Category: psychology

Taboo conclusions in human biology

June 10, 2024 • 10:00 am

Reader Suzi pointed me to a RealClear Science article about subjects that cause controversy in psychology—but also in biology and among people in general. Click the top headline to see their short summary of a longer paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a paper you can access by clicking the second title.

While you can click the title below to get to the article, you can also find the pdf here.

The purpose of this study was severalfold, and I’m not going to go into all the questions and conclusions. What I found most interesting was the authors’ list of ten taboo conclusions about psychology and society, the degree of confidence that psychologists had in these conclusions, the degree to which psychologists would self-censor their opinions on these topics (and the correlation with their agreement between censorship and belief), and, finally, the consensus on academic freedom—the assent of psychologists that people should be able to study whatever they wanted.

First, the authors asked 41 psychologists to give a list of what they saw as “controversial” conclusions. From this they distilled the ten most controversial ones, often using their own phrasing to state the conclusions clearly.

Then, the authors gave these conclusions to a bigger sample of psychologists: 470 who agreed to answer the questions (4,603 were asked).  Among other things, they were asked to state their degree of confidence in the answers and then their reluctance to share their views, whatever they were. They were also asked whether “scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.”

 

I’ve put below the list of ten c0ntroversial conclusions derived from the preliminary survey, along with the average degree of agreement for each conclusion among the scholars who gave answers (not all 470 answered every question). First, how the scholars were asked to agree/disagree and how they judged their degree of risk that would make them self-censor (this is all from the paper itself):

Participants were told they would be responding to 10 taboo conclusions in the social sciences that were nominated by their peers in earlier interviews. First, participants responded to three questions regarding each conclusion on 101-point sliding scales (ranging from 0 to 100): “How confident are you in the truth or falsity of this statement?” (responses ranged from 100% confident it is false to 100% confident it is true), x

Participants then reported how at risk they would feel of various consequences if they shared their views on these topics openly on a sliding scale ranging from no risk at all to very high risk. (All sliding scales used in our study had a range of 0–100.)

After each question, I’ve put in bold the average degree of confidence among the respondents about whether they consider the conclusion to be true.  Notice that the first question is about whether men were naturally selective to be sexually coercive, a conclusion I attacked strongly when younger (I’d have a more nuanced answer now, I think).  Note that two of the questions, #4, #7, are taken up by Luana and me in our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, and we have high confidence in them (I just asked Luana, and we agreed that we both have 100% confidence in those two conclusions).

So here are the top ten hot potatoes in human psychology along with the average degree of agreement.

1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” (53.47)

2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”  (45.26)

3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” (59.29)

4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” (66.10)

5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”(52.06)

6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” (46.93)

7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” (65.50)

8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” (29.10)

9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” (54.11)

10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.” (21.44)

Note that for most topics psychologists had split opinions, but not for racial differences in IQ being somewhat based on genetic differences (question 8) or diversity leading to worse performance (question 10). In both cases a big majority of people disagreed  The highest agreement, though, came for the questions that Luana and I discussed (sex being binary for the vast majority of people and men and women had different psychological traits because of evolution.  It is surprising that questions whose answers are dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement, which means that psychologists don’t know much about the binary nature of biological sex or about evolutionary psychology (note that question 7 doesn’t say that ALL psychological differences between men and women are evolved; it implies only that some of them are, which to me seems palpably true, e.g.,  differences in attentiveness to their offspring or the degree of choosiness in mating).

What I found almost as interesting to me is that there was, with one exception, a positive correlation between the degree of belief of individuals in these statements and their reluctance to share their views. Can you guess what the exception is?

Here are two graphs showing particularly strong correlations between degree of belief of a controversial statement and the degree of “self-censorship”; each point represents one individual. Surprisingly, the first one is the binary nature of biological sex. The more strongly you accept it, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself. That’s not true for Luana and me! It’s bloody obvious and we’ll shout it from the rooftops!

This one is more understandable as it’s the hottest of the hot potatoes: the claim that IQ differences between races are appreciable (at least 10% of the difference is based on genetic differences). The more you think that IQ differences between races are genetic, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself:

Did you guess that the one statement that people didn’t self-censor about was a statement in line with liberal ideology. Yes, it’s this one: “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”  The more confidence you have in that, that more likely you are to espouse it publicly, because it makes you seem less racist to be public about it.

All of the correlations, negative and positive, were statistically significant.

The authors note two differences in responses between males and females (that assumes a sex binary!), though of course these not be based on genetics or evolution (bolding is mine):

As seen in Table 3 and Figure S1 in the Supplemental Material, men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions: (a) For political bias in social science, there was a small but not significant effect in the same direction, and (b) women believed more strongly that academia discriminates against Black people. In some cases, differences were quite large. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence. Future research should explore whether male and female psychology professors present to their students different evidence and arguments regarding the veracity of taboo conclusions.

As has been noted by some, women are likely to be more empathic than men, and this may explain the result vis-à-vis racial differences.  Here’s another:

Female scholars were more left-leaning (M = 20.86, SD = 16.03) than male scholars (M = 27.90, SD = 18.70), t(401) = 3.93, p < .001, and younger, t(400) = 4.73, p < .001.

Since most academics are left leaning, I would expect this sex difference based on my hypothesis (which is not mine) that females are more empathic than men, and being more empathic makes you lean even more to the left (a hypothesis that is mine).

Finally, although self-censorship is rife in academia, I was glad to see that most scholars (but only by a bare majority) don’t think that people should be penalized for working on anything they want.

A slim majority of professors (52.3%) reported that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. By contrast,1.6% said scholars should not have this freedom, and 46.0% said it’s complicated.

Well, it is a bit complicated, for, as we said in our discussion in Amsterdam, there are some questions (though very few) that people should not be free to work on. But such work is banned anyway by research stipulations of granting agencies and academia, as this work involve harm to humans and other animals (i.e., the kind of experiments on inmates that Josef Mengele did in Auschwitz). Readers may want to think of some questions NOT involving harm to humans and other species that still should not be allowed.  Right off the bat I can’t think of any. There are plenty of experiments that I think are not worthy of doing on humans, but none that should be banned if they don’t cause mental or physical harm.

The belief in academic freedom does conflict with the ability of researchers to investigate some of the questions above, particularly those that have implications for social policy (i.e. is there bias against blacks or women in academia?).  It’s the “politically correct” thing to say that there is, but you really need to know how much bias there is versus other factors (culture, preference, etc) that can cause inequity before you start intervening to achieve equity. But I’ve discussed this before.

It would be a good thing if people didn’t have to self-censor, for that kind of censorship inhibits free discussion, the kind of discussion essential for a university to function and for people to examine their ideas and/or sharpen them.  But we’ll never get rid of self-censorship on questions like the ones above so long as academia is pervaded by ideology, which it must be since scientists are humans and don’t want others to think poorly of them.

The happiest man in the world. . .

August 23, 2023 • 12:30 pm

. . . according to the New York Times, is a 77-year-old monk named Matthieu Ricard, who happens to be the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter. The NYT article (click below) also says his books have been bestsellers, that he got the French National Order of Merit, and that he has a Ph.D in “cellular genetics.”

Of course the title of “world’s happiest man” is a bit dubious, as it’s based on brain activity, but the interview with him by David Marchese, which is well worth reading, is very good. It emphasizes that happiness comes from compassion (a Buddhist tenet that I happen to agree with), and that one can never be happy all the time, for suffering is part of life. But you can be unhappy without being angry or despairing. Above all, Ricard preaches empathy for others.

Here’s how he got his monicker:

In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Ricard’s brain produced gamma waves — which have been linked to learning, attention and memory — at such pronounced levels that the media named him “the world’s happiest man.”

And here he is with his Boss (photo from the NYT):

Click the screenshot below to read the interview:

First, how he reacts to his title (interviewer’s questions are in bold, Ricard’s answers in plain text):

For a while now, people have been calling you the world’s happiest man. Do you feel that happy?

It’s a big joke. We cannot know the level of happiness through neuroscience. It’s a good title for journalists to use, but I cannot get rid of it. Maybe on my tomb, it will say, “Here lies the happiest person in the world.” Anyway, I enjoy every moment of life, but of course there are moments of extreme sadness — especially when you see so much suffering. But this should kindle your compassion, and if it kindles your compassion, you go to a stronger, healthier, more meaningful way of being. That’s what I call happiness. It’s not as if all the time you jump for joy. Happiness is more like your baseline. It’s where you come to after the ups and downs, the joy and sorrows. We perceive even more intensely — bad taste, seeing someone suffer — but we keep this sense of the depth. That’s what meditation brings.

And his three “rules for life”:

You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave [an annual TED-like event held in India that gathers leading thinkers from a variety of fields].  They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.

And when I read the last point, I immediately though of my blog nemesis, P. Z. Myers, who is always going off on me.  I rarely respond, and am not really going to diss him, but I think he needs to listen to Ricard’s last sentence, as Myers is always wishing that people (especially Republicans and rich people) would suffer or die, an emotion I’m training myself to curb. Here’s the latest example from Myers, one of many, and the subject is Elon Musk, whom Myers hates:

. . . Ronan Farrow reviews Elon Musk’s life. Imagine an angel of utmost probity assessing his soul at the doorway to heaven, nodding kindly as he summarizes each decade, and then, sadly, pulling the lever that drops him into a blood-drenched flaming tunnel to Hell. It’s so satisfying.

Sadly, many of the followers who bark at Myers’s heels share this same wish for people to suffer.

But I must move on. More on compassion in the interview:

It’s not the best thing to say, but I can easily imagine wanting certain people to suffer. How are we supposed to deal gracefully with our polar opposites in a world that feels increasingly about polarities? I mean, the Dalai Lama could talk to Vladimir Putin all he wants, but Putin’s not going to say, “Your compassion has changed me.” 

Once, a long time ago, someone said to me, who is the person you would like to spend 24 hours alone with? I said Saddam Hussein. I said, “Maybe, maybe, some small change in him might be possible.” When we speak of compassion, you want everybody to find happiness. No exception. You cannot just do that for those who are good to you or close to you. It has to be universal. You may say that Putin and Bashar al-Assad are the scum of humanity, and rightly so. But compassion is about remedying the suffering and its cause. How would that look? You can wish that the system that allowed someone like that to emerge is changed. I sometimes visualize Donald Trump going to hospitals, taking care of people, taking migrants to his home. You can wish that the cruelty, the indifference, the greed may disappear from these people’s minds. That’s compassion; that’s being impartial.

I no longer wish anyone to suffer or die, and my philosophy of determinism helps me with that. If you think that bad people are like broken cars—the results of the laws of physics, including their genes and environments—then you don’t wish them to suffer—any more than you wish a broken car to suffer. What you want is for the car to fe fixed, and that’s what Richard wants. Fixing “bad people” is what should be the sole goal of judicial punishment (as well as keeping them from doing more harm).

You should read the whole interview, as I think it’s helpful. Ricard adds that sadness (which “goes with determination to remedy the cause”) is okay, but that there’s no point to despair. For those of you, like me, who say that “I can’t help it: I do feel despair,” Ricard notes that emotions can be changed (well, not by some numinous “will”, but by training). It’s similar to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Finally, Ricard recounts the last time someone “got on his nerves”, a very rare event:

Who gets on your nerves at the monastery? My nerves? Once in New York, when I was promoting one of my books, a very nice journalist lady said, “What really upsets your nerves when you arrive in New York?” I said, “Why do you presuppose anything is upsetting me?” It’s not about something being on your nerves. It’s about trying to see the best way to proceed. Paul Ekman [an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California San Francisco, known for his work on facial expressions and emotions. He is also the co-author, with the Dalai Lama, of the book “Emotional Awareness”] once asked me to remember when I got really angry. I had to go back 20 years: I had a brand-new laptop, my first one, in Bhutan, and the monk who didn’t know what it was, he was passing by with a bowl filled with roasted barley flour and spilled some on it. So I got mad, and then he looked at me, and he said, “Ha-ha, you’re getting angry!” That was about it. I get indignation all the time about things that should be remedied. Indignation is related to compassion. Anger can be out of malevolence.

There’s a lot more, so read the interview. I have to add that as I get older, I do seem to have acquired a bit of useful wisdom, which is a shame because you should be born wise, for when you’re really wise from experience and age, you either die or get dementia! One thing I’ve learned (though I still let it control my emotions sometimes) is that anger is a toxic and generally useless emotion, which can stand in the way of fixing either personal or societal problems. Another is that if you want to cooperate with others, and have them do what you think is best, treat them with respect and never, ever call them names.  Also, never accuse someone directly of bad behavior: simply tell them how their behavior makes you feel.

I know I’m sounding sappy. So it goes. Now if only I could curb my biggest problem: anxiety. I tried meditation, but I’m generally too keyed up to meditate!

An international group of gender-change specialists urges caution for American doctors and therapists

July 16, 2023 • 10:00 am

A bunch (21) of doctors and Ph.D.s from nine countries (Finland, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland, South Africa, and the U.S.) published the following op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. It might be paywalled, so I reproduced the entire short letter below.

First, be aware that this, as noted below, was in response to a letter from the President of the Endocrine Society published recently, a letter that staunchly defends the efficacy of “gender-affirming care.” That care involves a combination of therapy and, nearly always, medical intervention through hormones. That letter, from Dr. Stephen Hammes, said this:

Roy Eappen and Ian Kingsbury’s op-ed “The Endocrine Society’s Dangerous Transgender Politicization” (June 29) ignores scientific evidence and the conclusions reached by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other reputable medical organizations. More than 2,000 studies published since 1975 form a clear picture: Gender-affirming care improves the well-being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.

If you already know the evidence, you’ll know that this claim is wrong: there is not enough evidence to form a “clear picture” of either well-being or suicide. In response, the signers of the letter below (not shown) took issue with Hammes’s claims.

Click the headline to read, but here’s the whold thing.  And I’ve put the important parts in bold:

As experienced professionals involved in direct care for the rapidly growing numbers of gender-diverse youth, the evaluation of medical evidence or both, we were surprised by the Endocrine Society’s claims about the state of evidence for gender-affirming care for youth (Letters, July 5). Stephen Hammes, president of the Endocrine Society, writes, “More than 2,000 studies published since 1975 form a clear picture: Gender-affirming care improves the well-being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.” This claim is not supported by the best available evidence.

Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty. By contrast, the risks are significant and include sterility, lifelong dependence on medication and the anguish of regret. For this reason, more and more European countries and international professional organizations now recommend psychotherapy rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.

Dr. Hammes’s claim that gender transition reduces suicides is contradicted by every systematic review, including the review published by the Endocrine Society, which states, “We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” There is no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide-prevention measure.

The politicization of transgender healthcare in the U.S. is unfortunate. The way to combat it is for medical societies to align their recommendations with the best available evidence—rather than exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks.

This letter is signed by 21 clinicians and researchers from nine countries.

There’s also a coda to this letter, which appears to be a kind of addendum (like a Supreme Court Justice’s partial dissent) coming from someone who may have been asked to sign the op-ed:

Transgenderism has been highly politicized—on both sides. There are those who will justify any hormonal-replacement intervention for any young person who may have been identified as possibly having gender dysphoria. This is dangerous, as probably only a minority of those so identified truly qualify for this diagnosis. On the other hand, there are those who wouldn’t accept any hormonal intervention, regardless of the specifics of the individual patients.

Endocrinologists aren’t psychiatrists. We aren’t the ones who can identify gender-dysphoric individuals. The point isn’t to open the floodgates and offer an often-irreversible treatment to all people who may have issues with their sexuality, but to determine who would truly benefit from it.

Jesus L. Penabad, M.D.

Tarpon Springs, Fla.

I agree with that letter, too. I would never ban transsexual medical treatment for those people old enough to make an informed decision (I’m thinking about 18 years old), but young people need objective therapy, not “rah rah—>hormones” therapy.  If a therapist prescribes puberty blockers for a young person on the very first visit (or worse, sends them to doctors prescribing gender-change hormones), that is not a good therapist.

Of course the solution to this dilemma is research, which is why several European countries have put puberty blockers into the class of “clinical experiments” and are starting to practice less “rah-rah: transition” therapy in favor of actually listening to children without instantly affirming their desire to transition. That’s especially important because the large majority of young people experiencing gender dysphoria (about 80%, I think), eventually grow out of it, often by simply becoming gay.  And being gay doesn’t run the risks of medical complications, sterility, and the inability to have orgasms: some of the side effects of hormone treatment.

And it would help if extreme gender activists would stop politicizing this issue. In all my years of writing on this site, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such nasty and ignorant pushback as I have from gender activists who accuse me of transphobia simply because I think we need more research before we start injecting hormones into children and adolescents, lopping off bits of their bodies, and giving them objective rather than “affirmative” therapy. That view is not “fear of trans people”, for crying out loud. But the activists, who have ideology but not evidence on their side, resort to name-calling to intimidate their opponents. And it often works.

The pile-on also comes if one suggests, as did Abigail Shrier, that there can be social pressure that influences people to change their gender, a claim that by now I think is undeniable. (Adults, of course, are free to make their own decisions, but again, these should be informed decisions, and the long term effects, both medical and psychological, of transitioning are not often discussed. One reason is that gender activists rain down hatred on anyone who brings up these issues.)

In Friday’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan picked up on this letter and wrote about it, giving some statistics in response to the oft-heard claim made by some doctors and therapists advising parents of gender-dysphoric children, “Do you want a live boy or a dead girl?” That, of course, implies a very high risk of suicide by girls who aren’t allowed to transition to the male gender. Sullivan:

To give a sense of the bullshit, here’s Stephen Hammes, president of the Endocrine Society:

More than 2,000 studies published since 1975 form a clear picture: Gender-affirming care improves the well-being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.

Note the vagueness, and the absence of any mention of children — the only population we need to be concerned about. And here is the Endocrine Society’s own study on sex reassignments for kids:

We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, 21 pediatric clinicians from nine countries call Hammes out. In those countries that have conducted systematic evidence-based reviews of all the studies involving children, all of them have concluded that “the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors [is] of low or very low certainty.” The risks — permanent sterility, inability to experience orgasm ever, irreversible changes to the body, voice and face — are very real. Yet the American Academy of Pediatrics refuses to conduct a similar systematic review, five years after its last guidance.

A survey of a decade of child transitions in the UK, from 2010 to 2020, found that the data “shed no light” on whether reassignment affects the suicide rate. But here’s the stunner: of the more than 15,000 children treated for gender dysphoria, the number of suicides was four. It is insane to believe that every child with dysphoria will kill themselves if not subjected to a sex change. If a doctor tells you this, find another doctor.

Why would they lie like this? I honestly don’t know. Here are some possibilities: misguided compassion for children in distress; believing you are part of a cultural revolution that starts with children; banking on the vast revenues of having patients for a lifetime of treatment; or just following ideological fiats, intimidated by woke peers, and fearing liability for past missteps.

I think that pretty much covers all the possibilities. I’m not sure why the U.S., compared to other countries, is particularly resistant to discussion of medical and psychological issues like this, especially given that this isn’t just an ideological discussion, but a discussion with medical consequences.  As far as I can see, we should be doing what the Europeans are increasingly doing about this issue: collecting more data.

Trigger warnings are useless and counterproductive

February 19, 2023 • 11:30 am

We should have all learned by now that psychological research shows that trigger warnings do not do what they were intended to do:—protect the mental health of people with PTSD. In fact, as the article in Persuasion below reiterates, they simply keep people traumatized. Or they could even increase trauma.

To the contrary, psychologists and therapists recommend that controlled exposure to a traumatic subject is the way to help cure people of extreme PTSD.

Amna Khalid, who wrote the article at hand, is an Associate Professor of history at Carleton College and has a Substack site, Banished.  Her piece below includes links to the data about the ineffectiveness of trigger warnings, so remember to cite these data when people are arguing for trigger warnings.

(You may remember that Khalid, a Muslim, wrote a strong piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education criticizing the dismissal of an instructor at Hamline University for showing an ancient painting of Muhammad that depicted his face. And that instructor even issued several trigger warnings.)

Click below to read Khalid’s piece; its thesis is summarized in the title:

Let me say that, presumably like Khalid, I’m not opposed to every single “content warning”, as they’re now called. If I’m going to post a video that has gruesome stuff in it that might revolt a lot of people, like beheadings, dead bodies, and the like, I will warn people, for a lot of people prefer to avoid such images. They don’t have PTSD or phobias, but find some stuff pretty revolting. The kind of trigger warning that both Khalid and I oppose are those that single out stuff that most people wouldn’t find offensive at all, or that might turn them away from something they need to see or hear, especially in art or literature. One example is putting trigger warnings on books because they contain the n-word, or have violence in them, or depict any aspect of life that at least one reader would find offensive.

I’ve divided her piece into three parts (this is my own take, and I’ve put headings in bold. For each I’ll give an indented quote from her article.

a.) The inanity of many trigger warnings. 

Just days into the new year, Scottish papers reported that the University of Aberdeen had slapped a trigger warning on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a classic children’s novel about a place where nobody ever grows up. The reason: the book’s “odd perspectives on gender” may prove “emotionally challenging” to some adult undergraduates, even though it contains “no objectionable material.”

Yes, you read that right—a children’s book now comes with a trigger warning for adults. What’s more, Peter Pan is not the only children’s book to come with an advisory at Aberdeen. Among others are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Last year the university put a trigger warning on Beowulf, the epic poem considered one of the most significant works in the English literary canon, for its depictions of “animal cruelty” and “ableism.” The year before that, the university pushed lecturers to issue content warnings for a long list of topics including abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, depictions of poverty, classism, blasphemy, adultery, blood, alcohol and drug abuse.

Aberdeen is not the only British university following in the steps of American counterparts. The University of Derby issued trigger warnings for Greek tragedies. The University of Warwick put a content advisory on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for “rather upsetting scenes concerning the cruelty of nature and the rural life.” At the University of Greenwich, the death of an albatross in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 18th century poem, was deemed “potentially upsetting” and stuck with a content notice.

You can see that a trigger warning for the albatross in Coleridge’s poetry is simply too extreme, treating students as if the description of a dead bird would shatter their world.

b.) The futility of trigger warnings. I once met a guy who was a specialist in therapy for people with phobias or extreme anxieties. As I have a couple of friends who are really afraid of flying (something I don’t understand, as it’s safer than driving)—one of whom was my late Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin—I asked the therapist how he helped people overcome this. He said “We go as a group on a couple of flights to Milwaukee, turn around, and immediately fly back again.” He said it was okay to admit your fears to yourself, but you have to act against them. Same for those afraid of elevators. Controlled exposure to these things was the key to getting over them. But I digress; here’s Khalid’s summary of the data:

This trend is alarming for several reasons. First, it runs counter to research on the effects of such advisories. As early as 2020 the consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, was that trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress, and they do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts. Notably, these advisories, which were at least initially introduced out of consideration for people suffering from PTSD, “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”

On the contrary, researchers found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” A recent meta-analysis of such warnings found the same thing: the only reliable effect was that people felt more anxious after receiving the warning. The researchers concluded that these warnings “are fruitless,” and “trigger warnings should not be used as a mental health tool.”

c.) The counterproductive nature of trigger warnings. Khalid’s view, with which I agree, is that “there is something particularly perverse about appending [trigger warnings] to works of literature and art.” It treats the students like fragile infants, and in fact could make them more traumatized (or fragile) by somehow validating their emotional responses. I would give a content warning to students were I to show a movie of lions taking down a zebra, but would not if I were teaching The Great Gatsby (“trigger warning: death, spousal abuse, adultery, religious stereotypes”).

Khalid:

In other words, literature is transformative precisely because it has the ability to shock and surprise. It can jolt us out of complacency, force us to contend with the uncertain, the strange and even the ugly. For Franz Kafka, the only books worth reading are the ones that “wound or stab us.” He observed:

If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?… we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like suicide. A book must be an ax for the frozen sea inside us…

Contending with “the frozen sea” opens the door for the kind of contemplation that is necessary for growth. When a classic such as Beowulf comes with “animal cruelty” and “ableism” on the cover, a piece of literature that offers us a unique window into the traditions and values of medieval Anglo-Saxons is devalued, and simply becomes a text riddled with “problematic” themes.

I read Beowulf in the original (I took a year of Old English in college), and I don’t remember “animal cruelty” beyond the death of Grendel, a fictitious monster, nor any “ableism” at all. But back to Khalid:

I can’t help but think that something is broken when universities, the very institutions entrusted with helping young minds mature, infantilize students by treating them as fragile creatures. What accounts for this shift?

Students across Britain seem to be in favor of trigger warnings. According to a survey published by the Higher Education Policy Institute last year, 86% of students support trigger warnings (up from 68% in 2016). More than a third think instructors should be fired if they “teach material that heavily offends some students” (up from just 15% in 2016).

Sadly, it appears that universities in Britain have fallen prey to the kind of corporate logic that is already firmly entrenched in the United States. This growing managerial approach with its customer-is-always-right imperative is increasingly evident in university policies.

. . .But university is not a television or radio show. Far from it. It’s a place where students come for an education. A model where faculty and administrators pander to student sensitivities—to the extent that it starts undermining the mission of the university—would be comical were it not so serious. If we fail to equip our students with the skills and sensibilities necessary to cope with life, we are doing them a great disservice.

When adult university students ask for trigger warnings for children’s literature, we as a society should realize that somewhere along the line, we lost the plot. Instead of coddling our students we should be asking why they feel so emotionally brittle. Might it be that their fragility is the result of limited exposure to what constitutes the human condition and the range of human experience? Is shielding them and managing their experience of art and literature not just exacerbating their sense of vulnerability?

Perhaps, in the end, what they need is unmediated, warning-free immersion in more literature, not less.

I know that some schools actually require trigger warnings on syllabi. Mine doesn’t, thank Ceiling Cat, so you’ll never get into trouble here if a student runs crying to the administration that you didn’t warn him about the albatross.

More debunked or questioned psychological studies

December 31, 2022 • 9:45 am

From the site armin gravitas, characterized as “a simulacrum standing in for Gavin Leech“, a consultant, we have a three-year old piece that gives many examples of once widely-accepted psychological claims that didn’t stand up to (or were severely weakened by) attempts at replication. There are many more than the few I give below, but I’ve chosen a couple that I’ve written about or that readers may be familiar with.  On the webpage below (click to access), each weakened or refuted claim comes with a link to the original paper or book making the claim, and then a list of the studies that failed to replicate it.

I would avoid citing any of the research listed below, including the Dunning-Kruger effect: a staple of internet discourse characterized on Wikipedia as

. . . a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.

 

The fields and claims:

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

No good evidence for many forms of priming, automatic behaviour change from ‘related’ (often only metaphorically related) stimuli.

  • No good evidence of anything from the Stanford prison ‘experiment’. It was not an experiment; ‘demand characteristics’ and scripting of the abuse; constant experimenter intervention; faked reactions from participants; as Zimbardo concedes, they began with a complete “absence of specific hypotheses”.

 

  • No good evidence from the famous Milgram experiments that 65% of people will inflict pain if ordered to. Experiment was riddled with researcher degrees of freedom, going off-script, implausible agreement between very different treatments, and “only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.”

 

  • At most weak use in implicit bias testing for racism. Implicit bias scores poorly predict actual bias, r = 0.15. The operationalisations used to measure that predictive power are often unrelated to actual discrimination (e.g. ambiguous brain activations). Test-retest reliability of 0.44 for race, which is usually classed as “unacceptable”. This isn’t news; the original study also found very low test-criterion correlations.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

  • No good evidence that taking a “power pose” lowers cortisol, raises testosterone, risk tolerance.

    That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

After the initial backlash, it focussed on subjective effect, a claim about “increased feelings of power”. Even then: weak evidence for decreased “feelings of power” from contractive posture only. My reanalysis is here.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

  • Mixed evidence for the Dunning-Kruger effect. No evidence for the “Mount Stupid” misinterpretation.

 

  • In general, be highly suspicious of anything that claims a positive permanent effect on adult IQ. Even in children the absolute maximum is 4–15 points for a powerful single intervention (iodine supplementation during pregnancy in deficient populations).

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

  • No good evidence that tailoring teaching to students’ preferred learning styles has any effect on objective measures of attainment. There are dozens of these inventories, and really you’d have to look at each. (I won’t.)

BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE

  • The effect of “nudges” (clever design of defaults) may be exaggerated in general. One big review found average effects were six times smaller than billed. (Not saying there are no big effects.)

NEUROSCIENCE

  • No good evidence that brains contain one mind per hemisphere. The corpus callosotomy studies which purported to show “two consciousnesses” inhabiting the same brain were badly overinterpreted.

PSYCHIATRY

  • At most extremely weak evidence that psychiatric hospitals (of the 1970s) could not detect sane patients in the absence of deception.

PARAPSYCHOLOGY

  • No good evidence for precognition, undergraduates improving memory test performance by studying after the test. This one is fun because Bem’s statistical methods were “impeccable” in the sense that they were what everyone else was using. He is Patient Zero in the replication crisis, and has done us all a great service. (Heavily reliant on a flat / frequentist prior; evidence of optional stopping; forking paths analysis.)

h/t: Luana

A brave woman stands up against the infiltration of “progressive” ideology into psychotherapy

November 22, 2022 • 9:15 am

Meet Leslie Elliott, who’s studying to get a degree in mental health counseling at Antioch University in Seattle, part of the Antioch University system that includes the famous Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, famous for its radicalism. Apparently the Seattle school is also pretty woke, as you can judge from Elliott’s eight-minute video below, where she describes the horrific ideological “training” that passes for training in mental health therapy at Antioch.  Elliott’s still a student, and near graduation, but according to the video and an article at wng.org (excerpted below), she might not finish because she won’t sign an ideological pledge about social justice.  Elliott also works at a counseling service as a Holistic Wellness Coach and Consultant. She adds that she’s a “political liberal,” and I don’t doubt it. Someone who wants to go into non-M.D. psychotherapy is someone who wants to help people, not make money.

An excerpt from wng.org:

Leslie Elliott only has a few more courses to take in the graduate clinical mental health counseling program at Antioch University in Seattle before she can become a licensed clinical counselor. Yet she does not see how she can continue in the program because it is requiring her to endorse a “civility pledge” which violates her conscience. She is on a leave of absence to explore her administrative and legal options.

The pledge, which Elliott says is now included in most syllabuses, reflects the social justice mission of Antioch. It states: “I acknowledge that racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism, nativism, and other forms of interpersonal and institutionalized forms of oppression exist. I will do my best to better understand my own privileged and marginalized identities and the power that these afford me.” Antioch added the statement starting in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.

For Elliott, the offense came when the first assignment in one of her required courses was to affirm the pledge by rewriting it in her own words and stating her agreement. “That really felt like a purity test to me,” she said. “I felt compelled to confess to this worldview that sees myself as an intersectional group of identities that have privilege and marginalization attached to them, and I don’t agree with this framework. It feels like a theology, and it’s not my theology.”

A political liberal, Elliott knew social justice was a core tenet driving the ethical standards of the program when she entered it. But she soon learned that her idea of social justice was very different from that of her professors and administrators. To Elliott, social justice meant striving to provide access and opportunity and eliminating exploitation and unfairness when possible. “It seemed like a beautiful ideal you would find in most world religions and most positive philosophies,” she said.

But she found the teachings at Antioch opposed her beautiful ideal. Her professors and administrators viewed social justice as a critical lens through which Western society must be viewed to deconstruct cultural norms and values rooted in white supremacy, racism, and oppression of marginalized people. She believes this conceptualization of social justice is socially destructive and an anti-resilience philosophy.

The video below recounts a training designed to turn all mental-health counselors into social-justice advocates who turn all interactions involving therapy into issues about race. Counselors are also trained to place also people with gender issues onto a transitioning track, i.e., they’re trained in “affirmative therapy.”

Granted, this is one person’s take, but you have to admit that she’s courageous in taking on not just her university, but the very program that’s purporting to train her but in reality is indoctrinating her.  Still, all this description can’t match what she actually describes below.

The site also shows a response from Antioch sent to all students in the college—save Elliott (what a rookie move!)—implicitly singling her out for promulgating “white supremacy” and “transphobia”. Here we have the college acting like an online social-justice mob. The author of the college’s email, and presumably at least part of the “Commitment to Social Justice” statement, is Shawn Fitzgerald, CEO of Antioch’s Seattle campus and Dean of the Graduate School of Counseling, Psychology, and Therapy.

Clearly the “one person who posted online” is Eliott, who stands accused of transphobia, white supremacy, and “harmful ideologies”, as well as “hate speech”. The statement was certainly inspired by Elliott’s making the video above.  Eliott has posted another video detailing what’s below and giving her response.

The video above was posted about a month ago, while the statement issued by the College seems to be dated October 27—notlong after Elliott put up the video.

Elliott also has a Substack called “The Radical Center“. On it she’s published her response to Antioch’s “Position Statement” and its invitation to continue her coursework. I’ve put that response below. Elliott’s letter to officials at Antioch asks that the school refrain from retaliating against her (what’s above is simple retaliation) and affirming that she will continue speaking out and exercising her freedom of speech.

Here’s an hourlong interview of Elliott by “Martin’s Daughter”. I found it only this morning, so I’ve watched only snippets.

h/t: Luana

Steve Pinker has a new YouTube channel.

July 23, 2022 • 11:15 am

Reader Paul informed me that Steve Pinker has a YouTube channel, and he does and it looks official—run by Qualia.

It’s called “The Life of the Mind“, and there will be an episode every Wednesday. The first one is up and is 18½ minutes long; it’s a short history of psychological experiments beginning with behaviorism. (There’s also a short 50-second intro video, but the longer video has the same information.)

Steve’s own career in psychology mirrors the history from Skinnerian behaviorism until today, when cognitive psychology is a big deal. Throughout the narrative he interweaves his own career, and he winds up connecting experiments with rats getting rewards at “random” intervals with the intervals during which humans engage in war. The point there is that a truly random process, like the one used to give pellets to rats, looks to the layperson like they are clustered.  Wars have seem clustered to many, but they aren’t.

This shows how Pinker’s involvement in classical psychology has fed into his more recent work on history and its trajectory.

I don’t know if Steve is being interviewed here (he seems to be looking at someone form time to time), but he’s extraordinarily eloquent (he never says “uh”), and I don’t think he’s reading from a script.

The guy is amazing, but, as he says, he’s hardly done anything that isn’t controversial. Because I happen to agree with most of what he’s written, and have spent time with him, learning that he’s a truly nice guy and not in the least arrogant, I find it hard to understand the animus against him.  Maybe it’s because he believes in genuine progress, which of course angers people for a number of reasons.

Anyway, check the link above each Wednesday, or perhaps you can subscribe. But do listen to the history below, which I found enlightening.

Does everyone have a channel or podcast now? I fear that websites like this are simply going out of style. So it goes.