Monday, December 31, 2007

The Model of a Psychopharmacologist

Worker Substance Use

SAMSHA report

Full report

Why Aren’t All People Beautiful?

Maybe the genes that make hot males make distinctly un-hot females.

What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests?

A Freakonomics Quorum

Against All Odds

In “Against All Odds”, students follow a young person’s flight from oppression in his or her home country to exile in an asylum country. The game is intended to increase students’ awareness and knowledge about refugees – where they come from, what situations they have faced and how they adapt to their new lives.
Educators across the United States can help students learn about the plight of refugees and understand the importance of treating refugees with tolerance and respect. UNHCR offers free educational materials for teachers of grades 4-12, including lesson plans, magazines, videos, posters and games.

The secret to winning at rock, paper, scissors

start with scissors

Babies can tell helpful, hurtful playmates

Story Highlights

Whoopie!


Lap-Dance Science

Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, and Jordan, his recent undergraduate research assistant, did conduct a study examining the impact ovulation has on lap dancers’ tip earnings. But they gathered data via a Web site, where strippers logged in anonymously to provide information about their earnings, productivity and menstrual cycles during 296 work shifts (about 5,300 lap dances). The results: While ovulating — and therefore the most fertile — strippers made an average of $30 per hour more than menstruating women and $15 per hour more than women elsewhere in their cycles. Women on the pill — who typically don’t ovulate — made significantly less than naturally cycling women overall and had no “estrus earning peak.”

The New New Philosophy

Or is it social psychology?

Philosophers are increasingly eager to go out into the world and conduct experiments. But will their results settle any arguments?

Careers in Human Factors/Ergonomics

Information from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Career articles.

exactitudes

Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 13 years. Rotterdam's heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in cities abroad.
They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Debunking The Commercial Press and Why Scientists Hate to Talk to the Media

The popular press ran a story over the weekend about the eventual split into two species of the human race. The sources cited were the preeminent London School of Economics and the work of Professor Oliver Curry. The story published as scientific fact is rebuked by Dr. Curry and this article explains how it all happened.

Debates Persist Over Subsidies for Immigrant College Students

Children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents find, years later, that they must forgo higher education because they are ineligible for federal or state aid.

Deaf demand right to designer deaf children

DEAF parents should be allowed to screen their embryos so they can pick a deaf child over one that has all its senses intact, according to the chief executive of the Royal National Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People (RNID).

Japanese Scientists Create Mice With No Fear Of Cats

Video games are big business and soon they could be big in business too.


Sexy walks 'keep men off scent'

The women who were most fertile at the time of the experiment walked with fewer hip movements and with their knees closer together.

Campaign on Childhood Mental Illness Succeeds at Being Provocative

A provocative public service campaign on children’s psychiatric disorders has raised hackles as much as awareness.

Black people in advertising

Consumed Edward F. Boyd b. 1914
Sales Leader
By ROB WALKER
Published: December 30, 2007
He knew that advertising was all about fantasy, but it was a fantasy that black consumers might want a part of.

Monday, November 12, 2007

No Covert Racism

Over the last 25 years, some forms of racism have gone "under cover," that is these forms of racism are no longer socially acceptable. For example, anti-black racism is under cover in American right now and the cases of Dog the bounty hunter, Michael Richards, and Don Imus illustrate that. 25 years ago white people could safely say the n-word.


However, other forms of racism are not covert.


Anti-Islam and Anti-Arab racism is overt.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Monday, October 22, 2007

Watson, Race and IQ

The Times Online has a thoughtful response to the Watson debacle.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Health Care/Insurance

Last week President Bush vetoed a health care bill for children stating that it was socialism.

This was the major pitch of the AMA back in the 1950's to fight affordable health care. Is it socialism?

-------------------------


The Washington Post
October 3, 2007 Wednesday Regional EditionReturn of the Goldwater GOPBYLINE: Harold MeyersonSECTION: EDITORIAL COPY; Pg. A23LENGTH: 810 words
Just outside our nation's capital, in affluent Montgomery and Fairfax counties, they still build public schools when the number of school-age children rises above the number that the existing schools can accommodate. Beyond question, there are parents in Fairfax and Montgomery who could easily afford to send their kids to private schools but who send them nonetheless to the excellent public schools in their neighborhoods They thus increase government spending and withhold revenue from the private-school industry, but I've never heard anyone complain about that. A free public education is a right, or, if you prefer, an entitlement in America, because the nation long ago decided that an educated population is a national good.
You might think that the same logic would apply to providing children with health care, that the gains to the nation from having a healthy population would outweigh those of bolstering private health insurance companies in the name of laissez-faire ideology. According to President Bush and the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, though, you'd be sadly mistaken. Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own (it costs about $11,000 a year for a family of four) would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care."
Nine million American children have no health coverage, a figure that rose by three-quarters of a million last year as the number of employers who offer health insurance to employees and their dependents continued to shrink. Congress has placed a bill on the president's desk that would expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover most of those children, but Bush argues that it could benefit some people who would otherwise stick with private insurers. By the same logic, no more public schools should be built in well-off communities. But public education is the American way, while publicly subsidized health care for children is creeping socialism.
The unacknowledged ideological secret of American life is that we have any number of somewhat socialized systems that flourish in plain view. The health-care system for veterans, which most analysts consider about the best America has to offer (and no, Walter Reed was not a VA facility), is socialized medicine pure and simple. Medicare is not a socialized system -- it pays for private medical care -- but is a single-payer system. Like education, these aren't parts of the economy that were wrested from the grasp of a covetous private sector. They address needs -- insuring all seniors, covering the costs of veterans, educating all children -- that private companies chose not to meet because these enterprises, however necessary, weren't profitable.
So it is with health insurance today. We have a massive, competitive private sector that has decided it cannot turn a buck on millions of Americans of modest means or uncertain health. If there were a private-sector solution to the problem of 9 million uninsured American children, the private sector would have found it.
But the president and those Republican members of Congress who join him in opposing SCHIP's expansion have a faith in laissez-faire ideology that cannot acknowledge the limits of what capitalism can, or even chooses to, do.
We hear a lot from Republicans these days, presidential candidates most especially, that they want to return their party to its roots, to make it once again the party of Ronald Reagan. Problem is, they've overshot Reagan and seem bent on reinventing the GOP as the party of Barry Goldwater.
Reagan's conservatism had wind in its sails: The stagflation and drift of the Carter years provided an opening for Reagan's limited rollback of government. What Goldwater personified, however, was the triumph of ideology over experience. He opposed Social Security and Medicare and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the name of property and states rights. The needs of seniors, the claims of African Americans to equal rights, ran counter to Goldwater's theology of markets over people.
Today's Republicans seem determined to re-create that magical Goldwater self-marginalization. Opposing the provision of health care to children because it conflicts with one's faith in an economic future (capitalism insures everyone) that capitalism itself does not really share (or it would insure everyone) is the same kind of theological nuttiness that led to the Goldwater debacle. In the name of attacking socialism, what Republicans are really doing is affronting the empiricism and the pragmatism, not to mention the decency, of the American people. At, one need hardly add, their own risk.
meyersonh@washpost.com

------------------------

Socialism is one specious argument against affordable and universal health care, the other is moral risk.

What are the facts? (wow! look at the change in insured rates for blacks and Hispanics)

What would affordable and universal health care look like?

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Physical Attractiveness Cues

How physically and sexually attractive would you rate these women?


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Women often use fashion and comestics to enhance their attractiveness.

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Intrinsic Motivation Theory, Illustrated


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Friday, September 28, 2007

What is your biggest weakness?

When you get information from the free internet you get what you pay for. Regardless of this warning...

I have a few websites which speak of the stress interview:

http://www.as.pitt.edu/undergraduate/experience/internships/how-to-interview.html

http://www.fazeteen.com/articles/stressinterviews.htm

http://www.seek4job.com/content/view/38/2/

This last page states, "you should not give a directly answer to the questions at stress interview," and I agree.

This page then goes on to discuss the typical answer to the weakness question. I say that they break their own rule by directly answering the weakness question by giving a obviously rehearsed and information-less answer.

As the webpages say, the stress interview is to see how you handle stress. Thus, the weakness question finds out: Do you give useless and trite answers when under stress or do you know to keep your mouth shut?

Searching for Literature Reviews



EBSCO has changed how to search for literature reviews again. Hopefully they stick to this method because it's very simple.
Click the Advanced Search tab.

Go down until you see the Methodology window:


click to enlarge
and select Literature Review. Go up and search as normal.
And EBSCO has always made it very easy to identify Lit Reviews on the abstract page:
click to enlarge

Framing - Something that Bill can't remember the details of ...

Tversky and Kahneman (1981) demonstrated systematic reversals of preference when the same problem is presented in different ways, for example in the 'Asian disease' problem. Participants were asked to "imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows." The first group of participants were presented with a choice between two programs:

Program A: "200 people will be saved"

Program B: "there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved, and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved"

72 percent of participants preferred program A (the remainder, 28 percent, opting for program B).

The second group of participants were presented with the choice between:

Program C: "400 people will die"

Program D: "there is a one-third probability that nobody will die, and a two-third probability that 600 people will die"

In this decision frame, 78 percent preferred program D, with the remaining 22 percent opting for program C.

However, programs A and C, and programs B and D, are effectively identical in accordance with von-Neumann's expected utility hypothesis, in which the value of the outcome of an event is multiplied by the probability of its occurrence

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, 1981. "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211: 453-458.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Neat Program - Deadline 10/1/07


Thurgood Marshal scholarship program. I had a student do this and she felt it was very useful.



click to enlarge

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Doubt is our product

As a result of these trends, Lisa Bero says, science has become one of the most powerful tools that private companies can use to fight regulation. The strategy they most often deploy was pioneered by the tobacco industry, which learned to foment scientific uncertainty as a means of staving off regulation. A famous tobacco industry document from 1969 spells out the strategy succinctly: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy."
In 2003, Frank Luntz, a political consultant to the Republican Party, recommended using the same strategy to combat public environmental concerns. "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community," he wrote. "Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
"Some policymakers fail to recognize that all studies are not created equal," says Michaels, the author of a forthcoming book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. "This results in the existence of what appear to be equal and opposite studies, encouraging policymakers to do nothing in the face of what appear to be contradictory findings."
Virtually everyone interviewed for this article agrees about one thing: The U.S. government must strengthen its investment in science. The members of Norman Augustine's 2005 National Academies panel continue to call for an immediate doubling of federal investment in basic science, arguing that basic science is a quintessential public good that only the federal government can properly fund. The rewards of basic research are risky and diffuse, making it difficult for individual companies to invest in.
- Liza Lentini, “One Universe, Under God,” Discovery Magazine (Oct, 2007).

Friday, September 21, 2007

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

A magazine story from the NYT on how research (in this case medical) is communicated (and miscommunicated) to the public.

Much of what we’re told about diet, lifestyle and disease is based on epidemiologic studies. What if it is just bad science?

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events — that women who take H.R.T. have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don’t. But they cannot inherently determine causation — the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence — what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial — an experiment, not an observational study — and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses’ Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials — first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women’s Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women’s Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the “disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence” for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 — that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later — is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

I've heard this from students ...

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller




















click to enlarge

But ...


Jim Borgman by Jim Borgman

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Is the Surge Working?

Besides answering this question Steven D. Levitt makes a great observation about science and politics (or as I often say in class objective vs subjective) in this Freakonomics blog.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Is Cultural Diversity Bad?

A study conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggests that diversity hurts civic life and that differences can actually translate into distrust. The political scientist and author explains his findings on the flip-side of cultural diversity.

I'm not surprised about this finding. One basic idea in group work is that while diversity in a group is beneficial regarding the task, diversity requires more psychological work to be done in the group.

There were two social psychological topics touched upon. First, Putnam was talking about the stress of living in a diverse environment. Stanley Milgram talked about stimulus overload among city dwellers (because of the social stimulus city dwellers experience, they "turn off" and ignore much of the environment) and I'm surprised that Putnam never heard of it. Second, when Putnam was talking about the mega-church he was describing using a superordinate identity allow people of different backgrounds to -- literally -- ignore their differences.

Friday, August 31, 2007

The Simpsons on being a grad student



At I.B.M., a Vacation Anytime, or Maybe None


Is this pro-employee? Notice that this policy creates problems associated with the virtual office; employees are never "away" from the office and always on call.

Borrowing the Tricks of TV News to Set a Show Apart


Fox Broadcasting is sending fake news vans onto the streets of four cities to promote its new sitcom, “Back to You.”

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

why go to college?





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Monday, August 27, 2007

Behaviorism going to the dogs

Interesting articles about behaviorism by a dog trainer.

A Brief Introduction to Operant Conditioning

Punishment:Problems & Principles for Effective Use

General articles.

Depression is 'over-diagnosed'

Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a "catch-all" diagnosis driven by clever marketing.


And read the viewer responses.

Real Behaviors in Virtual Reality?

The "corrupted blood" disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.

But, there are ethical/methodological problems in using virtual reality to study such behaviors. For example, one reason the WoW players' behavior in the game was similar to real behavior is that the WoW players cared about their characters because they had an investment in them. Thus, it would be unethical to release a disease in a virtual game of such stakes. If the players don't care about the virtual world, then their behaviors would more likely to be artificial - and not as useful to the researcher.

Cosmopolitan magazine: Gray Rape

According to the article 'hook up' culture and women's new sexual 'aggression' has created a new kind of rape -- 'gray rape' -- "a kind of sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial."

"It seems the author completely made up the term. None of the 'experts' cited use it. There is no clinical or even criminal justice term called, 'gray rape.' If this term gets popularized, particularly by the same political segment that attacked the documentation of acquaintance rape in the eighties, victims will be even less likely to come forward or seek help. "

I've often heard this from writers at Cosmopolitan, that they are given conclusions to articles by the editors and told to go out and write a story to support it. Why? Making people afraid sells magazines.

New study finds problems with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs

A Congressional inquiry released in December of 2004 found that over 80% of the abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula used by over two-thirds of federal grantees in 2003, contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health," said Bill Smith, vice president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). "It is unacceptable that the federal government continues to dump millions of taxpayer dollars into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that contain false and misleading information, censor critical sexual health information, and contain scientific errors," Smith continued.

Sexual Assault in the Military

The researchers found that 79 percent of participants reported experiences of sexual harassment during their military service; 30 percent of the women reported an attempted or completed rape.

Police Families prone to violence

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population

1 in 5 high school girls victimized by dates

One in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by a dating partner, significantly increasing their risk of drug abuse, suicide and other harmful behavior, a study suggests.
The research published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association stems from surveys of 4,163 public school students in Massachusetts, but the authors say the results likely apply to teens nationwide.
According to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22% of high school students are victims of nonsexual dating violence, with girls slightly more likely to report being victims.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Winter Travel Grants

Subject: Winter 2007-2008 STOCS Program

Attached please find the student application for the Winter 2007-2008 STOCS (Study/Travel Opportunities for CUNY Students) Program, and a list of study abroad programs eligible for STOCS scholarships for Winter 2007-2008. Please make copies of this application and this list of eligible programs available to your students. Students can also find these documents online: Winter 2007-2008 STOCS Student Application Form: http://www1.cuny.edu/academics/oaa/uei/inted/stocs/for-students/w0708StudentApplicationForm.pdf Programs eligible for STOCS scholarships during Winter 2007-2008: http://www1.cuny.edu/academics/oaa/uei/inted/stocs/Winter07-08-STOCS.html
The deadline for Winter 2007-2008 STOCS applications is Friday, October 12, 2007. Funded by a grant from the DeWitt Wallace/Youth Travel Enrichment Fund at The New York Community Trust, the STOCS Program is in its second decade of service to CUNY students. Thousands of our students have benefited from STOCS, a program that helps our students discover the many worlds outside New York, and bring that knowledge home to the CUNY community. The STOCS Program stands as a testament to the promise of CUNY: international education for a remarkably international student body. I thank you for your support. Judith SummerfieldUniversity Dean for Undergraduate EducationOffice of Academic Affairs535 East 80th StreetRoom 503New York, N.Y. 10021Phone: (212) 794-5367Fax: (212) 794-5378

More on CUNY standards

STANDARDS AID CUNY STUDENTS
By ALFRED POSAMENTIER

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Response to Crain's op-ed

In response to http://billsblogofpsychology.blogspot.com/2007/08/raising-standards-at-cuny.html

The poor man's Harvard
Brooklyn: Re "New test rules fail CUNY's mission" (Op-Ed, Aug. 12): When I applied to City College in 1940, I needed a minimum 88 high school average before I could take the entrance exam. Once accepted, I had to maintain at least a C average or I'd be thrown out. Students got in and stayed in on merit. When open enrollment was instituted in 1969, our beloved college lost its standing as a top school. I am happy an attempt is being made to restore its reputation.
Seymour Becker, Class of '43

Source

Thursday, August 9, 2007

How long will you live?

What has a 16th-century astronomer got to do with the of governments and possible extinction of the human race? Answers in fractions please, says J. Richard Gott III

York just had its 40 year anniversary. According to Gott, York has a 2.5% probabilty of closing in the next 1 year.

go directly to calculator

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller


click for larger image

Several articles in the Sun about an Arabic Public School in Brooklyn

Madrassa Plan Is Monstrosity

Brooklyn Arabic School

Arab School To Face Scrutiny At Emergency Parent Meeting

Parents Voice Distrust Of Arab School Promises

‘Screaming and Crying' Greet Arab School Plan

A Madrassa Grows In Brooklyn

Muslim Panel: Many Distrust Legal System

Social Influence in the news

Now, scientists believe that social networks not only can spread diseases, like the common cold, but also may influence many types of behavior — negative and positive — which then affect an individual’s health, as well as a community’s.

This isn't so surprising to a social psychology, who has been trained to look at the social influence exerted upon us by our peers.

Seeking 'thinspiration'

Pro-anorexia websites offering tips on extreme dieting are nothing new, but their growth on social networking sites is a disturbing new twist and brings them within reach of a wider audience.

Vacation, All I Never Wanted


Family-Leave Values

Do workers have a fundamental right to care for theirfamilies? The latest front in the job-discrimination battle.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Gender differences on the job: asking for more

About 10 years ago, a group of graduate students lodged a complaint with Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University: All their male counterparts in the university's PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants.

That mattered, because doctoral students who teach their own classes get more experience and look better prepared when it comes time to go on the job market.
When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: "The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a course,' and none of the women had done that," she said. "The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, 'Who wants to teach?' "

----and----

Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

Read the rest of the Washington Post article.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Milgram Mania!!!

Primetime recreates Milgram Experiment under the supervision of a psychologist! Follow the link for story and video.

I often use this video to illustrate a current occurrence of Milgram-type obedience



The civil lawsuit has been settled.



Derren Brown's (a British magician) reenactment



Claymation version - cute




A humorous (?) student video

Consumed and more

http://www.murketing.com/journal/ ---> subscribe to this blog using rss

What is this site? Murketing.com is a project of R. Walker. That’s me. It is descended from an earlier project called the Journal of Murketing (the term “murketing” dates to this article from Outside Magazine, about Red Bull), an email newsletter that I discontinued partly because too many people signed up for it. Also because I was busy: “Consumed,” a weekly column I write for The New York Times Magazine, made its first appearance in January 2004, and it takes up a lot of my time.

Milgram's 37

I often mention "Milgram's 37" in class when discussing the Milgram Experiments. "Milgram's 37" is a song by Peter Gabriel about the outcome of one condition of Milgram's obedience study.

In this condition, the experimental subject was assigned a role as a recorder for two confederates who actually administered the shocks. The confederates always obeyed and the DV was whether the actual subject would disobey. Milgram obtained the greatest obedience in this condition 37 out of 40 subjects were totally obedient (compared to 50% in the condition we are more familiar with where the learner cries out and demands to be released).

How I came to love the veil

A Washington Post Article

One way to look for potential prejudices is to examine the way we respond to one group and then look at how we respond to another group:

When Islam offers women so much, why are Western men so obsessed with Muslim women's attire? Even British government ministers Gordon Brown and John Reid have made disparaging remarks about the nikab -- and they hail from across the Scottish border, where men wear skirts.

Is the veil feminist?

Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety -- not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.

Policing Terrorism

In remarks to reporters, Brown’s new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, articulated the basic message. “Let us be clear,” she said, “terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions.”

While mainly about Brown's policies, this article raises an interesting question about the language being used, and the groups and stereotypes being referenced:

Radical Islam
War
Terror

An Experiment: When the Only Familiar Sight Is a Uniform

Are police officers patrolling the streets willing to give directions to out-of-towners?

This NY Times article conducts "an experiment" on police officers' responses to questions about directions?

What would be the IV? DV?

What controls did the reporters use?

Were operational definitions mentioned?

What potentially important controls did the reporters not use?

Happy Birthday, Cognitive Dissonance

Cog Dis turns 50 this year ... hey bud, let's party!!!

NY Times

Science Friday podcast of interview with Eliot Aronson

NPR Story

Newsweek

****** NY Times article on the subconscious!!!! ****

Who’s Minding the Mind?
The subconscious brain is more active, independent and purposeful than once thought. Sometimes it takes charge.

I/O for lunatics

Study: Full moon doesn't cause workplace injuries

A Baby-Proof Method Tracks Just Where Little Ones Look

This is for 330 students doing research papers on developmental psych; this is how we measures if infants are aware of something.

New technology makes it easier to follow a baby’s gaze and to decipher the developing mind by looking at infants’ eye movements.

Availability



The availability heuristic and social politics: we are concerned about what the news media presents to us.

Monday, July 30, 2007

but being overweight may not be that bad...

Heart survival 'higher in obese'

Obesity 'triggers' disease fears

Discrimination against fat people might not be all the fault of bullies, international scientists say.


To me, this point should have been amplified in the article. Not all stigmas are created equally. The stigma of being overweight is said to be one of the last acceptable prejudices. I am worried that many will use the results of this study as a justification of their rejection of overweight people.

For example, the same can be said for racial and ethnic discrimination -- that there is an evolutionary/genetic basis -- but we recognize that only fringe people (KKK members and neo-Nazis) will they use the evolutionary/genetic explanation as a reason for their prejudice.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Brain damage turns man into human chameleon

"In his 1983 fake documentary 'Zelig', Woody Allen plays a character, Leonard Zelig, a kind of human chameleon who takes on the appearance and behaviour of whoever he is with. Now psychologists in Italy have reported the real-life case of AD, a 65-year-old whose identity appears dependent on the environment he is in. He started behaving this way after cardiac arrest caused damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain."

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test

In new experiments for NBC, people are observed as they watch commercials in fast-forward mode.


IVs?
DVs. How is that operationalized?





















IV - Viewing: fast commercials/tv shows (normal speed)
DV - engagement
Operationalization: “skin conductance,” heartbeats, accelerometer respiration

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment in what is known as mindfulness training.

On the Horizon, Personalized Depression Drugs

Genetic tests may soon help doctors find the best treatment for each individual.

Antidepressants Rated Low Risk in Pregnancy

Researchers report that taking an antidepressant like Prozac may increase a pregnant woman’s risk of having a baby with a birth defect, but the chances appear remote and confined to a few rare defects.

Dreams making a comeback

Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions.

Not my syndrome

Williams syndrome — a genetic accident that causes cognitive deficits and a surplus of unguarded affability — is revealing much about what makes us social beings.

Friday, July 6, 2007

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

- yawn --

'Yawning may keep us 'on the ball'

IVs? DVs? (my answers below)





















At the vary least:
IV=experimental condition; levels = breathed nose, breathed mouth, ice pack, room-temp pack, hot pack
watching a video of people yawning was a control - all subjects watched this
DV = # of yawns (which had to have some type of operational definition - opened mouth wide, made non-verbal sound; and I'd have two raters and check to see if there was inter-rater reliability)

I suspect they did this:
IV1= video: people yawning/people not yawning
IV2= breathed: nose/mouth
IV3 = pack: hot/room/cold

same DV

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Why I study rape the way I study rape.

My research on sexual assault is on how third-party observers view the rapist, survivor and the situation. Students are more interested -- and understand better -- areas about sexual assault which I don't study: survivor reactions, and pornography and rape. It makes sense for a psychologist to study how women (and men) respond to sexual assault, how they cope and how to speed the coping process; and it also makes sense for a psychologist to study the relationship between pornography and sexual assault. To students, it seems trivial to study how much a person blames a rapist for raping and what factors make people blame a rape survivor more for being raped. None of these things seem useful.

In this article, from Slate, there's an excellent example about why I study rape the way I do. People don't view rape the same way as other crimes (an excellent set of examples is at the end of the first page and beginning of the second). And, as this whole case shows, the way third-party observers view rape can have a great deal of impact on the well-being of people.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Beauty is only pixel deep!

Dove's Self-Esteem Project's Evolution film.

Playboy alters the images of its model so much that they forgot to replace one model's bellybutton! Readers demanded their money back for the issue.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance

New York Times article

Two interesting things. First, it appears that the Britons who are upset about the veil are talking past the Muslim-Britons: the Muslim-Britons see it as a political and free speech issue. Why is it not perceived that way? And (a related) second, I wonder to what degree attitudes against the veil are anti-Muslim attitudes being expressed symbolically?

science quote

"The job of a scientist is to generate wrong ideas as fast as possible."

-- Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winning physicist

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Dinosaurs

Why are dinosaurs so popular (e.g. Jurassic Park)?

Freud would say that it's identification with something that is stronger than ourselves and stronger than the things we fear.


Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
©2007 Universal Press Syndicate Custom comic pages by MYCOMICSPAGE.COM

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Knowing what we don't know

The adaptive unconscious has an extremely powerful influence on our behavior. A lot of what we do is not conscious.

An excellent demonstruation is here


Inattentional Blindness

People only perceive what they are looking for and what they think they will see. As a friend of mine is graduate school said, "I'll see it when I believe it."

This video is an excellent example of how well we misperceive.




While the above video was a demonstration, the following video is from an actual experiment which tested the hypothesis of inattentional blindness.

Participants were asked to watch the video and count the number of passes made by the team dressed in white.

Go to this page and watch the video

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

After watching it, scroll down

















in this condition (count the passes by the team in white) only 42% of the participants noticed the gorilla.

Here is a link to the article.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

And now for something completely different: not closed loop communication

Closed loop communication is when the listener repeats what they hear to allow the speaker to confirm that the listener correctly heard it. Any submarine movie (or episode of Star Trek) provides numerous illustrations.

This video is not an example of closed loop communication.


Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Depressive Realism?




The more realistic you are about your future - usually the more depressed you are.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Sunday, May 27, 2007

A NYT story about narrative psych!


Remember: The universe isn't made of atoms, it's made of stories.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

What make a society prone to rape? A Sociological View

I found this old talk announcement on my computer.

What makes a society prone to sexual assault and rape? Professor Peggy Reeves Sanday addressed this question this morning with students in a combined session of two classes, one in sociology and one in philosophy. Sanday is a distinguished anthropologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Sanday did research on 95 band and tribal societies to see whether rape is a universal phenomenon. It is not, according to Sanday's results. She conducted her study in the late 1970's and published it in 1981 as the lead essay in a special issue on rape in the _Journal of Social Issues_. Rape is not universal. Of the 95 band and tribal societies she studied, Sanday found 47% to be rape-free and 18% rape-prone, with the remaining 35% difficult to classify as one or the other.
The rape-free societies, in which sexual assault is rare, exhibited common characteristics. In them, (1) there are explicit codes emphasizing the importance of consent and choice in sexual relations. (2) Women and men are both conceived as active sexual agents, neither passively available for the other at the other's wishes. Both men and women are seen as potential initiators of sexual activity and intimacy. Finally, (3) the same standards of sexually appropriate behavior apply to both women and men. That is, there is no double standard, for example, where women are thought sexually dirty and men sexually normal for the same level of sexual activity.
In the rape-prone societies, there is clear evidence (1) that men rape women regularly or (2) that forced intercourse is considered normal sex. Also, (3) men may use ceremonies or rituals of rape or group sex to (a) punish women for violating sexual norms, (b) to introduce boys and young men to their sexuality, or (c) to display male sexuality, especially to other men. In such societies, commonly, all-male groups have social hegemony or dominate social life through controlling certain important social ceremonies or rituals. These all-male groups may show strong aversion to homosexual or bisexual men and may engage in activities designed to deny unequivocally any such inclinations of their own.
Professor Sanday offered several explanations for the difference between these two types of society. In rape-prone societies, (1) there is a high level of interpersonal violence. (2) There is a pervasive ideology of male toughness and a polar opposition between masculinity and femininity. (3) Women are not respected as fully enfranchised public citizens and have relative low status socially, politically, and/or economically. (4) There are high levels of sexual segregation (and male identity is often represented with centrally displayed phallic symbols). (5) There is social support or at least tolerance, either explicitly or implicitly, for rape and for men who commit rape. Finally, (6) great importance is placed on maintaining a sexual code defining appropriate from inappropriate sexual relations. In societies with these characteristics, rape is more frequent, more likely, and more condoned.
Sanday will give a lecture this afternoon at 4pm in Kissell titled "No Means No." Her visit to Wittenberg is being sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy, the Women's Studies Program, the Women's Program Committee, and the Office of the Provost.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Not Just at Euro Disney ...

From The New York Times's article, Not for Kids Only: Seeking Buccaneer Bliss -

Ms. Treadwell has sailed these waters here and at other Disney theme parks for more than two decades — once even dragging a boyfriend from Moscow to Euro Disney outside Paris for a weekend of riding Pirates of the Caribbean. “There are profound differences between the rides,” she noted. “Here, the pirates chase the women for food and booze, while at Euro Disney they chase women for sex.”

The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney has always bothered me regarding the scene described above. In one scene, pirates are chasing women around. In 1997, after complaints about this rape scene, Disney added pies to the women's arms to show that the pirates were chasing the women for the pies. Still on the ride is a latter scene where there is an auction of women and a pirate says something like "take one of these wenches as yea wife."

This is an example of the rape myth is our culture and the normalization of rape. The rape myth, according to Burt, is a set of beliefs centered around the idea that rape is not a serious crime because some (most) women desire to be raped. The rape myth is a necessary foundation for the normalization of rape - a process where are culture adopts the rape myth.

Another example of the commonplace-ness of this rape myth are the Pepe LePew cartoons. In these cartoons, Pepe (an sexually acting out skunk) stalks and gropes a female cat. In many cartoons, another aspect of the rape myth is seen: after repeatedly rejecting Pepe's sexual advances, the cat turns the tables on Pepe and chases Pepe - showing that the female really wanted Pepe to rape her.