Unanticipated Interpersonal and Societal Consequences of Choice

Thanks to Clare for pointing me to this paper forthcoming in Psychological Science by Savani, Stevens and Markus. Abstract below.

Abstract
Choice makes North Americans feel more in control, free, and independent, and thus has many positive consequences for individuals’ motivation and well-being. We report five studies that uncover novel consequences of choice for public policy and
interpersonal judgments. Studies 1-3 found that activating the concept of choice decreases support for policies promoting intergroup equality (e.g., affirmative action) and societal benefits (e.g., reducing environmental pollution), but increases support for policies promoting individual rights (e.g., legalizing drugs). Studies 4 and 5 found that activating the concept of choice increases victim-blaming and decreases empathy for disadvantaged others. Study 5 found that choice does not decrease Indians’ empathy for disadvantaged individuals, indicating that these effects of choice are culture specific. This research suggest that the well-known positive consequences of choice for individuals can be accompanied by an array of previously unexamined and potentially negative consequences for others and for society.

Dhaka University (DU) MS Psychology Admission Semester 2011-12

MS Psychology admission application invited at University of Dhaka. Applicants must have 4 years Hon’s degree in Psychology and 1 year MS degree from any recognized university. Application form can be collected from Room No: 5017 of Arts building of University of Dhaka. Application form collection and submission deadline is 2nd March, 2011

Source: Daily Kalerkantho

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ESP Paper

This one has been discussed for a few months online but, to be honest, psi phenomena were not high on my reading list toward the end of last year. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is an extremely good psychology journal by most sensible metrics, and so its decision to publish a paper on ESP has set the cat among the pigeons. The NYT gives an account of this here. A large amount of the internet comment on this centres around the limitations of classical hypothesis testing as well as publication bias in psychology journals. Bem discusses these issues in the conclusion, acknowledging some elements of the "file-drawer" problem though not problems, in his opinion, sufficient to generate the results. He also discusses some problems that might arise in replication. The paper reports statistically significant evidence in 8 out of 9 experiments looking at four types of "psi" phenomena - precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The NYT article above gives some flavour of the reactions to this paper.

Economic crisis and our elites

Ken McKenzie, formerly of the Geary Institute, offers an interesting psychological perspective on how the crisis might change how our elites do their business.

The Weirdest People in the World?

Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:

The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.

Psychology Students and Economics

I will be giving talks again this term to psychology students on behavioural economics. I have given a number of talks before about the potential role of psychology graduates in the modern economy. Some of this material is relatively obvious to people who have studied behavioural economics. My basic point in motivating psychology students to think about behavioural economics is that they have a strong role in dealing with many of the major challenges the world is facing in the 21st century. If we look at areas such as pensions reform, much of this comes down squarely to human psychology including issues such as future thinking, trust, procrastination, social network effects and so on. Increasingly, in areas such as climate change there is a greater emphasis in understanding the psychology of how people respond to incentives as well as understanding the best incentives to design from a theoretical point of view. In Ireland, the design of unemployment schemes, financial regulation reform, taxation and a wide range of other areas are now only informed by people with psychology training to a very surface degree and are areas where real psychology input could potentially yield very high social and economic returns.

Almost all the basic psychology undergraduate syllabus is relevant to economics but particularly relevant are courses in cognitive psychology, social psychology and neuroscience. If you look at the references in many modern economics journals, you will increasingly see citations to classic works in these fields. Some of the leading drivers throughout the 20th century of cognitive psychology such as Daniel Kahneman and Herbert Simon were also Economics Nobel winners. Thought leaders in economics such as Sendhil Mullainthan and Andre Shleifer are increasingly drawing from cognitive theories of attention to explain a wide range of economic phenomena from poverty to stock market fluctuations. Social psychology is also becoming increasingly influential in economics, with a great deal of work emerging on herding, conformity and related group processes. There is a also a growing field of neuroeconomics, which examines the neural basis of economic decisions.

While most psychology undergraduates have options in areas relevant to public policy such as health psychology, and relevant to business such as consumer psychology, it is still the case that most psychology students view major economic and social institutions such as healthcare, legal and financial systems as somehow outside their remit, with economics graduates largely dominating many of our core institutions globally. My experience with psychology students so far is that they are bright, interested in people and very comfortable with "hands-on" data gathering, field experiments and so on. I think there should be more people with psychology training in the heart of economic policy design in the context particularly of multidisciplinary teams. More on this issue as the term progresses.

Case studies

Case studies play no role in economics although there is some similarity with the "natural experiments" that are popular with some econometricians. In psychology, however, case studies have been very influential for example lesion studies where an individual's capacities have been compromised by some insult. Phineas Gage is the most famous perhaps. BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a series on classic case studies that are well known in psychology. They include the case of a man who's vision was restored after 50 years, leading to an unhappy outcome, and Dora the famous patient of Freud, an association that also did not work out particularly well.