Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
Last weekend (April, 2010), I attended my favorite event in Los Angeles, the LA Times Festival of Books, and picked up the book Consilience, by E. O. Wilson. Consilience literally means the "jumping together" of knowledge and Wilson talks about how there is a potential orderliness or unity of knowledge that is possible across academic disciplines.
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
What is more Immorral? Distracted Driving or Smoking Marijuana?
The answer is that it depends on whom you ask. Below is a graph based on yourmorals data where participants were randomly assigned to answer whether they agreed that "XXX is immoral" about one of seven health behaviors.
As you can see, conservatives feel that ingesting all types of substances (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) are more moral issues, compared to liberals. Liberals appear to moralize driving while using a cellphone and eating unhealthy food a bit more than conservatives.
Interestingly, liberal visitors felt that distracted driving is about as immoral as using cocaine and much more immoral than smoking marijuana. Conservatives, on the other hand, felt that the use of illicit drugs (cocaine and marijuana) was more immoral than driving while using a cellphone. This is perhaps another way to show the robust moral foundations theory finding that liberals care more about issues of harm (e.g. distracted drivers might kill someone), while conservatives care more about issues of purity (e.g. taking drugs is unnatural) and authority (e.g. especially illegal drugs).
- Ravi Iyer
edit: I had a few request for the sample size. 1,538 liberals and 337 conservatives took this study for this analysis.
How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations
I have recently been following a discussion in my discipline about the peer review process, which led me to this very interesting paper about the history of and alternatives to the peer review process in psychology.
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
Sam Harris’ TED video and the danger of liberal atheist moral absolutism
A fellow graduate student recently shared the below Sam Harris TED video with me and I was quite surprised at the premise of the talk. In it, Sam Harris gives a spirited defense of moral absolutism, the idea that there are objective truths about what we should and should not value. Below is the video.
Harris correctly observes that "the only people who seem to generally agree with me (Harris) and who think that there are right or wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues, of one form or another, and of course they think there are right and wrong answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the conditions of human and animal well-being...the demagogues are right about one thing, we need a universal conception of moral values."
His conception of morality is remarkably close to the construct of moral absolutism vs. moral relativism, measured on the YourMorals.org site using agreement to statements like "Different types of moralities cannot be compared as to 'rightness'" with agreement indicating more absolutism and disagreement indicating relativism. Harris also states that "It is possible for whole cultures to care about the wrong things....that reliably lead to human suffering." The graphs I show below show that he is correct that moral absolutism among these groups does lead to human suffering...but it also leads to suffering when moral absolutism is supported by liberals and atheists.
Harris then spends much of the rest of the talk detailing how terrible things occur as a result of cultures that do not share his values. I am generally liberal and likely agree with Harris' values, specifically the idea that morality is mostly about promoting the well-being of people. However, I do not believe that my values should be the values of other people as well. I have two main counters to this idea:
- Even the most liberal person can be made to consider ideas of morality outside of the idea of the greatest well-being possible. For example, liberals believe in equity too, such that some people deserve more well-being than others. Jon Haidt's brother-sister incest dilemma confounds both liberals and conservatives meaning that there is a universal ability to moralize disgust, even if it is less developed in some than others. Harm and well-being are not the only considerations.
- Moral absolutism generally leads to more human suffering, not less, as people fight great wars to enforce their vision of morality on others. Consider the below 2 graphs of yourmorals data relating moral relativism, the opposite of absolutism, and attitudes toward war.
Moral Absolutism relates to Support for War across Religions
Moral Absolutism is related to Support for War - Across Political Groups
Moral absolutism is not just dangerous for the groups that Harris dislikes, but also for the liberal and atheist groups that he likely subscribes to as the slope of the regression line is negative in all cases, indicating that moral absolutism is positively related to support for war for liberals and conservatives, atheists and christians.
It may be easier to think of groups that cause wars out of excessive group orientation (e.g. Hutus vs. Tutsis) or excessive authoritarianism (e.g. Nazis)...but there are also groups that caused harm out of excessive concern for others' well-being (e.g. The Weather Underground) or out of an excessive desire for social equality (e.g. the communist Khmer Rouge). Moral absolutism, believing that you are more right about morality than others, can be thought of as the first step toward hypermoralism, harming others in support of your moral principles. Human beings are already good at believing that our moral system is superior, with war sometimes as the consequence....instead or narrowing our conceptions of morality, we should be working to expand our moral imaginations.
- Ravi Iyer
The Psychology of Aggression and the Ugliness of the Health Care Reform Debate
Most people are not violent people. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes very little sense for a species to kill members of it's own species. Soldiers in war have to be trained out of their natural impulse not to fire weapons. For the vast majority of people, aggression is a last resort and I'm guessing that most readers have anecdotal evidence of this as rarely do everyday disagreements escalate into physical or even direct verbal attacks. It's usually not worth the risk and stress to our systems.
There is lots of psychological research on how to reduce these inhibitions (e.g. dehumanization, Milgram's obedience studies), but there is little research (feel free to let me know if I'm wrong about this and I'll edit this) on the positive pressures towards aggression. Among the ideas I am familiar with are Sherif's classic studies on competition for limited resources, which are echoed in Robert Wrights's ideas about zero-sum competitions leading to conflict. However, competition itself is just a circumstance and it doesn't necessarily get at the psychological mechanism for group level aggression. For example, people may compete because they covet a particular resource or they may compete because they need that resource to survive.
A couple years ago, I hypothesized that individuals are moved to aggression because of an excess of moral principle, rather than the absence of moral principle. In the context of the health care reform debate, this may mean harming others "for the greater good", which could be defined as saving unborn fetuses, providing health care to the sick, defending the constitution, fighting for liberty, or an assortment of other moral principles which have been asserted by both sides as justifying actions that might normally be considered out of bounds. In the past few days, we have seen gun threats, windows broken, the elderly disrespected, and slurs and spit hurled at politicians. These incidences of crossing boundaries in the name of a cause are not limited to one party as those in favor of health care have harassed Bart Stupak and tried to have Joe Lieberman's wife fired. No side has a monopoly on the ugliness.
I don't have data that speaks directly to this question, but I do have this graph to consider. At the time that I started thinking about what I call 'hypermoralism', I created a small educational website that I thought I'd use to gather some exploratory data as I thought about these issues. The website is still in beta but the results of the initial survey are interesting. I asked people to think of a group that committed violence against civilians (e.g. 30% picked the Nazis) and think of the motivations behind that violence. I then asked people to think of reasons why, in an extreme case, they themselves might endorse violence against civilians.
Reasons to support violence against civilians
As you can see in the above graph, people believe that notorious groups that kill civilians are amoral ("They were amoral, having no moral standards." or "They were seeking personal gain at the expense of others.") most of all and were willing to entertain the idea that they were hypermoral ("They were killing people who belong to a specific group to avenge a past injustice committed by other members of that group.") as that value was still close to the midpoint of the scale. Survival ("They were killing people because they themselves would be killed if they did not.") was a distant third motivation.
In contrast, when people considered when they would potentially resort to violence against civilians, survival (of both the individual and the family, which loaded on the same factor in a factor analysis) was the prime potential motivator. Unfortunately, for my hypothesis, moral reasons were deemed no more likely than non-moral reasons for individuals, but I still think there is something to be learned.
Clearly, these scenarios are not directly comparable as the average respondent is likely actually different than the average Nazi or member of the Khmer Rouge. It's not just a matter of perception. But if we believe in the vast amount of research on the fundamental attribution error, which shows that we underestimate situational pressure when others do bad things, there likely is some amount of attribution error occurring in this instance. It seems likely that many individuals within these notorious groups actually did feel some survival motivation that spurred their actions. For example, Hitler was quite poor, though clearly his actions went way beyond mere survival.
In the health care reform debate, it seems that a precursor to the ugliness is indeed couching the debate in terms of a life or death struggle for survival, justifying questionable behavior. Is America hanging by a thread? Then I suppose it's worth taking extreme measures to save it. Are people dying every day that reform isn't enacted? Then I suppose a few harassing calls to a congressman's home are a small price to pay.
Politics in America can often be a zero-sum game and it is inevitable that passions will be inflamed on both sides. Liberals may have 'won' this vote, but we all lose when the debate gets too ugly and liberals are just as guilty of exaggeration when things don't go their way. Indeed, I just received an email asking for help to "stop big corporations from taking over our democracy", a reference to a recent Supreme Court decision which conservatives "won". Such rhetorical devices may be useful, but we should all guard against where such exaggeration inevitably leads....ugliness.
Does trait anxiety make your more or less likely to support war & aggression?
Recently, one of the grad students in my department gave a brownbag talk about the relationship between fear and aggression. On the one hand, one might expect fear to lead to aggression as one perceives threat to a greater extent and responds accordingly. On the other hand, fear is associated with withdrawal and so we may expect those who are naturally fearful to avoid aggressive actions, such as war.
I analyzed data on our support for war and peace measure (e.g. "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict" - Van der Linden et. al 2008) as well as a measure of trait anxiety (e.g. how accurately "get stressed out easily" describes you - from the IPPI BIS/BAS scale). Unfortunately, the analysis I ran isn't particularly conclusive, but part of science is hopefully sharing both conclusive and inconclusive results so that others can build on it. There is a small significant negative correlation (r=-.166, p<.001) between trait anxiety and support for war. From the below graph, this relationship appears strongest in moderates (perhaps because they have made up their minds less about war/peace), but is consistent across groups except libertarians.
The straight lines above are linear relationships and the curvy lines are if we allow SPSS to fit a curvy line to the data. There is a semi-consistent result, but the slopes certainly aren't dramatic. I also ran the analysis for Big 5 Neuroticism and the correlation between that and support for war was even smaller (r=-.052) though still negative and significant (p=.004 since there were 3,041 participants vs. 604 in the above graph).
The take home message? I would say that it seems likely that there is an overall slightly negative relationship between general anxiety and general support for war. However, it seems likely (and consistent with previous research) that in a specifically threatening situation, the results might be quite different as the chronically stressed individual might perceive much greater threat and therefore support war in specific threatening cases to a greater degree than a less anxious individual. I hope to have more to report on this in the future as to what these cases look like and I'd welcome any comments pointing to other relevant research as it's something I'm learning about.
- Ravi Iyer
Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
One of the professors at my university co-authored a recent meta-analysis which found that there is a relatively robust correlation between religiosity and racism. It's hard to dispute the methodology of the study, which included 55 studies with over 20,000 people. Still, I can't help but cringe at what take home message people might get from reading about this study. I can see non-religious schadenfreude and religious defensiveness resulting from a simplistic assumption that correlation equals causality.
Religion does not cause racism, or at least that's my contention. My hypothesis is that the reason they are correlated is that some people who are naturally group oriented gravitate towards religion. Other people who are group oriented gravitate towards racism. There are a large number of things that being group oriented will lead one to gravitate towards....sports teams, the military, marching bands, boy scouts, etc.. Sometimes people who are group oriented will gravitate towards more than one of these groups and so it is not so surprising that we will see a correlation between racism and membership in any of these groups.
I cannot test this hypothesis directly, but I do have some evidence for this. In their paper, they state that "In our meta-analytic review, the paradox of religious racism was traced to the group-oriented motives that underlie religiosity." From a moral foundation theory perspective, we would expect endorsement of the moral principles of Ingroup Loyalty and Authority to correspond to these group-oriented motives. In our yourmorals.org dataset, we don't have measures of racism, but we do have measures of a related construct, social dominance orientation, which concerns agreement to items like "Inferior groups should stay in their place."
In our data, there is indeed a relationship between higher social dominance orientation scores and being Christian (most of the paper's studies used Christians as their religious group). However, when I control for moral foundation questionnaire scores on the Ingroup Loyalty and Authority dimensions, there is no difference between Christians and Atheists on social dominance orientation. It is hard to visualize regression results which 'control' for other variables, but perhaps the below 2 graphs illustrate this point. Basically, one can see that Christians and Atheists have very similar patterns of social dominance orientation at corresponding levels of group level moral concern. The lines more or less overlap.
If there were a main effect of religious group, we would see the blue line consistently above the green line, indicating that at similar levels of group based moral concern, religious people are still higher on social dominance orientation.
Another way to look at the effect of religion is by self reported religious attendance. Again, if we look at the simple relationship, there is a significant positive (Beta=.098) relationship between religious attendance and social dominance orientation. However, if we control for moral foundation questionnaire scores, the relationship actually becomes negative (Beta=-.040, p=.005), indicating that at similar levels of group level moral concern, religious attendance is actually negatively related to social dominance orientation.
How real are these effects? Will they replicate? Our sample is not necessarily representative of the whole world and social dominance is perhaps a poor proxy for actual racism...but at least in this data set, there does seem to be support for the idea that group level morality explains all of the effects of religion on group level dominance, such that we might find similar effects between any cohesive group and racist attitudes, purely as a function of a desire for group cohesion. All moral concerns are double edged swords and can be virtues (patriotic donations of blood after 9/11) or vices when hypermoralized (e.g. racism toward Middle Easterners after 9/11). From this perspective, the fact that group cohesion and the hypermoralization of group cohesion co-occur is perhaps to be expected.
- Ravi Iyer
A Difference Between Democrats and Republicans – The Effects of Empathy on Political Interest
Below is a simple little graph of yourmorals.org data that I thought would be worth posting. Interest in politics is positively correlated with empathic concern in liberals/democrats and not in conservatives/republicans. It's somewhat self-evident in posts like this, or debates about the role of empathy from either the Democratic or Republican side.
Can this difference be used to the advantage of the Democratic party? Perhaps inspiring empathy in the electorate will motivate liberals to be politically active more than conservatives? and how exactly might one appeal to empathy? Perhaps by pushing poverty reduction programs, increases in foreign non-military aid, or putting a human face on health care reform?
btw, empathic concern is measured using Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index which contains questions like "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me." The next obvious step is to manipulate empathy and see if it has any impact on political behavior, or at least on the intention to engage in political behavior, as there is only so much that can be inferred from this correlation. Still, it's a promising research lead with interesting potential applications toward inspiring political interest.
- Ravi Iyer
Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
I was browsing CNN today and I decided to expand my moral imagination by watching Glenn Beck Speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. I was surprised how reasonable his message sounded to me, as I my previous impression of him was not good.
I believe that people should be able to get what they deserve too. I don't begrudge small businesses who succeed through hard work. I appreciate hard work as much as anyone. Does that mean that I should switch parties?
None of my posts would be complete without a graph, so I decided to look at some of our data on justice and fairness from yourmorals.org. Below is a graph of how various ideologies would view changing a hypothetical allocation of a reward from ambiguous toward the use of some specific type of justice or fairness.
Equity concerns giving more to those who contribute more. Equality concerns making the distribution more equal. Need concerns giving more to those who need it more. Open information concerns making sure everyone understands the process. Equal voice concerns allowing everyone an equal say in how to make the allocation. Retribution concerns giving less reward to those who violate some relevant group norm. Higher bars indicate that making a change toward that principle is more desirable.
What did I learn from this graph? Liberals do care more about equality and need than conservatives and conservatives do care more about equity and retribution. However, both liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) find an equity based distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company instituted a way of quantifying each employee's contributions, and it then adjusted the bonuses up or down accordingly") to be more desirable to an equal distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company divided the money such that each employee received an equal share.") This somewhat captures how I feel about things. I care about people getting what they deserve, but perhaps I am willing to consider equality and need in some situations as well.
Below is another graph using different participants, which concerns endorsement of abstract principles rather than hypothetical allocations and again, we see that the proportionality principle (e.g. "Whether or not those who contribute more are rewarded more") is deemed most important.
The take home message for Democrats? Stop letting Republicans define policy as choices between equity and equality/need. Nobody is trying to stop small businesses from succeeding...few people want a completely equal society.
Rather, let's see if people are really getting what they deserve in life. Do investment bankers really deserve million dollar bonuses? I don't think they necessarily produce much more than many, and obviously in the past few years, their collective output has been negative. So I see taxing banks to recoup losses as a matter of equity/proportionality, not equality.
How about the working poor who work hard and then are bankrupted by a single medical expense? What percentage of Americans actually make enough money to pay for a chronic illness? We all need health care that doesn't go away when we get really sick and need to use it. So maybe health care isn't a right, but how can one argue with making sure the working poor and children all have health care? Does Glenn Beck's father, who owned a bakery and therefore would have immense trouble buying health care without a large risk pool, deserve health care less than those investment bankers who drove the economy into the ground with high risk derivatives? If not, maybe we should do something about that.
Democrats should welcome a debate about how to really give people what they deserve in life.
- Ravi Iyer