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               Thanks to Chris Gladis for permission to use this Photo.

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what’s going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn’t involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what’s really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Shopping

For this study researchers set themselves up in a mall pretending to carry out a consumer survey on nightgowns and nylon stockings. Passersby were asked to evaluate what they were told were four different nightgowns and four different pairs of stockings. In fact, all four items were identical.

Quite by accident they discovered a positional effect for the identical goods: people seemed to prefer the item that was on the far right. In fact this effect was really obvious for the stockings. The right-most pair, although identical to the left-most was preferred by a factor of four to one.

When asked why they had chosen a particular item, no one mentioned its position. Even when experimenters suggested to people that the position might have an effect, most participants looked at best very confused and at worst utterly dismissive.

Result: these people didn’t have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another.

Reading

In this study participants read a passage from the novel ‘Rabbit, Run’ by John Updike. The extract from the book involves an emotionally charged scene in which an alcoholic mother, while washing her baby in the bath, accidentally drowns and kills her.

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             Thanks to Mary Streepy for permission to use this Photo.

While spirit mediums and trance channellers come and go, there has never been anyone else quite like Catherine Elise Muller (more commonly known as Helene Smith). Born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1861, Catherine`s father was a Hungarian merchant with a talent for learning languages and her mother was prone to seeing “visions“. From an early age, Catherine had a vivid imagination and extremely intense daydreams. She would tell her parents of her visions of brightly coloured landscapes, bizarre images, and bright lights and openly speculated about being a changeling. It was in 1891 that she was first introduced to Spiritualism and quickly showed a remarkable talent for automatic writing. She also showed a knack for mediumship and communicated with different spirits (including the ghost of Victor Hugo). Table-tipping, spirit writing, clairvoyance, Catherine did it all. Her spirit guide, Count Cagliostro (more commonly known as “Leopold“) acted through her body and she claimed not to remember anything that occurred while she was in one of her trances . Surprisingly, Catherine never charged for her séances and supported herself as a shop-worker despite her growing fame throughout Geneva.

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              Thanks to Jordan Garn for permission to use this Photo.

I have never liked the term “learning disability,” preferring instead to use the term “learning difference.” Is this just more PC-speak? It seems to me that the identification of somebody as “learning disabled” is rather arbitrary. We don’t refer to people as “athletically disabled” or “musically disabled,” and send them to remedial classes. A literate culture cares a lot about verbal and mathematical skills, but in other realities, these talents might not count for much. Should we ever be so stupid as to bomb ourselves, my guess is that the Hell’s Angel is more likely to survive the new world order than the accountant.

We know that many serious conditions have compensatory aspects that keep them in the population, such as the protection from malaria that is the flip side of sickle cell anemia, or the creativity that seems to correlate with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Obviously, not all conditions have such benefits, but it is interesting to consider the ones that do.

Having spent a lot of time with my two favorite people with dyslexia, Mr. F and Karen, I was always dazzled by what they did well. Yes, writing was a struggle, especially for Karen, whose love of public relations plopped her in some exceedingly challenging reporting classes in the journalism departments of her universities. No spell check on lab work? Catastrophe! But these struggles were always offset by some amazing creativity. Karen just had her first-year research project accepted for presentation at the prestigious International Public Relations Conference …do I sound like a proud Mom or what? (more…)

A classic 1931 experiment shows how the mechanics of our own problem-solving are often a puzzle to us.

The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths.

This idea motivated Brewster Ghiselin to collate the problem-solving processes of great thinkers and artists from Poincare to Picasso (Ghiselin, 1952). Unfortunately, as I mentioned in ‘The Hidden Workings of Our Minds‘, these great thinkers usually report being mere onlookers to their own mental processes. They seem unable to identify what prompted their discoveries and even, when they’re actually happening.

The problem is that these reports were usually made many years after the original thought processes. Picasso may simply have forgotten what prompted him to create the first ever cubist painting ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (detail above). Perhaps if we’d asked him exactly what was going through his mind right after he painted it, the answer would have been more accurate.

A classic psychology study from 1931 suggests, though, that he still wouldn’t have been able to tell us what was going on in his mind. This experiment neatly demonstrates how we often don’t have a clue how we solve a problem.

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         Thanks to vieilles_annonces’ for permission to use this Photo.

On September 15, 1985, a seemingly innocent package was delivered to the home of Dr. James V. McConnell, then-professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.  His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened the package as Dr. McConnell looked on.  The resulting explosion resulted in Suino sustaining injuries to his arms and abdomen.  Dr. McConnell was more fortunate although he suffered a hearing loss as a result of the blast.  It remains unclear exactly why Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) targeted Dr. McConnell as he had others in the scientific communit, but Dr. McConnell’s colorful career may provide a clue. 

Considered a maverick in his time, James V. McConnell’s career was marked by his unconventional research and outspokenness.  In his most famous research project, he classically conditioned Planaria (flatworms) to react to bright lights using electric shocks.  He then cut up his research subjects and fed them to other Planaria and he found that the cannibal Planaria learned to respond to the bright light more rapidly than control Planaria did.  In his classic paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, he suggested that memory was chemically based and that the memory transfer had been accomplished through what he termed memory RNA.  While it was an intriguing finding at the time, other researchers have not been able to replicate his results and the concept of memory transfer fell by the wayside. (more…)

           Thanks to James Tworow for permission to use this Photo.

When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.

We may well, for example, be able to identify our current opinions on global warming. We might find it easy to say, “Yes, I think global warming is occurring and humans are to blame,” or, “No, it’s just a long-term trend that has nothing to do with humans”. But when our opinions change, by say watching Al Gore’s documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, psychologists have found we are unlikely to be aware what changed our minds.

It gets weirder. In certain circumstances we may even be convinced that our attitude has never changed. So that we are convinced our ‘new’ attitude is the one we always had.

Whether or not this sounds far-fetched to you, the effect is dramatically demonstrated in an experiment carried out by Goethals and Reckman (1973).

Attitude change

High school students were asked their opinions on a variety of social issues, including on how children should be bussed to school and whether it would help with racial integration. The actual topic itself doesn’t matter for our purposes, what the experimenters were doing here is getting a measures of participants’ attitudes to a specific issue before the experimental manipulation.

A couple of weeks later the students were invited back for a further discussion on the bussing issue. This time, though, they were split into two groups, one that was pro- and one anti- the bussing issue. These, then, are our two experimental groups, along with a third control group, more of which, later.

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           Thanks to Stephan Gellert for permission to use this Photo.

A recent and already infamous episode of Dr. Phil showed that, even with the ongoing writers’ strike, fiction and humor are far from extinct on the airwaves. This episode focused on Wade, who was brought to the Phil by Michelle, his wife. She had recently started to suspect that her husband was a compulsive liar and, as per usual, cheating on her. The standard schema of accusations, phil plashbacks, yelling, lie detector results, crying, and excuses resulted. No big surprises, until the last 5 minutes or so, where we learned that the next episode (today’s) would reveal how Wade admits not only to a long list of affairs and marital transgressions, but also multiple rapes and murders.

Apparently, after the show, when heading back to Iowa (to get their divorce) Wade told Michelle that he had vague memories of raping his ex-wife and a co-worker, as well as a time where he picked up a hitchhiker who refused to have sexual intercourse, leading him to a violent outrage, murdering and dumping the woman’s body on the side of the road. Adding to the intrigue, the audience learns of restraining orders, fruitless FBI investigations, death threats, stalkings, and suicide attempts from basically all the parties involved except Phil. While adding a certain dimension of excitement, and, perhaps most importantly, providing reason to extend the show for 2 more days, it’s also extremely unbelievable. After all, as Dr. Phil actually made clear on the first show, Wade is a compulsive liar, fibbing about little inconsequential things and distorting big, important matters. (more…)

               Thanks to Breidholt for permission to use this Photo.

In yesterday’s session of Behavior Disorders in Childhood, we were discussing Simon Baron-Cohen (not to be mistaken for his cousin Sasha) and his theory of Assortive Mating . Briefly, what Baron-Cohen is suggesting is that two systemizers who marry are more likely to produce a child with autism. Given the entrance of women to the workforce, the theory suggests that it is now easier for systemizers to find one another, particularly in tech fields, leading to an increase in children with autism.

Baron-Cohen is British, and his theories do not seem to trod on British sensibilities of gender differences as much as they cross American sensitivities. Baron-Cohen’s contention that women are “hard-wired” to be empathic and men to be systematic makes Harvard’s Larry Summers seem quite tame. Whether you buy into his theory or not, it is an interesting concept to explore. (more…)

Of all the prominent English artists who came to international attention during the reign of Queen Victoria, Richard Dadd definitely is in a class by himself. Born in 1817, as the fourth of seven children, Dadd showed early promise as an artist and began sketching at an early age. After his family moved to London, he entered the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of twenty.

Along with other artists with whom he studied, Dadd formed an important group that became known as the Clique although he remained the foremost artist among them. Their meetings throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s inspired a new style of painting that rejected academic high art and favoured more personal art that they felt should be judged by the public rather than academics. Given Dadd’s developing prominence in the art world, it was only natural that he was chosen to go with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, as a draftsman on a planned expedition through Greece, Turkey and Egypt. The expedition that began in 1842 was seen as an excellent opportunity for Dadd to expand his artistic horizons.

Absolutely nobody could have foreseen the profound change that would come on him over the course of the journey. (more…)

 
              Thanks to Max Baars for permission to use this Photo.

A reader asked me to read his book before saying that copycat suicides is not a real phenomenon. To be fair, his book is really good.  It is worth the price even as a reference guide/catalog of suicides and homicides that share similar characteristics, which are striking.   While the majority of the information is a google search away, the fact is that he actually did the searches.   It’s also a  good read– it neither bores you nor crams the conclusions into your head. (more…)