One of the best parts of psychology is that because, by and large, you're studying how people screw up, it's a lot easier to get away with humorous experimental designs than in, for example, physics. Here are some particularly silly studies I've read of:
• Godden and Baddeley (1975) tested how recall is affected by the similarity between the circumstances in which you memorize something and the circumstances in which you recall it. The two sets of circumstances used in the experiment were memorizing word lists on land and memorizing them underwater. In scuba suits. It's like when those guys played Monopoly underwater, except for science!
• Ariely and Loewenstein (2006) wanted to investigate how sexual arousal influenced sexual decision-making. Subjects (all male) answered hypothetical questions about sexual behavior using a laptop with software specially designed to be operable with one hand, so as to leave the other hand free. Free for masturbating. Masturbating for science. In some conditions, subjects had to rate themselves as at least a 75 on a 100-point scale of sexual arousal in order to answer questions. They were required not to ejaculate before the end of the session.
• Rockloff and Greer (2010) examined how arousal influenced betting behavior on a virtual slot machine. In this case, the source of arousal was fear. Of a crocodile. A juvenile three-foot-long croc with its mouth taped shut. Which the subjects held in their hands. Only for fun, not for science, since they were tourists on a crocodile farm in Australia who were solicited about the experiment only after handling the crocodile.
• In MacGregor and Slovic (1986), subjects had to predict marathon completion times by integrating several different cues (like duration of best ten-kilometer run and age) about each runner. The manipulated variable was which graphic display format was used to present the cues. Some subjects got bar charts, some got radar charts, and some got faces. For the faces, the height of the eyebrows indicated the runner's age, the direction of the eyes indicated the runner's total miles, the length of the nose indicated motivation, and how much the mouth was smiling indicated the runner's best ten-kilometer time. The face turned out to be the most effective display format. For science, anyway.
• In Zimbardo, Weisenberg, Firestone, and Levy (1965), subjects had to eat fried grasshoppers for science. And then, for dissonance reduction, their liking of eating grasshoppers increased if they complied with a request to eat grasshoppers from a belligerent experimenter who swore at his assistant for bringing out a tray of eels by mistake.
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Ariely, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2006). The heat of the moment: The effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 87-98.
Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66, 325-331.
MacGregor, D., & Slovic, P. (1986). Graphic representation of judgmental information. Human-Computer Interaction, 2, 179-200.
Rockloff, M. J., & Greer, N. (2010). Never smile at a crocodile: Betting on electronic gaming machines is intensified by reptile-induced arousal. Journal of Gambling Studies, 26, 571-581.
Zimbardo, P. G., Weisenberg, M., Firestone, I., & Levy, B. (1965). Communicator effectiveness in producing public conformity and private attitude change. Journal of Personality, 33, 233-255.
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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."
I'm not sure what I'm more impressed with, the absurdity of some of the examples, or the fact that you even went and cited your sources.
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If you're a human and not feeling creative, make this your signature.
I wrote this neat citation-generator program, so now, I just type "cite zimbardo firestone 1965" and bam, APA-style citation. It uses PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES for psychology, MEDLINE for neuroscience, and IDEAS for economics.
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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."
.....so what did Ariely and Loewenstein find?
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
See Tables 3 and 4 on page 94. tl;dr: They found indications that sexual arousal plays a causal role in bad sexual decision-making. I bet you're shocked.
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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."
I'm as unsettled by the date rape increase as I am tickled by the condom hate increase.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Small-world observation: in a history-of-psychology course I was in today, Richard Gerrig stopped by to talk about the process of revising Psychology and Life, a intro-psych textbook whose current authors are him and Zimbardo.
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"…and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."
The masturbation paper is on the reading list for a JDM class I'm taking this semester. I will report back if the class discussion reveals any problems with the paper I wasn't aware of. I mean, my chief complaint is the use of repeated measures instead of a between-subjects design, but in this case the issue ought only to have increased the risk of Type II errors, so it doesn't worry me.
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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!
Yeah keep bumping this. I find it neat.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I don't know if this is a silly paper, but it certainly could be taken as silly. And it's not really an experiment so much as a literature review (or whatever you people call it). And I didn't really read the entire thing so much as the abstract. I guess at the end of the day, I just wanted to add content:
Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive? Theoretical Views, Conceptual Distinctions, and a Review of Relevant Evidence
Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen R. Catanese, and Kathleen D. Vohs
ABSTRACT
The sex drive refers to the strength of sexual motivation. Across many different studies and measures, men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures. No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found. Hence we conclude that the male sex drive is stronger than the female sex drive. The gender difference in sex drive should not be generalized to other constructs such as sexual or orgasmic capacity, enjoyment of sex, or extrinsically motivated sex.
http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/71520.pdf
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
LOL Baumeister. He has all these cool papers and books, but my adviser and I were just joking yesterday about how he uses the term "the self" in an ambiguous, New Age-ish way ("Awareness of the self's inadequacies generates negative affect…").
Yeah, that's a literature review. Increasingly, traditional literature reviews are being replaced by meta-analyses, in which you numerically integrate the results of several studies and hopefully end up with a single number representing an effect size, but in cases like these, the psychological construct of interest is arguably too broad to make meta-analysis feasible.
I liked this passage:
When we told people we were studying whether men and women differ in strength of sex drive, most people responded by saying that the answer was obvious—but when we cautiously asked them what the obvious answer was, we heard all three possible answers (i.e., men higher, women higher, no difference) endorsed.
I wish the term "sex drive" were avoided. It has a Freudian past.
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So I elected to present Ariely and Loewenstein, but then I obtained permission to present this cooler (but somewhat less silly) paper instead:
Van den Bergh, B., Dewitte, S., & Warlop, L. (2008). Bikinis instigate generalized impatience in intertemporal choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 85–97. doi:10.1086/525505
In the four studies described here, subjects (all heterosexual men) looked at pictures of women in bikins (vs. pictures of landscapes or of men) or inspected brassieres (vs. T-shirts) and then specified how much money they would need to receive in 1 week and in 1 month to be indifferent to receiving €15 now. Sure enough, sex-cued subjects discounted delayed rewards more steeply; that is, they demanded larger amounts. I consider this study an improvement over Ariely and Loewenstein because (a) the manipulations are much subtler and (b) the dependent variables have nothing to do with sex.
I presented the paper today. Here are the slides (which mostly aren't too interesting, since I believe that in a talk, the verbiage should be delivered orally, not visually, but the at least the first two slides are worth a chuckle):
http://arfer.net/x/presentation.pdf
In conclusion:
http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/400x/10/10704/10960998.jpg
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Change your signature once a month for optimal health, and don't forget to backslash your backslashes.
Okay, so Freud's discredited among non-idiots, right? Because I'm hearing mixed things from the psychology types I know.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
The short answer is, yes.
The long answer is, the more I talk to people and read, the more I realize how complicated Freud's legacy has become.
As you know, Freud wasn't a scientist. He never ran experiments; he just came up with some wild ideas and figured that, because they sounded true to him, they must be right. He thus belongs more to the humanities than the sciences. And that's the thing: people's differing attitudes towards Freud reflect people's differing notions of what constitutes psychology. On the one hand we have experimental psychologists and psychometricians who think that psychology is and should be an empirical science, and consider Freud a idiot because he peddled patently unfalsifiable ideas. On the other hand we have (a) psychotherapists of all kinds (most not closely allied with experimental psychology, many at least tolerant of Freudianism, some actually practicing psychodynamic (read: Freudian) therapies), (b) many literary critics, critical sociologists, and other pseudointellectual types (including a few, um, psychoanalytic philosophers mysteriously holding tenure-track positions in psychology departments), and (c) the lay public, all of whom seem to think that psychology is just a matter of sounding clever and getting in touch with one's feelings. The American Psychological Association hasn't so much tried to heal this gap as ignored it exists: the APA publishes many of the best journals in the field even as it considers analysis as valid as cognitive-behavioral therapy and publishes an analytic journal. See, while most psychological scientists dismiss Freud, most "psychologists" aren't psychological scientists, but clinicians of one kind or another. This helps explain why most people aren't even aware experimental psychology exists, and think that you can't study behavior without neuroimaging.
If all that isn't messy enough, Freud has been making a kind of spiritual comeback in experimental psychology over the past forty years. Theories in memory, motivation, judgment and decision-making, and social reasoning increasingly express a few basic misanthropic themes: we aren't conscious of our mental processes, the outputs of those mental processes have a much more tenuous connection to reality than we think, and motivations we didn't even know we had can have drastic effects on our actions. The poster child of this trend in terror-management theory, which asserts (and, frequently, demonstrates) that the fear of death is the engine of human society. However, in my view, Freud doesn't deserve credit for any of these advances. I think he's cited so frequently in, e.g., terror-management theory papers more because he's one of those guys you cite whenever you can, like Aristotle or Adam Smith, than because his ideas are truly relevant.
It's interesting to compare Freud to William James. James, like Freud, generally appears near the top of lists of famous psychologists, despite having never run an experiment in his life and even evincing open disdain for experimental methods. But James is much better regarded by experimental psychologists than Freud, which I guess is just because he wasn't a lunatic. Instead of seizing on some wacky theory-of-everything, he made a living of thinking carefully, in a philosophical way, about various psychological issues. The result is that you can often cite James in a meaningful way, because he was the first guy who took the trouble to think these things through—and, let's face it, he had the intuition for psychology that Freud thought he himself had; James, considering how miserable his methods were, has turned out to be right with surprising frequency.
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Really interesting post, Kodi. Glad I read that.
"James is much better regarded by experimental psychologists than Freud, which I guess is just because he wasn't a lunatic."
Excellent.
I kind of <3 William James and have found myself citing him more meaningfully not as a psychologist but as a sociologist of religion. Even if he spurned the actual experimental method, his thinking was heavily informed by the early American empiricists like C. S. Peirce. Whether or not he "applied the statistical method to philosophy" as that school intended, he was inclined to a general skepticism, in a way where Freud was inclined to make things up, especially when the things he made up then confirmed his premise. As a scholar of myth, this makes me hate him, because he says things like this:
"You have asked me for an example of my objections to the most obvious method of exploiting mythology. I shall give you an example I used in the debate. Fraulein Spielrein had cited the Genesis story of the apple as an instance of woman seducing man. But in all likelihood the myth of Genesis is a wretched, tendentious distortion devised by an apprentice priest, who as we now know stupidly wove two independent sources into a single narrative (as in a dream). It is not impossible that there are two sacred trees because he found one tree in each of the two sources. There is something very strange and singular about the creation of Eve. - Rank recently called my attention to the fact that the Bible story may quite have reversed the original myth. Then everything would be clear; Eve would be Adam's mother, and we should be dealing with the well known motif of mother incest, the punishment for which, etc. ... Consequently, I hold that the surface versions of myths cannot be used uncritically for comparison with our psychoanalytic findings. We must find our way back to their latent, original forms by a comparative method that eliminates the distortions they have undergone in the course of their history.
(From Here: http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/psychotherapy/serpent3.htm )
Or, as I'd put it "so you see, if we assume that I'm right and all myths are about the violation of sexual taboo, and eliminate the substance of the myth while rearranging the accidents to include such a violation, well there we are." That is what we in the business call "a weak-ass comparative method."
Anyway, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder because of the whole "using Freud although he is demonstrably wrong about everything as a lens through which to read texts so we can present papers at Comp Lit conferences and get tenure without ever providing anything of value to society" thing. That is a bugbear of mine. Also Marx. There are only so many texts we need Marxist readings of before we get it, okay.
(Thank you for confirming what a jerk this guy is so that I can voice my profound disagreement with this one minor part of his theory with whatever vitriol I can summon at that moment.)
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Actually, this schism between experimental and clinical psychology is increasingly playing out in a history-of-psychology course I'm taking this semester. Stony Brook's psychology department has four areas: cognitive (mine), social, biological, and clinical. The clinical area is well represented in the class, I think because of some feature of the APA requirements for accredited clinical programs. Anyway, I'm not the only cognitive kid, but I talk in class quite a bit, and class discussions often end up as arguments between me and the clinical people.
Our philosophical differences came to a head one day when the professor was talking about how, even though few present-day psychologists are behaviorists, we are "behavioralist" in the sense that we accept only behavioral data, as opposed to, say, introspection, self-report instruments being regarded as tests of verbal behavior. I agreed and went on to say something like "After all, if a psychological construct has no influence on behavior, how can we meaningfully say it exists? Behavior is ultimately all there is." A clinical student added "And feelings." I argued that feelings only mattered to the extent that they affected behavior, whether in the form of throwing a book across the room in rage or saying to one's psychotherapist "I'm depressed", and I didn't see the point of giving feelings a privileged epistemological position. I was answered with several voices saying in chorus "That's because you're not clinical!" So yeah.
The funny thing is that the readings in this course have been exclusively about psychological science. We haven't talked about the history of psychotherapy at all.
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