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

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

InPHO Taxonomy

The Indiana Philosophy Ontology project (InPhO) recently luanched a beta version of its 'Taxonomy Browser' which is a useful portal for browsing and accessing philosophical resources on line. It includes links to articles on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as Google, Google Scholar, and other searches. It's pretty cool - and mostly automatically compiled, although they admit a little 'human feedback'. There's a more detailed explanation of how it works here.

Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders

Here's a fascinating paper that got some attention when first published a few months ago, although mostly in short blog pieces that quote the abstract in full and assert "this is cool". Here's an attempt to be more detailed. The paper finds that relatively specific differences in life circumstances are associated with differences in cognitive processing styles. I say that the differences in life circumstances were specific because the research subjects were from the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic group. The subjects were "members of three communities in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region whose daily economic activities are governed by varying degrees of interdependence" (p. 8552). The differences in cognitive processing style related to degrees of holism in "attention, categorization, and reasoning" (abstract).

As the authors of this paper note, there's an existing body of work suggesting relationships between degree of social inter-dependence and aspects of cognitive style. Much of this work focussed on comparing East Asians and Westerners, who tend to differ in cognitive style, but who also tend to differ in many ways (including languages, and educational systems) as well as in the hypothesised extent of interdependence thought to explain the differences in cognitive style. For an account of much of this research see R.E. Nisbett's 2003 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... And Why (Free Press, New York). The fact that the present paper (Nisbett is one of its authors) considers groups whose differences far more narrowly concern interdependence is a significant advance. The paper also addresses some concerns that the measures of cognitive style in earlier work lacked ecological validity.

As the authors note:

"Farming requires harmonious group collaboration. Moreover, farmers are largely sedentary; they are tied to the land they cultivate and, thus, to fixed communities. These factors are likely to encourage a high degree of social interdependence. In contrast, herding activities do not require much cooperation, but rely on individual decision making and autonomy. Moreover, herders are much less sedentary; their capital can be moved to any location with enough nutrition for animals. Herding communities are therefore unlikely to exert much pressure toward cooperation or conformity. Instead, they foster individualistic or independent social orientations" (p. 8552).

The study used a number of measures of cognitive style, including:

(1) The Framed Line Test (p. 8553f).



The figure above is figure 1 from the paper (p. 8554). The left panel represents the test - subjects are shown a square with a line descending from the middle of the top side. They are then asked to draw a line on a second square of a different size, with two different instructions: to draw a line of the same absolute length, and to draw a line that is the same relative length (compared to the sides of the triangle). To do better at the first task it helps to ignore the context (the square) and focus on the line, whereas the opposite holds in the second case. As the right hand panel (illustrating mean length error in millimeters for each task) shows, the herders made comparatively larger errors in the relative task, and comparatively smaller ones in the absolute task.

(2) A categorisation task (p. 8554).

In this task subjects repeatedly said which two of three depicted objects belonged together, where two of the three (e.g. a glove and a scarf - see panel a in the figure below) shared a mostly categorical relationship, whereas another two (e.g. a glove and a hand - again, see figure below) shared a mostly functional or contextual relationship. As predicted herders showed less of a tendency to opt for functional/contextual pairings in favour of categorical ones.


(3) Similarity task (p. 8554,5).

In this task, which I won't describe in much detail, it was found that Farmers and fishermen “more often perceived similarities based on holistic judgments of family resemblance” whereas herders preferred to decide similarity on the basis of a “unidimensional rule”.

This is all very interesting - although the effect sizes for differences in 'cognitive style' are not large, they're present, and they're apparently related to the sort of differences in level of social interdependence that informed the design of the study. It's also important in a number of ways. These differences might well be important at least near the margins for the effectiveness of things like public health campaigns, teaching methods, political decision making, and advertising. We need to know more, including more on how early in life the differences are measurable, and how enduring they are, for example whether differences are still measurable after one, or five, or more years following a change from one level of interdependence to another.

References

Nisbett RE (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... And Why (Free Press, New York).

A. K. Uskul, S. Kitayama, R. E. Nisbett (2008). Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (25), 8552-8556 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0803874105

Technology and the economics of reading 2.0

This article is about how various kinds of technology at the same time as making things to read more available, can make it more difficult to get proper reading done. It is a second attempt at a topic I wrote something about a little while ago (here’s version 1). This version is substantially longer and I think better.

In the first version I acknowledged an article I remembered but could not find by Tim van Gelder. In correspondence with him I figured out what the article was, and he sent me a PDF. His article is called "Penicillin for the mind? Reason, education and cognitive science", and as far as I can tell it isn't available on the web. (I've suggested to van Gelder that he post it on his blog, and I hope he does.) The paragraph that got my thinking going is the following one:

My mother was a philosophy major at the University of Melbourne some 25 years before I arrived to do the same degree. In those days, there was often only one copy of a book or article, and it was in the library. She went there to read it, and anything she took away had to be in her head or in her laboriously handwritten notes. This forced her to distil the text down to its essentials; and she did this time and time again. Today, almost nobody does it; if something is worth reading, it is worth copying first. In the library at the University of New South Wales students make 15 million copies a year (cost: 400 large trees). Photocopying fosters the illusion that knowledge has been acquired. The mental effort of comprehending and remembering has been postponed, often forever. These days teachers arrange to have class materials copied in advance, to save students the trouble. As a result, students get much less practice digesting a text. They are losing the disposition and ability to do such basic things as identify the main point and the main line of argument. They cannot form a critical response because they never engage with the reasoning in the first place.

I think van Gelder is onto something important here. What I found when I returned to his text, though, was that the way I'd "remembered" it included a more explicit economic concepts (not many, mind you), and I realised that was mostly the way I'd been thinking about it, and a product of my own research interests. So what I offer here are some reflections largely provoked by reading van Gelder's remarks a few years ago, but adding to them, and in some ways suggesting corrections to them. I don't actually think that the key problem is that copying fosters an illusion of knowledge acquisition, but that availability -- of texts and distractions -- does something to the value of individual reading episodes. In case it's not already obvious, I'm mostly talking about academic reading here, although some of the points probably generalise.

When I was an undergraduate student it was regularly the case that a key reading for a course with over 100 people in it was only available in a part of our main university library called the "Reserve Room" items on reserve could not be taken out, but only used for limited periods of time in the Reserve Room. There were waiting lists for high-demand items, and although it was possible to use your time to make a copy of the text, what most people did most of the time was sit down and give it a good thorough reading. This often meant trying to make notes in sufficient detail to make it very unlikely that a second trip would be needed. As a doctoral student I had a similar experience working at the British Library, which is not a lending library. On mornings when I worked there, I'd approach my reading with a view to doing everything so thoroughly that I'd not need to go back.

Now, in common with many people, I have close to permanent access to large numbers of versions of things that I believe I need to read, and yet seem to spend less of my time than ever before engaged in the sort of serious, deeply focussed reading that I've just described. The access I'm referring to amounts to the following: on my office PC, and my laptop, I have substantial numbers of dowloaded articles, with something around 100 of them at any time in one way or another designated as "things to read soon". I can print any of them with almost no delay, and take the laptop with me. Without doing anything, then, I have significantly more material that I want to read on hand right here and now, than was available to me in the old Reserve Room, or than I could have hoped to get through in a week at the British Library. So why am I not reading more things, but with the same intensity? I admit, a lot of other things have changed. I'm older (maybe dumber), have a bunch of responsibilities I didn't have before, and so on. It seems clear to me, though, that besides those differences, there's something important about the different reading situations -- the old ones, and the ones I routinely face now.

The first thing is that in the two cases above (the old Reserve Room, and the British Library) the costs of wasting, or semi-wasting, a reading session were quite high. In both cases it meant waiting at least hours, and maybe days, before a second chance. Making use of the chance itself took up a decent amount of time. The delays could have serious 'knock on' effects, if work I was planning on doing later on was dependent on what I'd been hoping to find out in the reading session. This is just not the way it is when I can start reading just about any time. If I procrastinate for 20 minutes, I can almost always start again in 20 minutes.

How is this an economic phenomenon? Well, it drives down the (apparent) costs of procrastination - and if our sometimes fickle and unreliable selves are thought of a buyers of procrastination, we can expect ourselves to buy more of the same thing when the manufacturers lower the price.

A second thing that is dangerously seductive is the almost free availability of various ways of "foraging" for things to read. Again, let me compare two cases.

Back in the day, when I read something I'd regularly encounter references to other works that it seemed I should read too. Mostly I'd make notes about that fact, and later make the results of a bunch of such note-takings the basis for a trip to the library. If I was already working in the library, I'd very occasionally get up and look for the document right away. But mostly the costs of searching around didn't seem worth interrupting my work for, and so I'd wait until I had enough on the "things to find" list to justify a proper expedition. Now if I'm reading a paper and see a reference to an interesting looking article, I can be reading the abstract of the paper within a few seconds if I'm online, which I almost always am. If the abstract looks important, I can be downloading the paper into my "things to read later" tray. I can do a quick search to find papers citing the paper I've found, look to see if any of them are important. Or find the web page of one or more of the authors to see if they've done other cool stuff I "should" know about. Sometimes I don't even finish one paragraph of an article before getting side-tracked like that, and after 30 minutes I've read hardly anything, but skimmed a pile of titles and abstracts, and added 20 papers to the "things to read" pile. It's close to going backwards, and relative to old-style reading it is clearly inferior.

This foraging is important - a key part of reading is working out what to read. But it shouldn't be allowed to eat into the reading process too much, at the risk of displacing proper reading with the kind of superficial knowledge that comes from having seen a bunch of abstracts and done little else. Even people who're honest about the fact that they've not yet read anything properly (and so not endorsing the "illusion" that they've acquired knowledge) may find it hard to stop being distracted and foraging to much eating (reading) too little. You need to invest some time in prioritising, and cheap foraging might (at least for some people) make it harder to settle on what to do, because you have a wider range of things that you "could" read at any moment, and so can more easily spend time browsing before settling down.

Again the phenomenon is partly economic - when the costs of foraging get lower, you'll buy more of it. And it's seductive in a way that other kinds of procrastination like fooling around with social networking aren't, because it really is a part of the working process.

A third problem (related to the above, but different) is the frankly awesome availability of distractions with close to zero start-up costs. One key distraction is socialising. Again, when I was a nipper working by myself at night if I wanted to mess around there was less TV to chose from, and social interaction usually meant making a phone call, or maybe wandering around the university residence to see who else was awake and trying to bug them (with mixed success - I was less charming then). Now I typically have two email accounts and facebook running in tabs on my browser at the same time as I've got a PDF of a paper open in another application, or a draft of something I'm writing open in a word processor. The occasional knock on the door or phone call of someone else looking for escape has been replaced with the steady pinging of mail notifications from a network of friends and acquaintances in almost every time zone, who I can also bother more or less ad lib. Again, a tempting product (and also one that is important to some extent) has been made cheaper.

So what can we do? How is it that anybody gets any proper reading done (since many clearly do)?

I think there are a few things.

First, we can make more of an effort to be clear with ourselves about the costs of delay are. It's not hard to keep track of costs when they're obvious things like having to make additional trips to libraries, it takes more effort to keep aware of the opportunity costs of the wasted hour you're right in the middle of it when it seems as though you can start work with no cost at the end of the hour. But our time is at least as scarce as ever. It also helps to me more clear about why pseudo-work like foraging can be counter-productive. Having definite targets so that you can tell whether you're falling short of them helps too.

Second, we can manufacture scarcity in various ways. Go to lunch (without a laptop!) taking only one article to read. If you don't read that one, you've failed, and you can't mask the fact so easily because there's no citation index (or facebook) to mess around with, or giant folder of downloaded articles to organise and browse. I've found that a terrific place to get reading done is in meetings. It really is possible, with only a little practice, to keep track of a basically administrative meeting and participate in it while reading something unrelated. And in meetings where you really are mostly expected to sit still and keep quiet, reading becomes a merciful release from the tedious and often inefficiently conducted business at hand. Part of manufacturing scarcity is raising the costs of distractions, and even small barriers can be helpful. Work off-line, or at least close down email and social networking stuff, for fixed periods.

These three suggestions are presented impressionistically - in some cases I know of peer-reviewed research that suggests they really would help, but in others I'm pretty much saying something about what I try to do, which seems sometimes to work. I'd welcome more research on academic reading from a behavioural economic perspective, and especially work on strategies and interventions to encourage intense critical reading.

Something I'm also very interested in is how all this plays out for new students, who've mostly never experienced the sorts of scarcity that give me the backdrop for assessing the effects of the current situation. It seems to me that many of them are far less likely to get any proper reading done than they should be. I'm just not sure what to begin to think about how to help that.

References:

van Gelder, T. J. (1998) Penicillin for the mind? Reason, education and cognitive science. Preprint No. 1/98, University of Melbourne Department of Philosophy.

Top cartoon - "Hard Read" from the Perry Bible Fellowship.

Two notable pieces on BPS research digest

I've found myself reading the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog more and more. There's a brisk flow of brief write ups of psychology research, focussed on peer-reviewed publications. I used to get there from the Research Blogging feed. (This is a cool aggregator of blog posts on peer-reviewed research, which you should check out if you're not already aware of it.) But I ended up there so often I've subscribed to BPS in its own right.

Here are two recent articles well worth looking at (had I but world enough and time, I'd consider blogging both of the papers they refer to):

(1) Recent research suggests that people who volunteer for psychology experiments / surveys are generally more stable and outgoing than those who don't. We need better recruiting strategies to get after the sulking neurotics.

(2) It also seems that self-perception of how well you are doing something impacts on your assessment of others who you are observing. So don't just try to impress folks - have them check you out while they're doing something well.

Associations between iris characteristics and personality in adulthood

There's a body of data, some of it contested, relating eye colour, or eye colour at some ages, with personality traits. Among other things its been reported that there are associations between dark eyes and traits like extroversion (Gentry et al, 1965), and that among kindergarten children below certain ages blue-eyed children were disproportionately likely to be extremely withdrawn (Rubin and Both 1989). Apparently researchers in the area came to agree that eye colour had very little to do with adult personality (e.g. Rubin and Both, 1989).*

There are some speculations regarding mechanisms that might connect eye colour and personality, relating to the fact that production of some substances involved in eye pigmentation is associated with production of other substances (including norepinephrine and cortisol) that are known to have their own associations with behavioural differences.

After reviewing some of the literature just mentioned the authors of this study point out that there are other significant differences between irises besides their colour, including the number and other properties of features called 'Fuchs' crypts', 'contraction furrows' and 'pigment dots' (see figure below). They sought to investigate whether the mechanisms associated with frequency of these properties were also implicated in behaviour. If they were, then there could be systematic correlations between iris features and personality.

Here's a figure illustrating the iris features, from the paper, via MindHacks:

One example of the sort of pleiotropy at issue here is the gene Pax6, which is apparently involved in the process of muscle-cell differentiation in the iris, and hence some of the visible iris features noted above, and also expressed in the brain with one Pax6 mutation being associated with disinhibition, impulsivity and other traits. Pax6 is also associated with production of dopamine neurons, in turn known to be important for a variety of cognitive processes, including some relating to learning, patience, valuation, and response to risk -- all related to personality.

So if some genes are expressed both in ways that bear on what irises look like, and on personality, there might be correlations between the two. This won’t necessarily be the case. There are multiple causal processes on each side, and room for any single factor common to both to get driven away from showing interesting or detectable correlation. There’s an empirical question here, and the present paper has a go at it. There’s a lot of detail that I won’t try to cover – here’s the main story in sketch form.

428 human undergraduates had their irises imaged, and incidence and properties (e.g. size) of the iris features noted above coded. They also completed the NEO PI-R, an instrument based on the ‘Five-Factor’ model of personality (where the five factors are neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness). Each factor was assessed in a way that measured six specific factors (in the case of neuroticism the specifics concern: anxiety, angry-hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability).

The study included two main analyses. One was a correlational analysis focussed on associations between individual iris characteristics and specific factors in the NEO PI-R. The other was a cluster analysis looking for relationships between overall iris properties and whole personalities. Both found interesting results, even though the effect sizes were (as expected) generally small.

A number of significant correlations were found in the variable based analysis, including between furrows and 'impulsiveness', furrows and 'self-discipline', crypts and 'warmth', crypts and 'positive emotions', and crypts and 'tendermindedness' (I've only listed associations significant at p<0.01 - others were found at p<0.05).

In the person oriented analysis a number of clusters of iris feature types were found, and a number of them had significant correlations with personality measures. It's more difficult to summarise these results in prose, and the pre-publication PDF annoyingly won't allow copying to the clip-board.

This is interesting. There are a few sorts of follow up I'd like to see:

1. The same general thing, but with behavioural (delay discounting) measures of impulsivity.
2. Direct measurement of the genetics, with the same personality measures.
3. Attempt to find out whether people are sensitive (likely unconsciously if at all) to any of this. One could manipulate images of faces replacing or otherwsie changing the irises, and see whether this alone made differences in respect of attractiveness, perceived mate-worthiness, etc. It could be that folks don't notice this, but if there is a decent visible indicator of personality lying around, there's a chance individuals sensitive to it would have been at an advantage.

Here's the text of the abstract:

Variable and person-oriented analyses were used to explore the associations between personality and three previously untested general iris characteristics: crypts, pigment dots and contraction furrows. Personality data, as measured by the NEO PI-R and ratings of iris characteristics from 428 undergraduate students were collected. Crypts were significantly associated with five approach-related behaviors, i.e., feelings, tendermindedness, warmth, trust and positive emotions, whereas furrows were associated with impulsiveness. These findings suggest that because Pax6 induces tissue deficiencies in both the iris and the left anterior cingulate cortex, Pax6 may influence the extent people engage in approach-related behaviors. The results from using a person-oriented analysis suggested that people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different personality trajectories. Future longitudinal studies, twin-studies and genetic association studies, may benefit from collecting iris data and testing candidate genes for crypts and furrows.

This paper has been written up elsewhere, including at MindHacks, and BPS Research Digest.

* The references here are in the first paragraphs of the paper. I'd put them in full here, but as I said above the "article in press" PDF is locked to copying to the clipboard.

LARSSON, M., PEDERSEN, N., STATTIN, H. (2007). Associations between iris characteristics and personality in adulthood. Biological Psychology, 75(2), 165-175. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2007.01.007

The spontaneous expression of pride and shame: Evidence for biologically innate nonverbal displays

The picture on the left shows two different judo competitors, just after winning a bout. One of them is sighted, the other congenitally blind. Can you tell which is which?

It took longer than it should for the case that facial expressions of emotion are largely human universals to be made (in fact wider than human, and conserved across many species). Paul Ekman is a leading figure here, and his introduction to one of the many editions of Darwin's The expression of the emotions in man and animals (Ekman introduced edition on Powell's here, eText edition here). Expression of emotion isn't simply universal - cultural differences can modify and mask it. Also, there's ongoing work on what sorts of basic emotions are relatively universal - early work focussed on states like happiness, fear and disgust. This paper considers highly relational states, in particular pride and shame.

There's some work already suggesting that the non-verbal expresions of pride and shame are fairly universal within humans, and between humans and some other species. (Think of inflated chests, raised arms, strutting, etc., for pride.) One key question not yet rigorously tested is whether displays of pride and shame universally follow actual successes or failures. If they do, that's encouraging news for functionalist accounts of the purpose of such displays in social signalling.

This paper presents the results of an elegant and beautiful attack on the question. There are few cases of success and failure clearer than sporting events with two individual competitors. Typically there's one clear winner and one clear loser. Also, participants in some sporting events are congenitally blind. Quoting the abstract of the paper:

"Specifically, we tested whether sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals across cultures spontaneously display pride and shame behaviors in response to the same success and failure situations—victory and defeat at the Olympic or Paralympic Games."

Data for athletes from 37 nations participating in judo matches at the 2004 Olympics and Paralympic games was gathered and coded. The codes showed good inter-rater reliability. Figure 1 below shows the results for a selection of non-verbal behaviors including tilting the head back, smiling, forming fists, etc. among 108 episodes involving sighted athletes (some individuals were recorded more than once).

Figure 2 shows the same measurements for 12 congenitally blind athletes.

There's some striking congruence, especially in the narrowing chest and slumped shoulders of losers, and in a selection of the behaviours of winners. But there's also more - the nationalities of athletes were used to assign them ratings on a number of cultural dimensions, including individualism vs. collectivism, secular-rational vs. traditional, and survival vs. self-expression. The data thus produced turned out to be interesting too. Again, quoting the formulation in the abstract:

"...culture moderated the shame response among sighted athletes: it was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia."

As the authors note, their findings don't settle the questions, even though they're interesting and important. One limitation is that while it seems reasonable to suppose that winners felt pride and losers shame, this wasn't directly measured. Also, the presence of an audience in all cases leaves open the possibility that the behaviours were in some sense "intentional social communications", although as they also note this seems considerably less likely for the congenitally blind. There's more to find out, but it does seem very likely that there's a significant universal component to the non-verbal expression of pride and shame, that may go on to be subject to cultural modulation.

This research has also been written up elsewhere, including BPS Research Digest, Wired and MindHacks.

Here's the full text of the abstract:

The present research examined whether the recognizable nonverbal expressions associated with pride and shame may be biologically innate behavioral responses to success and failure. Specifically, we tested whether sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals across cultures spontaneously display pride and shame behaviors in response to the same success and failure situations—victory and defeat at the Olympic or Paralympic Games. Results showed that sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from >30 nations displayed the behaviors associated with the prototypical pride expression in response to success. Sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from most cultures also displayed behaviors associated with shame in response to failure. However, culture moderated the shame response among sighted athletes: it was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia. Given that congenitally blind individuals across cultures showed the shame response to failure, findings overall are consistent with the suggestion that the behavioral expressions associated with both shame and pride are likely to be innate, but the shame display may be intentionally inhibited by some sighted individuals in accordance with cultural norms.

(The answer to the opening question is, incidentally, that you can't tell by looking and that as it happens the athlete on the right is the congenitally blind individual. This pair of images is figure 3 in the paper.)


Tracy, J.L., Matsumoto, D. (2008). The spontaneous expression of pride and shame: Evidence for biologically innate nonverbal displays. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(33), 11655-11660. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802686105

Encephalon #52

Encephalon number 52 is just out, in a Q&A format, over at Ouroboros.
There's plenty of good stuff in the roundup, including a useful piece on
grandmother neurons over at combing cognits, and something on the neural
basis of social attachments at Neurotic Physiology. The next issue of the
carnival will be hosted by Michael Meadon at Ionian Enchantment.

Brains ... brains ... brains ...

Stress reduction through consolation in chimpanzees

Consolation behaviour is interesting in various ways. Why do some individuals spend effort going and doing consoling things to some others? Why, for that matter, don't they sometimes? Why does it sometimes help? When doesn't it?

One promising arena for shedding some light on these questions is observation of the smarter non-human social primates. (There are plenty of open avenues of enquiry here - one of my earlier posts on this blog relates to the effect of social support on perception of geographical slant, which is relevant to the "what does it do" question. I'd like to see some good neuroscience on some of this.) Chimpanzees sometimes enage in consoling behaviour, and it's possible to observe who consoles who, after what, and measure a host of other socially important considerations in detail that would be at least very difficult in humans.

Here's the abstract of the current paper:

Consolation, i.e., postconflict affiliative interaction directed from a third party to the recipient of aggression, is assumed to have a stress-alleviating function. This function, however, has never been demonstrated. This study shows that consolation in chimpanzees reduces behavioral measures of stress in recipients of aggression. Furthermore, consolation was more likely to occur in the absence of reconciliation, i.e., postconflict affiliative interaction between former opponents. Consolation therefore may act as an alternative to reconciliation when the latter does not occur. In the debate about empathy in great apes, evidence for the stress alleviating function of consolation in chimpanzees provides support for the argument that consolation could be critical behavior. Consistent with the argument that relationship quality affects their empathic responses, we found that consolation was more likely between individuals with more valuable relationships. Chimpanzees may thus respond to distressed valuable partners by consoling them, thereby reducing their stress levels, especially in the absence of reconciliation.

Note here that reconcilliation occurs between the conflicting parties, and is not what this study is about.

Here, roughly and leaving out a lot of detail, is what the authors did with a well-established group of chimpanzees varying in size from 26 to 32 members over the course of the study:

1. Observed aggressive conflict, defined as "any interaction involving a bite, hit, brusque rush, trample, chase, or threat in addition to screaming" (p8559). (Obviously a longer list would be needed for research subjects with access to firearms, lawyers, bagpipes and medium sized pieces of iron-mongery.) Conflicts were further analysed to determine who "won", since losing is taken to be more stressful.
2. Measured post-conflict (PC) stress by counting rates of self-grooming and self-scratching, both known to increase under stress. (As before, for subjects who can buy dumb stuff on E-Bay, bang tools together in their shed, etc., a richer coding scheme is required.)
3. Measured consolation behaviours, by counting affiliative interactions, defined as "kiss, embrace, grooming, finger-in-mouth, gentle touch, or play". (Exercise for the reader.)
4. Measured relationship quality between different pairs of chimps, using coding methods developed for use with mother-infant relatioships.

The details I've left out are important - this kind of primatology is tough, and depends on laborious examination and encoding of recordings of interaction and activity, before any analysis can begin. (It involves amounts of crushingly dull drudge work impossible before the invention of the scientific underclass known as the 'graduate student'.) The analysis here also depends on some specific policies dividing up time for coding purposes, and more specifically classifying episodes of consolation as a function of time since conflict.

Subject to the various coding schemes and data collection policies, the authors collected data on 234 pairs of episodes (ones involving post-conflict behaviour and matched controls lacking it) for 22 recipients of aggression, involving 129 distinct pairings of individuals in the original conflict. The sophisticated analysis (detailed in the paper and the supplementary materials) established the main finding: that consolation reduces stress, and that the best predictor of the effect of consolation was relationship quality: it's worth more to be comforted by those who matter to us. The two figures below summarise some of the main results.
























For another article on chimpanzees on this blog (not about consolation) see Chimpanzees use self-distraction to cope with impulsivity.

And for anyone who doesn't know, the picture at the top is Philippe from Achewood (used without permission) . He's got his own blog here.


Fraser, O.N., Stahl, D., Aureli, F. (2008). Stress reduction through consolation in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(25), 8557-8562. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804141105

Two good new psychology related blog posts

Here are two posts worth looking at:

(1) First, Ed over at Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on an elegant study on the effects of wearing red in sporting events. Unlike previous studies, many of which have focussed on statistical analyses of real games, this one is a proper experiment, where qualified judges scored tae kwon do matches, shown to them on video. The cool idea was using digital editing to swap the coloured panels on the competitor's kit around, so being able to show an effect for the very same performances. Fighters wearing red got more points.

(2) Then there's a short report over at the BPS research digest, on reduced cognitive performance (especially selective and sustained attention) in subjects engaged in an emergency drill. This helps shed some light on why so many die in emergencies. (There's a related article at Cognitive Daily on working memory and choking under pressure.)

Recent blog articles I've read

Just a short nod to two recent blog articles that I found worthwhile:

(1) A report on how visualising an achievement from the perspective of onlookers does more for motivation to succeed that visualising it from the achiever's perspective, over at Sports are 80 percent mental.

(2) Something on the evolution of schizophrenia over at Neuroscientifically Challenged.

I've got some more social psychology write ups on their way - just having a crazy busy time, so not getting that much writing done.

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

Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing

Here’s some more cool social psychology, this time from a few years ago (2006). We’re all used to literary and other artistic associations between bad acts and physical dirtiness. In suitable formulaic television and film you can tell the ‘good’ from ‘bad’ characters almost instantly. The association is found in the figures of speech in a variety of languages. It’s an interesting question how cognitively deep the association is, and whether the pattern we see in language and art reflects something deeper about the ways our minds work.

Considered as a strictly conceptual question, the superficial association appears as an irrelevance. And in some sense we all know this: we would presumably mostly agree if asked with the claims that physically clean people can do awful things, and physically dirty people can act nobly. But how powerful is the association when we’re not asked questions that force us to be a bit more conceptually careful?

This paper reports on a series of related experiments, all suggesting that the association has significant measurable effects in cases where it should be conceptually irrelevant. More specifically the authors sought to investigate:

(i) whether a threat to moral purity activates a need for physical cleansing (i.e., the Macbeth effect) and (ii) whether physical cleansing is actually efficacious in helping people cope with moral threats.

The paper reports four separate, related, studies. Here’s a brief gloss of each, and its punchline:

Study 1: Subjects recalled either an ethical or unethical deed from their past, and then describe the emotions (not the deed itself). All then engaged in a word completion task, and subjects who had recalled an unethical deed completed words in cleaning related ways (e.g. W _ _ H, which could be ‘wash’ or ‘wish’) more frequently than subjects in the ethical recall condition. This suggests that thinking about unethical deeds makes cleaning related concepts more accessible.

Study 2: Subjects told that the study was about handwriting and personality, copied a short story in the first person, identical except for the final sentence which in one case suggested an ethical act, in the other an unethical one. They were then asked to rate the desirability of a range of products. Subjects who had copied the story with the unethical ending reported the cleaning products as more desirable. (See figure.)



Study 3: These subjects did the same recall task as in Study 1, but were then offered one of two different free gifts for their participation, either a pencil or an antiseptic wipe. Subjects in the unethical recall condition selected the antiseptic wipe more frequently.

Study 4: Again the same recall task (Study 1, 3) was used, except that all subjects recalled an unethical deed. Half of the subjects were then asked to clean their hands. Subjects who had cleaned their hands agreed to participate in a further experiment for no reward than subjects who had not. This suggests that the cleaning in some sense reduces the subjects’ perceived guilt.

What’s going on here? We don’t really know yet – this work measures some related effects, but sheds no direct light on mechanisms, including mechanisms of development. As the authors note, there’s already work suggesting that moral and what they call ‘pure’ disgust (such as reaction to rotting meat) are associated both with similar facial expressions and with overlapping brain activation (Moll et al, 2005). Overlapping brain activation isn’t on its own that impressive, although the overlapping brain activation isn’t that hard to come by, and the subjects in the Moll et al study were reading statements which seems to me a noisy kind of stimulus.

I reckon we could find out a lot about the mechanisms here from further investigation in non-human social animals. In fact ‘we’ probably have, it’s just that I need to go and do some more reading. I’d also be interested to see work on how early in human development the effect is measurable. We already know that preverbal infants have preferences that are at least relevant to moral questions.

As I said earlier, this research isn’t new. It’s been blogged a bit already, including here and here, and covered in the New York Times.

References: Moll, J., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Moll, F. T., Ignacio, F. A., Bramati, I. E., Caparelli-Daquer, E. M., et al. (2005). The moral affiliations of disgust: A functional mri study. Cogn Behav Neurol, 18(1), 68-78. [Link]

Zhong, C. (2006). Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing. Science, 313(5792), 1451-1452. DOI: 10.1126/science.1130726

Social Support and the Perception of Geographical Slant

You might think that perception is a process that basically extracts information from the environment, and passes the results on for further cognitive processing. And anyone would grant that perception could lose some information along the way and make the odd mistake -- who's perfect, after all. Actually, perception is a whole lot more complicated, and often a bit strange.

One way it’s strange is that how things ‘out there’ seem, turns out sometimes to depend quite a bit on how we are at the time.

So, for example, it’s been found that perception of slopes and of distances is influenced by whether the perceiver is wearing a heavy backpack, with backpack wearers reporting steeper slopes and greater distances, even when standing still and not expecting to have to walk up the slope or over the distance. (For a review of this and related findings see Profitt 2006). We also know from social psychology experiments that subjects primed with words associated with advanced age walk more slowly in the period immediately following what they take to be the end of the task (Bargh 1990).

The authors of this study, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, explore the relationship between social support and perceived geographical slant. (At the time of writing this entry the paper is still listed as an article in press.)

The research was simple and elegant:

Participants accompanied by a friend estimated a hill to be less steep when compared to participants who were alone (Study 1). Similarly, participants who thought of a supportive friend during an imagery task saw a hill as less steep than participants who either thought of a neutral person or a disliked person (Study 2).

Not only that:

In both studies, the effects of social relationships on visual perception appear to be mediated by relationship quality (i.e., relationship duration, interpersonal closeness, warmth). Artifacts such as mood, social desirability, and social facilitation did not account for these effects.

The result occurred for verbal and visual estimates of slant, but not for a haptic measure where subjects used their dominant hand to push a surface until they felt it was at the same slope as the target slope. This isn’t unusual – haptic measures are often more accurate, and resistant to the kinds of manipulation in question here. (For an extended discussion of the evidence relating to two separate visual systems, see Norman (2002).) Here’s the graph of results from Study 1:



This is interesting stuff. It suggests that our deliberate assessment (as determined by verbal and some other probes) is an interpretation, pricing in a variety of other considerations. There’s related work going on in some kinds of behavioural economics, for example finding that delayed food is discounted at higher rates than delayed money, even though you can use the money to buy food (e.g. Kirby and Guastello 2001).

I’m especially interested in impulsivity and decision-making, and so I’d be interested to see some work on how financial and other decision making is affected by manipulations of this sort. You’d figure that the value of the future for someone was related to her estimate of what relationships might be expected to persist. People primed to think of themselves alone might well have less interest in various kinds of planning, saving, avoiding risks, than people primed to think of lasting connections and responsibilities.

References:
Bargh, J. 1990. ‘Auto-motives: Preconscious determinants of social interaction’, in T. Higgins and R. Sorrentino (eds.) Handbook of motivation and cognition, New York: Guilford.
Kirby, K., and Guastello, B. 2001. Making choices in anticipation of similar future choices can increase self-control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7: 154-164.
Norman, J. 2002. – Two Visual Systems and Two Theories of Perception: An Attempt to Reconcile the Constructivist and Ecological Approaches, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 25, 73–144.
Proffitt, D. R. 2006. Embodied perception and the economy of action. Perspectives on
Psychological Science, 1, 110-122.

Schnall, S., Harber, K.D., Stefanucci, J.K., Proffitt, D.R.Social Support and the Perception of Geographical Slant. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, In press(In press) DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.04.011

Preschool Programs Can Boost School Readiness

In an earlier post on the Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children I reported some rather depressing, if excellent, research measuring the cognitive penalties children suffer along with, and likely as consequences of, serious disadvantage. There's some relevant good news in this short paper by Gormley, Phillips and Gayer. (Also available at the publications section of the site of the Crocus project.)

This time around the data reports that specific pre-school programs among pre-school children leads to significant gains in scores on tests that are regarded as good predictors of later school achievement. Two programs. both in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were studied - the Head Start Program, and the Oklahoma pre-K program. Each differ in how they work (the differences are briefly described in the paper) and Oklahoma was selected partly because:

The Oklahoma pre-K program has relatively high standards compared with those of other states and offers relatively high pay and benefits to well-qualified teachers. Every lead teacher must have a B.A. degree and must be certified in early-childhood education. Student teacher ratios of 10-to-1 and class sizes of 20 must be maintained. The Community Action Project (CAP) of Tulsa County, whose Head Start program serves the largest number of children in Tulsa, is eligible for state funding. Its teachers meet the same standards as their Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) counterparts and receive similar pay (p1723).

To avoid selection bias students who'd attended were compared with students about to attend the respective interventions. Variation in ages at start allowed the relationship between age and test scores either side of the age cut off for entrance to be estimated. The analysis also conditioned on indicators of poverty and race, and found program participation to be a more powerful predictor of success. The results are impressive. Here's another quotation:

The TPS pre-K program has sharply improved students’ cognitive development.
One way to capture this is to look at the effect sizes: 0.985 for letter-word identification, 0.743 for spelling, and 0.355 for applied problems. These effect sizes substantially exceed those reported for pre-K programs generally and are somewhat greater than those reported for five states with relatively high quality pre-K programs. The effects of the Tulsa Head Start program, though less spectacular, are also impressive: 0.514 for letter-word identification, 0.334 for spelling, and 0.369 for applied problems. These effect sizes exceed those reported for a national study of Head Start with random assignment of children.

Then take a look at the figure, converting the measured gains into monthly equivalents. These figures are, according to the paper, greater than those (not represented in the graph) occurring through maturation.

Cool. Well resourced educational programs with qualified instructors and good pupil-teacher ratios actually do some good. Also, they do good even with kids who we've got good reason to expect have been cognitively harmed by their environments. That's hardly surprising, but it's good to get a sensible measure of it, especially with all the flaky opinionated yelling that goes on over education.

As with the paper by Sampson, Sharkey and Raudenbush I referred to previously, a key feature of this research is the construction of a large enough sample, with appropriate differentiation within it, to extract meaningful data with statistical tools. The more social science like this we see the better.

Gormley Jr., W.T., Phillips, D., Gayer, T. (2008). THE EARLY YEARS: Preschool Programs Can Boost School Readiness. Science, 320(5884), 1723-1724. DOI: 10.1126/science.1156019

Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children

This paper in PNAS opens noting that there's broad consensus that "cognitive ability predicts adult well-being across a variety of dimensions, whether educational attainment, labor market success, avoidance of criminal behavior, or health. There is also increasing agreement that cognitive ability is significantly shaped early in the life course, such that a focus on children is essential" (p 845).

There's also some controversy about the precise extent to which the course of early development determines cognitive ability, with some researchers (for example Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve) arguing that differences in adult intelligence between populations are to a significant extent genetically based. I'm not going to try to say anything about the wider issues here, but this paper by Sampson, Sharkey and Raudenbush is an important contribution.

They key idea behind the research is an attempt to study the neighbourhood as a determinant of cognitive ability. There are several good reasons for this, reviewed in the paper, including that neighbourhood poverty is associated with inconsistent parenting, and poor mental health in parents. There are also ways in which marginal and violent neighbourhoods might be expected to compromise quality of speech communication, and in other ways limit opportunities for learning. The authors therefore hypothesised that "residing in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood cumulatively impedes the development of academically relevant verbal ability in children" (p 846).

There are non-trivial methodological problems in attempting to measure effects here. Some relate to analysis. Controlling for income, for example, while sensible in some ways amounts to hypothesising that neighbourhood doesn't itself have an effect on income, or at least reduces the chance of detecting multiple determinants of different cognitive ability. The present study attempts to deal with this in ways I’ll get to in a moment. There are also problems with selection of subjects, since the majority of studies are cross-sectional. The authors of this study opted to compare within-individual changes as related to stability or change in neighbourhood as a way of avoiding the limitations of cross-sectional approaches.

The study followed 2000+ children, living in Chicago, between the ages of 6–12. The subjects, along with their caretakers, were followed when they moved for up to 7 years. As the authors put it:

Approximately 17% of black children not living in disadvantage in 1995 moved to a disadvantaged neighborhood some time between 1995 and 2002, and 42% of the population of black children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in 1995 moved to a nondisadvantaged neighborhood between 1995 and 2002. We exploit these ''within-individual'' changes to estimate the causal effect of moving (p 846).

Leaving out a lot of important detail, the study proceeded as follows neighbourhoods were classified into levels of disadvantage using Census data, and subjects' trajectories classified according to a series of 'waves' giving a number of sequences (e.g. disadvantage, nondisadvantage or nondisadvantage, disadvantage). Baseline disadvantage (wave 0) was not regarded as a 'treatment' but subsequent waves were. The different trajectories were related to a measure of cognitive ability combining the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children vocabulary test and the Wide Range Achievement Test reading examination. Subjects were selected from nearly 35,000 households, and interviewed and assessed three times over a seven year period.

For various reasons the published analysis, concerning 'concentrated disadvantage' focuses on the African-American subjects. (Concentrated disadvantage was defined as neighbourhoods falling in the bottom quartile of a distribution factoring in six elements of the Census data.)

The most important finding, and the one noted in the title of this paper, is represented in this graphic. It compares cognitive ability scores of children who started out in neighbourhoods with concentrated disadvantage and remained there for both waves of the analysis with those of children who started in the same position but moved away from concentrated disadvantage for wave 2. Again quoting from the paper "Scores for black children who lived in such neighborhoods declined sharply relative to the average rate of growth in the sample as a whole, so that by wave 2, their verbal ability scores are well below the mean and_4 points below those of black children who do not experience the treatment" (p 851).

This is mixed news. It's lousy that it seems as though early disadvantage is so harmful. (The authors are cautious about extrapolating without additional justification from their results, but it's still lousy, and only more so if extrapolation is warranted.) On the other hand, it suggests where to focus at least some policy attention: fix the places kids grow up.

The paper is also currently available on Sampson's website here.

Sampson, R.J., Sharkey, P., Raudenbush, S.W. (2008). From the Cover: Inaugural Article: Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 845-852. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710189104