Dr. X's Free Associations

Philip Tetlock On Forecasting

Russ Roberts interviewed psychologist Philip Tetlock about his research on forecasting future events using groups of amateurs. Here's a sample:

Russ: Going back to the earlier work that you did and before the fall of the Soviet Union, what were some of the main empirical takeaways from that work?

PT: Well, one big takeaway was that--liberals and conservatives had very different policy prescriptions, and they had very different conditional forecasts about what would happen if you went down one policy path or another. And that nobody really came close to predicting the Gorbachev phenomenon. Nobody, for that matter, came really close to predicting the disintegration of the Soviet Union later on. But everyone after the fact seemed to have an explanation that either appropriated credit or deflected blame.

Russ: And it was consistent with their worldview, I'm sure.

PT: And meshed perfectly with their prior worldview. So, it was as though we were in an outcome-irrelevant learning situation. It didn't really matter what happened--people would be in an excellent position to interpret what happened as consistent with their prior views. And the idea of forecasting tournaments was to make it easier for people to remember their past states of ignorance.

PT: This is an aside of sorts, but it's just a wonderful insight into human nature, and it's a theme here at EconTalk. Which is: When you went back and asked people to give what they remember as their probability of, say, the Soviet Union falling, what did they say?

Guest: Well, they certainly thought they assigned a higher probability to the dissolution of the Soviet Union than they did. And there were a few people who assigned really low probabilities who remember assigning higher than a 50% probability. So, people really pumped up those probabilities retrospectively. So, the psychologists call that 'hindsight bias' or the 'I knew it all along' effect. And we saw that in spades in the Soviet Forecasting Tournament.

Russ: Yeah. I think that's an incredibly important thing that we all tend to do. We tend to think we had much more vision than we actually had. And we usually don't write those things down. You happen to have written some of them down. So that was awkward, that they actually had their original forecasts. But most of us, the I-knew-it-all-along problem is a bigger problem for most of us because we don't write it down.

PT: Well, we truly remember it differently. Even if you think the person on the other side of the table knows what the correct answer is, you still tend to misremember it.

Econtalk has the hour-long podcast and a transcript of highlights from the interview.

Previous posts on Tetlock's work. Foxes and Hedehogs, Are pundits blowing hot air?

Secrets and Lies

Elsewhere today, I followed a link to an article about children lying. I didn't find that article enlightening, but it reminded me of something I posted a few years ago. I just reread it and decided it's worth a rerun.

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This began as a comment on a post about secrets at Jung at Heart, but it was growing too long, so for context, read Cheryl Fuller's post first. Some of my thoughts on the psychology of secrets follow.

Shameful or guilty secrets can eat a person alive, but I wonder if there are functions of secrets that are more benign, or even psychically necessary and beneficial. What about secrets in relation to the developmental task of psychological separation and individuation?

Between parent and child, does the ability to keep a few secrets aid differentiation of the self? Perhaps it's reassuring to have a private self holding some secrets that serve a boundary function, marking inner and outer, me and not-me.

The Psychiatrist Psychopath

In 2005, UC Irvine psychatric researcher James Fallon made a startling personal discovery while studying psychopaths. Fallon's own PET scan looked exactly like the PET scans of psychopaths he was studying.

His story was covered a few years ago in a number of publications, but I was reminded of it again when NPR's Snap Judgment told Fallon's story yesterday in a fascinating progam that included clips from an interview with Fallon.

I promise you, this particular podcast is well worth a few minutes investment of your time, even if you've already heard about Fallon.

War Research: Why Men Fight

David Berreby discusses ongoing research:

In contrast to how we perceive them, the majority of terrorists, insurgents, and perpetrators of mass killing who have been tested by scientists have proven to be basically like the rest of us. That’s not to say that participating in a genocide or blowing oneself up in a crowded market is normal, but such behavior is not evidence of personality disorder or other serious psychopathology; rather, it’s an adaptive state of mind that mentally healthy people are entirely capable of adopting. In the case of Islamist terrorist groups, Atran says, “most foreign volunteers and supporters fall within the mid-ranges of what social scientists call the normal distribution of attributes like empathy, compassion, idealism, and wanting to help rather than hurt other people.” It’s proof of what the mid-20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” in her consideration of the seeming ordinariness of Nazis who committed atrocities in World War II.

“Ours is a ‘banality of evil’ approach,” says Hammad Sheikh, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research and collaborator with Atran and Wilson. Sheikh’s personal interest in the psychological origins of group violence began when he was growing up in Germany. “I could never believe that the Nazis were these evil people who had taken over. Millions of ordinary people had followed Hitler, and I met them. They had been fanatics. But in my childhood, they were nice old people shaking my hand and giving me chocolate.”

Phil Zimbardo's Prison Experiment: The Movie

Looks better than the original film of the study.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, Wikipedia offers a compact summary, including criticism.

Pets and mental illness

Yet another study finds a link between cats and serious mental illness. Does something genetic run in families with a preference for cats as pets, or is it something about cats?

A parasite common in cats, Toxoplasma gondii, perhaps ingested via feces while cleaning litter boxes, is under suspicion. The parasite is actually widespread in warmblooded animals, including humans, and associations between latent infection and several pathological changes in behavior have been identified by researchers.

Psychologist To Head Cook County Jail

Reuters:

CHICAGO, May 19 (Reuters) - A clinical psychologist will be appointed head of Chicago's Cook County Jail, the nation's second-largest jail where a third of the inmates are mentally ill, officials announced on Tuesday.

Nneka Jones Tapia will become executive director of the jail on May 26, county officials said. Tapia, who has been with the sheriff's office since 2013 and oversees mental health strategy, replaces Cara Smith, who will become chief strategy officer for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.

I've known quite a few psychologists who are employed at the jail or did clinical training there. As the Reuters article indicates, since the 1960s, the number of beds in Illinois psychiatric hospitals has declined from 35,000 to just 1500. With inadequate support for deinstitutionalization, many who would have been treated in psychiatric hospitals, now end up in Cook County jail or, as Sheriff Tom Dart has described it, "the largest mental health facility in the country."

Stephen Frosh on Forgiveness in Judaism and Psychoanalysis

This is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of the difficult subject of forgiveness, both as an individual and social imperative, informed by Jewish thought and psychoanalysis. A sample (56:50):

[Walter Benjamin] writes, For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."

The incitement to remember that Benjamin references, directs us to continually reexamine the past, to keep it in the present as a living entity, not only as a memorial to something lost.

What happened? What was done? What's the legacy? Especially, what injustice does it speak of that penetrates the present in barely visible streams of dust and smoke? The dust of historical oppression; the smoke and fumes of past destruction; these vapours drift across time and are breathed in by every generation – ghostly emanations that infiltrate the present, structuring it and giving it meaning, and sometimes poisoning it too.

Do yourself a favor and at least listen to the fine introduction by psychoanalyst Harvey Schwartz.

The problem of false memory in eyewitness accounts

The New York Times reported on the power of false memory, graphically illustrated by the case of an unprovoked hammer attack that ended in the shooting of the attacker. Witness Anthony O'Grady reported that the man was trying to get away from a police officer when he was gunned down. Another witness, Sunny Khalsa, said that the attacker was handcuffed when he was shot.

But there was surveillance video and:

Contrary to what Mr. O’Grady said, the man who was shot had not been trying to get away from the officers; he was actually chasing an officer from the sidewalk onto Eighth Avenue, swinging a hammer at her head. Behind both was the officer’s partner, who shot the man, David Baril.

And Ms. Khalsa did not see Mr. Baril being shot while in handcuffs; he is, as the video and still photographs show, freely swinging the hammer, then lying on the ground with his arms at his side. He was handcuffed a few moments later, well after he had been shot.

There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists

I wish the press would discuss this phenomenon more often when offering news analysis that cites the accounts of witnesses.

Taking guns from police officers when they're in therapy or on medication

This is an old post that saw a bump in traffic this week.

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Some time back, an acquaintance who is a police officer shot and killed a gun-wielding criminal. In the aftermath, he went through a routine departmental investigation that included a psych consultation. Later, he received an award for heroism because his actions may have saved the lives of bystanders.

The officer explained to me that he had been depressed for several months. He thought he was doing fine when he went for the psych consultation, but realized later that he was still "in shock" at the time. He added that even if he knew he wasn't fine, he would have lied to the psychologist because the department would have taken his gun and assigned him to a desk job if it was known that he was having difficulty.

He wanted to know if a doc from outside the department would be obliged to report him to his department if he went for therapy or got an antidepressant prescription filled without using his regular pharmacy or prescription coverage.