of my book Moral Minds quite accurately, there are some egregious errors that I would like to flag. I will quote directly from Derbyshire so that there is no misunderstanding.

Problem one. My moral sense test aims to probe moral intuitions by asking respondents how they imagine they would act in various hypothetical moral dilemmas. One such dilemma asked respondents to imagine themselves standing on a bridge from which they can see a tram hurtling towards five people stranded on the track. The only way to save their lives is to drop a heavy weight in front of the tram. A fat man also happens to be standing on the bridge. Should you push him to his death in order to stop the tram, or leave him, in which case those on the track will die?

Derbyshire writes that, “Hauser reports that only 10 per cent of respondents said it was morally permissible to push the fat man from the bridge. From this and similar results, he deduces a universal ‘intention principle,’ according to which intended harm is morally worse than harm that is foreseen but not directly intended. What is unclear, however, is why Hauser thinks data like these also license claims about the existence of a discrete moral faculty or ‘organ.’ It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.”

I did not claim that an understanding of the principles that guide moral judgement licences inferences about neural localisation. What I did say was that an understanding of the principles that guide our judgements enables us to move into detailed studies of the brain, attempting to both localise such psychological processes, chart their development and explore what happens when they break down. This is precisely what my students and I have done. For example, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recently published a paper that shows that the right temporo-parietal junction is critically involved in dilemmas that entail information about a person’s beliefs. More importantly, the level of activation in this area is modulated by the outcome of an action. Thus, if a person believes he will do harm and his actions cause harm, then the pattern of activation in this region is different than if the person believes he will do harm, but fails to do so. We explored this area in part because of our interest in how beliefs, intentions, goals and action figure into our moral judgements. Thus the theoretical and behavioral work motivates an exploration at the neural level.

Problem two. “Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s ambitious claims about moral grammar.”

Moral Minds provides a novel way of looking at our moral psychology, building on the general insights of Chomsky, the more specific ideas expressed by Rawls, and most recently, the work of the philosophers John Mikhail and Sue Dwyer. Unlike Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which eloquently summarised not only Chomsky’s arguments about language but the mountain of evidence that had accumulated over the 40 years since his initial account, Moral Minds was exploratory. But half the battle in science is to ask new questions that are, we hope, sufficiently interesting for people to attempt to answer. When I began working on this problem three to four years ago, there were several questions that had never really been asked. For example, to this day we still have no evidence about critical periods for acquiring a moral system, whether the first moral system is acquired in a fundamentally different way from a second system acquired later in life, of whether people can be “bi-moral,” and whether the neural representation of one moral system is different from the representation of two. Once the linguistic analogy is invoked, these become the obvious questions. Moral Minds has already set off a host of experiments, some of these from my own lab; interested readers may wish to download some of our recent papers.

Problem three. “And there is nothing here to suggest that this nascent discipline will conquer the ‘proprietary province of the humanities’ any time soon.”

I did not claim that a biology of morality will conquer the humanities. In fact, Derbyshire fails to quote the complete sentence, which reads: “Inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities, but a shared journey with the natural sciences.” The natural sciences are coming into increasing contact with the social sciences and humanities. For me, and many of my colleagues, there is an appreciation that the best work will come from a collaboration, one that recognises both that different disciplines have different strengths, and that each discipline brings some proprietary issues, some of which are open to inter-disciplinary fertilisation. In the case of morality, the biological sciences can provide rich descriptions of how people judge moral dilemmas and how they act in such cases, but it can not dictate what we ought to do. The field is abuzz, and the results are emerging quickly. I am glad to be alive to witness this renaissance, an inquiry into one of the most interesting aspects of human life.

LINKS

Marc Hauser’s website

Buy Moral Minds at the Prospect bookshop

Participate in the moral sense test