A skeptical friend sent me an interesting link this week. The headline makes the bold claim that a study suggests that people who like black coffee are more likely to be psychopaths. I’m sure you can guess my initial reaction: skepticism.

So let’s look at the research.

First, the choice of singling out black coffee is journalistic bullshit. The research is not so specific. Instead, the researchers categorized foods by taste and included coffee as a member of the “bitter” group.

Now, I think that’s a questionable categorization. Some coffee, especially strong coffee, can be bitter. However, when I hear or read the word “coffee”, I don’t think “bitter”. And that is directly related to the biggest problem with the study itself: the method was survey, not taste test. In other words, we don’t know if people truly preferred the tastes themselves. Self-reports of such things are problematic, especially when the food categorizations themselves are arguable.

What the researchers did: an online survey asked participants to rate their preferences for a list of food items, then to complete a number of scales such as personality inventories and measures of malevolent traits. What they found: a strong correlation of preference for sweet foods with agreeableness. Slightly weaker, but robust correlations of preference for bitter foods with psychopathy and “everyday sadism”.

So, in general, what they found is that agreeable people tend to prefer sweet foods more and bitter foods less than disagreeable people. And those who score higher on measures of psychopathy and sadism tend to prefer bitter foods more than those who score low on those measures.

The study itself isn’t bad and the findings are interesting, but it’s very, very limited due to the method.

There are a number of possible explanations for these findings. Taste preferences come from both genetics (our taste buds vary) and habits (what we eat shapes what we like to eat). Likewise, personality traits are like most human traits in that they are partly determined by genetics. It is possible that the small correlation seen here is at least partly a clustering of genetic traits.

It’s also possible that years of munching on radishes makes people cranky and disagreeable.

It’s also possible that rating foods primed people to associate those foods with personality traits (e.g., the authors note the stereotype of bitter foods being associated with bitter people), thereby affecting the outcomes of some personality measures–something the study authors fully acknowledge.

The authors also admit to another limitation of the self-report measure:

…in preferring bitter tasting foods more than less sadistic people, everyday sadists may perceive them as positive due to their potential to cause distaste [as opposed to their own preference], that is, to cause a negative experience in other people.

However, the findings are consistent with other research. For example, one study linked PROP sensitivity (Supertasters) with unpleasant emotional reactions to film clips depicting aggression. PROP Supertasters have a genetic predisposition to experience phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) as bitter, whereas most people find it tasteless. It is a bit of a stretch to conclude from this finding that aversion to bitterness is associated with stronger empathy, but it’s an interesting finding nonetheless.

Still, I have to wonder–and pardon my language here, but–who the fuck cares?

It’s not as if this research suggests that you should avoid sharing a table with someone at Starbucks simply because they order the Sumatra blend instead of a pumpkin spice latte or a mocha cappuccino. It just doesn’t.

Sagioglou C, & Greitemeyer T (2015). Individual differences in bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits. Appetite, 96, 299-308 PMID: 26431683

When I saw the Washington Post headline “Internet searches are convincing us we’re smarter than we really are” in my Facebook feed yesterday, I was only a little bit skeptical. Most readers are probably aware that I have been studying self-esteem and narcissism for some time, particularly the aspect of overconfidence. Over confidence prevents learning and interferes with rationality, so it is important to understand its sources.

It seems to be a rare moment these days when I can point to a mainstream media piece reporting a finding from the field of psychology without mistakes ranging from a minor distortion of the implications to facts so incorrect that they’ve reported the opposite of what was found. I’m thankful to say that this time the Washington Post’s piece is quite good, although the headline doesn’t quite fit.

The research is not flawless, but the authors address most of the limitations by running a series of experiments. The overall large sample size and a number of controls and checks compensate for the fact that it was conducted online. It’s not perfect, but few studies in this field are. It is just one series of experiments, so any conclusions drawn should be tentative.

All of that said, the findings are interesting. What they found: people who were asked to use the internet to find or confirm their answers to a series of questions gave, on average, higher ratings of their ability to answer questions in a different domain than those who were asked not to consult the internet. This finding held across experiments and the researchers were able to ferret out some details, including:

• This was an increase in confidence among internet users, not a decrease in confidence among those not allowed to consult the internet.
• The increase was not due to access to information or even the use of the internet to get the information. It was the act of searching for that information that caused the increase in confidence.
• Participants were not considering their access to knowledge in their responses about ability, but their knowledge. They appeared to be conflating shared knowledge (the internet) with personal knowledge (what’s in their heads).

In one experiment, half of the participants were asked to search for specific web pages (e.g., a scientificamerican.com page about dimples on golf balls) while the other half received the information on those pages. This shows that the difference in confidence cannot be attributed to the knowledge itself, but the act of using the internet to search for it. In another, participants did not rate their ability to answer the subsequent questions, but instead predicted their brain activity while doing so. We cannot attribute the difference in confidence levels to assumptions that access to information would be available. People really believe they possess the knowledge.

Overconfidence is one characteristic in a list of those associated with narcissism, so it is useful to look at these findings in relation to narcissism in general, especially considering the historical context. The world wide web’s emergence is relatively recent. In The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge and Campbell document a sharp increase in narcissism over the past 30-40 years. Although they attribute that increase to changes in culture, tracing it back to a best-selling self-help book called I’m Okay, You’re Okay that was popular in the early 1970s, cultural trends of entitlement can be seen decades earlier in “you deserve it” advertising approaches. Certainly the self-esteem movement of the 80s and 90s moved it along. So far, the internet’s blame has been limited to the vanity aspect of narcissism. There has been quite a bit of research suggesting that social media users are, on average, more narcissistic than others, but such correlations are confounded by factors of age, gender, and others difficult to tease out. It would also be extremely difficult to determine the direction of cause.

The experiments are limited to internet search and the specific characteristic of overconfidence, but they do not suffer from the same problems of confounding as those related to social media use. These findings suggest that searching the internet actually causes an increase in one’s self-assessed knowledge. Perhaps people think of the internet as an extension of the self.

The bottom line, I think, is that overconfidence clearly has many sources. Given this research, it appears that we can count the existence of Google™ among them.

Fisher M, Goddu MK, & Keil FC (2015). Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 25822461

By now, you’ve either wondered just what color the dress is or you’re living under a rock in the middle of a deserted island with no internet and the first thing you chose to read when you were back online is my blog. Weird, but awesome.

The last few days have seen a flurry of education about our visual system and I won’t duplicate too many efforts here. But I would like to talk a bit about the illusion and the way the internet exploded with pseudoexplanations and other BS as a result. I’m going to spend a little more time on what this illusion does NOT mean.

First, the dress…

http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/ 112073818575/guys-please-help-me-is-this-dress-white-and

When the ugly white and gold dress first appeared in my feed last Thursday, I had the same reaction that I’m sure many of you did: this is a hoax.

I quickly determined that it was indeed real, immediately saw additional pictures of the blue and black dress, both in an online store and on the woman who wore it (BTW, as ugly as that dress is, she manages to pull it off), and started to think about what was happening. I fully accepted that the dress was actually blue and black, but I couldn’t perceive it that way in that photograph to save my life. It was fascinating!

At this point I should note that I have studied color vision and color perception since I was an undergrad. My first real experiment involved asking people to rate the facial expressions of expressionless faces drawn on backgrounds of different colors. The purpose of the study was to test the claims made… well, everywhere… that colors affect people’s emotions. I continued that line of research for more than 10 years and won several awards for it. My master’s thesis was titled “The Physiological Effects of Color on Human Emotion”. A summary of many years’ worth of findings is available here.

I also taught cognitive psychology (a portion of which involves sensation and perception) for several years and supervised a number of student experiments about color, some with very interesting results. What I am trying to say is that I have a good handle on what is causing the illusion. I was still mesmerized.

The illusion itself is not what I find so fascinating. What’s fascinating, and what caused it to blow up the internet, are the individual differences. Most polls only offered two possibilities, with about 70% claiming to see it as white and gold, 30% as blue and black, but I counted about 1 in 5 in my Facebook feed who said that it was sometimes white/gold and sometimes blue/black. I can recreate very similar illusions quickly using a basic drawing program, but illusions tend to be fairly universal. While we see some differences across cultures, mostly due to differing environments, I don’t think that I have ever seen people in the same household, looking at the same picture, perceive an image so differently and in a stable manner. Yet my youngest son saw only blue and black while the rest of the house saw white and gold. When it comes to ambiguous figures, such as the famous figure/ground image below, most people can perceive the image either way and reverse it at will. Of those who said that they sometimes saw the dress as white/gold and sometimes as blue/black, nobody I talked to said that they could switch the perception at will.

Do you see faces or a vase?

On Friday, post after post tumbled through my Facebook feed. The first posts I saw picked apart the image, extracting information about the color of the pixels. Well, that stuff is mostly irrelevant. Perception is much, much more than the simple sensation of the color of light hitting our eyes. The color of the dress in the photograph does not tell us the color of the dress (which we know from other sources) or why some people perceive the dress’s color as it is (blue/black) and some so differently (white/gold). Both, btw, are considered illusions since neither matches the pixels in the image, but nobody should perceive the dress as the pixel colors because they wouldn’t perceive it that way in person. Confused yet?

Next came all of the explanations. Some claimed to show us how we could perceive the dress differently, replete with not-quite-right explanations for why it’s happening. Yet I have met nobody who could force a different perception, at least not for more than a fraction of a second, much less using the methods suggested. Those doctored images just looked like doctored images to me. They did not change my perception that the dress was white with gold lace. Many gave some pretty bad explanations (those who saw blue/black do not have better color constancy). Some suggested that one’s sleep cycle could explain individual differences (it can’t). This guy says:

Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part.

And that, my friends, is how a little bit of education can lead to dangerous things like deciding not to vaccinate your children. He has either skimmed Wikipedia’s entry on color theory or was half asleep through a half hour lecture in an intro psych class and now thinks he understands how eyes work.

And as of this writing that bit of BS has been RTed over eight thousand times.

My favorite bogus explanation: Mood. The color you see depends on your mood. That’s the one my kids heard the most during school that day.

And the jokes. Oh, the jokes. Some, like XKCD, were 10 kinds of awesome (make sure you read the alt text, and if you don’t get it, read this post). Others were not so funny.

Then, late Friday evening, after I’d taken a bit of a break from “the dress”, someone sent me this video and all hell broke loose. The video content isn’t relevant; it’s just a fun look at how to correct the photo. What is relevant is that suddenly the dress was BLUE AND BLACK. Not brown, not like an altered photo of a white and gold dress, but blue and black–the same royal blue that is in the other photos. I thought maybe the image in the video had been altered, so I pulled up a blog post with the original picture and it looked the same. I Googled “what color is this dress” and looked at the images. I saw a sea of blue/black dresses with one white/gold one in the corner. It looked to me like someone had replaced most of the pictures on the internet!

Since then the dress color switches for me. I usually see it as white with gold lace, but now and again it’s deep blue with black lace.

And I know why, yet I am helpless to control it.

And over the weekend, I started to see about-the-dress-here’s-some-more-BS-about-color-vision posts. Business Insider, which is becoming more and more like Buzzfeed every day, posted a number of pieces of varying quality. One of them had the unfortunate title, “No one could see the color blue until modern times”. The piece itself isn’t bad. It speculates about the effect that naming colors has on perceiving colors. There is some evidence that cultures which fail to distinguish between blue and green perceive fewer distinct hues in that area of the spectrum, but to extract from that the idea that human beings didn’t “see” blue until they had a name for it? Well, that’s a preposterous leap that’s actually a bit silly. Why would they name something that didn’t exist?

Another which has been picking up steam in the last couple of days is this incredibly bad piece on linkedin which makes the bold claim that 25% of people have a 4th cone that allows them to “see colors as they are”. It’s a very strange thing to claim–to “see colors as they are”, since colors are simply the brain’s interpretation of wavelengths of light. In that sense, colors aren’t. They kind of don’t exist. The article talks about tetrachromacy, which is a real phenomenon, but the author basically made up the rest. I cannot fully explain color vision (or vision in general) in a blog post, but I can tell you this is wrong. Also, tetrachromacy is extremely rare, at least in functional form, and her “test” is totally bogus. The author calls herself “Prof. Diana Derval, expert in neuromarketing”. I know that it’s trendy to slap “neuro” onto everything, but really? Neuromarketing? Ugh. I first saw and responded to the piece on Facebook Sunday night and by Monday afternoon Snopes had covered it (they did a nice job, too, but they usually do), but that didn’t keep it from going viral.

So what is going on with the dress?

Well, several pieces have explained it with relative accuracy. I said I wouldn’t duplicate those efforts and I won’t. I will instead recommend that you read/watch more than one of those links, take a look at the additional illusions that I created below, and internalize this perfect summation:

“It’s an illusion,” said [David] Whitney. “But everything is an illusion.”

And that’s the long and short of it. What we “see” is never, ever exactly what’s out there in the world. It’s our brain’s best interpretation of what’s out there. We are amazingly good at it, but it’s not perfect and perfection is not possible.

The grey bar in the middle is a solid color. We only perceive it as darker on one side than the other because of contrast with the surrounding color.

Although one bird appears to be more orange than the other, they are identical.

Let me cut to the chase: No.

Full disclosure: I own a Fitbit Flex™. I haven’t worn it in months, but I do like the thing. It’s a long, boring, irrelevant story why I’m not wearing it, so I won’t get into that. Just know that I am sincere when I say that I like my Fitbit.

I don’t think my Fitbit is telling me exactly how far I’ve walked or how many calories I’ve burned. I do think that it gives me a ballpark figure that can be used to compare one day to other days. I don’t think that it’s telling me exactly when I am sleeping, either, but the information about how restless I am some nights compared to others is interesting and even sometimes useful.

I also like that it buzzes on my wrist to wake me up in the morning.

Recording some basic information about my daily activity, giving me a reason to record what I eat, waking me up in the morning, and reminding me to get off my ass. These are not big goals and perhaps I don’t need a $100 gadget to accomplish them, but is the device bullshit?

Mother Jones sure seems to think so. Last week the site posted a piece titled “Science Says Your Fitbit is a Joke“. When I searched for more reports on the topic I found a Jezebel piece titled “Your Fitbit is Bullshit, Says Science“, and one on RYOT titled “Science Says Your Fit Bit’s Full of It“.

Since I don’t particularly trust any of these sites as a source of accurately-interpreted science news, especially those which appear to be trying a little too hard to find clever, edgy headlines, I was skeptical.

The Jezebel piece is easily dismissed as simply lazy blogging. The author links to Mother Jones, paraphrasing one of the main points of the piece (bold mine):

Mother Jones points to a new study showing that your iPhone or device of choice does just a good a job[sic], if not a better one, at doing things like tracking calories and measuring activity.

Except that’s not what the Mother Jones piece said. It reads:

But, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the apps on your smartphone do the job just as well, or even better—at least in terms of measuring your steps and your calories.

So Jezebel incorrectly paraphrased Mother Jones. And they aren’t the only ones. RYOT wrote this:

A new study came out showing that iPhone apps and other (much cheaper) devices do a better job than the bands at tracking your activity, steps, and even calories.

Even assuming Mother Jones is correct, these paraphrases are not. Walking is, of course, an activity, but it’s only one type of activity. Mother Jones was correct in noting that smartphones can do the work of pedometers, but Jezebel and RYOT are overstepping (pun intended). Wearables such as the Fitbit Flex™ and Jawbone Up™ can track your activity while you are swimming, bowling, or doing jumping jacks. Can your smart phone do that? Well, I suppose if you’re holding it in your hand, it can, but who does that? Also, if you don’t sleep with your smart phone strapped to your body, it cannot track your activity during sleep.

But is Mother Jones right? Might smartphones do a better job? Well, let’s find out.

Although Jezebel linked to the original source, a press release by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, it does not appear that the author read the press release, nor did the author of the RYOT piece, who linked only to the press release (failing to even give Mother Jones credit for the thoughts expressed). There is no reference to smart phones doing a better job at anything, much less a list of activities. The only study which is discussed is the one described in the Mother Jones piece, which examined the accuracy of several devices at counting steps and found all to be similar.

But let’s get to the bottom line. Is it a fair assessment that science says these devices are bullshit? A Joke? Full of it?

First, the study discussed involved counting steps. That’s it. There is absolutely no comparison of different devices in regard to tracking calories and no examination of other activity or reports such as distance walked. The study was fairly well-designed–something that does not come across in the reporting. Although there were only 14 participants, each wore every device at the same time and each walked both 500- and 1500-step trials twice.

Here are the results from the 500-step trials:

The results of the 1500-step trials are nearly identical. Now, it appears that the Fitbit One™ and the Fitbit Zip™ are spot-on, and the fact that the error bars are practically non-existent is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the authors failed to do any sort of statistical analysis at all. Instead, they stated these results:

We found that many smartphone applications and wearable devices were accurate for tracking step counts. Data from smartphones were only slightly different than observed step counts, but could be higher or lower.Wearable devices differed more and 1 device reported step counts more than 20% lower than observed.

Given the error bars for the rest of the devices, including the Fitbit Flex™, I’d believe that most did not differ from one another significantly, with the possible exception of the Nike Fuelband™, which apparently sucks. However, there are two very clear winners, with the Digi-Walker™ close behind. A simple statistical analysis would have confirmed this.

Regardless, it is very clear that smartphones do not outperform most of the wearables. What is really in question is whether people use the devices and use them to their advantage. This may be questionable, but it has hardly been decided by science and it has certainly not been decided in favor of tossing one’s Fitbit™. The JAMA article concludes:

Increased physical activity facilitated by these devices could lead to clinical benefits not realized by low adoption of pedometers. Our findings may help reinforce individuals’ trust in using smartphone applications and wearable devices to track health behaviors, which could have important implications for strategies to improve population health.

So there’s hope that devices, whether they are wearables or just smart phones, will translate to improved health for at least some users.

To be fair to Mother Jones, their piece is much more fleshed out than the other two, covering more than this one study. In my opinion, the Jezebel and RYOT pieces simply plagiarized Mother Jones. However, I saw nothing in the rest of the piece to warrant such harsh criticism of wearables.

Now after writing most of this I came across this wonderful piece on Mashable that was posted yesterday. I could have simply linked to it, saying “read this” because it’s pretty much what I have said, right down to a comparison to the game of “telephone” that I just edited out of this post.

In the end, I have to agree with its author, Chris Taylor, who opens with:

There are poorly designed scientific studies, and then there’s poor reporting on scientific studies by journalists who should know better.

I usually cringe when I read a comment by a skeptic arguing that “correlation does not prove causation”. Of course, it’s true that correlation does not prove causation. It’s even true that correlation does not always imply causation. There are many great examples of spurious correlations which demonstrate clearly just how silly it is to extrapolate cause from correlation. And the problem is not trivial. Headlines in popular press articles alone can be very damaging as most people simply accept them as true.

BUT…

I cringe because I am afraid that this oversimplification leads people to think that correlation plays no role in causal inference (inferring that X causes Y). It does. In fact, it plays a very important role that skeptics should be just as aware of as the sound bite “correlation does not imply causation”. And that is that causation cannot be logically inferred in the absence of a correlation.

What’s more, that sound bite does nothing to educate people about how and when we should infer cause. So let’s take a look at both problems.

Causation From Correlation

A classic example used to illustrate the problem is the very real relationship between ice cream sales and violent crime. As you can see, when sales of ice cream go up, violent crime increases.

So, should we stop selling ice cream? Of course not.

There are basically two problems with drawing causal conclusions from a correlation:

1. There may very well be a causal relationship, but the causal arrow is unclear. For example, it could be that eating ice cream makes people violent (“sugar high” is a myth, but perhaps it’s milk allergies?). Or, it could be that people get hungry after they’ve just held up a liquor store.
2. There is another variable involved. Most people eventually realize that the correlation of ice cream sales and violent crime is spurious. In other words, it is the result of a common cause–temperature. People are much more likely to eat ice cream in the summer, when it’s warm outside, and they are much more likely to commit violent crimes for various reasons.

Causes

So if correlation doesn’t prove causation, what does?

Well, nothing does. We can’t “prove” and that’s not really what science tries to do. But that’s a point for a different day.

So when can we reasonably infer that X causes Y? It is difficult to reach the bar of causal inference, but the requirements for doing so are actually pretty simple.

First, let’s define “cause” and “effect”*:

Cause
“…that which makes any other thing, either simple idea, substance or mode, begin to be…”

Effect
“…that, which had its beginning from some other thing…”

Confused? Well, let’s simplify it a bit:

A cause is a condition under which an effect occurs.

An effect is the difference between what happened (or is) and what would have happened (or been) if the cause was not present.

I should note here that an “effect” is always a comparison of at least two things. Everything is relative; that’s often a difficult concept to wrap one’s brain around when we are talking about specific examples, but it’s important.

So, let me repeat: a cause is a condition under which an effect occurs.

Causal conditions can be:

• necessary
• sufficient
• necessary AND sufficient
• neither necessary nor sufficient

A condition is necessary if the effect cannot occur without the condition. For example:

To receive credit for a course, you must be enrolled in the course.

In this case, the condition is necessary, but not sufficient. You don’t get credit if you are not enrolled, but enrollment does not guarantee credit (you usually need a passing grade, too).

A condition is sufficient if the effect always occurs when the condition is met. For example:

Decapitation results in death (in humans, at least).

In this case, the condition is sufficient, but not necessary. Nobody can survive without their head, but death can occur in many ways.

For a condition to be both necessary and sufficient, the effect must always occur when the condition is met and it must never occur unless the condition is met. For example:

To win the lottery, you must present a ticket with the correct numbers to the appropriate authorities.

Or this:

To be a parent, you must have a child.

The last one is the tricky one. A cause can be neither necessary nor sufficient, but if it is neither, it must meet another requirement: it must be a non-redundant part of a sufficient condition. This would make it an:

Insufficient
Non-redundant
Unnecessary part of a
Sufficient condition

Or an INUS condition.

The truth is that most causes in the world are INUS conditions. In the social sciences, we deal mostly with INUS conditions.

The big question is how do we identify them?

Well, let’s look at the question of what might cause a forest fire. Some possible causes:

• A lit match tossed from a car
• A lightening strike
• A smoldering campfire

None of these are necessary conditions for a forest fire to start. Science assumes that all effects have causes, so we assume that something occurs to start a fire, but it does not need to be something described here. But all are INUS conditions.

Taking just one as an example, a lit match from a car is not necessary for a forest fire to start since fires can start a number of ways, nor is it sufficient. If tossing a lit match out a car window always ended with forest fires, we’d have a lot more forest fires. There are other conditions which must be met: the match must remain hot long enough to start combustion, there must be oxygen to feed it, and the weather and leaves must be dry enough to keep from smothering it. If those things are met, then the condition as a whole is sufficient. But it must also be non-redundant. If something else in the mix does the job of the match, then the match cannot be considered a cause. Well, oxygen alone cannot start a fire, nor can dry weather, therefore the lit match is a non-redundant part of a sufficient condition.

Another good example of an INUS condition is the presence of a condom to prevent pregnancy. The condom is not necessary to prevent pregnancy; there are many ways. The presence of the condom does not guarantee prevention (effectiveness is ~98% and efficacy even lower). Efficacy is lower than effectiveness, primarily due to compliance. In other words, you have to use the condom right to prevent pregnancy, and even then there are ways the condom can fail. However, when everything is perfect, it prevents pregnancy. Condoms are an unnecessary, insufficient, but non-redundant part of a sufficient condition in the prevention of pregnancy.

So how can we identify an INUS condition?

Causal Inference

In essence, to logically infer that X caused Y, we need to meet three requirements:

1. We must know that X preceded Y. It is not possible for a cause to follow or even coincide with an effect. It must come before it, even if it is fractions of a second.
2. X must covary with Y. In other words, Y must be more likely to occur when X occurs than when X does not occur.
3. The relationship between X and Y is free from confounding. What this means is that no other variable also covaries with X when #1 and #2 are met.

*Definitions adapted from Shadish, Cook, & Campbell’s book “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference”

Let me explain each by using some examples:

EXAMPLE 1: A lit match (A) causes a forest fire (B) – YES!

1. A precedes B. – MEETS

• Lit match occurs before forest fire.

2. A covaries with B. – MEETS

• A forest fire is more likely to occur when there is a lit match than when there is no match.

3. The relationship between A and B is free from confounding.  – MEETS

• The lit match does not correlate with other factors, such as oxygen being present or leaves being dry.
• Oxygen is present whether the match is there or not.
• The leaves are dry whether the match is there or not.

Let’s look at one of the headlines I saw a few years ago on the New York Times website, claiming that good grades in high school mean better health in adulthood. Without going into detail about the study, let’s look at the criteria:

EXAMPLE 2: High grades in high school (A) cause better health in adulthood (B) – NO.

1. A precedes B. – MEETS

• High school grades occur before health in adulthood is measured.

2. A covaries with B. – MEETS

• Grades were positively correlated with adult health measures.

3. The relationship between A and B is free from confounding. – FAILS

• On average, persons with higher high school grades have more access to resources than those with lower grades.
• On average, persons with higher high school grades are more intelligent than those with lower grades.
• On average, persons with higher high school grades are more motivated than those with lower grades.

(and probably a lot more)

All of these things are more plausible explanations for the correlation than “grades are good for your health”.

But notice that correlation is a requirement to infer cause, always. What I see all too often are detailed, lengthy explanations for things that are not correlated. An excellent example is “Lunar Fever”. I’ve seen lots of explanations for why emergency rooms and police stations are busier during a full moon, from very good (e.g., the light from the moon makes it more likely that people will be out and about) to looney (the human body is full of water, which is affected the way the tides are affected). The first explanation might be the most parsimonious one, but it’s still useless because THERE IS NO CORRELATION. Studies are pretty clear that E.R.s and police stations are not busier during a full moon than other times of the month.

EXAMPLE 3: The full moon (A) causes people to act nutty (B) – NO.

1. A precedes B. – MEETS

• Behavior is measured after the full moon appears. 

2. A covaries with B. – FAILS

• There is no correlation between behavior and moon phases.

3. The relationship between A and B is free from confounding.  – PROBABLY MEETS

• There might be variables which are correlated with the full moon that have nothing to do with the moon phase, but it’s not really a relevant question if #2 isn’t met.

So how do we meet these requirements?

Ÿ#1: To establish temporal precedence, we conduct experiments.

#3: We eliminate confounding variables by isolating the hypothesized cause – the only difference between one condition and another is the causal variable. To do this we need:

• a Counterfactual (equivalent comparison/placebo)
• Random assignment (explained below)
• Controls to avoid other confounds such as expectation (blind, double-blind, randomized order)

ŸIf, after measuring the hypothesized effect, the outcome establishes covariation (#2), the only explanation for that covariation is cause.

By the way, we eliminate hypothesized causes in the same manner, by setting up conditions in which the only explanation for the outcome is that A does not cause B.

EXAMPLE 4: Test the hypothesis that acupuncture (A) reduces pain (B). 

1. We conduct an experiment comparing acupuncture to doing nothing. In doing this, we’ve established temporal precedence because the treatment precedes the measure of pain.
2. We find that when we compare the pain of controls to those who have received acupuncture, the former has more pain than the latter, establishing a correlation.
3. However, are there confounding variables? Yes, there are. The reduction in pain could be caused by anything that covaries with acupuncture, including the fear of being stuck with needles and the expectation that the treatment will work.

What we have in this case is an improper counterfactual. Participants were not blind to the treatment or its expected effects. Also, the body probably releases endorphins in response to being stuck with needles, so while they might claim that acupuncture reduces pain, the explanation isn’t where or how the needles were placed.

When we change the counterfactual by comparing acupuncture to sham acupuncture, the correlation disappears. Those who receive the sham treatment are in no more pain than those who received the “real” treatment.

When no randomly-assigned, double-blind, placebo-controlled experiments are possible…

One “control” that is absolutely necessary in any experiment to eliminate confounding variables is random assignment to treatment groups. In other words, the people who receive, say, the sham treatment in the acupuncture example are assigned to that treatment by a random process (like rolling a die). We do this because if we used any criterion other than randomness to assign, that criterion could explain any differences (or lack thereof) in outcomes. For example, if I put all of the people with headache pain in one condition and all of the people with back pain in the other, the outcome could be explained by the fact that these people have different medical conditions.

This is a problem for a lot of research, especially in education and health. For example, we cannot ethically assign people to smoke, randomly or otherwise, so how can we eliminate confounding variables? People who choose to smoke are different from people who do not in many, many ways, and any of those ways can explain higher rates of cancer. But I don’t know anyone who would deny that smoking causes cancer.

So what happens when we cannot do the kinds of “true” experiments that control for all possible confounds? Do we give up?

Of course not.

In these cases, we rely on evidence converging from different approaches to the question until the odds tell us that it is highly, highly unlikely that the correlation is spurious.

When it comes to smoking causing cancer, we first establish a correlation with temporal precedence. That’s easy. Smokers are much more likely to get cancer later in life than nonsmokers. But, since we cannot eliminate all confounding variables, we must conduct many different studies, eliminating hypothesized explanations. We know, for example, that smoking causes cancer in rats (that has its own ethical problems, but it’s been done). We can’t be sure that the effects are the same in humans, but when we reconcile that with other studies in humans that control for variables such as access to health care and amount of exercise, the probability that smoking does not cause cancer is reduced. The more studies and the more hypotheses eliminated, the more likely the remaining hypothesis (that smoking causes cancer) is the correct one.

I invite you to think about how we know that vaccines do not cause autism. While we cannot (ethically) randomly assign some kids to get vaccines while others do not, the answer becomes clear when approached from many different angles.

So I hope I haven’t tied your brain in knots with this over-simplified, yet lengthy explanation of causal inference. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart as a methodologist and one that I think skeptics should get a handle on if at all possible.

I felt compelled to write about eyewitness memory by a recent blog entry which I feel paints a misleading picture of the nature of memory and the (un)reliability of eyewitness memory.

Other skeptics have written about the subject and coverage has ranged from the pretty good to not so great. This blog post is somewhere in between. I have a great deal of respect for Vandy Beth Glenn and her knowledge on a wide range of topics, but I feel the need to address some issues in this piece that I think are important.

My first problem is that the inaccuracy of memory is overstated.

We don’t remember very well events that really happened to us.

Vandy Beth asks:

[S]hould eyewitness testimony be declared inadmissible evidence in court?… Eyewitness testimony has … brought many infamous individuals to account for their crimes. However, we shouldn’t doubt that at least as many innocents and patsies have been wrongly made to pay as well… We shouldn’t accept a faulty system just because it works more than 50 percent of the time.

How does one get the impression that eyewitness memory is so bad and so hopelessly unreliable that a reasonable solution is to toss it out all together? The literature on the subject of eyewitness memory (let alone memory generally) is vast and complex. Watching a presentation on false memory by Loftus and visiting the Innocence Project website, does not give one the requisite knowledge to make informed policy recommendations. Though I’m sure this is not the extent of Glenn’s knowledge on the subject, these are the only sources cited.

Daniel Loxton has argued that when skeptics write about things outside of their domain of expertise, they must exercise due diligence.

Skeptics solicit … trust. We make the implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise that we are able to provide the nuanced, objective, evidence-based facts. That combination of stated commitment to science, limited qualifications, and weighty ethical responsibilities … place a very high due diligence burden upon skeptics.

When Ed Clint, co-founder of the Skeptic Ink Blog network, and blogger at Incredulous, posted this article, I voiced concern regarding the exaggerated negative portrayal of memory, however both he and Vandy Beth seemed to believe this view was justified.

Ed, essentially began a lengthy explanation about eyewitness memory errors, not quite addressing my criticism and then side-stepping it altogether, saying that it doesn’t matter how many have been wrongfully convicted …

We can’t know if eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions because most such convictions will never be found out, and the pattern of which get found out could be biased in one or other direction. The evidence suggests that it is, and that’s as far as we can go.

But is that really important here? If anything beats this cause, it is prosecutor misconduct, and reform is needed there, too. But prosecutor misconduct is, at least, a known problem that juries and judges are mindful of (or should be). Are they equally mindful of the problem of unreliability of eyewitnesses? Or do they assume it is correct, if the witness is firm and sure on the stand? I’d guess the latter is the case, and in the most dire need of being addressed. This is true whether eyewitness misidentification is the #1 cause or #10 cause of wrongful convictions. I, frankly, don’t give a fuck what number it is. Steve Titus should not be dead.

Vandy Beth appealed to Elizabeth Loftus’s authority and reputation.

I admit I didn’t do my own research…I relied on my sources, like Elizabeth Loftus and the Innocence Project, to be themselves reliable. If you think they’re wrong, and can back it up, I’d be glad to learn about it.

I am confident that both Ed and Vandy Beth will recognize that I mean no disrespect in the criticism that follows. I consider Ed a friend and, having just met Vandy Beth, hope to one day call her a friend as well.

Yes, Steve Titus (and the many other exonerated individuals whose stories are detailed on the Innocence Project webpage) should not have been convicted. It very rightfully violates our sense of justice that these wrongful convictions have occurred and we feel outrage. This may motivate us to want to offer solutions to the problem that would prevent miscarriages of justice like this from occurring again and give us the sense that we have a good grasp of the nature of memory. But, it is not that simple.

We cannot know the truth in each criminal case, thus preventing us from being able to estimate the true incidence of wrongful convictions as a result of eyewitness memory. However, there is no data of which I am aware that suggests that the legal system gets it wrong in half of all cases as suggested by the text quoted above. A database of 317 exonerations since 1989 tells us that errors occur and that they are not exactly uncommon. But perspective is important, lest we erroneously conclude that the justice system is as broken as we mistakenly perceive our memories to be… According to published statistics from the Department of Justice, in 2010 alone, cases were filed against 91,047 defendants. Ninety-three percent, 81,934, of defendants were convicted. And of those convictions, 97 percent, or 79,260, pled guilty.

Agreement from more than one witness is not much assurance of accuracy, either. Approximately 36% of the first 250 Innocence Project exoneration cases involved the testimony of more than one witness (Garrett, 2011). If all witnesses are subjected to the same biased lineup procedure, it’s not inconceivable that they may all choose the innocent suspect. And proposing to eliminate eyewitness testimony altogether is an absurd “toss the baby out with the bathwater” sort of solution.

It is tempting to assume that we might get rid of problematic eyewitness memory and instead rely on physical evidence, such as DNA evidence, because we perceive it to be more reliable. One problem with this approach is that in 90 to 95% of cases DNA testing is not an available option (Innocence Project, 2014). Furthermore, physical evidence is not immune to error or bias; it can be contaminated or it can be interpreted incorrectly (Murphy & Thompson, 2010; Thompson, 2006). Adherence to established standards and procedures for the collection, storage, testing, and interpretation of that evidence helps minimize the incidence of errors. Eyewitness memory can be thought of as analogous to trace evidence. It is evidence that law enforcement must collect from the mind of the witness while exercising the utmost care not to contaminate it.

Memory researchers would have long ago been done with the context of the legal system when it was first established that eyewitness memory can be inaccurate and unreliable. But the literature does not support such a negative view of memory. If our memories were so poor we would have serious problems functioning in day to day to life and it would not be possible for the layperson to live blissfully unaware of the potential frailty of memory. Elizabeth Loftus’s work on false memory shows us that false memories are possible (e.g. a quarter of participants reported a false event in the famous “Lost in a Mall” study, Loftus & Pickrell, 1995) but not that false memories are so pervasive that we should never trust our memories. “We make no claims about the percentage of people who might be able to be misled in this way, only that these cases provide existence proof for the phenomenon of false memory formation” (Loftus, Coan, & Pickrell, 1996; p.207)

Long before Loftus even began her work on the misinformation effect and later false memories, Hugo Munsterberg (1908) had noted the potential for inaccuracy in eyewitness memory. We could have written off eyewitnesses as hopeless then and moved on to other problems. Instead, Munsterberg and eyewitness researchers since have spent decades trying to identify what factors influence accuracy in an effort to offer more practical solutions to minimize inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony and identifications while also contributing to a better understanding of the nature of memory as a whole.

While confidence, detail, and vividness do not predict accuracy, eyewitness researchers have been exploring the influence of countless other variables as well. We have identified some factors related to accuracy which we cannot control (termed estimator variables, see Wells, 1978) but are nonetheless helpful to be aware of because they signal which instances of eyewitness memory are more error-prone, such as, poor lighting, short exposure to culprit, stress, witness intoxication, the presence of a weapon, mismatch between witness and culprit race, etc. Other factors which can influence accuracy and are under the control of the legal system (termed system variables) have also been explored: whether witnesses are shown books of mug shots, making composite sketches, the specific lineup instructions given, the composition of the lineup such as the number of persons included and how the fillers were selected, the format in which the lineup is presented (e.g. simultaneously or sequentially), blind administration, etc. All of these variables are at play and this is what forms the complexity that requires greater familiarity with the primary research.

Regarding eyewitness identification research specifically Wells & Loftus (2003) say “The primary lesson of the eyewitness identification work is that mistaken identification rates can be very high under certain conditions and many of these conditions could actually be avoided by the use of scientific procedures for lineups”, p.150. This research has helped to inform important guidelines and recommendations for law enforcement agencies; a committee of experts assembled by The Justice Department published a set of guidelines for law enforcement (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999). Increasingly more jurisdictions (state and local) are adopting reforms aimed at improving the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness identifications and testimony; for example, approximately 32% of law enforcement agencies have switched to a sequential lineup procedure (Police Executive Research Forum, 2013).

Memory is certainly malleable and it is reconstructive, but this does not mean that eyewitness testimony can never be trusted or be valuable in court. It can … IF certain conditions are met.

REFERENCES

Garrett, B. (2011). Convicting the Innocent. Harvard University Press.

The Innocence Project (2014). Unreliable or Improper Forensic Science, retrieved from: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Unreliable-Limited-Science.php

Loftus, E.F., Coan, J.A. & Pickrell, J.E. (1996) Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In L. M. Reder (Ed.) Implicit memory and metacognition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 195-220.

Loftus, E., & Pickrell, J. (1995). The Formation of False Memories Psychiatric Annals, 25 (12), 720-725 DOI: 10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07

Munsterberg, H. (1908). On the Witness Stand.

Murphy, E., & Thompson, W. C. (2010). Understanding potential errors and fallacies in forensic DNA statistics: An amicus brief in McDaniel v. Brown Criminal Law Bulletin, 46 (4), 709-757.

Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), & United States of America. (2013). National Survey of Eyewitness Identification Procedures in Law Enforcement Agencies.

Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence. (1999). Eyewitness Evidence: A guide for Law Enforcement. Washington, DC: National
Institute of Justice.

Thompson, W.C. (2006). Tarnish on the “gold standard”: Understanding recent problems in forensic DNA testing The Champion, 30 (1), 10-16

Wells, G. (1978). Applied eyewitness-testimony research: System variables and estimator variables. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 (12), 1546-1557 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.36.12.1546

Wells, G. L. & Loftus, E.F. (2003). Eyewitness memory for people and events. A. M. Goldstein (Ed.) Handbook of Psychology. Vol 11 Forensic Psychology (I.B. Weiner, Editor-in-Chief). New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp 149-160

A piece by Joseph Brean that I read recently displayed the headline New hope for narcissists: New Canadian study suggests there may be a cure for self-centred[sic] grandiosity after all. My first thought was “I doubt it.”

The press release for this study is pretty accurate and, although I have some criticisms of the study, the journal article doesn’t make the dubious claims found in this piece. However, I will say that it’s a little hard to tell if Brean is fully responsible because it is unclear whether he interviewed the scientists who wrote the article himself. Even if he did, it’s hard to know what that interview looked like. I’ve been on the other side of such interviews and usually the end product is a gross misrepresentation of what I’ve said.

This piece also brought to mind the issue that free and easy access to original sources has some serious trade-offs. Laypersons often misinterpret studies (hell, scientists often do) and in communities such as skepticism, some of those laypersons speak those misinterpretations on stages with an air of authority. But more importantly, some calling themselves science writers misunderstand, cherry-pick, overgeneralize, over-extrapolate, and otherwise misrepresent the implications of findings, especially those in the social sciences. With the vast majority of the public (including a lot of scientists short on time and resources) getting most of their science news from non-scientists and trusting those sources, I find this to be a bit of a problem.

So let’s take a look at the statements made in this piece and what I think is wrong with them, given the original study. The National Post piece introduces the study this way:

…narcissist is usually described as the product of a long and complicated psychological development. Like hypochondriacs, narcissists are made, not born.

New research out of Wilfrid Laurier University, however, suggests narcissism might be simpler than that. More than just a moral failing or psychiatric symptom, narcissism might reflect a basic mechanical failure of the brain’s natural tendency to mimic.

Um, no. No, the research does not suggest that, nor do I believe that descriptions of narcissism imply that it’s all about parenting. Most disorders, including personality disorders, appear to be the result of a complex interplay of environment and genetics.

But where the author really goes off track is in the next sentence:

Intriguingly, it also suggests that narcissism’s opposite, empathy, might even improve with practice.

Um, what?

When I read the press release, I saw nothing in it that even hints at practice effects, so either Brean (the author) actually read (and misinterpreted) the article or he gleaned this bad information from the interview to which he refers. Or perhaps he just made it up because he thought he understood the research. Who knows?

Then there’s a quote of the lead author. Obhi, which reads, “Narcissists don’t imitate automatically.”

If that’s a quote, I hope it was taken out of context, because it reads as a statement of fact, a given, when it is merely one possible explanation for the findings, and one that does not appear in the journal article. In fact, it contradicts the findings and even the title of the journal article: Automatic Imitation is Reduced in Narcissists. This is a poorly-chosen title for at least two reasons that I will discuss below.

So what can we reasonably take from this study? Well, let me first summarize the study.

Obhi, Hogeveen, Giocomin, and Jordon conducted a rather simple study with a final sample of 24 subjects. The subjects performed a task which involved responding to a cue by lifting one of two fingers off of the keyboard. The cues were embedded in images of hands in which one of the fingers is raised. For some trials, the cue matched the position of the hand in the picture (e.g., the picture showed the index finger raised and the cue instructed the subject to raise their index finger) and in some trials the cue was incongruent with the picture (e.g.,  the picture showed the index finger raised and the cue instructed the subject to raise their middle finger).

This task is a paradigm that many readers will be familiar with, even if you don’t recognize it immediately. It is similar to the Stroop Task, the Simon Task, and the task used in Implicit Attribution/Association Tests.

Essentially, the task involves suppressing an automatic response–going against one’s initial, automatic response to a stimulus. For example, the classic Stroop Task involves identifying the color of ink in which a word is printed. The trick is that the words the participant is looking at name various colors. Nearly everyone will take longer to name or respond to the ink color when it is different from the word than when the word is the color of the ink.

The Stroop Test. It takes longer to identify the ink color when a color word does not match the ink color (bottom) than when it does (top).

This well-established effect demonstrates how automatic reading can be. Automatic behaviors are those which require few cognitive resources and are sometimes performed without much awareness. Automatic responses are often very difficult to “shut off”. When we attempt to perform a similar task which competes, the automatic response must be actively suppressed. This is what happens in the Stroop Task; we must suppress the response of reading the word in order to identify its ink color. The differences in reaction time between color-congruent and color-incongruent trials are a good measure of how much the automatic task interferes with the primary task.

The Simon Task and Implicit Attribution tests take advantage of something we call mirror responses. Research has confirmed that we see someone do something (e.g., as simple as raising a hand), our brains automatically respond with activity which is very similar to what we might see if we were performing the task ourselves. This response has many advantages, including facilitating joint attention. Joint attention is demonstrated when you move your eyes to see what someone else is looking at.

Many automatic tasks such as reading are acquired through lots and lots of practice, but not all. Some, like joint attention, are probably innate reflexes. Mirror responses are probably a mixture of both.

Obhi and colleagues also asked participants to complete a short version of the NPI [Narcissistic Personality Inventory] and divided them into two groups (“high” and “low”) based on their NPI scores. They found greater differences in reaction times (RTs) between congruent and incongruent trials among those in the low narcissism group than among those in the high narcissism group. In other words, participants who scored higher in narcissism demonstrated less interference than those who scored low in narcissism. Even more pronounced, however, were the differences in accuracy. Those high in narcissism erred in about 5.3% of the trials while the error rate for those low in narcissism was more than 12%.

As an aside, remember that quote about narcissists not imitating automatically? Well, the findings suggest otherwise. There certainly was an interference effect for both groups. Those high in narcissism did indeed respond more quickly and with fewer errors when the cues matched the images. Furthermore, the title of the article was Automatic Imitation is Reduced in Narcissists, yet they did not study narcissists. Subjects were not selected for their NPI scores and no diagnoses were recorded. The participants in the “high” group were simply those whose NPI scores were in the top half of the subjects tested.

The authors discussed possible explanations for these findings thoroughly. Essentially, the best explanation they give is that those high in narcissism more easily suppress mirror responses. This could be due to greater self-regulation or it could be that mirror responses are not as automatic. I cannot account for the decision to title the paper with one of those explanations, except that they dismissed the self-regulation hypothesis with a non sequitur.

What I can say for certain is that the findings do not suggest that narcissism is a product of poor mirror responses. They also do not suggest that practicing such responses, which are largely learned implicitly, would make them more automatic or make the individual more empathetic and less narcissistic. Neither of these hypotheses is impossible, but neither is likely, either.

The authors also acknowledged many of the study’s limitations, including the relatively small sample size, but my reaction to this study remains mixed. On the one hand, I applaud these researchers because although it seems that this area should have been well-studied, it isn’t. On the other hand, this is a very simple study to execute and the paper has four authors, yet they completely missed the opportunity to ensure strong findings by putting in just a little bit more work.

The study would be improved leaps and bounds by running a larger sample and testing whether self-regulation or motivation were factors. The latter can be easily accomplished by including a condition with non-social context (e.g., arrows instead of fingers). Furthermore, they could have pre-screened the subject pool and recruited only those who scored exceptionally high or exceptionally low in narcissism, thus raising their power tremendously.

That said, these findings are consistent with what we know about narcissism. A key feature of narcissism is reduced empathy and it stands to reason that reactions to the actions of others would be more automatic in those with greater empathy.

In the discussion section of every study is a laundry list of possible explanations and implications for the study’s findings, but most of these are speculation and usually labeled quite clearly as such by the authors. This does not seem to stop laypersons and “science writers” from accepting the speculations they find most interesting or desirable.

In this case, the implications of the study for a behavioral test of empathy are much more plausible than those for treatment of narcissism.

h/t Tim Farley of WhatsTheHarm.net and Skeptools.

Obhi SS, Hogeveen J, Giacomin M, & Jordan CH (2013). Automatic Imitation Is Reduced in Narcissists. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance PMID: 23957308

While I was on vacation, I missed a post by Sharon Hill on Skeptical Inquirer online. She recently re-shared the piece on Facebook, so I had an opportunity to give it a good read. Sharon’s pieces are usually filled with thoughtful reminders to reign in arrogance and do more than just tolerate other view points, embrace them and learn from them. I highly recommend following her regular columns there or at her blog, Doubtful News.

Is science hazardous?

This recent piece seems to be in response to the current discussion about the limits (and lack thereof) of science, such as this piece by Steven Pinker. However, it lacks the nuance I’ve seen in criticisms of Pinker’s piece.

Hill’s piece seems to define scientism, science, and several other terms somewhat vaguely, oversimplifying the issue and overcomplicating it at the same time. She begins the argument by claiming, if I may use an analogy, that there are many different ways to skin a cat, but then goes on to support that claim by pointing out that there are questions about whether the cat should be skinned, how much the process will cost, and whether the cat has a name. Answering these questions and skinning the cat are different tasks with different goals.

But it is this claim that I take the most issue with:

People who advocate fanatical reliance on science—where all competing methods of gaining knowledge are illegitimate—are practicing scientism.

This definition may very well put me in the category of “practicing scientism”, but it depends on what she means by “illegitimate”. While I recognize that personal knowledge can come from any number of methods and sources, respecting personal knowledge is not a reasonable stance when it comes to enacting policies and making choices which involve other people. To make the best choices, we need to rely on shared knowledge.

And I certainly do believe that empirical methods are necessary to gain genuine, reliable information about the world. In fact, that’s a basic assumption of science (more on that later).

The “just apply science” plan is an overly simplistic solution that not everyone will automatically buy into. There are other, also valid ways of evaluating problems. All the world’s problems cannot be solved by throwing science at it. At least not now (probably never).

This is a confusing statement with twists and turns.

First, whether or not “everyone will automatically buy into” a solution is no measure of the solution’s value.

Second, the statement about evaluating problems conflates the different tasks and goals associated with solving problems. Science, philosophy, and the humanities are different animals. To complicate matters, science incorporates philosophy and the humanities incorporate some scientific thinking. None of these things can tell us what to value, either.

For example, philosophy studies problems; it doesn’t solve them. Philosophy can only provide a way of thinking, not the information that one is to think about. Science, for that matter, doesn’t solve problems, either. It seeks and provides information and explanation. Technology solves problems, but it doesn’t do so just by thinking about them. Technology uses the products of science and scientific thinking (which includes products of philosophy) to solve problems.

So, this seems like a lot of apples and oranges and bananas to me.

The piece also contains more than a few straw men. For example:

For a start, scientism has utility problems. If we need to justify everything with empirical evidence, and then justify that evidence with evidence, and so on, not only do we get bogged down in minutiae, we end up in a scientistic loop which we can’t resolve. There must be a point where we accept a premise as a given – that reality is real, that we aren’t being fooled by a devious creator.

This is not only a straw man, it’s a misleading. Science does accept several premises as givens. In most college-level introductory science textbooks you can find these listed as “canons” or “assumptions”. For example, science assumes that the universe is deterministic, that all events have natural causes. Without this assumption, science can tell us nothing about the world with confidence because anything we observe might be explained by the supernatural.

So in a sense, the argument supports “scientism”.

Hill goes on to admonish over-enthusiasm for science because it “can mask the attention that should be paid to human social issues that are too complex…”, yet her examples are not issues too complex for science, but questions of policy which involve more than just information (e.g., one example involves the ethical question of whether to carry a fetus to full term knowing that it will be born with a debilitating condition). Science informs values, it doesn’t dictate them. However, values can’t answer those questions by themselves any more than science can.

Look at our laws. Many are informed by science (cigarette restrictions, driving after alcohol consumption, environmental regulations) but are tempered by other human interests such as personal pleasures, social norms and economic considerations.

Again, this seems a bit of a straw man. While there are those who claim that science can dictate values (which are embedded in each of those “human interests”), that is not a typical view and does not seem to be the view that Hill is railing against.

Science cannot tell us what we value or what we should value, but without scientifically-derived information and thought processes, we will fail to make choices and policies which promote those values.

Here is an example from my recent talks at TAM2013 and Dragon*Con, as covered in What Intelligence Tests Miss by Keith Stanovich:

In a study by Ubel, participants were asked to allocate 100 livers to 200 children who needed transplants. The children were presented in two groups: A and B. As you can imagine, most participants divided the livers equally, giving half to one group and half to another.

However, when the participants were told that the children in group A had an estimated 80% average chance of surviving the surgery, while the children in group B had only an estimated 20% average chance, the allocations varied much more. About one quarter of the participants gave all of the livers to group A, one quarter gave half to A and half to B, and half of the participants distributed the livers in a manner in between these two choices (i.e., one quarter gave 75 of the livers to group A and 25 to group B).

When asked why they gave livers to group B, participants justified their actions by saying things like “needy people deserve transplants, whatever their chance of survival.” This, of course, ignores the real question, which is how to allocate a limited number of livers to save the most lives. It tells us nothing about why the individual chose one child over another.

Participants in another study were given the same task except that the recipients were not grouped. Instead, they listed the recipients individually, ranked by the individual chance of survival. If the justifications were true, we would expect at least 25% of the participants to allocate the livers to every other child, or somewhat randomly down the list. Instead, participants had no problem allocating all of the livers to the top 100 children on the list.

The difference between the answers when the children are grouped and the answers when they are listed individually is called a “Framing Effect”. The way the problem is framed determines how a majority of the participants respond to it.

Now, science can’t tell us what’s “right” in this situation, but it can sure tell us how to meet our goals once we have decided what those goals are.

Let’s assume that our goal is to maximize the number of children who will be saved. Rational thought tells us that, given that goal and the choice of the two groups, we should give all of the livers to group A (science tells us that those are the children with the best chance for survival). The difference between that choice and the equal distribution is an expected 30 dead children.

It should be obvious from this example that considering our values and goals is not enough to make the best choices. We need good information and good thought processes to make the kinds of decisions that allow us to meet our goals.

One more statement that got under my skin:

When we overly indulge our science bias in informing decisions, such as in the realm of policy, the risk of making an unpopular guidance or rule increases.

Wait a minute. Is our goal to put the most popular policies in place or the best policies? For my part, I want policies that are best for society and the individuals within it. I don’t care if they are popular or not.

Science is not perfect or infallible, even when implemented correctly. Our knowledge is incomplete, which means that we will make a lot of mistakes when we take actions based on that limited knowledge. However, it will always beat human judgments in the long run, allowing us to make the best decisions and take the best actions toward our goals.

Works cited:

Stanovich, Keith E. (2009). What intelligence tests miss: The psychology of rational thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ubel, P.A. (2000). Pricing life: Why it’s time for health care rationing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Why do skeptics criticize Jenny McCarthy and Bill Maher?

Because they publicly trash mainstream science despite lacking the expertise to properly analyze methodology and draw different conclusions (how scientists do it).

Science uses peer review (not just “review”) to weed out bad studies, test the robustness of findings, and discuss appropriate conclusions. Peers are people who work in the same field – experts.

Scientists in related fields (or even completely different fields) are sometimes able to criticize the methodology of a given study, but big-picture stuff usually requires specific expertise. Non-scientist experts in a field of science are rare. VERY rare.

Pseudoscience and fraud are not science, so please don’t drag out the straw men and accuse me of claiming that only scientists can be good skeptics. I’m not. Think about the role that magicians have played in exposing so-called psychics, for example – the right tool for the job.

So, what am I trying to say here? Well, I’m trying to say that skeptics should criticize people who talk out of their asses about science on a public stage.

And I’m trying to say that skeptics should criticize it rather than do it themselves.

A skeptic, like anyone else, is entitled to make a mistake or two, even a big one. However, making a habit out of spouting one’s uneducated/under-educated opinion (or regurgitating one’s own interpretation of a cherry-picked opinion of an expert) from a stage is not what good skeptics do; it’s what people like McCarthy and Maher do. It shouldn’t be tolerated, much less encouraged.

But this has been discussed before:

http://www.skepticblog.org/2009/12/22/what-if-anything-can-skeptics-say-about-science/
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1338-need-advice-ask-an-expert.html
http://icbseverywhere.com/blog/2010/12/know-what-you-know/

For the record, there is NOTHING morally or ethically wrong with voicing one’s uneducated (or under-educated) opinion during private discussion or even in a public forum of equal footing. That’s called “discussion”.

This applies to both criticism and promotion, by the way.

Sometimes it is obvious where the line between pseudoscience and science is and sometimes it’s not. SkeptiCamps are a great place to get one’s feet wet and learn where those lines are, but I must warn you that even at these casual events, research-by-Google isn’t usually well-accepted. Do your homework if you’re planning to speak about pseudoscience.

And if you’re planning to talk about science, be very, very careful. Remember that reading a book or two, even if written by experts in the field, does not equate to the 10,000 hours of study required to gain expertise.

A note on why I wrote this:

There has been a lot of discussion about speaker lists in recent months.

I do not condone ultimatums or demands–attempts to bully organizations into punishing people you don’t like because you feel entitled to control. However, I have serious concerns about the quality of speakers at skeptic events and strongly believe that public discussion of the problems in general is needed.

These concerns are not new, but they have continued to grow and currently weigh very heavily on my mind.

So, sorry to be all judgmental and everything, but this stuff matters.

Responses to requests, demands, and criticism in the blogosphere in recent months has prompted a great deal of discussion, most of it terribly unproductive. In fact, most of it has been downright silly – a childish back-and-forth which, to an outsider, might appear to be violent agreement. In other words, camps do not appear to disagree, in general, about foundational issues, yet the bloodshed continues. Need I provide examples? I don’t think so*.

I hate to harp on a point (I really do), but oversimplification and shallow treatment of issues appears to be at the source of so much of the animosity that I think that rational discussion could be had if a short checklist were followed which included keeping one’s mind open to the possibility the other person is not evil simply because they criticized something or failed to submit to demands.

I am short on time and not prepared to discuss “Atheism Plus” in detail at the moment, but the discussion of it provides an excellent example or two that I think provide some insight into how discussions devolve into battles.

First, there is a slippery slope involved which is accelerated by crowd behavior and by unproductive reactions to criticism. We may, for example, start with a civil discussion about whether or not gender disparity in local groups can be attributed to a barrage of unwanted sexual attention women may receive at meet-ups. A number of views will be expressed, some with comments about their own experiences:

Person A: “I don’t do that.”

Person B: “I’ve been groped at meet-ups and it made me feel powerless and alone.”

Person C: “That’s never happened to me.”

Person D: “I think we should ban people who do that kind of thing.”

Person E: “So, I can’t ask a woman out at a meet-up?”

Person F: “Wait, I go to meet-ups to meet men and I like it when they grab me. I can take care of myself and I don’t want that behavior banned.”

Person G: “I’m not going to attend meet-ups anymore if people think that groping is okay.”

…and so on.

None of these views should shut down discussion. The refusal to concede that one’s own view may not be “right” is what turns discussions like these into battles of wills. Note that the original talking point was simple and there are small steps away from it as people talk rather than listen or make assumptions about what was said rather than ask for clarification. Those small steps add up. One day, a woman casually asks that men put a little more thought into when and how they proposition women and a few months later dozens of people are painting everyone who doesn’t support a rather specific call to action as a misogynist or ‘gender traitor’ while some of those called misogynists and gender traitors have dismissed the original problem altogether. This helps no one.

Those promoting “A+” have painted critics with a broad brush; we are “haters” who are “against social justice”. A post by Greta Christina on the issue of inclusiveness provides some insight:

An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheist women… and also be inclusive of people who publicly call women ugly, fat, sluts, whores, cunts, and worse; who persistently harass them; who deliberately invade their privacy and make their personal information public; and/or who routinely threaten them with grisly violence, rape, and death.

An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheists of color… and also be inclusive of people who think people of color stay in religion because they’re just not good at critical thinking, who blame crime on dark-skinned immigrants, who think victims of racial profiling deserved it because they looked like thugs, and/or who tell people of color, “You’re pretty smart for a…”.

In addition to holding up the reprehensible behavior of a few trolls as representative of the community as a whole, these statements are so full of subtext that they cry out for scrutiny. There are clearly false dichotomies buried in there as many of the proponents of A+ and many of their readers have expressed the desire not simply exclude the asshats who “publicly call women ugly” or “who deliberately invade their privacy”, but also anyone who dares to question whether such things have actually happened in given situations.

As has been said many times, we should be charitable when someone’s meaning is not entirely clear – give them the benefit of the doubt when we have little evidence of malice. This requires empathy. It requires us to resist defensive reactions and reconsider our views when we realize that we have failed in that regard.

Greta also notes that to provide a safe space for people of color, they must exclude “people who think people of color stay in religion because they’re just not good at critical thinking”. I found this particularly interesting in light of the fact that the belief that everyone with faith in a deity of some sort is “not good at critical thinking” is a widespread view among atheists (and skeptics, unfortunately). PZ Myers, one of the founders/owners of FreeThoughtBlogs said  this of the religious in a debate a few months ago (one I urge you all to watch: http://youtu.be/ZsqqFpWh7m8 ): “There’s something wrong with their braaains!”

It may be that Greta meant to refer to those who claim that people of color are generally poor critical thinkers and this explains lower rates of atheism. However, the math does not add up. Try constructing a syllogism from these statements. The proportion of believers in the population of people of color is higher than the general population. Believers are poor critical thinkers. Therefore…

So, who is right? Well, neither is right. Or correct.

Out of curiousity, I watched a recording of a few people discussing “Atheism+” [A+]. Much of this particular discussion involved defending the approach of A+ and suggesting that critics are somehow against social justice in general. I won’t got through the entire discussion; many of the arguments were straw men, which are not relevant. However, many were based on unsupported assertions (assumptions) and that is directly relevant.

One of the participants, Debbie Goddard (of CFI On Campus) attempted to address real criticisms rather than discuss those straw men and from her comments the disagreements became more clear. At one point, Stephanie Zvan criticized skeptics for ignoring evidence, noting that “We have mountains of evidence that ‘treating people equally’ is not treating people equally.” Debbie clarified this by expressing her belief that “color-blindness” is wrong.

That is when I realized that what they are talking about here are legitimate and rational disagreements over how to approach social injustices.

Legitimate and rational disagreements. Meaning that neither view is so well-supported that they can claim to know what’s best.

Yet people attempting to discuss these things rationally have been vilified and views have polarized. And the people who were speaking in this recording were doing so with such certainty that they were “right” that they failed to see that legitimate and rational disagreement was even possible.

And this has happened with many on both sides of the issue with most of the ‘dust ups’ in the community. I think a lot of the problem lies in treating these topics as simple when, in fact, they are not. As Ron Lindsay stated in a recent post on A+:

Social justice is great. After all, who’s against social justice? It’s when one starts to fill in the details that disagreements arise.

And it’s the details that matter here.

There are some who argue that, because minorities are at a disadvantage due to a history of oppression, they require special protection in order to reach equality. There are others who argue that such protection is both unnecessary and racist/sexist/___ist in and of itself. And there is a full spectrum of positions in the grey area in between these two views. 

What Stephanie claimed is that science tells us that the first view is “right”. Her certainty in that conclusion is clear from the video. Yet, she is wrong – sort of.

There are three details that we should consider. I am going to ignore one which comes from that grey area because it is extremely complicated, and that is the question of whether equal opportunity or equal outcome should be the goal. In other words, what “equality” means [If you claim that the answer to that question is no-brainer, you are making my point]. The other two major issues are the evidence for the claim and the evidence which suggests the best courses of action to correct injustices, which is the whole reason for asking the question in the first place.

We all know that stereotypes exist and that racism, sexism, any-ism, are alive and well in our society. And there is plenty of evidence that implicit biases exist. In fact, they are impossible to eliminate. We favor people whom we view as “like us” in many different ways. Depending on one’s definition of “ingroup” in a given context, we favor those who fit it. However, we are capable of making choices and taking actions which render such favor powerless. We are capable of overcoming these biases just as we are capable of overcoming other cognitive biases. Not eliminating, overcoming.

So science tells us that we have implicit biases which require a special effort on our part to overcome. Stephanie is right, no?

Not so fast.

Science may be able to tell us if affirmative action has contributed to the huge reductions in racism and related outcomes which have occurred in recent decades, but it cannot tell us if affirmative action is a good idea today simply based on the knowledge that we need to make a conscious effort to overcome biases. Even the first question is difficult to assess confidently, but I suspect it can be done and I suspect that the answer will be, “Yes. Yes, it has.”

But this is an extremely complex issue and it is further complicated by the fact that we all have dog in the race. We all care about it because we all identify with one or more of those man made categories we sum up as the variable “race”.

My personal views about special protection are like most of my political views (this IS a political issue, after all): very centrist. I believe that we need to pay attention to things like gender parity if we are interested in decreasing it. I am not convinced, however, that quotas are entirely appropriate in all situations. And if you think that science has the answer to whether my views are “correct”, I challenge you to prove so.

And here’s where I say that in my view, both Stephanie and Debbie are wrong. What I won’t do is reject their views outright and wonder why they can’t just see the truth that I think is written in “mountains of evidence”. I won’t do that because, although I am confident in my own conclusions, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about this very complex, emotionally-charged issue.

Why I think they are wrong:

The goal is not to place blame for disparities, but to reduce them. If the major source of disparity is discrimination, then the act of discriminating needs to be reduced. Science does provide us with information which is useful in efforts to reduce interracial and other inter-group tensions. What the evidence suggests is not the multiculturalism approach that Debbie believes is best, but what she rejected: color-blindness (and gender-blindness, etc.). Or perhaps a better term would be color-not-noticing, but that doesn’t roll of the tongue very well.

We all have multiple identities. I am a woman, a scientist, an educator, a skeptic, an activist, a blogger, etc. There are always people with whom I share some identities and not others. When the context focuses on a specific value or identity, those with whom I share that value or identity are part of my ingroup. Ingroup/outgroup classification changes with context, but some are more flexible than others.

Decades of applied research has failed to demonstrate that interracial tension in schools can be reduced by increasing discussions of cultural differences and celebrating diversity. This should not be surprising given the mountains of research that Stephanie mentioned about ingroup/outgroup mentality. Attention to differences increases that tension.

What reduces the tension? Focus on similarities, seeing people as part of the ingroup and ignoring the differences which are present in a given context. Reducing the amount of “othering” we engage in. The best way to do that is to focus on commonalities. For example, the work that Chris Stedman, author of a soon-to-be-release book entitled Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious  does has been criticized by PZ Myers and others because it brings people of different religious affiliations (and none) together to work toward common prosocial goals. Just yesterday a group of interfaith activists (as they call themselves) spent the day picking up trash on a beach to make it safer and cleaner.

Am I suggesting that people suppress parts of themselves about which they are proud? Let me make this clear: Hell, no. 

If that is what you’re taking from this post, you need to look outside of yourself and try to see the bigger picture. What I am saying is that my gender identity should have zero bearing on whether I am hired for a job or asked to speak at a conference or viewed as a sexual object in a professional context. Does that mean that I should not be proud to be a woman? Of course not.

Interfaith work does not suggest that people ‘check their religion at the door’, either. The work benefits more than just the likelihood that they will accomplish common goals.  Working together exposes each participant to people with whom they both share ideology and differ in ideology. Focus on the common ideology reduces the tensions caused by differences in other views and that reduction spreads to the differences themselves.

For example, a 2009 Gallop Poll result which most will find unsurprising is that people are much, much less likely to oppose same-sex marriage if they know someone who is gay/lesbian. There are certainly problems with drawing causal conclusions from such a study, but the effect is large and the findings are consistent with many lines of research which converge.

As I stated before, this is a complex issue. You may completely disagree with my argument, but to dismiss it altogether would be ludicrous, not to mention closed-minded and, dare I say it?, anti-intellectual.

I prefer to be recognized for my work rather than patronized because I am female. You may not see the issues the way I do, but calling me a misogynist for that disagreement is not only outrageous, it’s insulting and wrong.

When you speak with such certainty about how right and moral you are in relation to your critics without considering the possibility that you may be missing a nuance or two, you cannot hold any sort of moral or intellectual high ground.

My purpose here is not to argue about the topic of social justice, but to make the point that certainty, particularly about moral questions, is something we all need to be careful about. Too much (more than what is warranted) and it gets in the way of rational discussion. Too much and it divides people when no division is necessary. Too much and it is counterproductive. Too much and it is not confidence; it’s arrogance.

NOTE: Before you start commenting that Atheism Plus is about “allowing these discussions” because nobody else will, let me remind you that nobody ever said that discussions about evidence were outside the scope of Skepticism (one of the primary reasons put forward for the founding of A+) just because they relate to issues of social justice. In fact, quite the opposite is true and I think that this post is a good example of how science and skepticism can be applied to those areas.

*For those not following the ‘rationalist’ blogosphere, I apologize for my lack of links to the incidents I mentioned here. Frankly, there are too many and it’s difficult to know where to start or to choose one link which clearly demonstrates what’s happened. It seems to me that one does not need the background information to understand the example, but I cannot tell for certain.