Continuous Productivity

Truth Serum and Michael Jackson

A wonderful post at the Psychology Today blog rehashing some of the major gaps in the child molestation charges against Michael Jackson:

One of the two charges that received the most press coverage surfaced in 1993, when Evan Chandler filed a lawsuit against Jackson for sexually abusing his 13 year old son, Jordan. At the time, the news media reported widely that Jordan Chandler accused Jackson of performing oral sex on him, and that Chandler provided law enforcement authorities with a description of Jackson's genitalia. Eventually, Jackson settled this case out of court for $22 million; some have argued that this settlement is prima facie evidence of his guilt, whereas others have argued that Jackson understandably wanted to avoid a prolonged and emotionally grueling civil trial. I do not know which side is right, so I will withhold judgment on that issue here.

So what crucial fact has most of the press coverage omitted? It's that Jordan Chandler apparently never made any accusations against Jackson until his father, a registered dentist, gave him sodium amytal during a tooth extraction. Only then did Jackson's purported sexual abuse emerge; Jordan Chandler's reports became more elaborated and embellished during a later session with a psychiatrist.

Sodium amytal is a barbiturate and one of the most commonly used variants of what is popularly known as "truth serum," which is a spectacular misnomer. There's no scientific evidence that Sodium amytal or other supposed truth serums increase the accuracy of memories. To the contrary, as psychiatrist August Piper has observed, there's good reason to believe that truth serums merely lower the threshold for reporting virtually all information, both true and false. As a consequence, like other suggestive therapeutic procedures, such as guided imagery, repeated prompting, hypnosis, and journaling, truth serums can actually increase the risk of false memories - memories of events that never occurred, but are held with great conviction.

In fact, because the physiological actions of barbiturates are similar in many ways to that of alcohol, the effects of ingesting Sodium amytal are probably similar to those of imbibing a few stiff drinks. When we're rip-roaring drunk, we're more likely than when sober to say lots of things, only some of them accurate. Moreover, as Piper notes, there's overwhelming evidence that people can distort the truth or lie while under the influence of truth serum.

Whether Jackson molested children or not, it a minimum the case shows how easy it is to feed a media base dying for objectionable news.

Waterboarding Tested

I think most people agree that waterboarding is torture based on what they have read about how the process works. Journalist Christopher Hitchens went one further and actually put himself through the process. This is a very powerful video:

Humans Like Being Lemmings

I have always been fascinated by human-herding mentality. The question of "loyalty" to institution, or party, or brand is of deep interest to me. Now, there is some scientific evidence to back up some of my thoughts:

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

Wiltermuth's team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Anorexia and Suicide

Someone who develops anorexia is 50 to 60 times more likely to kill themselves than people in the general population. No other group has a suicide rate anywhere near as high (Archives of General Psychiatry, vol 60, p 179).

Recently, psychologists have tried to explain why anorexia and suicide are so intimately connected, something which is helping to answer the wider question of why anyone would commit suicide. If this explanation holds up, it will give psychiatrists a new tool for screening patients and determining which of them are most likely to kill themselves, perhaps saving lives.

Suicide has always been a conundrum for psychologists and other researchers interested in human behaviour. Self-preservation is one of the strongest human instincts, so the drive to commit suicide must be even more powerful. But what causes it?

Suicide is, of course, linked to depression and hopelessness, but nobody has been able to answer the question why some people commit suicide and others, in similar situations, don't. The basic question, and the hopes of understanding the answer through studying anorexia is:

The vast majority of depressed, hopeless people do not commit suicide, so why do some do it?

In 2005, psychologist Thomas Joiner, a suicide specialist at Florida State University in Tallahassee whose own father committed suicide, set out to answer that question. By studying suicide statistics and paying particular attention to the groups with above average rates, Joiner believes he has found a common thread others have missed. "It was the first grand theory of suicide in quite a while," says Nock.

In essence, Joiner proposed that people who kill themselves must meet two sets of conditions on top of feeling depressed and hopeless. First, they must have a serious desire to die. This usually comes about when people feel they are an intolerable burden on others, while also feeling isolated from people who might provide a sense of belonging.

Second, and most important, people who succeed in killing themselves must be capable of doing the deed. This may sound obvious, but until Joiner pointed it out, no one had tried to figure out why some people are able to go through with it when most are not. No matter how seriously you want to die, Joiner says, it is not an easy thing to do. The self-preservation instinct is too strong.

There are two ways people who want to die develop the ability to override the self-preservation instinct, Joiner argues. One is by working up to it. In many cases a first suicide attempt is tentative, with shallow cuts or a mild overdose. It is only after multiple attempts that the actions are fatal.

The other is to become accustomed to painful or scary experiences. Soldiers and police who have been shot at or seen their colleagues injured or killed are known to become inured to the idea of their own death. Both groups also have a higher-than-normal suicide rate. Similarly, doctors and surgeons who witness pain, injury and death are more likely to be able to contemplate it for themselves - the suicide rate for doctors is significantly higher than for the general population. Joiner describes this as a "steeliness" in the face of things that would intimidate most people.

History is Important, But Can it Solve Anything?

Things are somewhat similar to the events that led to the great depression. A must-read historical piece by Greg Mankiw:

From 1930 to 1933, more than 9,000 banks were shuttered, imposing losses on depositors and shareholders of about $2.5 billion. As a share of the economy, that would be the equivalent of $340 billion today.

The banking panics put downward pressure on economic activity in two ways. First, they put fear into the hearts of depositors. Many people concluded that cash in their mattresses was wiser than accounts at local banks.

As they withdrew their funds, the banking system’s normal lending and money creation went into reverse. The money supply collapsed, resulting in a 24 percent drop in the consumer price index from 1929 to 1933. This deflation pushed up the real burden of households’ debts.

Second, the disappearance of so many banks made credit hard to come by. Small businesses often rely on established relationships with local bankers when they need loans, either to tide them over in tough times or for business expansion. With so many of those relationships interrupted at the same time, the economy’s ability to channel financial resources toward their best use was seriously impaired.

Together, these forces proved cataclysmic. Unemployment, which had been 3 percent in 1929, rose to 25 percent in 1933. Even during the worst recession since then, in 1982, the United States economy did not experience half that level of unemployment.

Additionally, it seems as if we just can't learn from history. Not because we, as a society, don't try, but rather because we just don't have the intellectual capacity:

What’s next? Perhaps the most troubling study of the 1930s economy was written in 1988 by the economists Kathryn Dominguez, Ray Fair and Matthew Shapiro; it was called “Forecasting the Depression: Harvard Versus Yale.” (Mr. Fair is an economics professor at Yale; Ms. Dominguez and Mr. Shapiro are at the University of Michigan.)

The three researchers show that the leading economists at the time, at competing forecasting services run by Harvard and Yale, were caught completely by surprise by the severity and length of the Great Depression. What’s worse, despite many advances in the tools of economic analysis, modern economists armed with the data from the time would not have forecast much better. In other words, even if another Depression were around the corner, you shouldn’t expect much advance warning from the economics profession.

Sleep Deprivation? Doesn't Exist

I always suspected that the various sleep deprivation studies were a bit spurious. Now, some proof:

Another line of evidence trotted out for chronic sleep deprivation is that we typically sleep longer on vacation and at weekends, often up to 9 or 10 hours a night. It is often assumed that we do this to pay off a sleep debt built up during the week.

However, just because we can easily sleep beyond our usual daily norm - the Saturday morning lie-in, the Sunday afternoon snooze - it doesn't necessarily follow that we really need the extra sleep. Why shouldn't we be able to sleep to excess, for indulgence? After all, we enthusiastically eat and drink well beyond our biological needs. Why shouldn't it be the same with sleep?

Most mammals will sleep for longer than normal if overfed, caged or bored. The three-toed sloth is a good example. Sloths kept in zoos sleep around 16 hours a day - yet in their natural, wild state they sleep less than 10. Niels Rattenborg and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, recently found this out by using miniature EEG recorders attached to the heads of sloths in Panama, the first such experiment on a free-ranging wild animal. Why this difference in its sleep? The most likely explanation is that sloths simply sleep to excess when caged (Biology Letters, vol 4, p 402). This is seen in domestic animals too. Sheep in pens, horses in stables and cows in barns sleep much more than when in open fields, and pet cats sleep extensively compared with feral cats.

One of the favorite examples of these studies is that we sleep longer when we can. Wouldn't you know it, of course we do, it's like anything else we indulge in. I think sleep, like many things in life (alcohol, food, drugs), etc, is something we do when we have nothing better to do. Anecdotally, the most active, diverse, and inquisitive people I know sleep the least. And it doesn't seem to be just the socially active folks, but rather people with diverse interests whether they be sports or reading or even meditating.

And Yet Again, Out of the Movies

Police on the Greek island of Santorini have shot and injured a knifeman who decapitated his girlfriend and walked around the streets with her head.

This is the second decapitation crime reported in less than a week.

Straight Out of the Movies

"All of a sudden, we all heard this scream, this bloodcurdling scream," passenger Garnet Caton told CBC television.

"The attacker was standing up right over the top of the guy with a large hunting knife - a survival, Rambo knife - holding the guy and continually stabbing him... in the chest area," Mr Caton added.

The attack continued as passengers fled the bus and waited for police on a desolate stretch of the TransCanada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

Mr Caton, the bus driver and a trucker who had stopped at the scene boarded the vehicle to see if the victim was still alive.

"When we came back on the bus... he was cutting the guy's head off and pretty much gutting him up," Mr Caton said.

The attacker ran at them, Mr Caton said, and they ran out of the bus, holding the door shut to prevent him getting out.

"He calmly walks up to the front [of the bus] with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Mr Caton said.

I haven't read something this disturbing in a while.

Doctors and Suicide

There's a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own. An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year -- a suicide rate thought to be higher than in the general population, although exact figures are hard to come by.

Some doctors believe the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. Many fear admitting psychiatric problems could be fatal to their careers, so they suffer in silence.

And when the pain is too much, doctors have easy access to prescription drugs and a precise knowledge of both how the body works and the amount of a drug needed for an overdose to stop breathing and halt the heart.

This is something that I was completely unaware of. I could have guessed that policemen, firemen, and maybe even social workers are at the high end of the suicide spectrum, but not doctors. It seems to me that a profession which brings so much hope would not have these issues, but alas it's extremely common. The explanation as to why the suicide rate is so much higher for doctors is equally intriguing:

One explanation is that most suicide attempts in the broader population are unsuccessful, while doctors know how to successfully commit suicide, said Dr. Erika Frank, who specializes in research on physician health.

I Agree

Thanks to Kedrosky, another wonderful quote.  This is in reference to Vonnegut (emphasis mine):

The unhappiest times in his life were those months and sometimes a whole year when he couldn't write, when he was "blocked." He'd try just about anything to get unblocked, but he was very nervous and suspicious about psychiatry. In my early-to-mid-twenties he let it slip that he was afraid that therapy might make him normal and well adjusted, and that would be the end of his writing. I tried to reassure him that psychiatrists weren't nearly that good.

Like I said, I agree completely. 

Gee Really? Sex and Money are Related?

A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles _ sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

I find these sort of studies very interesting.  They sort of try to confirm what many of us could have guessed intuitively.

Ready, Aim, Pee

Awesome find by Casnocha, via Slate:

A piece in the New Republic reveals that after an economist proposed etching a black fly near the drain of toilet bowls in a men's restroom at an Amsterdam airport, "spillage" was reduced by 80 percent—"It turns out that, if you give men a target, they can't help but aim at it."

Irrationally Rational

An excellent article at The New Yorker reviewing a couple of books on behavioral economics:

From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions are difficult to explain. Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them. Yet actual economic life, as opposed to the theoretical version, is full of miscalculations, from the gallon jar of mayonnaise purchased at spectacular savings to the billions of dollars Americans will spend this year to service their credit-card debt. The real mystery, it could be argued, isn’t why we make so many poor economic choices but why we persist in accepting economic theory.

The bold above is mine to emphasize what every business person already knows.  People, in fact, are far from rational actors.  Whether it's "investing" in tech stocks in the late '90's to the recent real-estate "flipping" boom, people have shown their inability to act rationally.  So, it shouldn't really be a surprise that we will add books to our purchase at Amazon to get free shipping.  The interesting part is that we seem to be systematic about our irrationality.  That is, we seem to make the same mistakes over and over:

“Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic,” he writes. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.

In fact, smart business people have already exploited our inherent biases in their pricing strategies:

This effect is called “anchoring,” and, as Ariely points out, it punches a pretty big hole in microeconomics. When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.

To conclude:

“If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are all pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend,” he writes.

Risk is a Drug

In news that shouldn't surprise anybody that has ever traded or gambled:

A small group of scientists, including some psychologists, say they are starting to discover what many Wall Street professionals have long suspected — that people are hard-wired for money. The human brain, these researchers say, responds to high-stakes trading just as it does to the lure of sex. And the riskier the trades get, the more the brain craves them.

I don't know quite how I feel about brain images as data, but it is interesting to note that:

One of his findings was that brain images of drug addicts who are about to take another hit are indistinguishable from those of traders who are making money and about to place another trade. “That tells us pretty confidently that if you make money and make money again,” Mr. Zweig said, “it is very similar to a chemical addiction and it becomes very hard to let go.”

Mind-Reading Class

Interesting Financial Times profile on up-and-coming University of Chicago professor, Nick Epley.  His focus seems to be on how people read each other:

His research looks at how people intuit others’ thoughts, how good they are at it and the consequences of what he calls “mind-reading mistakes”. The findings are revealing: first, people generally know less about others’ views than they think they do. “For example, in experiments where people are asked which of their co-workers like them, their accuracy is barely better than if they picked them at random,” he says.

His research has very interesting implications for leaders in the business world:

“It’s uncomfortable to give other people negative performance feedback, so difficult conversations that need to be had often aren’t. Employees usually think they’re doing the right things – if the boss thinks the employee is doing something useless, there’s likely to be a gap there. So people go in with positive evaluations of themselves, hoping to hear the best and when they’re told the best – because the boss has a hard time having the difficult discussion – they come out thinking they got valid feedback.” Prof Epley says the other party should summarise what has been said. He also says companies should collect more data. “They should act like a scientist would and run some experiments. Lots of big organisations could do that really easily.” Finally, he says, if you want to avoid ambiguity, never depend on e-mail.

Wine Taste Really Doesn't Matter

I have made a couple of previous posts about wine taste perception and price.  A loyal reader was kind enough to forward an interesting profile about wine entrepreneur, Tim Hanni, who is a recovering alcoholic that never even tastes the wine he rates helps people discover:

Tim Hanni is one of the wine industry's top-tier experts. He is also a recovering alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in 14 years, rarely even "sipping and spitting" wine to taste it. He says that's part of the secret of his success.

A wine adviser to hotels and restaurants from Ruth's Chris to P.F. Chang's, Mr. Hanni, 55, is on a mission to combat snobbery in the wine industry -- and get more Americans to drink wine. Unlike many wine experts, he doesn't rely on the sophistication and sensitivity of his own palate, although he was one of the first two Americans to hold the highest credential in the field, Master of Wine.

I would highly suggest reading the entire article.  There are some interesting stats about alcoholism within the wine industry.  Also, it's a warm profile on how one entrepreneur triumphed over his vices.

Update: Tim was kind enough to leave a comment indicating that he does not "rate" wine.  His job is to actually help people discover the wines they will like.  He's working on a fun project called Budometer that is designed to help people discover the wines they love.

We Need to Pay for Things We Don't Use

Thanks to the always wonderful Kedrosky blog, I was led to this article about us delusional humans.  One short paragraph sums it up:

The economics of health clubs are simple: you need thousands of members who never come. The gym could never accommodate them all if they did.

The article also has a link to a study that basically says that we are overconfident about the amount of self-control we have.  Even when we think we will go to the gym regularly, we don't.  Beyond that, we refuse the cancel our membership even when it would be much cheaper to pay by the day:

Two Californian academics, Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, studied three US health clubs and discovered that 80 per cent of members used the gym so infrequently that they would have been better off paying the $10 fee for each individual visit. Many also left substantial gaps between their last visit and cancelling their membership.

Not a Good Day for Short People?

Or maybe this one just indicates that people like long legs.

Being Born Short can be Bad

Very interesting study about the increased propensity to commit violent suicide if born short:

Males that are born short have two and a half times the risk of attempting a violent suicide when adults than average length babies, a new study suggests.

And catch-up growth during childhood does not change this, say the researchers.

I think that last part is the most unnerving.  It seems to indicate that whatever happens to the baby in the womb that leads to being born short, might be a cause of the behavior:

Mittendorfer-Rutz says the research shows that violent suicide attempts were more strongly linked to the period in-utero than non-violent attempts.

The possible links are the usual suspects:

...maternal alcohol, drug abuse, or smoking during pregnancy that can lead to fetal growth restriction or preterm birth and so increase their child’s risk of suicidal behaviour and mental disorders later on, she adds.

You're Not Hot (Part II)

So it seems that I missed this posting when it came out back in November, but it reverberates how we view our own physical attraction, our partner's, and how we adjust.  Some interesting conclusions from the academic study with data obtained from Hot or Not:

...the fact that nearly all users are in agreement about who is pretty and not-so-pretty and that, despite this, unattractive people were more open to potential dates than attractive people, lead the researchers to conclude that ugly people who date other ugly people do in fact know the pedigree of their partners.

How do less attractive people cope? In a separate study, the researchers asked 24 participants of an online speed-dating event to complete a short survey in "which they indicated, on a ten-point scale, how much they weighed each of six criteria (physical attractiveness, intelligence, sense of humor, kindness, confidence, and extroversion) when selecting potential dates." After the event, the participants then rated the attractiveness of all those they'd talked to. It turns out that less attractive people put relatively less weight on the physical appearance of potential partners and relatively more weight on other qualities than attractive people do.

So, basically, if you can't get a hot girl, you convince yourself that she is funny, or nice, or smart, or whatever.

Middle Class Violence

Fascinating article on the Foreign Policy web site.  The author does an amazing job of delineating why most suicide bombers are mild-mannered middle class folks.  The interesting aspect is the psycho-social explanation of why it is uneasy for humans to act violently:

To grasp the point, we need to first dismiss the myth that it is easy for someone to act violently. If someone has a sufficiently strong grievance, the thinking goes, all the person needs to do is get hold of a weapon and he or she will start killing people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sociologists in World War II found that only 15 to 25 percent of frontline soldiers were actually firing their guns. Later training methods have raised the firing rate somewhat, but the shooting is almost always very inaccurate. Firing a gun on a range is quite different from shooting a person. My own research on milder forms of violence, with fists and feet and clubs, shows that most angry confrontations end in a standoff, where participants find an excuse to back down.

Middle class folks, it seems can easily commit suicide bombings precisely because nobody expects them to be violent.

You're Not Hot

Very interesting article that I came across as I was cleaning out my inbox.  Apparently, my proclamation that I look better in person is not true at all:

You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly photogenic (I recall one girl in high school who was maybe a 7 in person, but a 9.75 in an 8X10 glossy) and like having their pictures taken; everyone else in the world is convinced that they don't photograph particularly well.

A cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago explained why to me last winter. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, in any given session we tend to anchor on the time slice image that makes us look our best. That, we decide, is the "real" us.

So, apparently this entire time I was making eyes at myself in the mirror, it was only me that found me
attractive.

I have some saving grace, though:

[Your significant other] is probably the best gauge of how attractive you are; how attractive are the hottest people who want to go out with you? They're probably only slightly more attractive than you are.

So, either I am attractive or lucky.  I choose lucky (with a dash of charming).