Will Shares

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart (New Scientist)

psychotherapy:

“A high IQ is like height in a basketball player,” says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren’t equal. There’s a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there’s a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ.”

IQ tests and their proxies, which are designed to measure a factor known as general intelligence, are used by many businesses and colleges to help select the “best” candidates, and also play a role in schools and universities, in the form of SAT tests in the US and CATs in the UK. “IQ tests determine, to an important degree, the academic and professional careers of millions of people in the US,” Stanovich says in his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss (Yale University Press, 2008). He challenges the “lavish attention” society bestows on such tests, which he claims measure only a limited part of cognitive functioning. “IQ tests are overvalued, and I think most psychologists would agree with that,” says Jonathan Evans, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Internet use isn’t linked to social isolation...

psychotherapy:

A new study from the Pew Research Center finds that internet users are more social offline than non-users and that internet use isn’t linked to social isolation…

Observatory - People Hear With Their Skin as Well as Their Ears, Study Says - NYTimes.com

The syllables included “pa” and “ta,” which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and “ba” and “da,” which don’t produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard “ba” or “da” while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as “pa” or “ta.”

“What’s so persuasive about this particular effect,” he added, “is that people are picking up on this information that they don’t know they are using.” That supports the idea that integrating different sensory cues is innate.

Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn (Scientific American)

psychotherapy:

…People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind…

Childhood stress can trigger adult depression -- latimes.com

Once You Start Trusting a Source, Beware the Trust Trap

psychotherapy:

If you follow a news commentator closely, reading everything he or she writes in whatever venue it appears, you may unknowingly be in a trust trap.  Studies have shown that once we invest trust in a particular source of knowledge, we’re less likely to scrutinize information from that source in the future.

Now a new study in the journal Applied Psychological Science has taken this investigation a step further, showing that the trust trap can also result in the creation of false memories — and not only in the short term…

People work harder when they believe their work is "meaningful"

psychotherapy:

In philosophy, religion, work and play, human beings tend to seek for meaning in their lives. We enjoy occupations that have meaning, and we can become quickly frustrated if we sense the pointlessness of a task. In the psychological literature, meaning is sometimes viewed as one of the strongest motivating factors in human behavior; a concept that fits well also with common intuitions of what drives human behavior. Despite the seemingly obvious importance of meaning in determining occupational choices, only few economic studies appear to consider the role that a job’s “meaning” may have on the behavior of labor market participants. Because of this, I figured it might be worthwhile posting on a prominent exception in the labor economics literature which  appeared last year in the Journal of Economic  Behavior & Organization.

In the study, entitled “ Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of legos”, Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Drazen Prelec investigate whether manipulations of meaning (or purpose) and recognition affect people’s reservation wage (i.e. the minimum wage one would be willing to work for). They find that the meaning (or rather the absence thereof) as well as recognition (whether someone acknowledges your work), have substantial significant effects on people’s revealed reservation wages.
The experiment features around the task of constructing Lego toys for a fixed, decreasing wage. Participants in the experiment were asked to build Lego toys at a decreasing piece-rate until they no longer wanted to; i.e. until they thought that the current piece-rate no longer justified their building efforts.

Meaning, or purpose, in the task was manipulated by what the MIT and University of Chicago experimenters did with Lego toys after a participant had put them together. For one group of participants – the group with the meaningful task – the constructed Lego toys were piled up on a table for the participant to see, and new Lego pieces were provided to build further toys. For the meaning-deprived group, each constructed toy was immediately disassembled (for the participant to see), and the parts given back to be reused for subsequent building efforts.
Maybe not surprisingly to you, but possibly surprising for economic theorists, the average amount of toys each person was willing to build significantly differed between the two groups.

“Despite the fact that the physical task requirements and the wage schedule were identical in the two conditions, the subjects in the Meaningful condition built significantly more [Lego toys] than those in the Sisyphus condition. In the Meaningful condition, subjects built an average of 10.6 [Lego toys]  and received an average of $14.40, while those in the Sisyphus condition built an average of 7.2 [Lego toys] and earned an average of $11.52.”

Integrating concepts such as “meaning”, “recognition” (recognition is treated in a separate experiment, reported in the same JEBO publication), as well as the “embedding of labor market decisions into social  networks” all seem exciting directions for modern research in labor economics, and would certainly mean a lot to me.

Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?

psychotherapy:

sarahspy:

A new study demonstrates that thinking about love—but not about sex—causes us to think more “globally,” making it easier to come up with new ideas (via Scientific American)

Having sex is task oriented, but being in love causes you to think more about the future and more about possibilities…

How Long Does it Take to Form a Habit? (PsyBlog)

psychotherapy:

Say you want to create a new habit, whether it’s taking more exercise, eating more healthily or writing a blog post every day, how often does it need to be performed before it no longer requires Herculean self-control?

Clearly it’s going to depend on the type of habit you’re trying to form and how single-minded you are in pursuing your goal. But are there any general guidelines for how long it takes before behaviours become automatic?

Ask Google and you’ll get a figure of somewhere between 21 and 28 days. In fact there’s no solid evidence for this number at all. The 21 day myth may well come from a book published in 1960 by a plastic surgeon. Dr Maxwell Maltz noticed that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb and he argued that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes.

Unless you’re in the habit of sawing off your own arm, this is not particularly relevant.

Doing without thinking

Now, however, there is some psychological research on this question in a paper recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Phillippa Lally and colleagues from University College London recruited 96 people who were interested in forming a new habit such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or doing a 15 minute run each day Lally et al. (2009). Participants were then asked daily how automatic their chosen behaviours felt. These questions included things like whether the behaviour was ‘hard not to do’ and could be done ‘without thinking’.

When the researchers examined the different habits, many of the participants showed a curved relationship between practice and automaticity of the form depicted below (solid line). On average a plateau in automaticity was reached after 66 days. In other words it had become as much of a habit as it was ever going to become.

This graph shows that early practice was rewarded with greater increases in automaticity and gains tailed off as participants reached their maximum automaticity for that behaviour.

Although the average was 66 days, there was marked variation in how long habits took to form, anywhere from 18 days up to 254 days in the habits examined in this study. As you’d imagine, drinking a daily glass of water became automatic very quickly but doing 50 sit-ups before breakfast required more dedication (above, dotted lines). The researchers also noted that:

• Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit.
• A sub-group took much longer than the others to form their habits, perhaps suggesting some people are ‘habit-resistant’.
• Other types of habits may well take much longer.

No small change

What this study reveals is that when we want to develop a relatively simple habit like eating a piece of fruit each day or taking a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit. And, while this research suggests that skipping single days isn’t detrimental in the long-term, it’s those early repetitions that give us the greatest boost in automaticity.

Unfortunately it seems there’s no such thing as small change: the much-repeated 21 days to form a habit is a considerable underestimation unless your only goal in life is drinking glasses of water.

BBC NEWS | UK | Tough love 'is good for children'

a balance of warmth and discipline improved social skills more than a laissez-faire, authoritarian or disengaged upbringing.
qualities such as application, self-regulation and empathy were more likely to be developed in children whose parents employed a “tough love” approach.

Got Pain? Take Two Photos of Your Loved One and Call Me in the Morning

psychotherapy:

…The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, investigated whether the pain-reducing effects of social support can be activated with a photograph of a supporter instead of the real thing.  Previous research has demonstrated that activating mental representations of individuals can produce effects similar to the person being there. But in this study researchers wanted to know if a photograph could produce an effect similar to someone in pain holding a loved one’s hand — a  higher benchmark to achieve.

The subjects were 28 women in long-term relationships.  They were brought into a testing room and their partners were brought into another to have photos taken.  The women underwent testing to determine their pain thresholds via thermal stimulation. Once the thresholds were established for each subject, they were then exposed to a series of conditions while experiencing pain, including (1) holding the hand of their partner as he sat behind a curtain, (2) holding a squeeze ball, (3) holding the hand of a stranger, (4) viewing a photograph of their partner on a computer screen, (5) viewing a photograph of a male stranger, and (6) viewing nothing.  Subjects rated each condition’s unpleasantness on a 21-box numerical scale (the Gracely Box Scale, used in similar previous studies).

Here’s what happened: As expected, holding their partner’s hand resulted in significantly reduced pain ratings when compared to holding an object or a stranger’s hand.  Viewing their partner’s photograph also produced significant pain reduction when compared to the object and stranger conditions. Interestingly, viewing a photo was also marginally MORE effective than holding their partner’s hand.

What seems to be happening here is that our brains can be primed to conjure mental associations with being loved and supported just by viewing a photo — and this priming is potent enough to actually reduce how much pain is felt.  And, as the results suggest, in some cases a photo may be even more effective than the real thing.

When Feeling grumpy 'is good for you' - BBC

happy people are more trusting…when they shouldn’t be…

Behind the Autism Statistics

givemesomethingtoread:

The CDC now says that 1 in 100 Americans has autism. But is the epidemic real? It turns out that many children with other developmental problems are being given autism diagnoses just to get them state funding.

Another great excerpt:

In 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) began broadening the definition of autism to include not only children for whom socialization is impossible, but also those with varying levels of ability to interact and function. What was once a devastating affliction known simply as “autism” evolved into a “spectrum” of disorders, encompassing everything from profound impairment to far milder challenges. Naturally, this more expansive definition of autism partly explains the exponential increase in diagnoses in recent years.