“[…] if I wish to be understood by others, and if I wish to enlist others for my purposes, then I must present myself in a way that conforms to folk-psychological platitudes, or laws. To explain my actions – even my most outrageous ones – to others is to find an appropriate set of folk-psychological platitudes in the light of which I am understandable and predictable. […] Given the fundamental role of folk psychology, it should not come as a surprise that it is also the intuition most strongly protected by sanctions. Inability to come up with acceptable folk-psychological accounts of ourselves and others is sanctioned by disapproval, lack of acceptance, or even referral to psychiatric services. No wonder, therefore, that social psychologists find their subjects ‘telling more than they know’: rather than admit that they have no introspective access to many of their higher cognitive processes, subjects will tell folk-psychological stories of how their mind allegedly works.”
– Martin Kusch (1999, p. 239), Psychological knowledge: A social history and philosophy. Routledge.
Tag: psychology
Is there any point in therapy if behaviour is “unavoidably determined”?
In an introduction to psychodynamic ideas, Jonathan Shedler (2022, p. 432) claims:
“If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.”
Although I’m not sure about determinism, I think this assertion is false. I also believe it is important to understand why it is false for clients who do believe in determinism, such as the occasional philosopher.
Suppose behaviour were unavoidably determined. We still experience stuff, some of it fun, some of it not. Our accompanying conscientious sensations that go along for the ride doesn’t seem to care. Related to this, I think it’s interesting that we still go to the cinema and read books even though we know the ending has already been decided: we seem to derive great pleasure from finding out what happens next. “You should go on living, if only to satisfy your curiosity”, goes the Yiddish proverb.
Importantly for therapy, chatting with someone and feeling listened to partially determines what we do and how we feel. While it’s possible that therapy is merely another link in the massive causal network of the universe, it is hopefully more likely to improve someone’s life than other links, regardless of how predetermined going to see the therapist and its consequences might be. As Galen Strawson puts it (2010, p. 247, footnote 22):
“Naive fatalism holds that there is no point in doing anything because everything is predetermined […], hence nothing you can do can change how things will be. It is false, because one’s doings and deliberations can change things, being themselves real parts of the (possibly deterministic) causal process.”
References
Shedler, J. (2022). That Was Then, This Is Now: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy For The Rest Of Us. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 58, 405–437.
Strawson, G. (2010). Freedom and Belief, Revised Edition.
Logic and psychology
I happened upon an interesting question on Philosophy Stack Exchange: “What are the main views among academics on the question of the relation between logic and human cognition?” Here follows (a lightly edited version of) my answer.
Van Benthem (2008) offers examples of how cognition and social practices influence the development of logics, citing, e.g., Prior’s work on temporal structures and Lewis and Stalnaker on comparative orderings of possible worlds. He concedes that much of the work in this direction is informal (p. 74):
Logicians analyzing natural language, or computer scientists modeling “common sense”, tend to go by their own intuitions, anecdotal evidence from colleagues, email surveys of sometimes surprising naiveness, and other easy procedures that avoid the laboratories and statistical packages of the world of careful experimental design. But even so, experimental evidence is relevant, in that these theories can be, and sometimes are, modified under pressure of evidence from actual usage, even when it comes through these home-grown sources.
He also points to work in the other direction, where cognitive scientists take non-classical logics and use them to model social and cognitive phenomena. An example I know about (it was one of the reasons I chose my PhD topic and supervisor) is Stenning and van Lambalgen’s (2005) analysis of the “suppression task” in psychology, using nonmonotonic logic. Probability theory may be viewed as a kind of logic and it is used in cognitive science too; try e.g., Pfeifer (2013) and references that follow.
One key element of cognitive science studies that use logics is how people interpret tasks, and often have different interpretations, which can be modelled as choosing a logic and setting its parameters. Geis and Zwicky (1971) observe that logic students sometimes map the natural language indicative “if A, then B” to a biconditional in classical logic, so even in logic class interpretations aren’t naive.
Cognitive scientists don’t expect non-specialists to be aware of the logics that model their interpretations and inferences, e.g., here’s Da Silva Neves, Bonnefon, and Raufaste (2002, p. 110) discussing the relationship between potential properties of people’s reasoning systems and how people feel that they reason:
… even if we expect human inference to corroborate these properties, we know of no sufficient reason to think that lay reasoners would recognize any rationality postulate as valid, neither that they would conscientiously use them to guide their reasoning. […W]e assume that human inference is constrained by knowledge organisation in memory and that its formal properties emerge from a spreading activation process operating directly on knowledge structures.
References
van Benthem, J. (2008). Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter? Studia logica, 88, 67-84.
Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, E. (2002). An empirical test of patterns for nonmonotonic inference. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 34, 107-130.
Geis, M. L., & Zwicky, A. M. (1971). On invited inferences. Linguistic inquiry, 2(4), 561-566.
Pfeifer, N. (2013). The new psychology of reasoning: A mental probability logical perspective. Thinking & Reasoning, 19(3-4), 329-345.
Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. (2005). Semantic interpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: The real meaning of the suppression task. Cognitive Science, 29(6), 919-960.
You are free to believe this meta-analysis if you want
‘The “But you are free…” (BYAF) technique is a technique to increase compliance (for example, to give spare change for the bus), by adding the words “But you are free to accept or refuse” to the request. In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we examine the effect of the BYAF technique in 52 experiments (N = 19528). An analysis of 74 effect sizes showed a medium effect (g = 0.44, 95% confidence intervals (CI) [0.36, 0.51]) for the BYAF technique. […] An examination of risk of bias showed that only seven studies were of “low risk”, and a meta-analysis of these studies showed no effect of the BYAF (g = 0.11, 95% CI [-0.18, 0.40]).’
References
Fillon, A. A., Souchet, L., Pascual, A., & Girandola, F. (2023). The effectiveness of the “But-you-are-free” technique: Meta-analysis and re-examination of the technique. Meta-Psychology, 7, MP.2020.2640.
Being brave with causal interpretations
One of the fabulous things about evaluation is that we are allowed to (or, rather, required to!) make causal claims from a wide variety of evidence, not only experiments. Causal estimands, defined in terms of potential outcomes, are the norm for quantitative impact evaluations. Causal DAGs are becoming more popular too and one of my favourite tools for thinking through quasi-experimental designs.
Not all fields have it so good.
Julia Rohrer has written a great blog post, following a series of journal papers, urging personality psychologists to be upfront with their causal claims. It’s challenging to persuade and I think interesting as a sociology of science case study. As Rohrer summarises, ‘Being vague about the desired interpretation may maintain some degree of plausible deniability and potentially offload the error to others (“oh, you shouldn’t have interpreted our numbers like that!1”). But honestly, that’s just a cowardly way to do science. Life is too short for that.’
Exploring the validity of sentiment analysis in psychotherapy
What happens if you apply the Multilingual Language Model Toolkit for Sentiment Analysis (XLM-T), “a transformer-based NLP model derived from the Cross-lingual Language Model based on RoBERTa”, to psychotherapy transcripts? Eberhardt et al. (2024) investigate. Here’s a slightly simplified Table 1, showing correlations between positive and negative sentiment and a patient-reported emotions scale. Green gives between-patient correlations and pink within-patient across sessions. Note the wide confidence intervals.
Eberhardt, S. T., Schaffrath, J., Moggia, D., Schwartz, B., Jaehde, M., Rubel, J. A., Baur, T., André, E., & Lutz, W. (2024). Decoding emotions: Exploring the validity of sentiment analysis in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy Research.
Nice video on colour mixing and why purple “doesn’t exist” (Steve Mould)
Predictors of Transgender Prejudice: A Meta-Analysis
Hailey Hatch et al. (2022) conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of predictors of transphobia. The final analysis consisted of 82 studies with a total of 36,285 participants. Main findings in the table below. A higher score indicates more transphobia. Right wing authoritarianism (RWA) is one of the strongest predictors, “characterized by the tendency to submit to authority figures, to adhere to conventional social norms, and to aggress against those who may be considered threatening or perceived to go against conventional norms”.
References
Hatch, H. A., Warner, R. H., Broussard, K. A., & Harton, H. C. (2022). Predictors of Transgender Prejudice: A Meta-Analysis. Sex Roles, 87(11–12), 583–602. [Unpaywalled]
Sentimentality
Do you often cry while having a warm feeling in the heart because you find something beautiful? If so, you might be intrigued by this study of the Geneva Sentimentality Scale!
Do “Growth Mindset” interventions improve students’ academic attainment?
“We conducted a systematic review and multiple meta-analyses of the growth mindset intervention literature. Our goal was to answer two questions: (a) Do growth mindset interventions generally improve students’ academic achievement? and (b) Are growth mindset intervention effects due to instilling growth mindsets in students or are apparent effects due to shortcomings in study designs, analyses, and reporting? To answer these questions, we systematically reviewed the literature and conducted multiple meta-analyses imposing varying degrees of quality control. Our results indicated that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions are possibly due to inadequate study designs, reporting flaws, and bias. In particular, the systematic review yielded several concerning patterns of threats to internal validity.”
Here’s a pic:
Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2022). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin.