Hipster scientists postulate existence of ‘ironic matter’

Senior hipsters have announced that they believe it likely that the universe is filled with massive quantities of ‘ironic matter’ on the analogy of the ‘dark matter’ hypothesized by physicists.

Dark matter has not yet been directly observed, because it neither emits nor absorbs light. That’s why it’s called ‘dark’ matter. The behavior and distribution of objects that can be observed points to large and unexplained gravitational forces acting on what we can see. As that gurning science pin-up Brain Cocks puts it:

“If we only refer to the matter that we can see, then we just have no idea why that matter is carrying on the way it is. It’s fucking weird is what it is. So, we have a choice. We can accept that the universe is very weird, or we can propose that it only seems weird because there is some very weird and difficult to detect stuff in it, and that we physicists could find this stuff if we got handed trillions and trillions of dollars to build insane toys. And it’s not just the expensive toys. We need money to fly around getting hammered at conferences, and money for a tiny number of female post-docs who we cluster around like vultures near the bloated rotting remains of a bull hippo that’s been dead for five-days. Obviously we thought about it really carefully. Can we have our money now?”

Figure 1: Physicists say that the large-scale distribution
of observable matter makes no fucking sense at all, unless
there is a whole lot of dark matter distributed in blobs
like those in this image nicked from Wikipedia. They also
say ‘we need more money’.

In a little more detail, the speculation favored by the physicists is that there are very large quantities of this dark matter in the universe, engaging only in gravitational interaction, and perhaps the ‘weak’ force, but not electromagnetically. A leading hypothesis in the field is that dark matter consists largely of ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particles’, or WIMPs. If this hypothesis is correct, then substantial numbers of WIMPS must pass through every part of the earth almost every second. A number of (very expensive) experiments to test this hypothesis are underway, but WIMPS of the required sort have yet to be observed.

It is also well known that hipsters neither emit nor absorb anything genuinely useful. Indeed do not spontaneously interact with anything recognized as interesting or entertaining by the vast majority of people. Even so, the observed behavior of hipsters demands an explanation, just like the observed behavior of galaxies. Why the fatuous obsessions with retro hats, poorly functioning energy inefficient and sometimes unsafe, albeit visibly non-contemporary vehicles, unsuccessful bands and movies without plots? Why devote so much effort to sourcing and wearing T-shirts with badly rendered logos of defunct products and quotations from movies nobody ever watched? Why, when the world is so exciting and scary, pay so little coherent attention to things that matter to everyone else, and work so hard to cultivate a disposition of bored indifference?

Figure 2: This also makes no fucking
sense. None. At all. Holy living fuck.Picture taken from here. 

‘Ironic matter’, the hipster scientists argue, would answer all of these questions. The brainwave came while a hipster affected complete indifference to a room-mate’s explanation of his ‘horrifyingly mainstream’ physics PhD. As the resolutely unsmiling hipster put it, “the physics problem was that the ‘dark matter’ theory said there should be loads of WIMPs, but the WIMPs had not been observed. And then it hit me. If you look at hipsters, it’s clear that there are loads and loads of observable wimps. But the mainstream just can’t ‘get’ our interests and priorities.’ Later, while listening to a bootleg cassette of some staggeringly obscure Amish ‘shun core’, his thinking went a little further:

“The physics guys could explain what visible matter does if they could detect the WIMPs. And the mainstream can detect the hipster wimps, it just can’t explain them. But what if there is a whole lot of invisible ironic matter, which only hipsters respond to and interact with?”

The analogy with physics and hipsters breaks down about here. Mainstream, and dorky, physicists work very hard to figure out how to detect dark matter if it does exist, and spend a lot of time trying to secure massive funding for massive experimental tools to conduct the tests. (And getting hammered at conferences, etc.) Hipsters say that even if ironic matter could be observed, the mainstream just wouldn’t understand it. Some Hipsters speculate that that the act very of observing ironic matter would bring it into the mainstream and thereby eliminate its ironic properties. And nothing would more clearly establish that ironic matter was no longer performing its function than a massive research grant. As one hipster “all that funding shows that physics is the opposite of hip.  They should call what they’re looking for ‘dork matter’.”

Testosterone shifts the balance between sensitivity for punishment and reward in healthy young women

Ah, men. We just keep on finding out ways that we're crazy, on average, as compared to women. I've got a little pile of papers on male idiocy, and I'm going to try to write up a couple of them. This one is first for a bunch of reasons, among them:

(1) The journal it is in has a very cool name: Psychoneuroendocrinology. I really would like a paper in that on my CV.

(2) It reports a pretty cool experiment.

(3) I'd already read it.

In a nutshell, this team found that administration of testosterone made healthy young women demonstrably less risk averse and punishment sensitive. Here, as usual, is the full abstract:

Animal research has demonstrated reductions in punishment sensitivity and enhanced reward dependency after testosterone administration. In humans, elevated levels of testosterone have been associated with violent and antisocial behavior. Interestingly, extreme forms of violent and antisocial behavior can be observed in the psychopath. Moreover, it has been argued that reduced punishment sensitivity and heightened reward dependency are crucially involved in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathy. A task that has been proven to be capable of simulating punishment-reward contingencies is the IOWA gambling task. Decisions to choose from decks of cards become motivated by punishment and reward schedules inherent in the task. Importantly, clinical and subclinical psychopaths demonstrate a risky, disadvantageous pattern of decision-making in the task, indicating motivational imbalance (insensitivity for punishment and enhanced reward dependency). Here, in a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design (n = 12), whether a single administration of testosterone would shift the motivational balance between the sensitivity for punishment and reward towards this tendency to choose disadvantageously was investigated. As hypothesized, subjects showed a more disadvantageous pattern of decision-making after testosterone compared to placebo administration. These findings not only provide the first direct evidence for the effects of testosterone on punishment-reward contingencies in humans, but they also give further insights into the hypothetical link between testosterone and psychopathy.

The paper does pretty much what it says on the box. The experiment was partly occasioned by existing work showing that testosterone affected punishment sensitivity and aggression in animals, which in turn suggests that it may play a role in psychopathy. Jack van Honk (of Utrecht University) and fellow researchers rounded up "12 healthy young women ranging in age from 20 to 25 years" and established absence of psychopathology and substance abuse by interview. Testing was conducted during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, "because of the low and stable levels of sex hormones during this period". Each subject received a single dose (0.5mg) of testosterone or a placebo, with the testosterone administration leading to a "10-fold increase in total testosterone". This dosage had been previously established to lead to "significantly elevated physiological responsiveness (vaginal pulse amplitude) in healthy young women after about 4 hours".

Yes, that's right: vaginal pulse amplitude. In case you were wondering (and who wouldn't be) this is the "only physiological response known to possess a
non-habitual nature, thus allowing multiple measures throughout the day". This non-habituating response also justified the 4 hour delay from administration to the other assessment. They don't say how they measured it.

Besides the physiological measure just described, subjects completed a mood assessment by self-report, and the IOWA gambling task. In this task subjects select cards from four decks paying hypothetical rewards and giving (sometimes) hypothetical penalties. Subjects get to chose 100 cards. Two decks are net advantageous, two net disadvantageous, but the 'bad' decks give larger payouts sometimes. Many take it that persistence with the 'bad' decks indicates low sensitivity to punishment or risk. Scoring usually (and here) divides the 100 draws into 5 blocks (of 20) and reflects the relative fraction of good and bad choices for the block.

I've got my doubts about the IOWA task, of which more shortly. That aside, the team found the following:

So more testosterone makes you madder, in the sense of sticking with high payout courses of action that on balance are net punishers, as compared to those less hopped up on the knacker water. Bear in mind that the 10-fold increase left the healthy young women with less of the stuff than the average male of the same age.

I should also mention that van Honk's group has done a pile of other work on testosterone and decision making. If there's a useful web page listing the work, it's been cunningly hidden, but I'm going to blog more of it, and citation indexes will help find it too.

Getting back to my worries about the IOWA task, I don't see why there are four decks instead of two (although this may not matter). I don't see why the instrument combines so many things in such a dirty way, since there are varying magnitudes and frequencies of both rewards and punishments, and the contingencies are unknown to the subject. As a good behaviourist I want to know why individual assessments for sensitivity to delay, and risk, and punishment aren't performed separately and rigorously, and why there isn't something real at stake for the subjects (whose choices don't in fact lead to real reward or punishment). There are some odd results with the IOWA task as well - Chiu and colleagues (2005) found that making new decks with the same net rates of reward but different frequencies of payment led to 'normal' subjects chosing differently, and higher levels of education leads to worsened performance on the IGT (Evans and Colleagues 2004).

Finally, here's a semi-serious question, although it means I'll never be President of Harvard: Does the same protocol lead to any measurable difference in mathematical ability?

References:

Chiu, Y-C., Lin, C-H., Huang, J-T., Lin, S., Lee, P-L, and Hsie, J-C. (2005). Immediate gain is long-term loss: Are there foresighted decision makers in Iowa Gambling Task? (Presentation at the third meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics, Kiawah Island, September, 2005.)

Evans, C., Kemish, K., and Turnbull, O. (2004). Paradoxical effects of education on the Iowa Gambling Task. Brain and Cognition 54: 240–244.

J van Honk, Dennis J.L.G. Schuttera, Erno J. Hermansa, Peter Putmana, Adriaan Tuitena, Hans Koppeschaar (2004). Testosterone shifts the balance between sensitivity for punishment and reward in healthy young women Psychoneuroendocrinology, 29 (7), 937-943 DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2003.08.007

Postscript 24 January 2009: Here's a related piece on BBC News, by Simon Baron-Cohen. I doubt anyone knows any more about autism. Or that's what my mate Dave says.

Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction

Most of us sometimes anthropomorphise things around us. We do this in various ways - talking to them, seeing similarities between them and proper agents, treating them as though they had beliefs or feelings. We also sometimes impute intentional explanations to non-intentional phenomena, such as the rain -- or the supernatural being -- that 'knew' there was a picnic on the go.

Most of us are also sometimes lonely. Do loneliness and anthropomorphising have anything to do with each other? The authors of this study hypothesised that they do, and went on to find that they do. Lonely people anthropomorphise more in two ways - they are more likely to anthropomorphise "nonhuman agents such as mechanical devices and nonhuman animals to make them appear more humanlike" and by "increasing belief in the existence of commonly anthropomorphized religious agents". Here's the abstract:

People are motivated to maintain social connection with others, and those who lack social connection with other humans may try to compensate by creating a sense of human connection with nonhuman agents. This may occur in at least two waysÑby anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as nonhuman animals and gadgets to make them appear more humanlike and by increasing belief in commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God). Three studies support these hypotheses both among individuals who are chronically lonely (Study 1) and among those who are induced to feel lonely (Studies 2 and 3). Additional findings suggest that such results are not simply produced by any negative affective state (Study 3). These results have important implications not only for understanding when people are likely to treat nonhuman agents as humanlike (anthropomorphism), but also for understanding when people treat human agents as nonhuman (dehumanization).

Here's a run-down of main points of the three studies:

Study 1

20 volunteers completed an on-line survey which asked questions about anthropomorphic responses to four hypothetical gadgets, as well as assessing their level of loneliness. More lonely subjects on average gave higher ratings on anthropomorphic dimensions. This is correlation but not cause, a point that study 2 aimed to address.

Study 2

Here the loneliness variable was an experimental manipulation, rather than a self-report measure of general level of loneliness. Subjects comprised avowed believers in God, and avowed non-believers. In a standard social psychology paradigm all completed the 90-question Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and were the told their actual extroversion score (to increase credibility) and offered a putative prediction relating to their future life. Half of each group (believers and non) were told that they would be lonely later, and half that they would not. All subjects then completed a set of questions about their belief in supernatural agents and processes of various kinds (ghosts, curses, miracles). Believers who received the "future lonely" manipulation had increased belief in supernatural agency compared to believers in the "future not lonely" condition, and than non-believers in general.

One reasonable concern here is that it is generally bad to be told that you'll be lonely, and so the measured response is to negative affect, rather than loneliness specifically. Study 3 attempted to address this worry.

Study 3

Subjects watched video clips, being asked to empathise with the protagonists. The clips were chosen to evoke one of three conditions: Disconnectedness, fear, and a 'control' clip showing positive (non-fear, non-lonely) social interaction.

Following the viewing subjects completed the same degree of belief in supernatural agents test as used in Study 2, and to think of a pet they owned or knew and pick from a list of 14 traits the 3 that they felt best described the pet in question. The list included anthropomorphic traits and non-anthropomorphic ones. Finally, subjects were shown a series of 20 ambiguous figures and asked to say what they saw in each one. The figures were designed so that some suggested faces (see figure below).


It was found that subjects in the disconnected condition reported stronger belief in supernatural agents than those in the other conditions, including the fear condition. Participants in the disconnected condition were also more likely to select anthropomorphic traits for the pet they were imagining than participants in the other two conditions. Finally, participants in the fear condition spontaneously reported seeing more faces than participants in the other two conditions, suggesting that as predicted that fear is distinguishable from loneliness in this respect.

So there you go. This doesn't tell us everything about loneliness or anthropomorphising. (See an earlier article on this blog about how loneliness is associated with feeling cold.) It tells us something useful about both, and about one of the sources of religious belief. This work is related to, and should be read alongside, recent reports that loss of control leads to increased degree of superstition. There are all kinds of things that might make us fumble for Gods, and there are more ways of feeling weak and needy than plain loneliness.

Nicholas Epley, Scott Akalis, Adam Waytz, John T. Cacioppo (2008). Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency in Gadgets, Gods, and Greyhounds Psychological Science, 19 (2), 114-120 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02056.x

The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation

I've previously reported on a few studies showing some of the ways that taste evaluation isn't a simple response to the physical properties of what is tasted. Actually, now that I check I've only blagged about one so far: We've seen how the same wine (at least when delivered as sips that aren't being paid for) is preferred when it is thought to cost more. But there will be more on this topic, because I enjoy running interference at my wine tasting group.

This paper reports an attempt to find out whether a sense of congruence with an individual's values makes a difference to how good something tastes to that individual. The answer turns out to be yes. Here's the abstract:

We suggest that consumers assess the taste of a food or beverage by comparing the human values symbolized by the product to their human value priorities. When there is value-symbol congruency, they experience a better taste and aroma and develop a more favorable attitude and behavior intention; incongruence has the opposite effect. Participants in two taste tests were told the correct identity of a product or misinformed. Participants who endorsed the values symbolized by the product (that they thought they were tasting) evaluated the product more favorably. The implications for marketing strategy, self-congruity theory, and the assimilation effect are discussed.

This certainly isn't a crazy hypothesis. As the authors of this study note, we've known for ages that people rate the very same carbonates water more highly when they're told it's Perrier (Nevid 1981). Also, the effects aren't always consistent, because different people have different expectations - differing for example over whether 'healthy' or 'organic' food will taste better or worse.

To test the hypothesis in this case two different taste tests were set up, one for a food and one for a drink.

In the food case omnivorous participants tasted a vegetarian meat substitute (chosen to be least distinguishable from actual meat) sometimes thinking that it was meat, and sometimes that it was substitute. It had been previously established that in the relevant population the vegetarian versus meat eating distinction was associated with low versus high preference for 'social power'.

In the drink case two colas, one a brand Cola (Pepsi) found to have high association with an 'exciting life' and another store branded (in this case Australian Woolworth's) were offered. The colas had been previously found to be indistinguishable in blind tests, and subjects again sometimes drank falsely believing they were drinking another cola.

All participants completed a value questionnaire (to assess their values with reference to social power, and exciting lives) and a multi-scale taste assessment of the products they had tasted. The scales were combined to give a single linear taste assessment for each subject. Participants were randomly assigned to taste what they were told they were tasting, or to taste under a misconception. They were also asked about attitude and purchase intention, current food and drink consumption, social desirability bias, and asked whether they believed they had been drinking or eating what they had been told.

First, it was found that:

In the drink category participants irrespective of condition preferred Pepsi to the Woolworth's. (In the actual experiment they had a cup of it. It's not clear whether the earlier test that found them indistinguishable had been a sip test.)

In the food test participants showed no main effect of actual product in their taste evaluations.

More significantly, the main predictions were confirmed: "low social power participants gave the food a higher taste evaluation when they believed they had tasted a vegetarian alternative and gave the food a lower rating when they believed they had tasted a sausage roll (b = .42, t = 4.1, p < .001). High social power participants showed the opposite tendency, though to a lesser degree (b = .11, t = .9, p = NS)."

And: "participants who valued excitement and enjoying life had a more favorable attitude and purchase intention when they believed they had tasted Pepsi than when they believed they had tasted Woolworth (b = .44, t = 4.5, p < .001)."

These results are analyses factoring in various elements of the different questionnaires - you should read the paper for the details, which would slow down the exposition here. This is further evidence that taste evaluation is not a simple or direct response to the physical properties of the thing tasted, but depends in significant ways on the symbolic and other associations of the thing tasted. I reckon you could find similar effects for foods presented as being 'local' or 'foreign' for people with strongly nationalist or xenophobic tendencies.

References:

Nevid, Jeffrey S. (1981), Effects of Brand Labeling on Ratings of Product Quality, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 53, 407-10.

Michael W. Allen, Richa Gupta, Arnaud Monnier (2008). The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (2), 294-308 DOI: 10.1086/590319

Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women’s Math Performance

Hosting the December 2008 Praxis Carnival got me thinking again (partly courtesy of submissions by PodBlack Cat and Dr Isis) about the representation of women in science. When a seasonal clean out of one of the many folders filled with PDFs that I "really ought to read some time" turned up this paper, I figured to blag it.

It's not controversial that in many sciences, including mathematics, women are under-represented compared to the ratios in the population at large. There's a lot of discussion over the questions of what precise mix of factors might explain this imbalance, and what sorts of policies might reduce it.

This study looked at women's performance at mathematics. The subjects completed a test including two mathematics sections separated by a reading comprehension section. The middle section was an experimental manipulation, with one of the following four essays:

(G) This essay argued that there were mathematics-related sex differences, and that the explanation was genetic.

(E) This essay argued that there were mathematics-related sex differences, and that the explanation was experiential.

(NS) This essay argued that there were no mathematics-related sex differences.

(S) This essay primed the question of sex without making reference to differences in mathematical ability.

The hypothesis was that in the second test participants in condition (G) and (S) would underperform those in condition (E) and (NS). This is just what they found, a result that was replicated in a schematically similar study where the manipulation was heard, rather than read. See the figure below.


This isn't surprising at all - it's consistent with a pile of established social psychology on the effectiveness of stereotypes. But it's definitely important.

Among other notices of this little paper, see The CIRTL Cafe.

I. Dar-Nimrod, S. J. Heine (2006). Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women's Math Performance Science, 314 (5798), 435-435 DOI: 10.1126/science.1131100

Cold and Lonely

Here's a lovely little bit of social psychology. It shows that some of our common metaphors correlate with a genuine association in experience, in this case between social exclusion and physical coldness. If you don't have a subscription, you can currently get a preprint of the paper here. Among other mentions of this research in the media, is this piece in the New York Times.

This is the abstract:

Metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. Two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold. Experiment 1 found that participants who recalled a social-exclusion experience gave lower estimates of room temperature than did participants who recalled an inclusion experience. In Experiment 2, social exclusion was directly induced through an on-line virtual interaction, and participants who were excluded reported greater desire for warm food and drink than did participants who were included. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition and support the notion that social perception involves physical and perceptual content. The psychologicalexperience of coldness not only aids understanding of social interaction, but also is an integral part of the experience of social exclusion.

The paper does pretty much what it says on the box. In experiment 1 a total of 65 subjects (undergraduate students, the rat of social psychology) were told they would perform a series of unrelated tasks. In the first they recalled either an experience where they felt very socialy excluded, or socially included. Then they were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Subjects who had recalled being excluded gave lower estimates (their mean estimate was about 2.5 degrees Centrigrade lower) than subjects who had recalled being included.

In experiment 2 a total of 52 subjects played the popular cyberball game (in which a virtual ball is passed between the player and two virtual players, with the fraction of passes to the subject being a proxy for levels of inclusion). They were then asked to rate the desirability of 5 different products including a warm drink and a warm food and a cold drink and a cold food. Excluded subjects rated the warm food and drink as more desirable (by about 1 point on a 7 point Likert scale) than controls, while rating the cold food and drink neither better nor worse.

So if you're wondering whether your guests feel welcome or not, ask whether they want tea or a soda...

As so often with social psychology, the interesting result is described in terms of a fairly qualitative theory sketch in terms of 'schemas'. It would be good to know more about this from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience.

For related articles on this blog, see this one on morality and cleanliness (also with Chen-Bo Zhong as first author), and this one on social support and the perception of gradients.

Disclaimer: I have no idea whether the Jackie Frost Ensemble, or the "Cold Lonely Blues" are any good - the album cover image was just one of the top few hits for 'cold lonely' on Google Images.



Chen-Bo Zhong, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli (2008). Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold? Psychological Science, 19 (9), 838-842 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02165.x

Chimpanzees use self distraction to cope with impulsivity

This is an interesting and important paper about a strategy for dealing with impulsivity that has not previously been documented in non-humans. Here's the abstract:

It is unknown whether animals, like humans, can employ behavioural strategies to cope with impulsivity. To examine this question, we tested whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) would use self-distraction as a coping strategy in a situation in which they had to continually inhibit responses to accumulating candies in order to earn a greater amount of those rewards. We tested animals in three conditions in which they were sometimes given a set of toys and were sometimes allowed physical access to the accumulating candies. Chimpanzees allowed the rewards to accumulate longer before responding when they could divert their attention to the toys, and they manipulated the toys more when the candies were physically accessible. Thus, chimpanzees engaged in self-distraction with the toys when such behaviour was most beneficial as a coping mechanism.

One of the most persistent ways in which people make poor decisions is by being impulsive. In the behavioural sense, impulsivity amounts to a temporary preference for a smaller reward that is available sooner over a larger one that is available later. (There are more complicated impulsivity constructs in psychiatry and personality psychology - they're not what I'm writing about here.)

This is a dangerous kind of preference to have - it's by definition inconsistent with some of your own preferences over longer ranges, making us open to exploitation, and setting us up for regret. There's a substantial pile of evidence across various species that the discount function describing the decline in the present value of a reward as delay to delivery increases is approximately hyperbolic. Only an exponential curve (so called because the delay term appears as an exponent) has the property that the relative value of rewards at different delays stays constant without ever going to zero. Hyperbolic curves, instead, can lead to temporary preferences (see figure below):

George Ainslie (e.g. 2001) describes a number of strategies that people can use to try to fight inconsistency, including managing attention, preparing emotion, making side-bets and using other committment devices, and chosing
according to rules that connect future rewards and present temptations in different ways. One of his own key experiments (Ainslie 1974) showed
something related to committment as a way of dealing with impulsivity is observed in pigeons: some birds trained that pecking one key would lead to a smaller sooner reward, and another a larger later one, learned to peck an additional key earlier on that had no effect except to remove the temptation of the smaller sooner reward.

This paper is specifically concerned with managing attention as a way of dealing with temptation. As the authors note there is some evidence that human children can adopt self-distraction as a strategy to help them not give into temptation in an experimental setting where refraining from taking an immediately available reward leads to greater reward accumulating later on. Although nobody has attempted to see whether Chimpanzees can do the same thing before, other work suggesting that chimps use behavioural strategies to cope with other kinds of stress suggested it would be worth looking.

The key experiment was quite simple: candies accumulated steadily in a dispenser, but when the dispenser was taken, accumulation stopped. So waiting led to greater rewards, but there was a growing temptation. In some conditions the chimps had toys available - the hypothesis was that toy use would increase during the waiting intervals, suggesting that play was a behavioural strategy for dealing with temptation. In a variation the chimps had no control over the dispenser, because it was out of reach - toy use in that condition was taken as a baseline measure, to be compared to cases where toy use could have been related to resisting temptation.


The results are fairly clear: toy use in the 'toys available' condition was greater (for three out of four of the chimps) when it was up to the individual chimp how long to wait. As the authors conclude:

"This is the first evidence indicating that non-human animals can use a behavioural strategy to reduce their own susceptibility to ongoing temptation."

This is cool stuff. It will be interesting to see how much sophistication in managing impulsivity can be found in other non-human animals when these and other means are made available.


References (besides the 'BPR' tag):

Ainslie, G. (1974) Impulse Control in Pigeons, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 21: 485–489.
Ainslie, G. (2001) Breakdown of Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, T.A., Beran, M.J. (2007). Chimpanzees use self-distraction to cope with impulsivity. Biology Letters, 3(6), 599-602. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0399

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness

A paper published in PNAS in January of this year has been getting a fair bit of attention. The paper, by Plassman and colleages, is called Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness, and the bottom line result is that experimental subjects rated the very same wines as more pleasant, and had greater activity in some brain regions, when that wine was presented as being more expensive.

The subjects of the experiment had been told that they were tasting five different wines, with known prices, where in fact two of the wines were repeated, each time at a different price (one at USD5 and 45, the other at USD10 and 90).

Among the other accounts of this research in the blogosphere see Ben Goldacre, Epistemist, Neurocritic and Mindhacks.

The result isn't particularly surprising, and it seems to me that some fairly obvious variations on the task would have helped get clearer on what is going on. Also, I find some of the ways the results are presented a little unhelpful.

First, let me say a bit more about how the study was conducted. Subjects rated wines (all Cabernet Sauvingnons) without price information to establish that ratings of the wines were reasonably consistent. They were. Under scanning, with squirts of wine delivered through plastic tubes, they made a series of ratings (of either 'pleasantness' or 'intensity' on a 6 point scale) interspersed with mouth rinsing. Every wine was presented along with its 'price', and subjects held the wine in their mouth for 10 seconds before rating it. One of the repeated wines was presented half of the time at actual price of USD5 and otherwise marked up to USD45. The other repeated wine was presented at its real price of USD90, and marked down to USD10.

Subjects rated the same wine as more pleasant when more expensive, and, as hypothesised, there was more activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortext (mOFC), because other studies suggest that it is in the business of representing 'experienced pleasantness'.

So far so good. But the authors open by saying that "A basic assumption in economics is that the experienced pleasantness (EP) from consuming a good depends only on its intrinsic properties and on the state of the individual." They give a citation for this claim, but as so often the citation is to another publication endorsing the same prejudice, rather than a piece of evidence from the history of economics or utility theory. Actually, even Bentham was quite emphatic that as well as direct determinants of the utility from an experience (intensity, duration, certainty and propinquity) but also three important relational properties - fecudity (the tendency of a pleasure to be accompanied by others), purity (the tendency of a pleasure not to be followed pain) and extent (the number of persons who share a pleasure).

So price could well be an indicator of fecundity or purity (suggesting fine rather than lousy food, toadying service, well-dressed dates, etc.) even to a Benthamite. I wonder if there will ever be a day when people can manage to report results like this without feeling the need to announce a caricature or worse outright misrepresentation of the history of economics.

An earlier (2004) paper in Neuron, called Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks by McClure and colleagues, is clearer, and covers related ground. McClure et al found that on average subjects liked Coke more when they knew what they were drinking, than when they didn't know whether it was Pepsi or Coke. In their case the neural correlates of the marketing related preference weren't the mOFC, but a set of areas including the hippocampus and the ventro-medial PFC.

We need more experiments to try to isolate effects of scarcity (for example telling subjects that what they were tasting came from one of two classes, set up so that one was much scarcer), as well as Bentham style fecundity, purity and extent. That would also help shed light on how the different components of prior beliefs are neurally implemented and how they interact.

Two more quibbles, then a speculation.

Quibble 1: The abstract of the Plassman paper, and some remarks in the paper, suggest that this has something to do with "decision making". Indirectly it probably does, but the subjects in the experiment didn't make any decisions at all - they merely reported ratings. The subjects in the McClure et al study did make decisions forced choices between Coke and Pepsi, where there was a definite opportunity cost to each choice.

We just don't know whether subjects would have kept on buying the "UDS90 wine" over the "USD10" wine having tasted both and when spending actual money. We know that people like free wine more when they think it's expensive, and that's not the same thing at all.

Quibble 2: There's some plain sloppiness here, whether the fault of the authors or PNAS. On p1051 the text refers to figure 1D as representing data from the 'postscanning blind test' whereast the figure caption indicates that it is panel 1E that represents that data. On page 1053 it says that "Two of the three wines were administered twice, once identified by their actual retail price and once by a 900% markup (wine 1: $5 real retail price, $45 fictitious price) or a 900% reduction (wine 2: $90 real retail price, $10 fictitious price)." Yeah right, a 900% reduction of USD90 leaves you with ten dollars. There I was thinking that 10 was about 11 percent of 90.

Then the speculation. I'd really like to see a roughly analogous experiment in the case of politics. Hotelling effects drive the content of at least some policies held by opposing parties in democracies towards near-indistinguishability. But citizens typically hold strong preferences between parties. Why not have subjects rate their level of agreement with policy claims and vary whether they're told that the policies are those of a Democrat or Republican, or a Tory or Labourite, etc.? I'd bet that the framing would make a difference, but I'm curious as to whether any coherent brain data would come along with that.

Oh, and one last thing. My occasional wine society (a bunch of friends who get together to eat and drink) are doing the opposite tomorrow night - a blind tasting to see if we can pick the expensive wines out of a set with 50% of the cheapest wines we can find. I'll report back. Odds are we'll drink too much and not discover anything new. Also, sadly, we don't have a brain scanner.

License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations

The paper I'm writing about here is a little old (June 2007), but it's a good start to what I expect will be a series reporting research on 'dumb people'. All will relate to the many, many ways in which psychologists of various kinds (and behavioural economists)
keep on finding ways in which people depart from optimal behaviour or show failures of rationality. (And I don't mean anything 'thick' by rationality - just consistency in pursuing any set of ends.)

This piece, by Fitzimmons and colleagues, is published in the Journal of Consumer Research, and is called License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations. (It's also available here.)

The key findings are pretty simple: Asking people in advance about whether they think they are going to engage in some kind of "vice behaviour" makes it more likely that they will engage in the vice. A "vice behaviour" is defined by the authors as a behaviour about which subjects "simultaneously hold both negative explicit and positive explicit attitudes", and the sort of thing they have in mind is skipping class, watching TV instead of working, drinking more than you should. One part of the study successfully confirmed the mix of explicit negative and implicit positive associations to the vice behaviours, by comparing deliberate and response time tasks.

The study found that students asked (and asked once at the first class of a 16 week semester) how often they thought they would skip classes went on to skip classes more often than students who were not asked.

It also found that subjects who already thought of themselves as having a problem with self-control were more likely to exhibit increased vice behaviour following being asked about expected vice.

Finally, it was found that the effect of reporting expectations could be reduced if subjects "precommitted" to self-reward for avoiding the vice, or thought about actions they could take when faced with specific temptations. The "precommittment" simply involved describing a reward that the subject could give her or himself if they met their vice-restraining goal (this part of the experiment concerned drinking).

None of this 'should' make any difference. Answering a question about how often I expect to muck around blagging instead of grading papers or doing research doesn't give me any new information, and doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should change my preferences. And since talk is cheap, imagining that I could pay myself for not giving into temptations seems like no reason at all not to take the temptations and then take the reward anyway. But the results suggest that both of these sorts of things do make a difference.

One reason not to pay myself the reward when I didn't 'earn' it, is, of course, because my own credibility is worth something to me. Some of my total expected reward will depend partly on that credibility. I'd have been interested to see whether thinking about ways of dealing with temptation, or planning self-reward, worked the same, or better, or worse, for subjects who regarded themselves as having control problems, or who were more impulsive by some other measure.

I also figure that the next time I throw a party, I'll put a little quiz on the invitations, asking "Do you think you're likely to drink too much and dance on the tables?", "Do you think you're likely to get frisky with the host?" and so forth. It may be harder to work this into dating without the pre-date conversation seeming a little weird, but it looks like that could also be worth a try.