Psychonomics
Nov. 15th, 2008 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashnistrikeWoohoo, my posting page is working again. On Wednesday, I was going to post about how this grad student and I had a really cool study idea, but discovered that "perceived speed of time passing" is actually a really complex variable, with individual and environmental factors and possibly with different underlying processes depending on the size of temporal unit involved. And now we have to catch up on this whole area of the literature in time to redesign the experiment by the IRB deadline, which would be fun except that I don't actually have time. Ironic, no? And in the process of doing that, I discovered that the other experiment I was planning had already been done, and I now need to revise that proposal to be a not-already-done follow up. But my posting page wasn't working on Wednesday, so I didn't post about that. I also didn't post about how my beta beta reader thinks The Jester's Child needs another scene, which is why I haven't sent it to my beta readers yet. I need to reread it and decide if I want to go ahead and add something or if I need a triangulation beta reader first.
Please excuse random and mostly nonexistent cut tags. I can't get them to work tonight, except for the one in the middle--no idea why.
Psychonomics is in Chicago this year. This would be extremely convenient, except that it means I have to commute in. Since my usual Psychonomics schedule runs from 8 or 9 AM till after midnight this is not much fun. I have been missing morning talks and am still wiped. I came home early today and have been cocooning. Please excuse me if my prose is therefore clunkier than usual, or even (gasp!) accidentally ungrammatical. But there have been many cool things, including a talk by Daniel Kahneman. If Kahneman is not a household name in your household, he won a Nobel Prize for reinventing economics based on the fact that actual people are not perfectly rational actors. He sounds like a Nobel Prize winner. He is in that strata of intelligence, high above the level at which you no longer understand what someone is saying but can tell it's brilliant, and well into the place where everything he says is clear and cogent and you have no idea why it wasn't obvious to you before. I am not as smart, and am exhausted, so I will simply try and lay out some of his points semi-coherently.
There are two kinds of happiness/well-being. There is in-the-moment, experienced happiness--how do you feel right now? And there is remembered happiness--how you evaluate an event, or your life as a whole, looking back at it. These two things are not necessarily closely correlated. There's a lot of experimental evidenced for that. For example: -The mood, at any given moment, of a person living in California, is not likely to be better or worse than that of a person living in Ohio. But both Californians and Ohioans agree that people are happier in California.
-Two people have a colonoscopy. Both rate their pain every few seconds during the procedure. For every pain that Person A rates, Person B has a rating at least as bad, but Person B's procedure is twice as long and the pain drops off near the end. Person B, afterwards, rates their experience as less painful and less bad than Person A's retrospective rating.
-People go into a pain research lab (why?) and are given two separate experiences. In one, they immerse their hands in really cold water for 60 seconds. In another, they immerse their hands in water of the same temperature for another 60 seconds, after which they keep their hands in for another 30 seconds while the temperature is raised by one degree. A full 85% of people, when asked which experience they'd rather repeat, pick the 2nd.
Et cetera. He and other researchers have been doing this for 20 years. There are two notable things about the way people retrospectively (or prospectively) evaluate well-being. First, the goodness or badness of an experience isn't integrated over time--duration is not strongly weighted. Instead, they average the peak pain or pleasure with the level of pain or pleasure at the end of the experience. Secondly, a Focusing Illusion causes people to give extra weight to whatever characteristic of a situation they're thinking about (e.g., the sunny climate if you ask them about happiness in California, or unhappy things in general if they're already depressed). In general, the factors that influence remembered and experienced happiness are not the same. So something can make you happier in a large percentage of your lived moments, while causing you to evaluate your overall life as less good--or vice versa. Kahneman thinks that the remembering self is the one that makes decisions, and the experiencing self has no voice. I suspect that this is true for people who end up winning Nobel Prizes, but that the remembering self is not the one that plays Solitaire when a deadline is looming.
Other cool, non-Kahneman-related things:
-very late dinner with the Source Monitoring crowd on Thursday. We had dramatic readings of a new chapter on the topic. This was funnier than it sounds, as it included not-overtly-rude-but-it's-good-to-have-tenure descriptions of a competing theory, and Obama-style exhortations to our better (experimental design) selves. There were also competing blitz-style presentations of data, and I got mocked for my complaints about an effect that won't go away. (I think it's a reasonable complaint. If I can't make it go away, it means I don't know what causes it. But I got no sympathy.)
-very late dinner with my advisor's lab and myriad descendants/cousins on Friday night. Less intellectual, as Russian Tea Time has vodka flights. (I didn't have them myself, just observed the discussions about whether you could change the apparent taste of the supposed coriander-flavored vodka through the power of suggestion.) Many people were threatened with karaoke.
-An extended session this morning on Psychology and Law, going well beyond the usual findings about unreliable eyewitnesses. One particularly good talk about jury interpretations of legal instructions. This was really frightening, especially the direct-quote triple-negative sentence explaining the guidelines for imposing the death penalty, which I need to get ahold of as an illustration of why writing clarity matters.
-My undergraduate cognitive students came to the noon poster session and got to see actual cutting edge research and the general glamour of cognitive psychology. (For once, I'm not being sarcastic about this. The Chicago Hilton has glamour spilling out of its pores. Gilt-encrusted conferences rooms with trompe l'oeil paintings and bas relief ceilings.) On Monday I will find out if they understood anything.
-An extended session this afternoon on linguistic relativity and the Whorf Hypothesis. Very cool findings about the influence of language on numbering ability, drawn from the Piraha, MIT undergraduates, Nicaraguan homesigners, and some 7-year-olds who've memorized a really useful mental imagery technique that lets them add 10 three-digit numbers in under ten seconds. Everyone but the seven-year-olds either relies on language to keep track of exact amounts above 3, or can't keep track of exact amounts above 3 because their language has no words for it. And the seven-year-olds, of course, originally learned the concept of counting from language, they just have a more efficient way of doing it now.
Sleep now. Tomorrow I have talks on Emotion and Cognition, followed by a date with S at the Field Museum. Followed, probably, by Not Cleaning the House.
Please excuse random and mostly nonexistent cut tags. I can't get them to work tonight, except for the one in the middle--no idea why.
Psychonomics is in Chicago this year. This would be extremely convenient, except that it means I have to commute in. Since my usual Psychonomics schedule runs from 8 or 9 AM till after midnight this is not much fun. I have been missing morning talks and am still wiped. I came home early today and have been cocooning. Please excuse me if my prose is therefore clunkier than usual, or even (gasp!) accidentally ungrammatical. But there have been many cool things, including a talk by Daniel Kahneman. If Kahneman is not a household name in your household, he won a Nobel Prize for reinventing economics based on the fact that actual people are not perfectly rational actors. He sounds like a Nobel Prize winner. He is in that strata of intelligence, high above the level at which you no longer understand what someone is saying but can tell it's brilliant, and well into the place where everything he says is clear and cogent and you have no idea why it wasn't obvious to you before. I am not as smart, and am exhausted, so I will simply try and lay out some of his points semi-coherently.
There are two kinds of happiness/well-being. There is in-the-moment, experienced happiness--how do you feel right now? And there is remembered happiness--how you evaluate an event, or your life as a whole, looking back at it. These two things are not necessarily closely correlated. There's a lot of experimental evidenced for that. For example:
-Two people have a colonoscopy. Both rate their pain every few seconds during the procedure. For every pain that Person A rates, Person B has a rating at least as bad, but Person B's procedure is twice as long and the pain drops off near the end. Person B, afterwards, rates their experience as less painful and less bad than Person A's retrospective rating.
-People go into a pain research lab (why?) and are given two separate experiences. In one, they immerse their hands in really cold water for 60 seconds. In another, they immerse their hands in water of the same temperature for another 60 seconds, after which they keep their hands in for another 30 seconds while the temperature is raised by one degree. A full 85% of people, when asked which experience they'd rather repeat, pick the 2nd.
Et cetera. He and other researchers have been doing this for 20 years. There are two notable things about the way people retrospectively (or prospectively) evaluate well-being. First, the goodness or badness of an experience isn't integrated over time--duration is not strongly weighted. Instead, they average the peak pain or pleasure with the level of pain or pleasure at the end of the experience. Secondly, a Focusing Illusion causes people to give extra weight to whatever characteristic of a situation they're thinking about (e.g., the sunny climate if you ask them about happiness in California, or unhappy things in general if they're already depressed). In general, the factors that influence remembered and experienced happiness are not the same. So something can make you happier in a large percentage of your lived moments, while causing you to evaluate your overall life as less good--or vice versa. Kahneman thinks that the remembering self is the one that makes decisions, and the experiencing self has no voice. I suspect that this is true for people who end up winning Nobel Prizes, but that the remembering self is not the one that plays Solitaire when a deadline is looming.
Other cool, non-Kahneman-related things:
-very late dinner with the Source Monitoring crowd on Thursday. We had dramatic readings of a new chapter on the topic. This was funnier than it sounds, as it included not-overtly-rude-but-it's-good-to-have-tenure descriptions of a competing theory, and Obama-style exhortations to our better (experimental design) selves. There were also competing blitz-style presentations of data, and I got mocked for my complaints about an effect that won't go away. (I think it's a reasonable complaint. If I can't make it go away, it means I don't know what causes it. But I got no sympathy.)
-very late dinner with my advisor's lab and myriad descendants/cousins on Friday night. Less intellectual, as Russian Tea Time has vodka flights. (I didn't have them myself, just observed the discussions about whether you could change the apparent taste of the supposed coriander-flavored vodka through the power of suggestion.) Many people were threatened with karaoke.
-An extended session this morning on Psychology and Law, going well beyond the usual findings about unreliable eyewitnesses. One particularly good talk about jury interpretations of legal instructions. This was really frightening, especially the direct-quote triple-negative sentence explaining the guidelines for imposing the death penalty, which I need to get ahold of as an illustration of why writing clarity matters.
-My undergraduate cognitive students came to the noon poster session and got to see actual cutting edge research and the general glamour of cognitive psychology. (For once, I'm not being sarcastic about this. The Chicago Hilton has glamour spilling out of its pores. Gilt-encrusted conferences rooms with trompe l'oeil paintings and bas relief ceilings.) On Monday I will find out if they understood anything.
-An extended session this afternoon on linguistic relativity and the Whorf Hypothesis. Very cool findings about the influence of language on numbering ability, drawn from the Piraha, MIT undergraduates, Nicaraguan homesigners, and some 7-year-olds who've memorized a really useful mental imagery technique that lets them add 10 three-digit numbers in under ten seconds. Everyone but the seven-year-olds either relies on language to keep track of exact amounts above 3, or can't keep track of exact amounts above 3 because their language has no words for it. And the seven-year-olds, of course, originally learned the concept of counting from language, they just have a more efficient way of doing it now.
Sleep now. Tomorrow I have talks on Emotion and Cognition, followed by a date with S at the Field Museum. Followed, probably, by Not Cleaning the House.
