ART & ORGANISM

 

BIAS, INTUITION, PREJUDICE

notes

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Who can discern his own errors? Cleanse me from my hidden faults.

Psalm 19:12

 A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.  –William James^[i]

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Is eshewing bias fighting against our own nature?  No!…the struggle has similar existential elements of extreme effort in the pursuit of survival, but the hoped for outcome is maintaing balance.  Imagine walking the gymnast’s balance beam. 

 

 

 

HOW DO OUR BIASES AFFECT THE ART WE CREATE

 

HOW DOES BIAS AFFECT OUR PERCEPTION OF ART? 

CAN ART SHAPE OUR BIASES? (confirm or disconfirm them?)

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CASE STUDIES:

• Look at an A&O-reading on social-justice-in-art-alex-ross-(2020) about white-supremacy-in-music/
• Picasso: Love Him? or Hate Him?
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• BIAS is often defined in terms of a deviation from a norm–in A&O it refers more precisely to a CONSTRAINT or LIMITATION on one’s capacity for perception or cognition. Many are congenital, others–the one’s we speak of most often–are acquired.
• We cannot divest ourselves of BIAS—it is what we are made of from sense organs to the whole organism.  It is a kind of habit, a key shortcut in our processing of experience (see William James, below). 
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge might say that we must endeavor to overcome habit, “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom” (1817)^[1] but that would only mitigate some of the misunderstandings that occur as information is transferred from the environment, the body, or some other part of the brain.  It would enhance mindfulness.  And like cognitive processes at every level of organization, habit is dysfunctional when there is a deficit or when it is manifest in excess. 
• An excess of habit becomes despotic—the  straitjacket of the imagination, even paralyzing.   John Stewart Mill observed that “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement” (in: Liberty, XVIII: 272).  BUT ALSO, as William James put it, habit “…is … the enormous fly‑wheel of society, its most precious  conservative agent (Principles of  Psychology I:121, 1892). Alfred North Whitehead spoke of the error of cultivating  the habit of thinking of what we are doing, “The precise opposite is the case.  Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” …  “Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number , they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. (1911) Introduction to Mathematics ch.5.).  And yet, our most basic metaphysical assumptions are based on a habit of thinking: it is “Custom [that] determines the mind to suppose the future will follow the past,” said David Hume   [look also at Robertson and Miyahara’s (2020) comments in PSYCHE:  in-praise-of-habits][ 

BIAS is so pervasive and manifests at some many levels of organization that it is infuriating to try and tease out the strands of congenital and acquired determinants.  At every level, from cells to societies, one’s development, ecology, evolution, and physiology alter its relative influence on its causes and consequences of behavior in any given situation.   Bias meets an important need but like all servants of the self it is subject to the principles of “nothing in excess” with respect to individual behavior and “natural selection” in the long run. 

 

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 Bias: predilections, prejudices, habits necessarily intrude on the deepest possible representation of what’s on an artist’s mind–Japanese aesthetics speaks to this with the concept MUSHIN.  

 

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CASE STUDY: FORENSIC SCIENCE  “In the span of a decade, cognitive bias went from being almost totally unheard of in forensics to common knowledge in the lab”–Brandon Garrett.  (see “The Bias Hunter” in Science 12 May 2022) :

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ART.  The many elements that converge on one’s view of an art work are affected by its physical or psycho/sociological context–either the one in which you are operating or your opinion of the context in which it was created–even the possible state of mind of the artist.

MUSIC: hearing what you expect:  http://www.education.com/science-fair/article/hear-what-they-want-to-hear/

 

We can see in ART HISTORY the extent to which knowing the past can alert us to the biases that now inform our perceptions.  We are, of course, immersed in the past–carried along in this”river of time” (to use Oliver Sacks’ term).  Goethe was quoted by Tallman (2020) for his observation that beauty is never universal:

 

… “Art history is, inevitably, a story imposed on a selected group of artifacts by people who, consciously or unconsciously, have predilections and agendas. Ideally, the story grows from the objects, and the question of which objects is what animates both conservative critics and the protesters in the streets. As Wood and Michaud demonstrate, the canon has never been static. New things come in, old things get weeded out and sometimes come back. As for the current row over monuments, memorials, and statues, a few things are clear. We cannot limit public art to works whose subjects and styles are in lockstep with our own ethics; our museums would be empty if we did. Neither, however, can we ignore the reality that certain forms of public display act as endorsements of the values of those who erected them.”   (quoting Tallman (2020)^[2] from A&O notes on ART HISTORY)

COGNITIVE CONTEXT. 

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The great epics of our Western culture, instantiated by emotion (“Sing, Muse, of the Wrath of Achilles…”) or by exploration and discovery (“Tell me, o Muse, of the ingenious hero who travelled far and wide…”)  represent assumptions of cause and effect and meaning in life that diffuse to every aspect of social life and even how to reflect on our selves. They do not require absorption in the epic itself.   Another example is the great epics of India.  “The great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan used to say that no one in India ever hears the Mahabharata (or its sister epic, the Ramayana) for the first time. One grows up with these texts as a deep part of the self, their characters serving as models for all kinds of human conduct, more often than not self-destructive, and for a vast range of emotion and sensation.” (From David Shulman’s review of Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata; in NYRB, Sept 24, 2020)

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BIAS is HIGHLIGHTED in many DOMAINS. for example:

 

• NOISE… interesting new work on “NOISE” at https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033391-200-the-biggest-flaw-in-human-decision-making-and-how-to-fix-it/#ixzz6ydCL3P4M Saved at C:\Users\Neil Greenberg\Dropbox\A&O\BIAS – NOISE (Kahneman & Sibony 2021 in NS).docx   Article seems off-target Oct 18, 2020: WAGNERISM, Art & Politics by Alex Ross: (His life and his legacy was and remains to this day a continuum in which enchantment, even ravishment, comes hand in hand with provocation and controversy, adoration and loathing.” … “…this is ‘a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians — resonances and reverberations of one art form into others.’ Music is of course omnipresent in its overwhelming sensual and emotive force, but Ross’s purpose is rather to examine the effect it produced … when combined with the stagecraft, poetry, iconography and deep psychological intuition that constitute Wagner’s unique wizardry.”) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/books/review/wagnerism-alex-ross.html             
  • NOISE BIAS: Skeptic EPISODE # 189 w/ Daniel Kahneman — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment … Shermer speaks with Daniel Kahneman about the detrimental effects of noise and what we can do to reduce both noise and bias, and make better decisions in: medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection.

• PERCEPTUAL BIAS:  saved at C:\Users\Neil Greenberg\Dropbox\My PC (GREENBERG7510)\Documents\PHENOMENOLOGY -back-up folder\PHENOMENOLOGY – EMBODIMENT\DEEP – BIASES in PERCEPTION.docx  (= https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004649 )  “In real-world settings, objects frequently produce signals that simultaneously stimulate multiple sensory modalities. Considering the opposing biases in the visual and auditory modalities  [“visual localizations show a bias towards the center of space, while auditory localizations show a bias towards the periphery.”], when visual and auditory stimuli co-occur at the same spatial location, which bias emerges during localization? The results show that visual bias dominates, however, the magnitude of the central bias in the visual modality is reduced when the visual stimulus is integrated with a co-occurring auditory stimulus, thus revealing an additional advantage of multisensory integration: the reduction of perceptual biases.”
  • spotted something about perceptual biases: “In real-world settings, objects frequently produce signals that simultaneously stimulate multiple sensory modalities. Considering the opposing biases in the visual and auditory modalities  [“visual localizations show a bias towards the center of space, while auditory localizations show a bias towards the periphery.”], when visual and auditory stimuli co-occur at the same spatial location, which bias emerges during localization? The results show that visual bias dominates, however, the magnitude of the central bias in the visual modality is reduced when the visual stimulus is integrated with a co-occurring auditory stimulus, thus revealing an additional advantage of multisensory integration: the reduction of perceptual biases.” Saved article at C:\Users\Neil Greenberg\Dropbox\My PC (GREENBERG7510)\Documents\PHENOMENOLOGY -back-up folder\PHENOMENOLOGY – EMBODIMENT\DEEP – BIASES in PERCEPTION.docx )
•  BRAIN.  CORTICOCENTRIC BIAS: an example of logic of the lamppost? : https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6548/1265
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• BIASES that affect PERCEPTION of REALITY: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/eight_reasons_to_distrust_your_own_perceptions
• A&O—BIAS: COMPLEXITY BIAS: https://fs.blog/2018/01/complexity-bias/   SIMPLICITY BIAS (A&O site): Occam’s Razor, my disposition for “cutting to the heart” (“finding the seed crystal” or “irreducible essence”) of an issue about which there is much conflicting or confusing commentary, such as “existentialism.”  
• A&O BIAS in Medicine: “Structural racism, or the discriminatory policies, practices, and systems that reinforce an unequal distribution of power and resources in social institutions…”  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6540/348 saved locally: C:\Users\greenberg\Dropbox\NEIL NEW\BIAS in MEDICINE  (Fair & Johnson 2021 SCIENCE).docx           [LINK]

 

• LINGUISTIC BIAS. 

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    LANGUAGE.  “In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, [Lera Boroditsky] is amassing evidence that … language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that ‘the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,’ not only when they are thinking in order to speak, ‘but in all manner of cognitive tasks,’ including basic sensory perception. ‘Even a small fluke of grammar’—the gender of nouns—‘can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,’ she says.”  (Newsweek 2009)[8]

    • Your native language affects what you can and can’t see.  And how you are seen… Your everyday language affects how you are perceived by others:

       “Amid our discussions of racism, sexism and even classism, we don’t spend much time thinking about the ways we can be biased when it comes to how people speak. It is, however, one of the last prejudices permissible in polite society. As Kinzler notes, “Linguistic bias is part of our basic cultural fabric. It is so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it. It’s sanctioned by the law, it’s allowed by culture, and it’s practiced so frequently that people do not even realize when it is happening. Linguistic discrimination is seen as normal and typical, and because of this, it flies beneath the radar.”(“from The Biases We Hold Against the Way People Speak”  By John McWhorter  July 21, 2020  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/books/review/how-you-say-it-katherine-kinzler.html  Review of  HOW YOU SAY IT: Why You Talk the Way You Do — and What It Says About You  By Katherine D. Kinzler).

BIAS and RELEVANCE

SALIENCE:  in the light of congenital disposition, past and concurrent experience, a stimulus is judged to be more or less relevant … deserving of specific behavioral responses.

ARBITERS of RELEVANCE.   Our perceptions of the relevance of stimuli can be easily distorted — particularly when we find our “stone-age brain” dealing with modern stimuli and situations. 

 

AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE on impediments to accurate perception is exemplified by RISK ASSESSMENT.  As our “stone age brains” deal with modern problems, the most ancient and conservative arbiters of relevance prevail.  As mentioned below, we seem to possess innate wiring naturally selected to help us “… avoid dangers by calculating odds based on factors that you’d expect as well as others that may surprise you.”  In fact, risks are more compelling if their outcomes are gruesome, if we have little or no control over our vulnerability, and if they are relatively novel.  We may feel our lives more at risk from SARS than flu, even though flu is the greater danger, and HIV not as threatening as excessive UV light exposure.  

“If I made charbroiled beef even a weekly part of my diet, it would raise my lifetime cancer risk by an additional 1 in 50,000–five times my annual risk of dying in a plane crash.” 

 

“Our prehistoric ancestors faced many lethal hazards. Sanitary conditions in the wild weren’t great, so people were in constant danger of becoming ill from tainted foods. Worse, while foraging for snacks, they could easily become something else’s dinner. On balance, however, our forebears must have evolved good ways of assessing risk, or I wouldn’t be writing this—and you wouldn’t be reading it.

Recent neurological research suggests that we are innately wired to avoid dangers by calculating odds based on factors that you’d expect as well as others that may surprise you.”  (From Neuroquest Sept 2003: http://discovermagazine.com/2003/sep/neuroquest/?searchterm=risk)

PROPAGANDA (information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.)[3]

PREJUDICE (a specific quality of positive or negative bias in which evaluation of another person is based on beliefs about them based on their presumed membership in and general assumptions about a group of which they may be a member, such as gender and sexuality, religion and beliefs, , social class, age, physical appearance and beauty, disability, race/ethnicity,  nationality and language,  occupation,  education,  criminality, sport team affiliation. (Wikipedia)  

 

DEVELOPMENT

• Human infants manifest bias in preferences for skin color …

ECOLOGY

• Inattentional blindness
• Search image involves strong bias for recently successful action that persists until possibilities are exhausted even when alternatives are available – is this a kind of  “sustained inattentional blindness” ?   There appear to be separate cerebral sites for attention modulation and the creation of that modulation …. for sensory attention (rt hemisphere) and motor attention (left hemisphere) (John G. Taylor 2003) [4]

EVOLUTION

• Sensory Bias in sexual selection: the preferences of the reproductive partner influence the evolution of signals to get their attention.  “sensory exploitation” in some animal behavior literature.
• Cognitive Bias:
  • HUMANS, LIKE OTHER ANIMALS, see the world through the lens of evolved adaptations. In vision, for example, the experience of color is mediated by the adaptations of the eye, which in the human case uses wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation between about 380 and 760 nanometers, allowing us to see hues ranging from red to violet. But, there are other possible colors on earth. Recent work on bird species demonstrates that “blue” tits are actually ultraviolet (Hunt, Bennett, Cuthill, & Griffiths, 1998). The feathers of the male blue tit reflect ultraviolet radiation (300 to 400 nm), and females display a preference for males with the brightest ultraviolet crests (Hunt et al., 1998). Some reptiles, such as rattlesnakes, see light in the infrared range (see Goldsmith, 1990, for a review). Color is not an inherent property of an object; it is constructed by the interaction of reflected radiation in the environment with evolved visual mechanisms in the perceiver (Bennett, Cuthill, & Norris, 1994).
  • Using faculties of social perception, humans construct images of the social world in similar ways. Like color, sexual attractiveness is not a feature of the world that preexists the mechanisms that perceive it, and what is sexually attractive varies depending on the perceiver. Within humans, what appears attractive in a man depends on adaptively relevant variables that differ between female perceivers and within individual perceivers at different points in time. Women who are higher in physical attractiveness themselves find facially masculine men more attractive than do less attractive women (Little, Burt, Penton-Voak, & Perrett, 2001). Even more dramatic, women’s ratings of men’s attractiveness vary across the menstrual cycle, with more facially masculine men preferred near ovulation and less masculine men preferred at other times (Penton-Voak et al., 1999). Thus, a man that a woman sees as particularly attractive on one day might seem less so on another, even though he has not changed at all.
  • It appears that the “there” of familiar experience is one that the mind has a role in constructing. The mind translates the properties of the world, such as electromagnetic radiation and the contours of objects, into useful units of information. One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the role of the mind in our apprehension of the world is the existence of cognitive biases. A wide range of biases, which we review in the next section, has been discovered by psychologists. Where biases exists, individuals draw inferences or adopt beliefs where the evidence for doing so in a logically sound manner is either insufficient or absent.
  • As well as being interesting in their own right, biases are important to study because they often reveal the design of the mind. In this chapter, we present a three-category framework for understanding cognitive biases from an evolutionary perspective, and we discuss what biases in each category can tell us about the evolved mind. We conclude by describing the implications of this evolutionary psychological perspective on biases. For example, the functional specificity of these biases reveals the intricacy of the mind’s design and supports the key hypothesis that the mechanisms of mind are domain-specific. The conclusion that many biases are not the result of constraints or mysterious irrationalities also speaks to the ongoing debate about human rationality. Our perspective suggests that biases often are not design flaws, but design features.” (Haselton MG, Nettle D, Andrews PW (2005). “The evolution of cognitive bias.” (PDF). Chapter 25 In Buss DM (ed.). Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 724–746.)
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• Sexual Selection
  • Pornography  (applied to sexual stimuli, violence, food,
    • Sarah Ullman’s (sex-addiction counselor) site:   http://thesexaddictedbrain.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/the-neuroscience-of-pornography.html

PHYSIOLOGY

• Cognitive processing shifts toward more adaptive patterns in the presence of specific hormones:
  • Sex peptides and steroids to identify (selective attention) take advantage of reproductive opportunities;  ovulation and perceived masculinity research
  • Stress peptides and steroids to identify and respond appropriately to threats and opportunities for gratification.[5]  
• “Chronic Stress biases decision-making strategies, affecting the ability of stressed animals to perform actions on the basis of their consequences.”[10]

• Stress biases organisms towards more familiar models: “with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum (Dias-Ferreira et al. 2009)[6]
• Pareidolia & stress … conservative (“safe”) bias increased under stress

 

 NON-CONSCIOUS BIAS

Strictly speaking, bias represents a short-cut and we are full of them, genetically design over evolutionary time to attend to only those stimuli that deserved attention in some ancestral environment;  then those we fine-tune or learn after we are born and have direct experience of the current environment.

They manifest as habits …a good thing in most circumstances (“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” (Alfred North Whitehead (1911) Introduction to Mathematics ch.5.)

Most bias is nonconscious … that’s what makes it particularly valuable or costly, depending on circumstances.

Biases and habits are heuristic shortcuts that facilitate learning and save time (and thus energy) — but only in moderation (which itself is of varying advantage depending on the how stressful the environment and how urgent the need for creative problem solving).  Obviously there is a downside to conservatism or rigidity–the curse of bias and habit: Thoreau wrote,“It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance … To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired.” (Journal Dec 11 1855 8:44) and Coleridge cautioned us to “overcome habit, “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom”  (1817)

DEEP ETHOLOGY: Scholars of the physiology of stress know the reliably anxiolytic effect of NOVELTY: READ about THE FAMILIARITY BIAS

• Analysis of bias?  The “Implicit Association Test” developed by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Benaji – it is a list of words to be responded to by making a check mark if it is “animal or good” OR “plant or bad” … then another list of words with the associations “plant or good” or “animal or bad”  — this is powerful in revealing prejudices you may have been unaware of.  (Discover Oct 2003 p.88)

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METAPHOR:   “…every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions. Cultural assumptions, values, and attitudes are not a conceptual overlay which we may or may not place upon experience as we choose. It would be more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through, that we experience our “world” in such a way that our culture is already present in the very experience itself.” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003:57).

COUNTER-INTUITIVE BELIEFS

• For example, the flow … the passage of time … seems fundamental to human perception … BUT “nothing in known physics corresponds to thye passage of time. Indeed, physicists insist that time doesn’t flow at all; it merely is.” (Paul Davies. 2002. “That Mysterious Flow.” Sci Amer. Sept 2002:40-47.

 

How social perception can automatically influence behavior:     Abstract:  “Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally influenced by what we have recently perceived? It has been traditionally assumed that the automatic influence of knowledge in memory is limited to people’s interpretation of the world, and stops short of shaping their actual behavior. Researchers in experimental social psychology have begun to challenge this assumption by documenting how people’s behaviors can be unknowingly influenced by knowledge that is incidentally activated in memory during social perception. We review findings that suggest that the social knowledge that is incidentally activated while reading words or imagining events subsequently affects participants’ behaviors across a range of ostensibly unrelated domains.” —  How social perception can automatically influence behavior”  by  Melissa J. Ferguson and John A. Bargh (2004)   TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.1 January 2004    http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/$ – see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.11.004

CULTURE

DUALISM –    it is likely that in the history of thought, this way of conceptualizing is rooted in personal or species exceptionalism] [kinds of dualism in the history of thought in Wikipedia and Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy]

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The WEIRD BIAS in Science—especially psychology:  

·    Why do we study “The weirdest people in the world?”  Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) appeal for researchers to be “less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from [a] particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity” they characterized as “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)…” Herich et al (2010)[ii]

But NOW, look at this: (shared by Phil Regal on 1 March 2020: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-knowledge-about-different-cultures-is-shaking-the-foundations-of-psychology

• When I’m Sixty-Four (Psychological Science 2011)
• Unrepeatable experiments (reported in Science)  Brian Nosek & team
• The Unscientific Method (Sonia van Gilder Cooke in NS 16 April 2016 39-41) 

 

COMMUNITY & POLITICS … victorious home teams give incumbent politicians a bump …  Neil Malhotra (Jul 6 b200 ProcNAS)

 CULTURE is known to affect visual perception. For example, Asian people tend to dart their eyes around a photo, while those in North America fix on specific details (NS 2005)^[iii]

 Much of this is covered in The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Robert Boyd and Peter J.Richerson (2005) comments  from the review by Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh):

“For the most part, culture consists in the beliefs, values, norms, desires, techniques, and so on, that people acquire by social learning. Cultural transmission is not always faithful: Cultural items may be modified, for instance because of transmission inaccuracies or individual innovation. Moreover, not all cultural variants are equal: Boyd and Richerson emphasize various biases that favor the transmission of some cultural variants over others, particularly conformism, compliance to social norms, and imitation of prestigious individuals. Culture is thus a system of inheritance with modification, in which various forces (conformism, etc.) determine which cultural items are preferentially transmitted in a population. In other words, culture evolves.”

“… According to them, culture is an adaptation, like other forms of social learning in non-human animal species: It enables humans to acquire adaptive behavior in variable environments. But while the scope of social learning is rather restricted in other species, culture pervades human behavior as well as the human mind (Nisbett et al. 2001). Culture differs also from non-human social learning in that it is cumulative: Only humans acquire socially some beliefs, values, and so on, that they could not acquire by themselves.”

“… culture created some social environments, in which specific adaptations were selected for by natural selection. This notion of gene-culture co-evolution may be the most important aspect of their work.”

“… our two authors are to some extent out of touch with the most successful works in recent cognitive and developmental psychology (Carey, Spelke, Haidt, to cite a few psychologists). Moreover, their models lean heavily on the study of social learning made in the seventies. The psychological study of social learning should be certainly pushed forward. To be fair, social psychologists themselves have often neglected social learning in the eighties and nineties. Noticeably, some psychologists and experimentally-minded anthropologists, including Richerson and colleagues, have recently brought the experimental method to bear on the study of cultural transmission (Kameda & Nakanishi 2002; Baum et al. 2004).  Critiques and References[iv]

RELIGION

In an experiment in the Netherlands,  Neocalvinists were faster in identifying subcomponents of a picture than Calvinists.  The researcher suggests the neocalvanist doctrine of separating church, state, and education might be a factor (NS 2005)[9]

 

COHERENCE.  BIAS toward finding order (recalls pareidolia or apophenia):   The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.  And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, xlv; this is one of the “idols of the tribe,” which have their origin in human nature) (Compare Karl Popper: “Our propensity to look out for regularities, and to impose laws upon nature, leads to the psychological phenomenon of dogmatic thinking or, more generally, dogmatic behavior: we expect regularities everywhere and attempt to find them even where there are none; . . .” (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963:49).

Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions  (15 September 2009 by Jim Giles Magazine issue 2725.) 

WILL these hands ne’er be clean?” asks Lady Macbeth, as she obsessively tries to wash away the guilt she feels for her role in the murder of King Duncan. Her feelings of self-disgust, we are led to believe, have manifested themselves as a sensation of physical dirtiness.

• It is not only in the language of playwrights such as Shakespeare that complex emotions like guilt, grief or loneliness are compared to physical sensations. These metaphors crop up in everyday phrases, too, in many languages. In English, for example, we talk of being “left out in the cold” when we feel socially excluded, a sentiment echoed in the Japanese saying “one kind word can warm three winter months”.
• At face value, these connections seem purely symbolic. In real life, loneliness doesn’t really send us shivering, and guilt doesn’t really make us feel dirty. Or do they? Recent research has found that these physical sensations can often accompany our emotions. It works the other way too – by provoking a feeling of disgust, a scene from the film Trainspotting shaped the way subjects in an experiment made moral judgements.
• Many now believe that this reflects the way complex emotions arose in our evolutionary past. As our brain evolved to process more and more complex emotions, the theory goes, there was no need for new neural machinery: our emotions simply piggybacked onto the circuits that handle basic sensory perceptions. Here are some of the most striking experiments linking physical sensations with emotions and behaviour.

Cold shoulders and warm receptions

• DURING the autumn of 2006, a series of volunteers arrived at Yale University’s psychology building. Each was greeted in the lobby by a researcher, who accompanied them up to the fourth floor. In the elevator, the researcher casually asked the volunteer to hold the drink she was carrying while she noted down their name. The subjects did not know it, but the experiment began the moment they took the cup.
• Once in the lab, the 40 or so volunteers read a description of a fictitious person and then answered questions about the character. Those who had held an iced coffee, rather than a hot one, rated the imaginary figure as less warm and friendly, even though each volunteer had read the same description. Answers to other questions about the figure, such as whether the character appeared honest, were unaffected by the type of drink (Science, vol 322, p 606).
• The experiment, run by Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado at Boulder and John Bargh of Yale, is not the only study to link physical and psychological warmth. Just thinking about being socially excluded, for example, can make the room feel around 3 °C cooler (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 838). This may explain some aspects of how we socialise. For example, it is more common to offer a hot drink rather than a cold one when we welcome someone into our home. “Certain behaviours people engage in during interpersonal relationships reflect an understanding of the link between physical and psychological warmth,” says Williams.
• The insular cortex, which lies deep within one of the folds that line the surface of the brain, is probably at the root of these results. Brain imaging shows that this area is active when people are experiencing both physical and psychological warmth. The connection is probably present at birth and strengthened during early life, when babies learn to associate the physical warmth of their parents with nourishment and protection, says Williams.

Cleanliness and godliness

• “TRULY Allah loveth those who turn unto Him, and loveth those who have a care for cleanness,” says the Koran. Islam is not alone in linking hygiene to moral purity. Christians cleanse the body and soul through baptism, and cleanliness is likewise important to Hindus.
  • This connection, which is entrenched in the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, can have a profound and unexpected influence on our behaviour. In one recent study, Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth, UK, and colleagues showed half their volunteers a neutral film and the other half the toilet scene from the film Trainspotting. (The uninitiated need only use their imagination here: the clip features what is described as the “worst toilet in Scotland”.) Those who viewed the Trainspotting clip subsequently made more severe judgements about unethical acts such as cannibalism than volunteers who had viewed the neutral scene. Exposing subjects to a fart smell and placing them in a filthy room had a similar effect (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1096).
  • And as Lady Macbeth’s obsessive hand-washing suggests, a feeling of guilt can leave us reaching for a bar of soap. Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in Canada and Katie Liljenquist, now at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, asked volunteers to read a first-person account of either an ethical act or an act of sabotage. They then had to rate the desirability of various household objects, including soap, toothpaste, CD cases and chocolate bars. Those who had read the sabotage story showed a greater preference for the cleaning products (Science, vol 313, p 1451) than those who had not.
  • A simplistic conclusion from these experiments would be that a cleaner environment makes us more tolerant of the misdemeanours of others. Yet the act of physical cleansing does not necessarily encourage us to act more morally ourselves, as religious ceremonies might have us believe. In another part of their study, Zhong’s team asked volunteers to recall an unethical deed from their past. Under the guise of a health and safety precaution, he then gave half the subjects antiseptic wipes to clean their hands. The participants were then asked if they would take part in another experiment, this time to help out a desperate graduate student. Only 40 per cent of the subjects who had cleaned their hands volunteered, compared with almost three-quarters of those who hadn’t.
  • Other experiments have shown that feelings of moral disgust can spur people to help others. By allowing people to wash away these feelings, say Zhong and Liljenquist, we may be giving licence to ungenerous behaviour.

The sting of rejection

• CAST your mind back to your schooldays. Do you remember how it hurt when you were left out of a game? Or how you felt when you weren’t invited to a party? The pain of exclusion may seem tangible, but can it ever resemble the sensation of a physical wound?
• To probe the neural link between physical and emotional pain, Naomi Eisenberger at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues asked volunteers to play a virtual ball game. Each volunteer believed that their teammates were in other labs, but in fact these “people” were generated by the software, which was also programmed to gradually exclude the human player. All the while an fMRI scanner recorded the subject’s neural activity.
• The scans revealed that the feelings of social exclusion increased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), an area of the brain also involved in the feelings of distress that accompany physical pain. The dACC also lit up when people thought about the death of a loved one (Science, vol 323, p 890).
• This might explain why some people in deep emotional pain turn to drugs like alcohol or heroin, which numb physical pain. Yet according to an unpublished study by Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, less potent drugs could also do the trick, without side effects.
• DeWall asked around 60 college students to take either paracetamol (acetaminophen) or a placebo in the morning and evening for three weeks. The students also answered daily questions about their emotional state. DeWall found that those who took the painkiller reported fewer hurt feelings.
• In another experiment, DeWall gave paracetamol or a placebo to volunteers playing the virtual ball game. The result was as expected: the painkiller reduced activity in the dACC that was associated with the emotionally painful feelings of exclusion. He now wants to test the drug on people with clinical symptoms of depression or anxiety. “Anxious people are constantly concerned about negative evaluation,” he says. “Perhaps Tylenol [paracetamol] can help them.” It remains a long shot, and not something to be recommended right now, but if the results pan out it will be an interesting avenue to explore for the future.

Jim Giles is a writer based in San Francisco

 

PHYSICAL FEELINGS accompany EMOTION and the connection seems more than merely metaphorical.

• hot or cold drink before being asked questions about the nature of a person: shows influence.
• tendency offer people warm beverege as hospitality reflect connection between pysychologoical and physical warmth? Lawdrence Williams (U Col) & John Bargh (Yale) Psyhol Sci 19:838)
• INSULAR CTX: brain images show activity when people are experiencing psychological or physical warmth.

 

 

NUMBERS:  BIAS:

  HYPERLINK ” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927994.200-without-language-numbers-make-no-sense.html  ”  Without language, numbers make no sense  (News > This Week p13)  The discovery that people need language to understand larger numbers may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense

Hope and hype in the world of statistics  15 February 2011

Magazine issue  ” http://www.newscientist.com/issue/2799  ”  2799 . ” http://www.newscientist.com/subscribe?promcode=nsarttop “

For similar stories, visit  “http://www.newscientist.com/topic/editorials”  Editorials  Topic Guide

More could be done to give the public a realistic picture of research findings

STATISTICS, the American academic Aaron Levenstein once wrote, are rather like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

Few people are more charmed by the seductive power of statistics than journalists and politicians. As for everyone else, it might be better to cover your eyes. As our feature on the ills of medical statistics makes clear   HYPERLINK “http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927991.700-spin-doctors-the-truth-behind-health-scare-headlines.html”  (“Spin doctors: The truth behind health scare headlines”) , see any percentage in a headline and you should start asking questions.

The massaging of complex data into a neat headline figure can distort it to the point where it becomes meaningless. Confusing absolute and relative risk, mixing up correlation and causation, mangling mortality and survival rates: these are the sorts of solecisms that plague statistics in the sensitive area of human health and well-being.

It is tempting to lay the blame solely at the feet of ignorant politicians or an irresponsible media. They do indeed play a significant role, often perpetuating mistakes, muddles and misunderstandings.

But journalists and policymakers can only work with what they are given. Scientists need to bear in mind how their statistics can be abused – or perhaps unintentionally read the wrong way.

Take the Fox News report in August 2008 that throat cancer among white men in the US had risen 400 per cent over 30 years. Solid science or sensationalist scaremongering? Both, actually.

The 400 per cent figure – 463 per cent, in fact – can be traced to   HYPERLINK “http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/16/1184.abstract” \t “nsarticle”  an academic paper reporting an increase in the incidence of adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus from 1.01 to 5.69 per 100,000 person-years .

On those numbers, to say that you would be better off worrying about being run over by a bus is an exaggeration – although not by much. But the huge, scary percentage is not Fox’s invention. It is there in the study’s abstract, along with the smaller and less frightening absolute figures: mathematically unimpeachable, practically worthless and ripe for misinterpretation.

That is a minor transgression compared with evidence of a deeper-seated problem in medical literature.   HYPERLINK ” http://www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/repFiles/MedCare/s23.pdf ” \t “nsarticle”  A review in 2007 of 119 systematic therapeutic studies in three high-profile medical journals  revealed that only half reported both the benefits and harms of the therapy, and of those only two-thirds presented them using comparable figures.

No doubt much of this is innocent. But in medical research, where cynicism about the role of vested interests is widespread, such omissions or maladroit presentation can discredit worthy work – and worse still, misinform policymakers and the public.

This is a system with few checks and balances. The interests of researchers in search of funding, scientific journals in search of wider media exposure, and journalists in search of compelling stories often coincide to create a military-industrial complex for the production and propagation of dodgy statistics.

The bias in favour of misrepresentation is something against which all involved, New Scientist included, must be vigilant. But the vigilance must start at the source, cutting off questionable figures before they receive a bad press.

Read more in our web special: ”  HYPERLINK “http://www.newscientist.com/special/spin-doctors”  Spin doctors: The truth behind health scare headlines “

Artificial Intelligence.  Even AI can be biased^[v]

 

[3] Propaganda is a form of biased communication, aimed at promoting or demoting certain views, perceptions or agendas. Propaganda is often associated with the psychological mechanisms of influencing and altering the attitude of a population toward a specific cause, position or political agenda in an effort to form a consensus to a standard set of belief patterns.” –Wikipedia on Propaganda  

Propaganda is information that is not impartial and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (perhaps lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information presented.^[1]    //  Today the term propaganda is associated with a manipulative and jingoistic approach, but propaganda historically was a neutral descriptive term.^[1][2]

[4] Taylor John G.  2003.  Paying attention to consciousness.  Progr Neurobiol 71(2003):305-335.

[5] “…using a nasal spray to administer OT to the central nervous system in humans enhances the perception of emotions, increases accuracy for socially relevant information and the ability to infer the mental and emotional states of others from subtle facial cues, to increase eye gaze to neutral and emotional human faces (Andrews et al., 2002; Domes, Heinrichs, Michel, et al., 2007; Domes et al., 2013; Leknes et al., 2013). OT also enhances allocation of early attention towards the face searching for positive social emotions (Marsh, Yu, Pine, & Blair, 2010), and elicit longer gaze to the eye region of human faces, relative to placebo (Guastella, Carson, Dadds, Mitchell, & Cox, 2009; Guastella et al., 2008). Marsh et al. (2010) suggest that OT’s facilitation of interpersonal trust and prosocial interactions could reflect the fact that it enhances sensitivity to signs of trustworthiness, such as increased ability to interpret subtle signs of positive facial expressions.” –from review in MS thesis by Jarle Alexander Winge at Oslo University, 2014

[6] The ability to shift between different behavioral strategies is necessary for appropriate decision-making. Here, we show that chronic stress biases decision-making strategies, affecting the ability of stressed animals to perform actions on the basis of their consequences. Using two different operant tasks, we revealed that, in making choices, rats subjected to chronic stress became insensitive to changes in outcome value and resistant to changes in action-outcome contingency. Furthermore, chronic stress caused opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying these different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum. These data suggest that the relative advantage of circuits coursing through sensorimotor striatum observed after chronic stress leads to a bias in behavioral strategies toward habit.  (Eduardo Dias-Ferreira,  João C. Sousa, Irene Melo, Pedro Morgado, Ana R. Mesquita, João J. Cerqueira, Rui M. Costa, Nuno Sousa1. 2009.  Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making.  Science 31 July 2009: Vol. 325(5940): 621 – 625.

[7] Westerners and Easterners see the world differently NS 22:00 22 August 2005 by Zeeya Merali

Chinese and American people see the world differently – literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US. // “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,” he says.

By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. “Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,” says Nisbett. “We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see.”

The researchers tracked the eye-movements of two groups of students while they looked at photographs. One group contained American-born graduates of European descent and the other was comprised of Chinese-born graduate students who came to the US after their undergraduate degrees.  // Each picture showed a striking central image placed in a realistic background, such as a tiger in a jungle. They found that the American students spent longer looking at the central object, while the Chinese students’ eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.

Harmony versus goals.  Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. “Harmony is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on how things relate to the whole,” says Nisbett. “In the West, by contrast, life is about achieving goals.” 

Psychologists watching American and Japanese families playing with toys have also noted this difference. “An American mother will say: ‘Look Billy, a truck. It’s shiny and has wheels.’ The focus is on the object,” explains Nisbett. By contrast, Japanese mothers stress context saying things like, “I push the truck to you and you push it to me. When you throw it at the wall, the wall says ‘ouch’.”  //  Nisbett also cites language development in the cultures. “To Westerners it seems obvious that babies learn nouns more easily. But while this is the case in the West, studies show that Korean and Chinese children pick up verbs – which relate objects to each other – more easily.  //  “Nisbett’s work is interesting and suggestive,” says John Findlay, a psychologist specialising in human visual attention at Durham University, UK. “It’s always difficult to put an objective measure on cultural differences, but this group have made a step towards that.”   //  Nisbett hopes that his work will change the way the cultures view each other. “Understanding that there is a real difference in the way people think should form the basis of respect.”  //  Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 102, p 12629)

[8] Sharon Begley.  What’s in a Word?  Language may shape our thoughts.   Newsweek dated Jul 20, 2009 p.21.

“When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it “floated above the clouds” with “elegance and lightness” and “breathtaking” beauty. In France, papers praised the “immense” “concrete giant.” Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.

That’s where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that “the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, “but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception. “Even a small fluke of grammar”—the gender of nouns—”can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,” she says.

As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English’s light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian’s goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that’s a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for “in” when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

In Australia, the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre use compass directions for every spatial cue rather than right or left, leading to locutions such as “there is an ant on your southeast leg.” The Kuuk Thaayorre are also much more skillful than English speakers at dead reckoning, even in unfamiliar surroundings or strange buildings. Their language “equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities,” Boroditsky wrote on Edge.org.

Science has only scratched the surface of how language affects thought. In Russian, verb forms indicate whether the action was completed or not—as in “she ate [and finished] the pizza.” In Turkish, verbs indicate whether the action was observed or merely rumored. Boroditsky would love to run an experiment testing whether native Russian speakers are better than others at noticing if an action is completed, and if Turks have a heightened sensitivity to fact versus hearsay. Similarly, while English says “she broke the bowl” even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like “the bowl broke itself.” “When we show people video of the same event,” says Boroditsky, “English speakers remember who was to blame even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causality.”  Begley is NEWSWEEK’s science editor.  © 2009  http://www.newsweek.com/id/205985

[9] How religious people see the world differently // Bernhard Hommel at Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues … found that Dutch people following a certain brand of Protestantism are quicker than their atheist compatriots to home in on an image’s details.” Hommel’s team showed 20 atheists and 20 neocalvinists, who follow a version of Calvinism, a series of large triangles or squares filled with smaller triangles or squares. / Both groups were quick to identify the image by its overall shape, but the neocalvinists were on average faster when asked to identify it by its component shapes (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003679). Hommel says neocalvinists may be less distracted by the large shape because their brains are used to separating out the influences of education, government and church, an idea central to neocalvinism.”  NS  19 November 2008 Magazine issue 2683. P.18

[10] Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making.  Eduardo Dias-Ferreira, João C. Sousa, Irene Melo, Pedro Morgado, Ana R. Mesquita, João J. Cerqueira, Rui M. Costa, Nuno Sousa.  Science 31 July 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5940, pp. 621 – 625 DOI: 10.1126/science.1171203.

“In everyday life, we constantly have to select the appropriate actions to obtain specific outcomes. These actions can be selected on the basis of their consequences (1, 2), e.g., when we press the elevator button to get to the particular floor of our new apartment. This goal-directed behavior is crucial to face the ever-changing environment, but demands an effortful control and monitoring of the response. One way to balance the need for flexibility and efficiency is through automatization of recurring decision processes as a rule or a habit (3). Habitual responses no longer need the evaluation of their consequences and can be elicited by particular situations or stimuli (1, 2), e.g., after living for some time in that apartment, we automatically press the button of our home floor when we enter the elevator. The ability to shift between these two types of strategies is necessary for appropriate decision-making (2), and in some situations,it may be crucial to be able to inhibit a habit and use a goal-directedstrategy, e.g., if we are visiting a new building, we shouldnot press the button for our home floor.

Chronic stress, mainly through the release of corticosteroids, affects executive behavior through sequential structural modulation of brain networks (4, 5). Stress-induced deficits in spatial reference and working memory (6) and behavioral flexibility (7) are associated with synaptic and/or dendritic reorganization in both the hippocampus (8) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (9). However, the effects of chronic stress on action-selection strategies have not been investigated. Here, we examined whether previous exposure to chronic stress would affect the ability of animals to select the appropriate actions, based on the consequences of their choice. Because associative corticostriatal circuits involving the prelimbic (PL) cortex (10) and the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) (11) have been implicated in the acquisition and execution of goal-directed actions, whereas sensorimotor circuits, namely, the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) (12), arenecessary for habit formation, we examined the effects of chronicstress on these brain areas.

In an attempt to mimic the variability of stressors encountered in daily life, adult rats assigned to the stress group were exposed to a well-established stress paradigm (13) that combines different stressors in an unpredictable manner to avoid the resilient effect of behavioral control over stressors (14).Twenty-one days of stress exposure decreased body-weight gain(fig. S1A), reduced the thymus/body-weight ratio (fig. S1B),and resulted in persistently raised serum corticosterone levels(fig. S1C), when compared with attributes of handled controls.After stress exposure, we tested whether chronic stress affectedthe ability of animals to perform actions, based on the consequencesof their behavior, using two different instrumental tasks.”

 

[11]