Book review: "Predictably irrational" by Dan Ariely

Time for some behavioural economics! It's a topic that has interested me for some time, having studied psychology and economics as my Bachelor's. Finally had a chance to catch up on Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" a very accessible book about accessible but often counter-intuitive research.

Ariely deals with a wide array of human behaviour; he discusses how arousal can alter thought processes (or at least self-presentation) by studying response to questions on sexual behaviour while masturbating v. a non-masturbation control (the latter is more typical of psychology labs, the former more typical of psychology conferences). Elsewhere our difficulty in evaluating the value of things is up for grabs, particularly when we don't have the yardstick of a similar thing with which to compare. This discussion includes not just items for purchase but also potential romantic partners, as discussed at the end of the TED talk in the link.

A lot has been written in behavioral economics about the differences in how people perceive gains and losses, but one particularly interesting point Ariely makes is how people's economic decision-making can be distorted in response to goods/services which are free (or FREE! as he invariably writes it). This is particularly the case where one has a choice where not everything is free, but one of the options has a FREE! component. He gives a lovely concrete example. Step 1: he offers kids some small chocolates and says they can exchange a small chocolate for a larger chocolate bar. Surprise surprise, they make the exchange; so far, so rational. HOWEVER, he then gives some kids the small chocolates and says they can either have a large bar for FREE! or have two large bars in exchange for one small chocolate. The latter option gets you a bigger chocolate profit, but a majority of kids just can't say no to something FREE! Tragically, undergrad students seemed to fall for this as well (ffs, I hope they were hungover/dieting).

One of the enviable aspects of Ariely's work is he seems to get to do a lot of field work. To see if ordering behaviour is affected by the choices of those around you, he acts as a waiter at a local inn. The manager gives it the green light, but says if Dan doesn't serve a customer within 30 seconds of entering the premises one of the regular staff will swoop in first, so people aren't kept waiting too long. Classic. Perhaps my envy is misplaced; even in a more lab-based environment psychology is the kind of science that fosters interesting occurrences, particularly if you do things like assess people's response to social stress.  

Like most behavioural economics, Ariely doesn't agree with the way most economists assume people are rational, disspassionate decision-makers. Indeed, he suggests that the so-called "standard" economic model is guilty of a kind of naturalistic fallacy, in that it assumes that if people don't save for their pension, or avail of better deals etc., then they must be acting in their own best interest. One might take Ariely's less rosy view of people's decision-making as advocating a more pateralistic state, and indeed some behavioral economists advising on policy have started to advocate what has been called "soft paternalism", much to the chagrin of a well-loved celebrity academic.

I think behavioural economists can go a little hard on standard economists; theories that oversimplify individuals' cognitive skill or insight into their own preferences may nonetheless explain aggregate behaviour. They can sometimes go a bit hard on human's thinking patterns too; although mental shortcuts or heuristics can be flawed (and, as Ariely points, predictably-and thus exploitably- so), Gerd Gigerenzer and others have pointed out that heuristics can serve us quite well most of the time.

Regardless of whether you agree with much of what he says, this is a research book that turns its own pages. If interested in finding out more about Dan Ariely or even participate in his research (online surveys for the win), check out his website: http://danariely.com/

Fiction review: "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" by Eimear McBride

I was originally going to buy this at the same time I bought "Here are the Young Men" by Rob Doyle, but decided against it for whatever reason. (Maybe the counterpart names felt a little too obvious, hee hee). Doyle's book is well worth a read, putting you right in the nihilism and/or neuroses of its post-Leaving Cert Dublin characters, while still maintaining a fairly matter-of-a-fact style.

McBride's book makes an interesting contrast; the writing in "A Girl..." is like a character from Joyce's Ulysses telling a Patrick McCabe story. The stream of consciousness breaks off sentences and races through thoughts like Leo Bloom and the gang, coming close to the fighting-with-sentences seen in Finnegans Wake during one particularly tough scene towards the end. Adapting it for the stage couldn't have been easy. Unlike Joyce, however, literary allusions, puns and linguistic games are not so frequent in this place (save a prayer or two); we're straight to the guts here.

Whereas Doyle's protagonists (teens doing their Leaving Certificate around 2003) are almost exactly my contemporaries, Eimear McBride's protagonist is a little bit older (maybe 5-10 years), one for whom the old guard of Catholicism were still getting their final dig in. Although this broader cultural context hangs heavy over the book, the main incident in the plot revolves around two major interpersonal "issues": the double trauma of a terminally ill brother and an abusive uncle. As terrible as the former may be, the latter part of her story will probably trouble more readers for longer, obviously because of the manner of their relationship, but also because from a first person perspective we aren't offered a passive victim's voice. More broadly, if fiction can alter our social cognition, the unpredictability of the central character gave me pause for thought.

Indeed, I can't remember having such a strong emotional reaction to a book in some time. It's telling of the author's power and/or the easy life I've had that the petty cruelty of sibling and stranger, parent and grandparent seemed to rattle around the mind for a while after the book is put down, almost as much as the heavier stuff. One scene in particular, where the grandfather berates the protagonist's mother for the children's (and her own) perceived lack of religiosity, and the mother's subsequent acting out against her kids, was a time to put the book down and do something else for me.

Given its depth, it's the kind of book one would read again a few years down the road, probably wincing at how one interpreted certain aspects the first time around.

Where does the mind begin and end?

The following is a (very slightly) edited version of an essay I wrote 6 or 7 years ago. If you find the ecological mind of interest (it goes quite a bit beyond social questions, which I address here), the work of Andy Clark is well worth checking out.

"Where does the mind begin and end?"

Daughter:     Daddy, why do things have outlines?

Father:         Do they? I don’t know. What sort of things do you mean?

D:                 I mean when I draw things, why do they have outlines?

F:                 Well, what about other sorts of things-a flock of sheep? or a conversation? Do they have outlines?

D:                 Don’t be silly. I can’t draw a conversation. I mean things.

(Bateson, 1972, p. 27)

Introduction

By taking a functionalist view of the mind, this essay aims to challenge the limitation of mind to individual humans. The phrase “boundaries of the mind” could be interpreted as suggesting the question of whether or not we should draw the line at individual people, or perhaps families or groups. Psychology has certainly been accused of individualism (e.g. Tuffin, 2005). However, if the debate is framed thus it still assumes that the study of mind should be restricted to humans, when mental phenomena can actually be studied in other species and even non-organisms.

Through the history of psychology, thinkers and trends (in psychology as well as other disciplines and society at large) have facilitated the narrowing or broadening of the study of the mind.

The Mind

Pinker defined the mind simply, calling it “a system of organs of computation” (1997, p. xx). Reber & Reber (2001) pointed out that treating the concept of “mind” as being interchangeable with concepts like the soul, the self or identity only compounds the confusion.  But defining the mind is difficult, and various concepts have been conflated with the mind over time. The mind should be viewed as a set of processes, not a given process that is somehow separate from its various constituent processes (Ryle, 1949).

Wilson (2004) suggested that for something to have a mind, or at least a minimal mind, it must possess one psychological property. Furthermore, there should be some physical structure that realises this property.

Functionalism

William James, in his Principles of Psychology, espoused a functionalist approach to the mind:

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon (1950, p.8).

James was influenced by evolutionary theory, and functionalism is concerned with what’s adaptive about the mind, i.e. how the mind helps thinkers adapt to and exploit their environment (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). Functionalism can be contrasted with structuralism. Structuralism is concerned with the how the constituent elements of experience in the mind. While structuralism relied heavily on introspection and focused on the study of “normal” humans, functionalism would use other methodologies and study the behaviour of animals and the mentally ill (Hergenhahn, 1997).

Searle (1992) challenged functionalism by arguing that the study of the mind is always and everywhere concerned with consciousness (though few studies may explicitly refer to it), and that a functional role is unnecessary for consciousness. While the study of consciousness is a worthwhile endeavour, Searle’s focus on the non-functional aspects of consciousness (which may not exist anywhere else but within our personal “selves”-note the risk of solipsism) positions the individual human as the sole owner of a mind.

The Individual

The roots of Western individuality, as in the focus on the individual, can be traced back as far as the Renaissance, the introduction of private property in the 13^th century or even Ancient Greek philosophy. However, the emergence of psychology as an autonomous discipline coincided with a great increase in Western society’s emphasis on the individual (Jansz, 2004). The belief that the “inner self” was truer than the public self became popular between 1500 and 1800, as increasing mobility made it harder to ascertain the identity of individuals just by looking at them (Tice & Baumeister, 2001).

Wundt is often portrayed as a founding father of psychology, given his establishment of the laboratory at Leipzig (e.g. Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). For a long time Wundt’s “Physiological Psychology” was emphasised to the point of ignoring his “Psychology of the People”.  The latter work discussed the importance of social and cultural phenomena that were not suitable for laboratory study, and thus did nothing to further psychology’s status as a natural science (Jones & Elcock, 2001). The lack of attention paid to “Psychology of the People” helped to position the individual as the central subject of psychology.

As a discipline, psychology’s treatment of the research participant as an isolated individual (as opposed to an individual in a particular situation) has been a methodological symptom of an individualised society, but has also in turn lent empirical credibility to this individualism (Danziger, 1990).

Mind, Body and Soul, Man and Beast

For the ancient Hebrews, the soul was whatever it was that made the body alive. The Pythagoreans argued that the soul could move from its original body to other bodies following death. Plato granted the soul further autonomy by suggesting it could exist in a disembodied state (c.f. Shaffer, 1968).

Robert Whytt, with his discovery of spinal reflexes in the middle of the eighteenth century, suggested that the soul or mind was located in the spine as well as the brain. For many philosophers, this implied that the soul and the body were closely enmeshed, and implied that simpler animals could also possessed minds/souls (Reed, 1997). William James took this idea further with his proposal that the psychological realm evolves as part of the natural world (Reed, 1997).   

Descartes, an early proponent of dualism, is sometimes portrayed as viewing animals as lifeless machines. The Cartesian evidence for having a mind is not just communication (which many species are capable of), but communication that is based “pure” thought, i.e. thought which is based on abstract symbols (Alanen, 2003). However, while Descartes argued that only humans were capable of pure thought, he was willing to admit that clocks can keep time better than humans, and other species may outwit us on occasion (Clarke, 2003). This seems to suggest that Descartes supported the non-existence of minds in non-humans only inasmuch as he took a relatively structural approach to the mind.

Nonetheless, animals and even early humans have been described quite recently as zombies, as they apparently lack(ed) language and culture (Malik, 2000). Animals may not have cultures, but animal behaviour can be predicted by noticing what an animal notices and finding out what the animal wants (Dennet, 1998).

Indeed, as the cognitive revolution in human psychology took place, there was also a renewal of interest in the study of cognitive phenomena in other species (although a strong emphasis on behaviour understandably remained) (Roberts, 1998). Although there is a lack of evidence that any other species can use language in the recursive way that humans can, the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees and young children are not very different (Harley, 2001). Where there are differences, it is worth thinking the observation of Reed (1996), who argued that philosophers frequently compare humans to other animals in terms of internal properties, when they should instead be comparing how our environments differ.

The Ecological and Social Mind

In defining the boundaries of something, it seems like common sense to ask what is inside and outside the object of study. What is inside or outside the mind? If we take away what is outside the mind, then it has nothing to act on and no subject matter for its thoughts (Gergen, 1999). From a functionalist perspective, this would negate the mind’s very existence.

Gergen (1999) argues that the mind is inseparable from relationships if we firstly treat psychological discourse as performative and secondly embed performance in relationships. From this point of view thinking is just a public act carried out in private. Like Malik (2000), Gergen implies that thought is a linguistic act, and that mental activity is driven by interpersonal relationships.

Many critical social psychologists argue that identity is context-dependent. They reject the essentialist view and advance the idea that identity is not possessed but rather negotiated, and should be studied by investigating discourse (Tuffin, 2005). What sets the (relatively new) practice of discursive psychology apart from psychology as natural science is that it does not treat the individual “subject” as being representative of universal human truths (Tuffin, 2005). Psychology as natural science implicitly assumes that the mind is located within the individual, and that findings on the mind of an individual can be generalised to the minds of other individuals.

Discursive psychology focuses on how language and speech acts behave, and does not offer a window onto the workings of the mind (Parker, 2002). A comparison could be drawn with Behaviourism, in that both practices avoid the use of cognitive concepts in describing human interaction. Thus, an ecology of identity does not necessarily support an ecology of mind, but rather can undermine examination of the mind altogether.

Mind may extend to our ecological environments, but what about our social groups? Emphasising the needs or importance of groups is not the same thing as saying that they have minds.

Wilson (2004) suggests that the group mind hypothesis, as he calls it, can either be taken as the literal proposition that groups can have minds or as a cognitive metaphor. The cognitive metaphor stance suggests that although groups don’t actually have minds, they act sufficiently like individuals to be treated as though they did. (Note that this framework still treats individuals as the paradigmatic boundary of the mind).

Communities of insects are considered to be “super-organisms”. The individual organisms do not understand the aims of the group. The term “super-organism” cannot easily be applied to human groups, however: the individuals within the group are typically aware of the aims of the group, even though they may only play a minute role in achieving such aims (Wilson, 2004).

In other disciplines one can see the concern with the validity of reducing the decisions etc. of the group to the aggregate of those of the individuals who make up the group. In macroeconomics, for example, the Keynesian School argues that investors are prone to “herd behaviour”, with the herd acting as a metaphorical group mind. In contrast, the New Classical School proposes that people react to the prevailing economic conditions as autonomous individuals, so the unemployment rate, G.D.P. etc. can be explained solely in terms of the thoughts and actions of individuals (Snowden & Vane, 2005).

The Artificial Mind

The “mind as computer” metaphor has pervaded psychology for at least four centuries (Reed, 1996). Conversely, do computer have minds? Functionalism argues that functionally identical acts can be carried out by different physical entities (Bem & de Jong, 1997), so theoretically there is no reason why silicon can’t do the work of flesh and blood.

Strong artificial intelligence is the hypothesis that a computer which carries out a cognitive task is, in fact, thinking (Kukla & Walmsley, 2006). Structurally, the brain is in many ways different from an artificial computer (c.f. Jaki, 1969). However, the Turing machine demonstrates that thought can be carried out computationally (Pinker, 1997).

Kukla et al. (2006) argue that, from a functionalist perspective, strong artificial intelligence is supported if a computer can perfectly simulate human cognition. This argument is quite anthropocentric, in that it assumes that the carrying out of a cognitive task is an insufficient demonstration of mind unless it is done in exactly the same way as a human would. Surely a truly functionalist approach should support the existence of some kind of mind in anything that can carry out a given cognitive task, regardless of how it goes about it? Turing machines do not have the same structure as the brain (Dawson, 1998). Turing’s point was not to demonstrate that a machine can think in exactly the same way humans do. Rather, it was that if the machine can fool a human into thinking it’s a human mind in a blind test, then it has mind (Dennet, 1998).

Indeed, if we are concerned with what is adaptive about mind, we should focus on what constitutes adaptiveness for beings with artificial intelligence. Meyer (1996) argues that a behaviour is adaptive for a robot if it allows the robot to continue performing the function for which it was designed. The workings of swarms of social insects have influenced robot designers to produce systems of robots that work together without centralised control or explicit communication (Kube & Zhang, 1993).

A classic argument against strong artificial intelligence is attributed to Lady Lovelace, who complained that Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine” could only generate ideas that it was programmed to. Turing (1950) refuted this view with two points. Firstly, humans require teaching in order to produce “novel” ideas, so it is inconsistent to set a higher criterion for mind in computers, given that it is assumed that humans have minds. Secondly, according to Turing, producing novel ideas is simply a matter of engineering to make a computer produce more than one idea for a given input. This may be setting the bar somewhat low, as the programmer may be able to predict the two or more outputs perfectly, but it is does require a great stretch of imagination to see how a computer can generate random outputs but be programmed with somewhat “wooly” criteria for which of these outputs to select as most aesthetically appealing.

The Man with Two Brains

Perhaps the human brain contains more than one mind. While one feels a cohesive state of consciousness at any given time, there is no one brain structure that is responsible for consciousness (Dennett, 1991, Greenfield, 1999). It is possible that there is no central organiser within the brain that creates a “unified” mind, but rather individual subsystems acting together as a sort of superorganism. As the environment impinges on one, a “majority” view is reached among the subsystems, and this view is expressed in overt behaviour (Dennett & Humphries, 1998). This is perhaps a more structuralist argument against the idea of one person, one mind. 

Following corpus colostomy, split-brain patients can only articulate pictures shown to the right eye, as the left hemisphere controls speech (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003). It would appear that the two halves of the brain have thoughts of their own. For the split-brain patient, the brain does not produce a mind, but two minds!

Of course, one should try to avoid excessive reductionism. An individual neuron either fires or doesn’t, and so lacks psychological properties in the sense of Wilson’s (2004) “minimal mindedness” criterion. Nonetheless, it has been argued that the neuron should be considered a computer, given the variety of inputs it may have to process (Jaki, 1969).

Discussion

The discipline of psychology has emerged and developed beside other emerging and established disciplines such as computing, theology, philosophy, economics and ethology, and these disciplines have influenced one another. In the Western world, individualism in society as well as its sciences and philosophies has risked restricting the location of mind.

Although thinkers such as Block (1978) have suggested that functionalism may lead us to too liberal a view of mind, I believe that most people’s definition of mind is excessively illiberal. Functionalism cannot give a complete account of the human mind, or one that will satisfy our desire for an account of consciousness. However, if one accepts that pursuing some aim is a sign of mind, then it becomes clear that restricting the concept of mind to individuals, humans or even organisms is misguided.

References

1.      Alanen, L. (2003). Descartes’s Concept of Mind, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

2.      Bateson, G. (1972).  Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Aylesbury: International Textbook Company Limited.

3.      Bem, S. & de Jong, H.L. (1997) Theoretical Issues in Psychology, London: Sage.

4.      Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In Savage, C.W. (Ed.) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

5.      Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical Review, 95 (1), 3-45.

6.      Clarke, D.M. (2003). Descartes’s Theory of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7.      Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8.      Dawson, M.R.W. (1998). Understanding Cognitive Science, Malden: Blackwell.

9.      Dennet, D.C. (1991). Consciousness explained.

10.  Dennet, D.C. (1998). Brainchildren, London: Penguin.

11.  Dennet, D.C. & Humphries, N. (1998). Speaking for our selves. In Dennet, D.C. (Ed.) Brainchildren, London: Penguin.

12.  Gazzaniga, M.S. & Heatherton, T.F. (2003). Psychological Science: Mind, Brain and Behaviour. New York: W.W. Norton.

13.  Gergen, K.J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction, London: Sage.

14.  Greenfield, S. (1999). Soul, brain and mind. In M.J.C. Crabbe (Ed.) From Soul to Self (pp.108-125). London: Routledge.

15.  Harley, T. (2001). The Psychology of Language, Psychology Press: Sussex.

16.  Hergenhahn, B.R. (1997). An Introduction to the History of Psychology (3^rd Edition), California: Brooks/Cole.

17.  Jaki, S.L. (1969). Brain, Mind and Computers, Indiana: Gateway Editions.

18.  James, W. (1950). Principles of Psychology, New York: Dover Publications Inc.

19.  Jansz, J. (2004) Psychology and society: an overview. In J. Jansz & P. Van Drunen (Eds.) A Social History of Psychology (pp. 12-44). Malden: Blackwell.

20.  Jones, D. & Elcock, J. (2001). History and Theories of Psychology: A Critical Perspective, London: Arnold.

21.  Kube, C.R. & Zhang, H. (1993). Collective robotics: from social insects to robots. Adaptive Behaviour, 2 (2) 189-218.

22.  Kukla, A. & Walmsley, J. (2006). Mind: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction to the Major Theories, Cambridge: Hackett.

23.  Malik, K. (2000). Man, Beast and Zombie, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

24.  Meyer, J. (1996). Artificial life and the animat approach to artificial intelligence. In M.A. Boden (Ed.) Artificial Intelligence (pp. 325-354). San Diego: Academic Press.

25.  Parker, I. (2002). Critical Discursive Psychology, Hampshire: Palgrave- Macmillan.

26.  Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.

27.  Reber, A.S. & Reber, E.S. (2001). The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, London: Penguin.

28.  Reed, E.S. (1996). Encountering the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

29.  Reed, E.S. (1997). From Soul to Mind, New Haven: Yale University Press.

30.  Roberts, W.A. (1998). Principles of Animal Cognition, Boston: McGraw-Hill.

31.  Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.

32.  Searle, J.R. (1992). The Rediscovery of Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press.

33.  Shaffer, J.A. (1968). Philosophy of Mind, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

34.  Snowden, B. & Vane, H.R. (2005). Modern Macroeconomics: Its Origins, Development and Current State. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

35.  Tice, D.M. & Baumeister, R.F. (2001). The primacy of the interpersonal self. In C. Sedikides & M.B. Brewer (Eds.) Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self (pp.71-88). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

36.  Tuffin, K. (2005). Understanding Critical Social Psychology. London: Sage.

37.  Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59 (236), 433-460.

38.  Wilson, R.A. (2004). Boundaries of the Mind: the Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Chewing gum update

A new article has carried out a systematic review of the research looking a chewing gum and attention. The review indicates that a modest majority (14/22) of papers found a positive effect of chewing gum on attention, while a handful of others showed both positive and negative effects (5/22), while a minority showed no significant effect (2/22) or just a negative effect (1/22). The article also points out that the exact mechanism underlying such an effect remains somewhat mysterious, even though numerous theories have been put forward. The literature is not perfect (there could be more positive controls to help untangle mechanisms and effect sizes), but it does seem to suggest a positive effect.

It's an open access article, so it's freely available to anyone who wants to read it.

On a less positive note, I've encountered a recent paper suggesting that excessive chewing gum consumption amongst adolescents could be linked to headaches, so everything in moderation...


P.S. Note also that I've learnt my lesson about pics after the sexism accusation debacle (see previous post on sexism).

So what? The breadth and depth of research's impact

During research towards a Master's degree, I attended a course on research ethics. Early on in the course, we were summarising the nature of our research to one another-the participant describing his work who spoke before me was travelling to Rwanda to conduct research on "The Children of Bad Memories"- children conceived as a result of the rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Following my piece on my own research (the effects of caffeine on cognition), a third participant said she feared my research topic was rather trivial. Notwithstanding the fact that caffeine and cognition is still an active research area, on the day her criticism was understandable, given the inevitable comparison between my research and that of the previous speaker.

A harsher critique is that such "trivial" research may not merely avoid heavier topics, but rather distract from them. Such criticisms have been made by thinkers such as Ian Parker and others in deconstructing psychology and what it, or at least its practice, is "really" about. In the past at least, Parker has been particularly tough on psychology as a whole. At a talk by Parker I saw (a while back in 2007) he advocated a move away from what he referred to as "anti-psychology" towards "non-psychology". This would be a situation where psychology would be replaced by the study of broader social and economic trends that, the logic goes, affect more people in a more tangible way. Even if you don't go as far as this, with fierce competition for research funding, it is understandable that someone seeking money to research Aids may feel shafted if someone down the corridor gets money to look at the common cold or Nutrigrain bars.

However, before we go diverting absolutely all research efforts towards life-threatening illness I would like to make a case for plurality. Using a particular approach to sustain attention is unlikely to have as big an effect on your life as a major trauma. However, even where effect sizes are small, this can still have a large impact at a population level. If caffeine gives you an extra 30 minutes of productive work at whatever it is you do, this may be no great shakes for you today. However, when so many people consume caffeine, if such effects are reliable than this could have very sizeable effects from a bird's eye view. Of course, the challenge then is you need larger sample sizes in order to observe such effects.

Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the fruits of research are often serendipitous. Whether research on less "serious" topics is more or less prone to serendipity is open for debate, although I think one is more likely to fall into "tunnel-vision" when one is researching a topic where the gravity of the topic is obvious from the start. But perhaps you disagree?

He ain't heavy, he's my carer

Anne: There's no point in going on living. That's how it is. I know it can only get worse. Why should I inflict this on us, on you and me?

Georges: You're not inflicting anything on me.

Anne: You don't have to lie, Georges.

Georges: Put yourself in my place. Didn't you ever think that it could happen to me, too?

Anne: Of course I did. But imagination and reality have little in common.

Georges: But things are getting better every day.

Anne: I don't want to carry on. You're making such sweet efforts to make everything easier for me. But I don't want to go on. For my own sake, not yours.

Georges: I don't believe you. I know you. You think you are a burden to me. But what would you do in my place? 

Amour 


In 2006 the Central Statistics Office estimated that nearly 5% of the Irish population is engaged in providing hands-on care for a relative. While this can be very rewarding for many people, it presents many challenges that can be highly stressful, particularly for those caring for a relative with dementia. In addition to seeing the loss of independence in a loved one, dementia can be associated with challenging behaviours such as night-time wandering, irritability and aggression. 

A recent study has indicated that people providing care to family members with Alzheimer's disease have higher levels of depression as well as stress and anxiety compared to non-caregivers. This may be sadly predictable, but the results also indicated that caregivers performed more poorly on a number of tests of cognitive function. Furthermore, caregivers had disrupted output of cortisol-a hormone which is activated by acute psychosocial stress (and associated with fight-or-flight mechanisms such as increased heart rate) but whose function can be damaged by long-term stress. 

Many caregivers for people with dementia are their spouses, who are elderly themselves. As the ageing process can have effects on the brain which are similar to those of chronic stress, there may be a compounding effect of these two factors. At the same time, where children are providing care for elderly parents they may have to balance responsibility for their parent with work and/or children of their own. This may partly explain why spouses are sometimes more willing to take part in research in this area than sons/daughters. 

I wonder how often is the question is also asked how stressful is it to receive caregiving? Again, this can be difficult to disentangle from other stresses, such as those of deteriorating health and losing one's independence, but (for example) trying to minimise the extent of one's dementia to one's family caregiver must no doubt act as an additional source of stress for some people in the early stages of dementia.

There are psychological interventions such as cognitive-behavioural group therapy which have been shown to help caregivers to better cope with the challenges they face. At a broader level, perhaps one of the most important contributors to the level of caregiving burden is not just the presence of problems but the lack of an extra pair of hands. Indeed, there is evidence that cortisol output is more normalised on days when caregivers avail of adult day services compared to days when they do not. Sadly, too often there aren't enough people other than the primary caregivers pitching in a few hours a week to give the main caregiver a break. At present I would include myself in that criticism. At a societal level, I can't help but imagine that this concentration of the burden of care in the hands of fewer people also leaves older people more vulnerable to elder abuse. While "isolated individuals" may carry out such acts, they can only do so because so many of us do not watch out for each other. 

Who's studying who? Demand characteristics in psychological research

Trolls are psychopaths! A recent study understandably gathered a lot of attention by showing that those who enjoyed trolling were more likely to report higher levels of psychopathic traits. (I'm sure much of print media was keen to use these findings to take a dig at the online world which has cost them so much income). However, if asked to complete questions about enjoyment of trolling, followed by questions of how much of a psychopath one is, one does not need a Bachelor's degree in psych to guess that the researchers might be trying to see if online trolls are, in fact, psychopaths. So, being the poo-stirring troll that you are, might it not be fun to exaggerate your level of antisocial behaviour out of spite, just to enjoying the resultant media poo-storm?

Q 13. Do you have any further comments on your experience of trolling? (Please write these into the space below).

A 13. uruururur how i enjoin throwing kats in de bornfire with ma knuckly-dragging companions, den boastin bout it online to liberaln00bs wuh wuh wuh (Written by someone who wouldn't say boo to a cat in real life)

Perhaps a little unfair to pick on this one study, as this is a pervasive problem in psychological research. Demand characteristics are changes in behaviour which are due to the person taking part in the study seeing what the researcher is trying to show, and then changing their behaviour accordingly.

There are various ways to get around or minimise demand characteristics in human research. One handy method is to use a placebo condition. Say if you were studying caffeine it would be relatively easy to have two pills which look identical, but only one contains caffeine. Better yet, go double blind, so that the researcher (whichever one interacts with participants) doesn't know which condition they're in. However, for a lot of psychological research this is not so easy to pull off. If you're looking at the effects on depression of a type of psychotherapy versus a waiting list control, people can see whether or not they're getting the treatment. One way to address this is to have an active control, where people do engage in some kind of intervention (say a group meeting with other people with depression), so that there will still be demand characteristics, but the key ingredient of your new psychotherapy is missing.

It was cool to see an article taking this issue a bit further. Boot et al. suggested that in addition to having an active control condition, one should also look at the extent to which the active control and the actual intervention under study are associated with an expectation of an effect. In this way one can get a better sense of whether any change is due to a positive effect of the intervention or just an expectation that it will do as much. At the same time, one needs to watch out if the more novel therapy is perceived as what the researcher is really interested in, as even with equivalent expectations participants may still display more positive effects if they correctly perceive which one is the experimental  condition.

When doing studies about chewing gum it occurred to me that there was no placebo condition.  Unlike the caffeine pill scenario, there isn't really a strong equivalent with chewing gum; people can tell if they're chewing or not. I was surprised at the relative lack of research on demand characteristics in psychology more generally (perhaps it's a Pandora's Box), so I conducted a study of my own with Prof Andy Smith. People taking part were given chewing gum, rated their level of alertness and completed attention tasks. For the "positive" condition, I told them at the beginning that previous research had shown a positive effect of chewing gum on alertness and attention (I also chewed during this condition-always the method actor). In the "negative" condition I told them previous research had shown a negative effect. There was also a neutral condition where no explicit prompting was given.

We found that people in the negative condition reported lower alertness in response to chewing gum than those in the positive condition or the neutral. The lack of a serious difference between the neutral and positive conditions was interesting, although I'm still undecided if that's due to a genuine effect or the mere presence of some manipulation being enough to induce demand characteristics. In contrast to the observed effects on reported alertness, there was no performance difference in terms of attention. If people weren't showing better sustained attention when told that gum was good, this suggests they may have only been reporting greater alertness rather than actually experiencing it. I suppose the lesson is that if you actually have some kind of overt behaviour in your study this will be less vulnerable to demand characteristics.

While designing the study I recall watching the film "Inception". The plot concerns people who can enter other people's dreams. Furthermore, they can enter dreams within these dreams. I sometimes have trouble finding films escapist, as I can end up thinking about how some aspect of the film could say something about my own life. In this case, I started to think about demand characteristics within demand characteristics-what if people perceived that the study was about demand characteristics, and started responding so as to confirm my hypothesis that demand characteristics impact upon performance? A senior academic at Cardiff brought up this point as well. Unfortunately, I have no easy answer. I did ask people at the end of the study if they could guess what the hypothesis was, and only one person guessed correctly, although maybe some people did and decided that they'd keep quiet, and let me hear again what I wanted to hear.....

Allen, A. P., and A. P. Smith. (2012). Demand characteristics, pre-test attitudes and time-on-task trends in the effects of chewing gum on attention and reported mood in healthy volunteers. Appetite, 59(2), 349-356.