Besides dovetailing with my research, I think there is a practical value to be taken from this video. I often find myself concentrating on what I am doing, sometimes forgetting why I do things. In a world where we all have too many paths to choose from, we sometimes choose the path that has the most urgency (extrinsic motivation) rather than the path that is the most meaningful (intrinsic motivation). In business, that might mean doing whatever generates a profit now, rather than what satisfies the business' core mission. In academia, that may mean writing a paper for publication sake (extrinsic reasons) rather than exploring ideas that may not just get published, but also may serve some larger purpose. If you are inclined to explore these theories/ideas further, I might read more about self-determination theory, which talks about how intrinsic, rather than extrinsic motivation, leads to better human functioning, in addition to the benefits described in the above talk.

- Ravi Iyer

What interested me was not the data, but the critique of how psychologists attempt to illuminate the human condition.  A few quotes from the chapter summarize the points I'd like to emphasize.

Psychologists often study phenomena in isolated, artificial environments, which allows researchers to necessarily isolate variables of interest, but....

Aiming to isolate phenomena, scholars in this research enterprise are prone to devise somewhat peculiar and overly constrained assessments of moral functioning that are remote from everyday moral experience.

A gold nugget in Gilligan’s (1982) critique of moral psychology was her skepticism concerning such constrained dilemmas and her advocacy for assessing moral judgment more naturalistically, tapping moral problems from individuals’ own experience.

Another paradigmatic assumption to which we draw attention asserts that people are psychologically “cut from the same cloth,” uniformly operating by the same moral psychological

processes. This assumption is manifest in the frequent reliance on a single type of research participant (e.g., undergraduate students garnering course credit), a lack of consideration for

individual differences, and a homogenizing “people” label.

Our proposal contends that lab experimentation should be balanced with real-world observation of socially significant affairs and that morally relevant aspects of personality should

be tapped across all levels of personality description. Different methodologies should be mutually informative. Multiple lenses on the same phenomena contribute to a more comprehensive understanding, whereas divergent findings across methodologies hearken our attention.

So what can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities, or simply reading the newspaper thoughtfully, cannot?  I would say not much, but rather that psychology can help buttress what can be learned by other methods and vice versa. They both get at the same questions. A colleague of mine once shared that he thinks of psychology studies as statistical parables, in the same way that stories of the real or fictional world provide us with different kinds of parables. Anyone who has read a really good novel might believe Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote that "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

The authors I quote above want us to use multiple lenses to understand the human condition, referring to the lenses that psychologists might use (different samples, different methods). I would further extend that analogy to all fields that attempt to understand the human condition, such as literature and the humanities, but also just reading the news. This is not to say that there is not something powerful about quantitative analysis and methodologically rigorous psychological research. But as I step back from the research, I find that I'm only convinced by findings where there is a web of evidence, of the type that one researcher, paper, study, method, or discipline, could never produce...where the statistical parable has been replicated in other ways by other people and is echoed in situations I've faced and news stories I've read about. Fortunately, the internet and semantic web technologies promise to make it easier to discover such webs of evidence...but that's a subject for another post.

If you have the patience, it's worth reading the results of the conference in Herzilaya, but if not, perhaps I'll make a practice of summarizing some of the other chapters as I read them. Social psychology can be unfortunately unintelligible, in ways that literature is not.

- Ravi Iyer

Academic publishing is not easy. In psychology (though we'd be happy to publish outside of psychology), it's not enough just to have a valid results, but the results often have to be novel as well. Therefore, many replication studies may not be publishable or may only be publishable in lesser known journals or just on this blog. That doesn't necessarily make that endeavor unworthwhile, as replication, or the failure to replicate, is an essential part of the scientific method, but we want people to know what they are getting into. We're open to anyone who is motivated to publish in peer reviewed journals, and there is no inherent reason that limits this to academics. However, it's a labor intensive process with no monetary reward, so it's quite possible that only those with an eye toward building an academic CV might be interested.

Here is a running list of potentially publishable results which are in our publication queue, but there are many more possibilities. We are open to proposals on a variety of topics. Some of you might be interested in a specific topic and might find this list of measures useful in determining if we have data on that topic.  Data might potentially serve as the 1st study in a 3 study package where a community sample reinforces the results of a lab experiment, or as convergent evidence in something you already are working on. In rare cases, we may even be willing to collect new data using additional measures, even including experimental methods, if your ideas are compelling enough. However, there are only so many resources we have and the degree of effort required is definitely a consideration, balanced against the contribution which could be made. Also bear in mind that some number of papers are already in progress, and it may be possible that your idea is already being worked on.

If you are interested, please use this form to contact me as it has important questions to be answered. Beginning any publication process is a commitment and we would obviously like to work on projects that have successful conclusions. Thanks for your potential interest.

- Ravi Iyer

VoteHelp 2008 Election Visitors

VoteHelp served hundreds of thousands of visitors, so I'm guessing many millions took similar surveys when you combine traffic from all 2008 election calculators.  Traffic spiked noticeably during decision making periods (Jan-Feb primary and November election) with a low bounce rate, indicating that it served it's purpose of educating the electorate. There is clearly demand for such time saving services.

The ironic thing is that people know far more about presidential candidates compared to other elections. In 2010, how many people know much about local judges, state senators, or even our congressmen. People have better things to do, even political junkies like me, and it is understandable that people rely on partisanship rather than issue positions when making voting decisions. As much as votehelp was useful in 2008, it could be even more useful in 2010 if it could change the equation, such that becoming informed on individual issues was simpler.

However, the task of assembling data was difficult in 2008. We had some funding, but even for one election, the expense of the research was not small. Repeating those methods, even just for congressional races, would be prohibitively expensive. I was hopeful that the convergence of new data sharing technologies (APIs, XML, the semantic web) and databases (open government data sources) might facilitate this process. I subscribe to mailing lists about parsing political data, follow the Sunlight foundation on facebook, and am aware of few organizations like OnTheIssues and Project VoteSmart which track issues, some of which have APIs. Could I combine these projects into a mashup of data that would inform 2010 voters?

Unfortunately, a few days later, I have to admit defeat. There is tons of data out there. But it just isn't complete or meaningful enough. For example, VoteSmart has a wonderful service where they have interest group ratings for candidates.Theoretically, these interest groups could take some of the open government data on votes and create composite viewpoints, based on their issue perspective and reflected in their ratings. However, ratings only exist for prominent politicians like Barbara Boxer and not for challengers like Carly Fiorina (her likely opponent in the California Senate race) or Steve Poizner. Fiorina may not have much of a record as a businesswoman, but Poizner certainly should have some ratings from his other official offices. Further, below is a graph of the interest group ratings which exist for Boxer.

Interest Group Ratings for Barbara Boxer

The vast majority of ratings are either 100 or 0, which leaves little room for nuance. The increasing partisanship we see in washington is reflected in these ratings such that there is little predictive power beyond whether someone is a democrat or republican. Perhaps interest groups, which are necessarily partisan, aren't the best aggregators of knowledge as their views are necessarily extreme and therefore their opinions of legislators are equally extreme.

I don't think the world needs more open government data, at least for informing the electorate in voting decisions. Maybe that helps the press uncover corruption, but what seems more important are objective ways to aggregate data and create meaning out of the tidal wave of public data. Political scientists and psychologists can play a role in objectively extracting meaning from this data, along with web developers and data architects who make this data available. If anybody has ideas on how I might be able to do this for 2010, I'd love to hear them as I would love to work with smart, resourceful people on these issues. Please drop me an email or a comment. Until then, it looks like votehelp will have to wait til 2012.

- Ravi Iyer

I was attracted to this book because it captures an overarching theme about how I have come to view the world. Everything I read these days jumps together into some grand puzzle, and social psychology, the field I study, is a natural glue (not the only possible glue, but a useful one for me). Almost anything can be studied by social psychologists...culture, health, gender, marketing, politics, morality, sports, poverty, love, justice, religion and death are all prominent topics that social psychologists study. I dare say that list includes most any big question that people care about.

Perhaps social psychology is just a set of methods and standards of analysis, but those do not seem unique either. The gold standard of generating new knowledge in social psychology is the experimental method using random assignment, a method shared with most every other scientific discipline. Social psychologists analyze the text of books, measure reaction times, examine images of the brain, do surveys of large nationally representative samples, and construct mathematical models.

In sum, social psychology can be the study of almost anything that people do by almost any method that can be quantified. Some people might take that as a knock on social psychology, but personally, I think the interdisciplinary or amorphous nature of the field is it's strength. The need to point to a unique contribution of one's field is part of the business of academia, not part of the quest to understand the world (see Louis Menand's Marketplace of Ideas for a discussion of this point). If you want to understand the world, this "jumping together"/consilience is perhaps the only way to get a true perspective.

A Booth at the Book Fair on "Happy Science"

Consider an age old question like 'what makes people happy?'. To be sure, it's a vague question that scientific/quantitative methods can make more precise. But the people at the booth from the book fair in this picture (left) probably have a reasonably well thought out perspective on what makes people happy as well. Philosophers probably think the answer lies in contemplation. English majors might think the answer is revealed by great literature. Neuroscientists and biologists seek answers in brain chemistry. Religious scholars in religious texts. Psychologists randomly assign people to do things and see if it makes them happier. Who has the answer? I would say nobody...and everybody...Just as any psychological finding is made more robust by the convergence of findings using multiple methods by multiple researchers in various settings on diverse individuals...so too is any greater theory about the human condition more easily believed through the convergence of knowledge across disciplines...or consilience.

For those who embrace this convergence, it's an exciting time. People are generating far more quantitative data as every facebook interaction, google search, credit card swipe, & GPS location can be mashed up into some application or graph that provides some evidence of the human condition. People are generating far more qualitative data as well, in the form of countless public blogs, forums, tweets, and facebook posts. Logic, statistics, & the scientific method can be used by people of any discipline to take this wealth of data and produce convergent knowledge.

I still plan to focus on posting graphs about quantitative findings that relate to psychological theories on this blog.  But one of the main purposes of this blog is for me to store my own thoughts. My thought processes about the psychology of anything would be incomplete if I didn't have a place to store experiences that didn't explicitly have any data component to them...the random news article, observation, book review or quote that provides external validity to anything psychologists study. It is one thing to see something in a psychological experiment.  But sometimes you only know it is real when you see the same thing exhibited in a character in a novel, in a quote from a politician, or in an essay by a philosopher.

Hence this section of the blog is born...the consilience section, where I jumble together news and assorted ideas from tangential areas that hopefully relate to moral and political psychology.

Posts in this category below:

• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
• Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
• What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?
• Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War
• What the positive psychology approach can learn from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided
• Gratitude Video from Conan O’Brien and Louis CK
• France to consider measures of gross national “bonheur” (happiness)
• Hyperpartisanship & Obama’s speech to kids in US schools
• Three polls which point to differing underlying fairness principles driven by differing goals
• Democracy Promotion vs. Dignity Promotion

At the same time, I've been working with colleagues on a paper about experiential vs. material purchasing styles, for which we have found convergent correlations all suggesting that experiential purchasers are dispositionally motivated towards seeking new, stimulating experiences to promote positive emotion, while material purchasers often seek to avoid negative emotions. This is supported by the fact that, in the YourMorals.org dataset, experiential purchasers report higher levels of openness to experience, lower levels of neuroticism (both measured by the Big Five Personality Inventory), and lower levels of disgust (as measured by the Disgust Scale). The disgust finding does not necessarily fit with the idea that experiential purchasing is related to seeking new experiences, unless one looks at the literature on disgust. In particular, this study theorized about such a relationship and confirmed it by reporting correlations between disgust and big five personality dimensions.

It occurred to me that I could contribute to the original studies' findings, by examining the same correlations in our dataset, using a more diverse and far larger sample, and perhaps even including some internal cross-validation.  The results are summarized in the table below.

Disgust Scale Correlations with Big Five Personality Traits

The main hypothesis of the original study actually dealt with the two robust relationships found in our dataset, specifically that disgust is negatively related to openness to experience and positively related to neuroticism. In all, these two relationships stand out as robust across groups and in both studies. Interestingly, the correlation between openness to experience and disgust is weaker in the two most 'rational' groups, edge.org and libertarians, which might be worth pursuing later. Given the smaller sample size and restricted diversity of the original study, I'd be inclined to say that conscientiousness and agreeableness are not robust correlates of disgust, though this could be an effect of the fact that yourmorals.org uses a different measures of Big Five personality traits from the original study.

Can I publish this finding? It's only correlational and says nothing about causality. It really doesn't say much that is new, but rather confirms the original study, more or less. Still, the 26 papers which cited the original study would be slightly more improved if they could cite this finding as well, since it's the same basic study with a different (larger and more diverse) sample. This is where the discussion of the peer review system converges with this analysis. According to this paper,  "many natural science fields operate on a norm that submissions should be accepted unless they are patently wrong." In contrast, psychology papers are often rejected, not because they are wrong, but because they are not interesting or novel enough.

The paper and the listserve discussion bring up many points related to this, but one relevant one to this finding is that it is hard to build a cumulative science when you don't reward replication, but instead reward novelty. The end result is that you end up with a series of slightly different perspectives on the same subjects, all named differently, where authors are constantly trying to come up with something new rather than building on something existing. This may help academics, but it makes it very difficult for these theories to be used in the real world. Any research on humans is likely flawed in some way. Can anybody do double-blind experiments on representative samples of people with behavioral measures? The public is wisely skeptical of any social science finding as are academics...but the solution might lie in publishing more replications rather than in restricting the publication process toward the mythical goal of the perfect, novel study. No single study proves anything when dealing with research on people. It's the convergence of lots of studies that might potentially be convincing enough to outsiders.

- Ravi Iyer

ps. if anyone wants to write this up and publish it traditionally, feel free to contact me

The timeline went something like this...

• March 2010 - de Rugy publishes a paper alleging that Democratic districts received more money than Republican districts from stimulus funds.
• April 1, 2010 @ 11am - Silver challenges her assumption in that she failed to take into account the fact that the districts receiving the most funds were state capitols, which ostensibly were supposed to send funds onwards.
• April 1, 2010 @ 4:42pm - de Rugy shares her data, concedes some points (including the need to check for capitols), while giving explanations for other points and maintaining her larger finding and taking some offense for being accused of bias.
• April 1, 2010 @ 7:35pm - Silver responds to her response, praising de Rugy for her openness, tempering his accusation of bias as the sort of unconscious bias that all social scientists have, and perhaps finding a middle ground in conceding that there may be some unconscious bias effects or particular project effects which account for her initial finding, which may or may not survive the inclusion of state capitol-hood as a controlling variable.

I imagine that both of them are right now crunching the numbers and figuring out some far more accurate interpretation than either of them would have come up with on their own. The best part is that if I wanted to, I could download the data myself and join in on the fun, perhaps merging in another data source if I so chose. Perhaps someone else is doing that right now too.

I found the exchange so intriguing that I took a break from working on a paper I'm writing about libertarian moral psychology (getting me to take a break actually isn't that hard, unfortunately). When I finish this paper, the timeline is likely to be something like the following:

• I submit the paper to a journal.
• 4 Months later - I receive 2-3 reviews of my paper. If they liked it (~30%), I can edit the paper to respond to reviews and move to the next step.  If not, I go back to step 1.
• 2 Months later - I resubmit the paper.
• 4 months later - If I'm lucky I may get the paper accepted (~30%), but more likely is that I have to do another round of edits which takes another few months or in rarer cases, the paper is rejected after this stage and I go back to step 1.
• 2 years later - maybe 50-100 people have read my paper, which now contains an outdated literature review and dated conclusions.  If someone wants to challenge my results, their paper may come out around this time. Few people outside of academia can read my paper due to the need to subscribe to the journal in question. I can't update my paper and have to have a whole new set of findings rather than being able to add a single study or clarification to a part of the existing paper.

Now the process that I described has it's merits. It produces more carefully thought out work, reviewed in depth by experts in the field. It's probably essential in some areas, but it's merits are dependent on the situation and I'm not so sure it's the best method for social science research that is supposed to be used by society in some timely fashion to have positive social benefit. Is that not the real goal of social scientists, rather than CV building?

As Nate Silver points out in his critique of de Rugy's piece, there is inherent unconscious bias that all social scientists encounter when they do any research. Peer reviewers don't reanalyze your data and they rely on your own description of methodology, so they really can't address many possible sources of bias, conscious or unconscious. All research is somewhere between a zero and one in terms of conclusiveness and it only moves close to a one after many people have replicated it, in my opinion, as research is inherently unreliable when you are dealing with people.

What if social scientists all self-published (maybe let's call it sharing rather than publication) on the internet? Overall quality would go down, no doubt. Sharing of replicated results, null findings, and perhaps most importantly, failures to replicate, would probably increase a lot though. Academia would lose a monopoly on research as anyone with a stats program could weigh in and data sharing would become the norm for controversial results. Also, separating the wheat from the chaff is a problem that computer scientists, Google, Digg, Slashdot, and countless others are continually solving. There is tons of research that gets published and then nobody every cites it, so the peer review couldn't have done that well at it's gatekeeping process. What if "getting published" was no longer the standard for acceptability, but rather the number of positive votes/comments of the people who read the article, and you could continually edit and revise your article to make it better, linking to people who replicate your study and updating your literature review and conclusions to keep current. I could envision a post-sharing review system that would actually improve quality by making the review process completely open and transparent, giving extra credit to those whose data has been re-analyzed independently, replicated by others, and read by experts.

There are a million considerations I'm probably leaving out right now, both positive and negative, but given the way that social science data is being generated and the pace the world is moving, it seems unlikely that the peer review process can resist these disruptive forces. Right now, the peer review process confounds sharing research with praising the research in question and maybe there are ways to separate the two goals so that they don't have to happen simultaneously.

Still, technology has changed the way we communicate in almost every arena and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.  Will the peer review system survive?  If not, what will take it's place? I don't know the answer to that question, but perhaps examining some of the areas where the current business of psychology and the current world don't match will lead us to some answers.

• It's slow for authors - Peer review is already derided as a slow process and given the pace of the modern world, it seems inevitable that change needs to occur in this area.  There are too many researchers producing too much work for unpaid experts to keep up willingly.  This will only get worse as online sites like Facebook produce mountains of data that should be analyzed.
• It's binary - What makes matters worse about the speed of the process is the fact that decisions are binary.  You either are accepted (rarely in social psychology) or you are rejected.  Yet papers exist on a continuum and some research gets cited hundreds of times while most research never gets cited at all...which is a chilling fact given how much effort and time went into it.  All that work that reviewers do in their expert review of the research gets lost in the binary nature of their result and the fact that their comments are never revealed to the public.
• It's slow for readers - Invariably, the research that is most interesting is the research that is going on right now.  How are discoveries expected to be made if cycles of research are delayed for years by inefficiencies in sharing information?
• It's static - Most papers in psychology contain a review of current literature and a discussion which talks about why the paper helps advance current knowledge.  Unfortunately, that information becomes outdated soon after it is written and is even more outdated by the time it is published.
• It confounds praise with publicity - Having your article published serves two purposes.  It helps you get a job in that it proves the worth of your work.  It also allows other people to read your work and build upon it.  However, these two things don't necessarily need to go together.  'Unsuccessful' research needs to be shared as 'failure' can be very instructive.  Meta-analyses and other research aggregation techniques require that information.
• It is inefficient for authors - In most businesses, people specialize in certain tasks.  In order to be a standout psychologist, you need to be able to be able to combine knowledge of psychology with writing skills and knowledge of statistics and increasingly, technical knowledge to collect data online.  Few people can do all of these things well.

What kind of systems should stand in place of the current peer review journal article system?  I don't have the answer to that, but I hope to talk about ideas for how technology may change the peer review system in successive posts.  The problems of information overload facing academics is the same problem which everyone has these days.  And people are continually improving systems which address this problem through innovations like crowd-sourcing (digg), leveraging social networks to filter information (facebook), collaborative writing (wikipedia), and sharing data across data sources (semantic web and freebase).

I'll write more in successive posts about specific solutions, but I think an ideal system would be one where all data is published, but the prestige that comes from a publication is awarded by crowd-sourced ratings and reviews, not by the act of being published.  The publishing of a paper is the beginning of a conversation with the world, not the end.  I say data, because I think people should be able to publish data or literature reviews or a combination...but that it should be possible to publish data for others to analyze, just like people publish theories for others to test.  Analyses and literature reviews should be separate as analyses should remain relatively static while literature reviews and conclusions will inevitably change and should be updateable by the original authors (eg. see Psychwiki).  Any review of a paper should include semantically tagged ratings of the research so that others can combine these ratings into meta-analyses.  Indeed, eventually all data should be semantically tagged such that the aggregation of data points, not just studies, is possible.

I know that is a dense paragraph and I know I'll want to change it as soon as I hit publish....and the beauty of the internet is that I can.  But rather than pretend I have the answer (I don't), I'll try and blog about innovations to the publishing process and the business of psychology in later posts, all in the business of psychology category of this blog.

Posts in this category:

• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?
• Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data
• Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations
• Nate Silver and Veronique de Rugy demonstrate how a more modern peer review process could work.
• The Business of Psychology: Will the peer review journal article system be changed by technology?