Friend Magnets

Quite some time ago I had a few postings about Roger Coghill, who sells magnets that are supposed to have various medicinal powers, spreads alarm about power lines, and offers a large prize for an experiment on a human infant, in his ethically alarming eponymous 'Challenge', a caper with no scientific merit. My mate Dave had one of those generically pointless correspondences with him, which are covered in the earlier postings. (And here.)

Dave now tells me that he's received a friend request, via Facebook, from one Roger Coghill. Torn between curiosity about what jollies might be found in the Dodger's status updates and posted items on the one hand, and lively aversion on the other, Dave asked Roger to 'jog his memory' since he couldn't seem to place him. I wonder what if anything will come in reply?

Anyway, here's the request:

Useful piece on nutrition, science and supplements

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry recently published a useful piece called 'Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice'. It's by Reynold Spector who has held professorships of medicine at Iowa, Stanford, and Harvard-MIT, and is presently a professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The piece discusses what we know about human nutrition (a lot), what we know about the value of supplements (in most cases we know it's little or nothing), and issues relating to who gains and who loses from the massive trade in diet related products, and the often unhelpful reporting and advertorial on these topics.

It's well worth a read, and a link, and being brandished in the face of a popular and pernicious kind of idiocy. Here's the piece: Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice.

Bad Vibrations at UKZN

This posting is cross-posted at Intrepid Aardvark, which should be considered as its primary home. I've mostly put it here because I'm feeling a bit down about the low posting rate I've managed over the past few weeks. - Doc S.

Far too much pseudo-science and useless or harmful health 'interventions' huddle under the umbrella of 'alternative' medicine or 'alternative' healing. These 'alternatives' thrive in 'alternative' places (such as dubious 'societies' of homeopaths), and with 'alternative' people (exploitative weasels who market their products as 'nutritional supplements' precisely to avoid the standards applied to licensed medication).

Occasionally, though, the nonsense secures some kind of status at a formal research institution - one where proper science normally goes on. This status makes matters worse: it gives a veneer of respectability to dangerous rubbish, when alternative medicine should be robustly criticised and scientifically tested. When this happens, people who care about evidence and effectiveness should kick up a stink.

David Colquhoun has written several fine articles on this phenomenon in the press, and on his blog DC Science, where he also criticises the running (all too often the wronging) of universities. I've included links to a selection of his pieces on this topic near the end of this article.

Here at Intrepid Aardvark, we're going to keep an eye on instances of this in South Africa at least, and to the extent we can, in Africa at large. Here's the first installment.

A recent issue of UKZNOnline (an electronic brag-mag at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) includes an article enthusiastically reporting on a talk on 'body alignment as a healing strategy' presented to the university department of Physiotherapy.

The speaker was Mr Jeff Levin. Looking at his website I see no evidence of any scientific training, but rather a worryingly long list of fields ("architect, nutripath, author, healer and pioneer in the world of energy medicine"). The webpage as a whole gives no indication of the existence of any rigorous trials, or peer-reviewed research. There's a typical list of testimonials and anecdotes but no sign of a randomised double-blind trial with a placebo condition. So no indication of meaningul evidence.

Jeff waffles; mostly about 'energy' including 'vibrational energy' and 'fields'. There's a description here.

The article in UKZN on-line burbles on enthusiastically about the waffle and the waffler. Levin, we are told, is "internationally renowned for his healing work." Levin, "demonstrated how electromagnetic influences caused by cell phones, electric devices such as tooth brushes, geopathic stress from earth grid lines and negative emotions, can shrink an individual’s energy field. In the same way, positive emotions and the creation of healing vortices can expand energy fields and promote healing."

Here's most of the rest of the article, with quotations from Levin:

"To maintain health the body must maintain optimal vibrational frequency. Any change in the ordered frequency of the body manifests as disease."

"The human energy system is powerfully affected by emotions and the level of spiritual balance. Negative emotional experiences become subconsciously locked into the body at a cellular level and contribute to the disease."

"Body alignment technique lifts the body’s vibrational frequency to its optimal level thereby relieving bodily manifestations of pain, fatigue, chronic and acute conditions and structural imbalance, as well as learning difficulties," said Mr Levin.

During his introductory talk, Mr Levin demonstrated the effectiveness of this modality in relieving pain using some volunteers. The responses were almost immediate to the astonishment of those involved.

It makes sense that Levin doesn't have much to say about evidence, because there's little if any evidence for anything he says, significant evidence against much of it, and the general framework is sharply at odds with some of the best established science from over 100 years ago. Among other things, it's quite clear that:

• There's no good evidence at all of health disruptions from power grids. (And see this related article on 'magnet therapy' .
• On alternative Chinese medicine, much of it also regularly talked about in terms of energy, Chi and other flim flam, see this piece.
• There's a substantial body of science stretching well over 100 years on the conservation of energy, and the fact that the same small set of fundamental [note 1] forms of it are to be found in all systems whether living or not. There's no evidence for the kinds of gaps that would be needed for the woo-energy to fit in. For a recent short review, see here.

In endorsing this stuff, UKZN have scored an unfortunate own goal.

[note 1] That is, if you take 'fundamental' to mean strictly fundamental physics, then the number might be very small, even one, depending on how the unification of fundamental forces plays out.

--oOo--

Relevant articles in DC Science:

Quackery at Leicester (with a little help from Human Resources)

The Salford 'MSc' in complementary meds, now dropped.

General problems with alternative medicine.

Westminister University (quackery central?).

Amethysts and 'yin energy' (with specific remarks on vibrations).

The Vacuous Energy Invoking Gambit

Defenders of this or that kind of pseudoscience can often be heard saying things like ‘everything is made of energy’ or ‘it’s all energy’. Or, more specifically, that their preferred brand of tosh should be taken seriously because it involves ‘a different kind of energy’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard this, whether about crystal healing, or chi, or acupuncture, or reflexology. This cloud of smoke is supposed, it seems, to help. The sceptical naturalist is apparently expected to stagger back going ‘Egad! That’s true – energy is everywhere and very, very important, and so whatever mystical crud anybody likes probably really happens!’

Let’s call the nebulous appeal to ‘energy’ the Vacuous Energy Invoking Gambit (‘VEIG’, pronounced like ‘vague’). It’s nonsense. There are lots of reasons for this, and in this post I want to review a few of the ones that seem important to me, and say what follows from them. I’m indebted to my mate Dave for discussion of some of the historical issues. This posting is rather long for this blog, even though in a sense I’ve been brief: there’s a whole pile of science stacked up against loose energy talk, and this is no more than a tour of some of the highlights.

What I’ll say here is intended to complement articles by, among others, David Colquhoun on DC Science, including this. It’s useful to ask anyone deploying the VEIG to define energy, or say what units it is measured in. (And ask them to explain what it means that it’s the same units as work, and to say what the difference between energy and power is.) They generally don’t mean energy in any remotely rigorous sense, but rather as a metaphor for ‘oomph’ or ‘making stuff happen-ness’ and these metaphors can survive only in a near vacuum of accurate science.

Here I’ll focus on some aspects of the history of science, especially the conservation of energy, and say something about how that history places a burden of proof on anyone making claims about energy, which are supposed to refer to anything except kinds of energy found in all physical systems and already known to mainstream science.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries various experiments attempted either to find vital or otherwise spooky forces at work, or to test the hypothesis that in living and non-living systems the same small set of forces were conserved.

Earlier scientists had postulated additional forces to explain various phenomena, including forces of attraction and repulsion for electrostatics, magnetism and the cohesion of bodies; forces of irritability and sensibility to account for perception and other responses of living things to changes around them; forces to explain fermentation, the origin of micro-organisms, and chemical bonding. Some of these forces were found, including the forces described by Coulomb’s laws relating to charge and magnetic polarity. None of the non-physical ones, or the ones supposed to occur only in living things, were. Electricity is an interesting case: Galvani had supposed electricity to be a distinctively animal phenomenon (he stimulated parts of frogs with metal instruments leading to muscle action). This idea was widely taken seriously until Volta generated it with combinations of metals in a humid environment, and in the absence of animal tissue.

Alongside this work finding that living and non-living systems were interestingly alike, even where scientists had often supposed they were not, was a body work beginning to unify the physical treatment of force, work and energy. Important pieces of the puzzle included:

• Faraday’s researches on electromagnetic induction, which also showed the unity of apparently different sorts of electricity (whether electrostatic, induced or from batteries),
• Joule’s on the quantitative equivalence between heat and mechanical work,
• Helmholtz’s on deriving the principle of conservation of the sum of kinetic and potential energy from rational mechanics, and relating to this principle to the work of Joule.

Helmholtz also referred speculatively (but being himself medically trained) to the possibility that conservation of energy applied to living systems. A great deal of experimental effort was spent on this possibility. Much of it involved different forms of calorimetry. A calorimeter measures the heat given off by a process. Different forms of calorimeter are distinguished, among other things, by how they accomplish this, and what other sorts of measurement of the process (what it emits, for example) they also permit.

Boyle’s air-pump experiments had shown air to be essential to life and flame alike. Lavoisier and Laplace designed the ice calorimeter, which permitted measurements of heat produced against carbon dioxide emitted by a living creature. Comparison of the results for flames and life led Lavoisier to conclude that respiration was a form of combustion, obeying the same conservation constraints. It was also discovered that muscular action involved the consumption of oxygen and the emission of carbon dioxide, suggesting a further relation to respiration, and providing further evidence of conservation. Leibig, who did some of the key experimental work in this area, mistakenly expected that matter rather than energy is conserved in respiration. This view was not refuted until the work of Frankland, who performed detailed experiments establishing the energy gained from the consumption of specific foodstuffs. (See the image below, from Coleman 1987, page 136 - a figure from Frankland 1866. Click on the image for larger version.)

Further research required different tools. Regnault and Rieset introduced the respiratory calorimeter, which enabled accurate measurements of the consumption and emission of gases by the processes in the calorimeter, in 1849. Late in the century Rubner combined the ice and respiratory calorimeters further to investigate the applicability of the principle of conservation of energy (of known types) to biological systems. His emphatic conclusion (some individual experiments lasted over a month) was that:

Not a single isolated datum chosen at will out of all of these experimental results can leave us in any doubt that the exclusive source of heat in warm-blooded animals is to be sought in the liberation of forces from the energy supply of the nutritive materials (in Coleman 1977, 142).

Complementary enquiries refuted specific claims for peculiarly biological causal principles to explain this or that phenomenon. Among the highlights of this research are the following:

• In 1828 Wöhler produced urea in the laboratory, a result that Shlick later suggested “refuted once and for all the doctrine that the synthesis of organic compounds requires a special force” (Shlick (1953, p. 524).
• In 1897 Buchner successfully isolated an enzyme from yeast, and showed that it promoted fermentation in the absence of any cells. So Pasteur was wrong (about the requirement of living cells for fermentation) and the theory of the chemical catalyst had been vindicated.

Coleman notes that by 1897 Bernard was able to state confidently that:

…there are not two chemistries or two physics, the one applicable to living creatures and the other to inert bodies; rather there are general laws applicable to all substances[s], however [they] might be disposed, and these laws admit of no exception (in Coleman 1977, 126).

For a while chemistry was a striking exception to this trend. Although various chemical regularities had been discovered, there was no serious contender for an explanation of chemical bonding in terms of fundamental physical processes, and the possibility that there were as yet unknown chemical forces was taken seriously by leading scientists. The philosopher Broad referred to chemistry as the ‘most plausible’ candidate for an ‘example of emergent behaviour’ (Broad 1925, p. 65). Chemistry did not remain an exception, though. Following a series of important advances by Thomson, Rutherford and others, Bohr successfully constructed, first, a dynamical model of the hydrogen atom, then of heavier atoms, and finally aspects of the structure of the periodic table (see Pais 1991, pp. 146-152). A key measure of Bohr’s success was deriving good fits to the hitherto descriptive Balmer formula for the emission spectra of hydrogen and some other simple elements from his model. A physical theory of chemical bonding had been developed, and while it did not apply readily to all molecules, or indeed all atoms, it did dispose of the view that chemical phenomena involved distinct non-physical forces or forms of influence.

The upshot of all this work, and much more along the same lines, is to establish a very strong burden of argument on anyone wanting to make empirical claims about any kind of energy that isn’t one of the set recognised and measured by mainstream science. People who play the VEIG have some work to do. It’s not enough simply to say that the putative phenomenon relies on ‘energy’ or involves a ‘different kind’ of energy. There’s plenty of reason to think that there are very few kinds of energy, that they obey specific conservation principles, and there are no distinctively different ones (‘chi’) in living systems. There’s no direct evidence for the existence of any kinds of work and energy besides basic physical ones (mechanical, electrostatic) and much of the same evidence regarding conservation of known kinds of energy indicates clearly that there are no gaps where such woo-energy might hide.

So, woo-promoters, stop being VEIG, and let’s see some real measurements. Seriously, show that acupuncture in a calorimeter violates energy conservation assuming only established forces and forms of work, or explain how the known energy in food is converted into ‘chi’, and how fiddling about with needles has anything to do with it. Show us equations and non-bogus experiments. Or fuck off.

Selected references

Broad, C. D. 1925. The Mind and Its Place in Nature, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Coleman, W. 1977. Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schlick, M. 1953. ‘Philosophy of Organic Life’, in H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck (eds.) Readings in the Philosophy of Science, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., pp. 523-536.

Pais, A. 1991. Neils Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity, Oxford: Clarendon.

Encephalon #64

The latest issue of Encephalon (a neuroscience and psychology blog carnival) is out at Neurocritic, and it's really a very fine piece of work. Check it out.

Dead or Alive? Knowledge about a Sibling’s Death Varies by Genetic Relatedness in a Modern Society

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin! This piece is a modest contribution to a large scale blog love-in that I mentioned in an earlier posting. It's about a recent study by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle driven by a simple hypothesis about genetic relatedness, and how this might make a difference to what people know about other people. Specifically, it was hypothesised that individuals would be more likely to know whether a related sibling was alive or no. Here's the abstract:

Using a large sample of non-institutionalized individuals from the Netherlands
(n = 7610), we examined the influence of relatedness on an individual’s knowledge about whether their sibling is alive or not. Respondents were generally less likely to know whether their sibling was alive if they were not fully related. The effects were stronger for differences between paternal half-siblings and full siblings than for differences between maternal half-siblings and full siblings.

Hamilton (1964) argued that selection should favour investment in closely related kin, and this hypothesis has been largely confirmed in a wide variety of studies. A reasonable precondition for investing in someone is knowing whether they are alive or dead, and so whether someone has this knowledge is a plausible proxy for openness to investment. More specifically the authors say "Our hypothesis is that respondents will be more likely to know whether a sibling is alive when they are fully related than when they are not."

This study is part of a larger, ongoing, study of kinship in the Netherlands (the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS)). For the present research "respondents [were] asked to list all their siblings (adopted, step, half- and full siblings) and to indicate whether they know whether this sibling is alive or not".

As the authors note, an alternative view is that levels of affiliation and dispostion to invest might follow development, in particular who was around when an individual grows up. "This proximate theory would suggest that relatedness in most families is confounded with being raised together." They proposed to track this confound by distinguishing both paternal half-siblings (who are generally raised apart) with full siblings and maternal half-siblings (who are generally raised together) with full siblings. The study excluded adopted siblings because there were so few in the study. (It would be interesting to know more here, but a specific study would probably be needed to ensure enough adopted individuals for useful analysis.)

Data analysis considered up to the first six siblings, and controlled for "education (9 categories: from incomplete/primary to university/postgraduate; treated as interval), age, age differences between the siblings, gender of the respondent, and number of family transitions before age of 16" where a "family transition" was "an alteration in the respondent’s family living situation since birth, for instance going to live with grandparents or with another family member". The analysis constructed multinomial logistic regression models to calculate the "independent effect of sibling type on knowledge about the sibling’s death". I was surprised to hear that over 1200 of the subjects (total number 7610) even had as many as six siblings.

Figure 1 below shows the raw proportion of respondents who did not know whether a sibling was alive or dead as a function of sibling type and number.

The analysis using the regression models showed that across "all six models, sibling type proves to be a highly significant predictor of knowledge about a sibling’s death [...]. The other variables did not prove consistent predictors." And the predictive value of sibling type is dramatic: "respondents are 25.75 times more likely to not know whether their sibling 1 is alive when" that sibling is a step-sibling than when he/she is a full sibling (emphasis added).

The authors are careful to note that their hypothesis concerned ultimate outcomes, rather than proximate mechanisms. It's an interesting question by what means relatedness is tracked, and to what extent it depends on epigenetic factors. Surprisingly the authors don't mention a study published in 2007 in Nature regarding sibling detection. That paper is well worth a look - it doesn't settle the questions here, partly because the proposed system is partly dependent on observed interactions with mothers, and duration of coresidence with candidate 'siblings', but it should have been discussed. Also, the conclusion of the Nature paper is worth quoting in this celebratory article:

"These results contribute to a growing body of findings showing that humans are not immune to the evolutionary forces that have shaped other species, and that Darwinism has a central role in discovering the neural and psychological architecture of our species."

References:

Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I, II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.

Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007) The architecture of human kin detection, Nature 445, 727-731.

Thomas V. Pollet, Daniel Nettle (2009). Dead or Alive? Knowledge about a Sibling’s Death Varies by Genetic
Relatedness in a Modern Society Evolutionary Psychology, 7 (1), 57-65 DOI: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep075765.pdf

Comparative Mind Database

There's a possibly cool project in the offing to create a Comparative Mind Database. My mate Dave's mate Wayne has written some useful thoughts on the challenges facing such an endeavour over at his blog. Wayne's right - there are some tricky questions. I think his list is pretty good, but would add a concern that isn't specifically related to design, but to the economics of the affair.

If it takes work (over and above what can be automated) to get research reflected in the CMD, which it will, then it has, as far as possible, to be in the interests of the people doing the science to do the work. That pretty much has to mean that the payoff in terms of impact for work already done and quality of ongoing work should be greater than the cost, over some acceptable time scale.

Mini blag roundup

I've been a bit slow blagging for a week or two (not counting today). I'm not heading for another prolonged layoff, and I haven't been incapacitated with digrizfizzes. I've just been pre-occupied with various affairs in meatspace. Also I've been semi-working on a few pieces that are taking longer than expected.

To help fill the dead air, here's a roundup of a few things I've read that are well worth looking at.

First, over at Not Exactly Rocket Science (a fine blog if you don't know it) you'll find the following:

(1) A good write up of an interesting and careful study showing how self-reported race classification was sensitive to changing socio-economic status.

(2) A good, if ultimately rather depressing, piece on how 'absolutists' are less capable of rational compromise, although more responsive to symbolic incentives.

(3) A very interesting piece on a genetic variation that is associated with different levels of aggression in response to perceived provocation. [This Achewood on Morally Challenging Hot Sauce is more relevant that you might think until you read the aggression article.]

Then at the British Psychological Society Research Digest (also a good one to keep an eye on) are these:

(1) An account of a study of the rhetoric of the (far right) British National Party, and how it's like a conspiracy theory.

(2) A study confirming that you really do spend more when using credit than you do with cash, and when you're sad. Cash/Credit study (sad)

(3) A very interesting study finding that training in face discrimination reduces magnitude of the effect on the race Implicit Association Test (IAT):

And finally over at Epiphenom, a report of a study showing that spiritual guidance actually reduces success in substance abuse treatment.

Construal Level and Procrastination

Here's a study that's got a bit of attention, including at The Economist, at intellectual vanities and at Psychology Today. The paper found that the degree to which a task was construed abstractly made a difference to the level of procrastination: more abstract meant more procrastination.

You can currently get the paper at website the first author (Sean M. McCrea) here.

This is the full abstract:

According to construal-level theory, events that are distant in time tend to be represented more abstractly than are events that are close in time. This mental association between level of abstractness and temporal distance is proposed to be a bidirectional relationship, such that level of representation of an event should also have effects on the time when the activity is performed. In the present studies, participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire via e-mail within 3 weeks. The questionnaire was designed to induce either an abstract or a concrete construal. Using a variety of manipulations of construal level, the studies supported the predictions of construal-level theory. Individuals were less likely to procrastinate performing the task when the questionnaire induced a more concrete construal. Furthermore, this effect did not depend on the attractiveness, importance, or perceived difficulty of the task.

Based on a body of previous research suggesting among other things that events in the distant future are more likely to be represented abstractly (and vice-versa), and that concrete construals lead to better task performance, the authors hypothesised that "forming a concrete representation of a task will reduce procrastination, independently of any effects of planning or understanding of the task."

There were three complementary experiments, all using subjects who were students at the University of Konstanz. In all cases students had a questionnaire (about various tasks) to complete and return by email. In all cases they rated the importance, difficulty, pleasantness, convenience and interest of the tasks In all cases the number of hours taken to return the questionnaire (there was a deadline) was recorded (there was also a coding system for 'early', 'on time', 'late' and 'not returned' for an additional analysis). Subjects were randomly assigned to the abstract or concrete condition in each experiment.

There were also some differences between the three experiments.

In experiment 1 the questionnaire itself included either abstract or concrete demands relating to the same generic tasks ("open a bank account"). The abstract condition required participants to describe "what characteristics are implied" by the activity, in the concrete condition the demand was to say something about how to go about the task.

Experiment 2 was much the same, except that the abstract task required providing categories ("A bird is a _______" while the concrete task required providing examples ("A bird is an example of a _______").

Experiment 3 was designed to address a risk that, despite the inclusion of difficulty and other ratings, any difference in return times in experiments 1 or 2 was related to something other than the abstract/concrete construals. Here all subjects completed the very same questionnaire, but half were primed concretely and half abstractly. The prime was a colour print of Seurat's 'La Parade' (detail from it here), with subjects either told something about the technique of pointillism (concrete) or the desired effect (abstract).

One way of looking at the bottom line of the results (there are several analyses in the paper) is to look at the response times for the three experiments:

Experiment 1:
Concrete: 175.78 hours
Abstract: 503.85 hours

Experiment 2:
Concrete: 301.76 hours
Abstract: 532.20 hours

Experiment 3:
Concrete: 338.75 hours
Abstract: 491.29 hours

As the authors note this is a significant addition to our understanding of procrastination. It's been known for some time that factors such as delay discounting are important for explaining procrastination, but this shows in addition that "the way the task is represented influences when individuals complete it."

This is important, and possibly useful. Maybe some of my mate Dave's more tardy grad students would find it helpful if they thought in more concrete terms about their overdue work ("write 500 decent words a day") instead of being distracted by hopeless tasks that happen to have vivid concrete descriptions ("read the whole internet"). Are you reading this, punks?

Finally, all discussion of procrastination should include a look at John Perry's fabulous essay on structured procrastination.


Sean M. McCrea, Nira Liberman, Yaacov Trope, Steven J. Sherman (2008). Construal Level and Procrastination Psychological Science, 19 (12), 1308-1314 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02240.x

The Intrepid Aardvark

There's a new group blog for science living woo-loathing bloggers in South Africa. Or, more precisely, currently in South Africa, but with tentative dreams of going pan-African somewhere down the track. The group blog is called The Intrepid Aardvark, and following two self-introductions by members (full disclosure: I'm one of them) it's now got its first 'proper' article, about dodgy reporting of a study in acupuncture in the national media.

Baked on Brains: Encephalon number 62

The latest Encephalon Carnival is out at the Mouse Trap. Sandy G has done a fine job, and whether you snort it, smoke it, shoot it up, or spoon it right onto the cortex, you should head on over.

Other Encephalon related news is that there is now a dedicated feed.

The next edition of this carnival comes out on February 2nd and is hosted by Shelley Batts at Of Two Minds. The carnival archive and schedule is here.

Blogging for Darwin

There's a blog swarm a'commin', and it is taking place from February 12th-15th of this year (2009), to mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, which was February 12th, 1809.

Effortless Incitement will be participating. I'm not sure what I'll be doing yet, but I'll search the pile of stuff I'm planning on blogging for suitably Darwin celebratory hooks. To find out more about the swarm, click the image.

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

We like thinking that some things about us are achievements rather than endowments. This goes especially for things that we think we can justify or rationalise, including some of our beliefs and preferences. When we can give a plausible reason for something we believe, it's easy enough to suppose that we really *do* believe it for those reasons.

As several previous posts on this blog, and a giant pile of research from various fields, shows, it isn't that simple. There are all kinds of ways that our beliefs and preferences are sensitive things that don't seem like they should be relevant. In philosopher-speak we often have 'non-epistemic' reasons.

This paper suggests that political affiliation may be related in some way to what in the title is called physiological traits. You might more plainly say 'biology'. This isn't a crazy hypothesis at all. Risk aversion, aggression, and all kinds of other strategic dispositions are related to physiology. And the mixture of strategies in a population, as well as the connections between strategies and other properties of the individual are among the targets for natural selection. So there could well be interesting patterns here.

Douglas R. Oxley and a team of others, in a commendably interdisciplinary team of political scientists, psychologists and others, took on one aspect of the question about political attitudes and physiology. Here's the abstract:

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

First a telephone survey identified individuals with strongly held political beliefs. These individuals then visited the lab and completed a survey including demographic information, and measures of specific political beliefs and personality traits. About two months later each individual made a second visit, during which the physiological measurements were made. The two measurements were skin conductance, and "orbicularis oculi startle blink electromyogram (EMG) response".

This study didn't attempt to study political beliefs in general. Subjects were asked about their level of support for 28 policies or political acts, and 18 were identified as "those most likely to be held by individuals particularly concerned with protecting the interests of the participantsí group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats." (So the list included military expenditure, opposition to foreign aid, etc.) The authors don't endorse the view that any of these positions actually have the protective consequences, merely that "given the common frames of the modern American policy, those most concerned about social protection will tend to be attracted to the particular policy positions listed."

The subjects were divided into two groups for the purposes of the skin conductance response test - those above, and those below, the group median score for concern to protect the social group. Skin conductance was measured during a picture viewing session, where 3 out of 33 pictures were of threatening images "(a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it)". Here are the results:


So there's a significant difference in skin conductance response for threatening images, associated with degree of support for measures aimed at protecting the individual's own social group. (This effect stood up to a further regression analysis controlling for gender, age, income, and education.)

The other physiological measure was the startle blink EMG response. This response habituates, but there are inter-individual differences in the hardness of the blink, which is regarded as indicating a higher level of fear. Subjects wore headphones while looking at a computer screen with a single point they were supposed to focus on. During the staring session each participant was subjected seven times to the threatening stimulus of an unexpected burst of loud white noise. Here are the results (with the same division into groups) in a series of overlapping three event clusters of stimuli, to show habituation:


A different way of looking at the eye blink data ignores the habituation, and presents mean blink amplitude for all seven threatening stimuli, again with the same group division:


So there you go. This is impressive and interesting stuff. And the authors are clear that there is very much that we don't know about the result and what explains it:

Our data [...] do not permit firm conclusions concerning the specific causal processes at work. Particular physiological responses to threat could cause the adoption of certain political attitudes, or the holding of particular political attitudes could cause people to respond in a certain physiological way to environmental threats, but neither of these seems probable. More likely is that physiological responses to generic threats and political attitudes on policies related to protecting the social order may both derive from a common source. Parents could both socialize their children to hold certain political attitudes and condition them to respond in a certain way to threatening stimuli, but conditioning involuntary reflex responses takes immediate and sustained reinforcement and punishment, and it is unlikely that this conditioning varies systematically across political beliefs.

That seems about right. Behavioural genetics in other species suggests that fearfulness, or behaviours associated with it, have some heritable component. And there's independent evidence of various kinds for heritable components of personality (leading to the result I blogged a while ago showing a relationship between iris characteristics and personality). It's an empirical question how much variation in the physiological responses studied is genetic, but we know how to find that out. It will also be interesting to see what sorts of environmental and developmental contingencies (early malnutrition? season of birth? birth order?) bear on the development of the physiological traits.

Needless to say this paper generated some twitchy responses. On a crude reading (not that of the authors) it says conservatives are cowards. But that's not really what it says at all. People who have stronger startle responses tend to support more protective policies, sure, but the authors were careful to say their classification of political views was narrower than "conservative vs. liberal". I couldn't find serious write ups from a quick search, though, so no links. If you know of any substantial coverage, let me know, and I'll add links.

Finally, there's a related paper in Nature Neuroscience that anyone who has read this far might find interesting. The authors (David Amodio and colleagues) claim to show that "greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern." (Quoted from the abstract.)

D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Praxis number 6 is out!

Hooray! There's another edition of Praxis, over at PodBlack Cat. A cool carnival, at a cool blog, and one of my posts made the cut.

The next edition will be hosted at Mudphudder, and it should hit the pipes on February 15th.

The video below is irrelevant. But it came up high on a Google of 'praxis', and I rather like it. And I'm going to stick with regularly including images or videos that result from this semi-random procedure for a while, just to see what happens. It did give us the stainless steel rat brain slicer image for the post on the digrizfiz, after all.

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.

African naturalist blogroll

Michael Meadon over at Ionian Enchantment has compiled a blogroll of African blogs with a pro-science, or sceptical orientation. There aren't very many, but that's not so surprising on a continent with so little internet penetration. The blogroll is a useful service, and I'm reproducing it here:

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
  
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality **New**
  
• Botswana Skeptic **New**
  
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan's Corner
  
• Ionian Enchantment
• Irreverence
• LimbicNutrition **New**
  
• other things amanzi
  
• Orion Spur **New url**
  
• Pause and Consider
  
• Pickled Bushman
• Prometheus Unbound
• Psychohistorian **New**
  
• Scorched
  
• Science of Sport
• Stop Danie Krugel **New**
  
• subtle shift in emphasis
• Timbuktu Chronicles **New**
  
• the little book of capoeira
• The Skeptic Blacksheep
  
• The Skeptic Detective
• Yet Another Sceptic's Blog

Since Michael is the one doing the maintenance and updating, if you see a blog that you think belongs on the list (whether or not it's yours) you should contact him. Here is his most recent posting of the blogroll.

(I prefer 'naturalist' for one who takes science to be our best guide to how the world is. It's not clear what word is best here, because at least in SA English 'sceptical' doesn't carry the associations it does in much of the rest of the English-speaking blogosphere.)

Proposal: The Journal of Null Results

There's a lot of research that gets 'done' but doesn't become 'real', because it isn't submitted for publication. One common reason for this is that there's a lot of research that in some sense fails to find anything. More specifically, what is found isn't far from the 'null hypothesis' that there is no interesting relationship between the variables measured, or no effect of the experimental manipulation.

Journals mostly have a strong preference for articles that do find something, which means something other than an outcome consistent with the null hypothesis. That is, they prefer 'positive' results.

There are arguments for this preference, but following it comes at a cost. First the cost: discovering that the null hypothesis holds in some specific case is not the same thing as discovering nothing. You discover nothing when you don't do any work at all, or do it badly (having no control condition for an intervention, or having too few subjects to do meaningful analysis, etc.) that you might as well have not done any. When you do work that likely could have found something if it was there, and don't, that's a modest discovery. It should be part of the scientific record. It's absence, among other things, confounds literature surveys and meta-analyses.

This is not, of course, an original point. It has been made eloquently by various people. Among recent examples see this piece by Ben Goldacre. Here's one quotation about the loss represented by un-published trials:

We may never know what was in that unpublished data, but those missing numbers will cost lives in quantities larger than any emotive health story covered in any newspaper. Doctors need negative data to make prescribing decisions. Academics need to know which ideas have failed, so they can work out what to study next, and which to abandon. In their own way, academic journals are exactly as selective as the tabloid health pages.

Some have argued that failing to publish the results (no matter what they are) of any research involving human subjects is unethical. Here is an example in the BMJ. I think a stronger point could be made. At the very least, there is an obligation to make available the results of any science that is to any extent publicly supported. For one report on a survey attempting to figure out how many un-published research there is, see this report in Nature. While I'm throwing links around, some of what I say here is related to some points made in the article on The Future of Science (well worth reading) by Michael Nielsen.

The preference, on the other hand, makes sense for at least two reasons. One is that 'unexpected' results are regarded as better than expected ones, and confirming the null hypothesis is, from this perspective, a very boring an predictable thing to do. This preference is not unconditional - it's sometimes onside independently to duplicate a result, indeed it is often required. It's also not clear that 'unexpected' is a very important category - what is expected depends on prior beliefs, and so the very same empirical work might switch back and forth from being expected to unexpected as background theory changes, or other positive results get taken on board.

Another reason is scarcity of space. Even if null results are in some sense part of science, they're less likely to get cited or built on than positive results. They are indeed less interesting, and when space is scarce, as it mostly is with paper journals, and with finite time and patience on the part of reviewers irrespective of the medium of publication, a bias in favour of the interesting is rational.

The internet takes away the space scarcity problem, and it might be that the reviewer scarcity problem can be managed. So here is my at least semi-hare-brained proposal, in its first draft form:

1. There should be a web-based Open Access Journal of Null Results.
2. The journal should be non-disciplinary.
3. Any scientific team or individual can submit a brief report of any research that led to a null result.
4. Submissions should be publication quality in the following respects:
   

   (a) Authors and affiliations should be fully detailed.
   (b) The submission should have a proper title, abstract, account of methods, and data analysis.
   (c) Where appropriate to the discipline it should be made clear what ethical approval was obtained, and whether there were any conflicts of interest.
   (d) Where possible the primary data (excepting anything that violates consent or privacy protocols) should be archived with the submission.

5. People or teams who submit should be asked to provide details of at least three peer-reviewed publications in the past five years by independent authors (i.e. with no overlap with the author list of the submission). These authors are then asked to briefly review the methods of the submission, and say whether in their view the research had a decent chance of finding anything if it was there. Submissions that pass this test have that fact noted on the journal, along with the names of the reviewers and the date at which their opinions were given. (So this is not a blind review process at all.) Submissions passed by two reviewers are considered peer-reviewed publications in the Journal.
6. As far as possible, the operation runs automatically, with minimal volunteer human oversight.
   

I regard (4) as the most serious problem. Experiments with volunteer review haven't gone well (again, see Nielsen's The Future of Science), which is why I think reviews should be requested. But the proposed review system is a little unusual, and I think some careful debugging would be needed to make it fly.

I don't know who might host such a thing, or whether there are obvious flaws in this idea, or who might possibly foot the bill. I'm still not entirely recovered from New Year celebrations. But for now, let the blogosphere have its say...

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

Reversal of cocaine addiction by environmental enrichment

Addiction is one of those topics where there's a lot of morally hysterical yelling that generates plenty of heat but no illumination. It's also an area where we're making rapid and interesting scientific progress. One battle that was -- to my mind -- won a long time ago involved getting addiction taken seriously as in key respects a behaviour like any other. That doesn't mean addictive behaviour isn't odd in some respects, but rather that like any other behaviour it is sensitive to opportunity cost.

This was a tough sell partly because much muddled thinking about addiction sees the activity of the addict as a departure from her normal agency - the addict was roughly supposed to be periodically and unconditionally enslaved to something else. A body of empirical work was done showing that consumption by addicts was sensitive to price - when booze costs more, drunks drink less. And also sensitive to opportunity cost - when booze costs the same, but additional substitutable products become available, so that what is being given up by drinking is more, drunks also drink less. The introduction to Rudy Vuchinich and Nick Heather's 2003 anthology Choice, Behavioral Economics and Addiction (Pergamon) provides a terrific overview of the relevant theory and results.

This paper adds very importantly to what we know. The paper reports that mice addicted to cocaine lose addictive symptoms when exposed to an "enriched environment" during withdrawal. Here's the abstract:

Environmental conditions can dramatically influence the behavioral and neurochemical effects of drugs of abuse. For example, stress increases the reinforcing effects of drugs and plays an important role in determining the vulnerability to develop drug addiction. On the other hand, positive conditions, such as environmental enrichment, can reduce the reinforcing effects of psychostimulants and may provide protection against the development of drug addiction. However, whether environmental enrichment can be used to "treat" drug addiction has not been investigated. In this study, we first exposed mice to drugs and induced addiction-related behaviors and only afterward exposed them to enriched environments. We found that 30 days of environmental enrichment completely eliminates behavioral sensitization and conditioned place preference to cocaine. In addition, housing mice in enriched environments after the development of conditioned place preference prevents cocaine-induced reinstatement of conditioned place preference and reduces activation of the brain circuitry involved in cocaine-induced reinstatement. Altogether, these results demonstrate that environmental enrichment can eliminate already established addiction-related behaviors in mice and suggest that environmental stimulation may be a fundamental factor in facilitating abstinence and preventing relapse to cocaine addiction.

So what did they do? Well, the addicted a group of mice to cocaine, and the split them into two sub-groups during withdrawal. Those in the "enriched environment" had larger enclosures with nicer shelters, a running wheel, and access to toys that were changed weekly.

They studied three different measures of addiction, each in a separate experiment:

(1) Behavioural sensitisation, which is a measure of the increase in effects of cocaine following chronic administration.
(2) Location preference, which is a measure of the extent to which a previously learned spatial association continues to elicit drug-seeking behaviour.
(3) The propensity of cocaine administration to lead to relapse after withdrawal.

The result was dramatic - after 30 days of exposure to the "enriched environment" addiction behavior of all three kinds had disappeared.

In contrast, the mice in the non-enriched environment still showed measurable addiction on each model after 30 days.

What has been found here isn't that availability of substitutable 'alternatives' makes a difference to the course of addiction. First, we knew that already. Second, the mice in the "enriched environment" weren't chosing between play and cocaine, so that the availability of play raised the opportunity cost of cocaine. They had more options during withdrawal.

The authors suggest two possible mechanisms. First, the "enriched environment" was less stressful, and stress is know to mediate relapse and drug-seeking. Second, the "enriched environment" provided opportunities to learn a wider range of reward-seeking behaviours, which reduced the power of the previously learned patterns relative to controls which had fewer such opportunities. These are not mutually exclusive, and both seem highly plausible (there's also independent evidence for each).

There's plenty more to be found out, but this is a very useful addition to our understanding. For another brief notice of the same research see this on Science Daily.

M. Solinas, C. Chauvet, N. Thiriet, R. El Rawas, M. Jaber (2008). From the Cover: Reversal of cocaine addiction by environmental enrichment Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (44), 17145-17150 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806889105