Tag: psychology

Gender differences in psychology

My take on this:

  1. There are gender differences in ability, but not many, and the effect size is typically small* (Hyde 2005).
  2. Brain structure development is affected by a range of factors, environmental and genetic. For instance brain structure changes as a result of learning (e.g., Maguire et al, 2000). (And the phrase “hard-wired” is annoying.)
  3. A mean difference between groups, mean(group 1) > mean(group 2), on some measure does not imply that everyone in group 1 is better than everyone in group 2. So when selecting someone for a job, say, you could (a) grab a load of people with the gender which, on average, has (very slightly—see point 1) more of the ability you want and choose someone at random, or (b) you could choose someone who has more of the ability you want, and not focus on what gender they happen to be.
  4. The designers of IQ tests hack their tests to remove gender differences, for instance the designers of the British Ability Scales (version 2) “used three strategies to test for fairness and to remove items likely to increase bias” (Hill, 2005). Blinkhorn (2005) says: “Where there are sex differences to be found, detailed study of the internal workings of the test tends to show why. That’s not based on instinct, but on my professional experience in designing gender-fair tests.”

References

Blinkhorn, S. (2005). Intelligence: a gender bender. Nature, 438, 31-32.

Hill, V. (2005). Through the Past Darkly: A Review of the British Ability Scales. Second Edition. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 10, 87-98.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60, 581-592.

Maguire, E. A.; Gadian, D. G.; Johnsrude, I. S.; Good, C. D.; Ashburner, J.; Frackowiak, R. S. & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97, 4398-4403

* Cis women are better at giving birth than cis men, with a large effect size.

How perception determines your world

From a lovely article by John Hull:

“Sighted people, for the most part, do not recognise themselves as sighted. What I mean is that they seldom appreciate the extent to which they live in a world which is a projection from their sighted bodies. This leads to the common mistake of thinking that one’s own world is actually the only world, and so sighted people tend to unconsciously look upon those who are not in their sighted world as being without any world, and thus to be pitied. It took me a long time to realise that blindness is actually a world, a distinctive human way of living and being.”

— John Hull (10 April 2008)

“Conscious” reasoning

Read this:

For us, however, a key difference is that only conscious reasoning can make use of working memory to hold intermediate conclusions, and accordingly reason in a recursive way (Johnson-Laird, 2006, p. 69): primitive recursion, by definition, calls for a memory of the results of intermediate computations (Hopcroft & Ulmann, 1979). [… example task omitted …] The non-recursive processes of intuition cannot make this inference, but when we deliberate about it consciously, we grasp its validity (Cherubini & Johnson-Laird, 2004). Conscious reasoning therefore has a greater computational power than unconscious reasoning, and so it can on occasion overrule our intuitions.

There’s no evidence that whatever bits of memory intuition uses cannot do recursion.  Hunting through semantic memory structures can be viewed as a recursive process and the process is not (at least always) accessible to consciousness.  Aside from this, you can impose recursion on just about any process you care to analyse, and you can often remove recursion from a process description depending on what primitives are available.  Questioning whether a process “is” or “isn’t” recursive isn’t a healthy activity.  Also the jump from “recursive” to “primitive recursive”, as if they were one and the same, is deeply confusing.  See the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy for details of other flavours of recursion.

Bucciarelli, M.; Khemlani, S. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2008). The psychology of moral reasoning. Judgment and Decision Making, 3, 121-139

“Usefulness” in psychometrics

“Consider, for example, instrumentalism. This view does not invoke truth but usefulness as the primary criterion for the adequacy of scientific theories and measurements. However, we are surely not seriously considering the idea that we have to rule out rivals to the hypothesis that intelligence tests are useful. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS; Wechsler, 1955) comes in a big heavy box, which is very useful to hit people on the head with, but the hypothesis that the WAIS is valid for inflicting physical injury is certainly not the kind of hypothesis we are interested in.”

Borsboom, D., Mellenbergh, G.J., & Van Heerden (2004, p. 1065).  The concept of validity. Psychological Review, 111, 1061-1071.

A beautiful bastard

“Psychology – like Psyche – is a beautiful bastard. It promises much to young students who specialize in it. Yet at its heart it has been eternally homeless. It has tried to locate its parents in physiology, physics, or even in art – to be rebuffed by all these alleged parents as either not solid enough – or not sufficiently beautiful. So it continues to wander in the World – between societies – looking for its place. At times it finds a temporary place where there is some ideological order for its products – like tests or ways to re-direct blame for various actions between groups in a society. Yet such applied success – selling one’s actions while hiding one’s soul – does not lead to the latter’s discovery of its own identity, unsuccessfully sought after in Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats, or (currently) in fMRI pictures.”

—Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa, from Chapter 1 of The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology

Cognition

To support the view that cognition (and any study of cognition) is just a point of view on all activities and not limited to high level philosophically respectable thought and reasoning, I found a paper which involved inserting an inflatable polyethylene bag into people’s rectums as they were being scanned using MRI (Adeyemi et al, 2005). The BOLD signal was recorded as the device was inflated, first without scanning to determine for each person when they could “feel something” and before they reported any pain. Participants were asked to squeeze their sphincter too.

Interesting result: there was more activation in the anterior cingulate of women than of men during the inflation, “suggesting cognition-related recruitment” (this goes again the cognition as a viewpoint view, but onwards). However, the authors note that “the gender differences seen during nonnoxious rectal distension may be due to additional stimulation that can potentially arise from contiguous structures such as the posterior vaginal wall.”

Reference

Adeyemi Lawal, Mark Kern, Arthi Sanjeevi, Candy Hofmann, and Reza Shaker (2005) Cingulate cortex: a closer look at its gut-related functional topography. Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol 289(4): G722-G730.