Working on your quirk

Another brief interlude from the stats and cog psych, but related to individual differences in reasoning I think! Interesting aside in a book by Robert Sutton on dealing with assholes (technical term here) in the workplace. He clarifies his defintion of the particular breed of asshole (technical term) in whom he is interested (pp. 16–17):

My focus is squarely on screening, reforming, and getting rid of people who demean and damage others, especially others with relatively little power. [...] I am a firm believer in the virtues of conflict, even noisy arguments.

Here’s a special case he describes (pp. 18–19) of people who can occasionally appear to be assholes (technical term), but are not:

I also want to put in a good word for socially awkward people [...]. I was struck by how many successful leaders of high-tech companies and creative organizations like advertising agencies, graphic design firms, and Hollywood production companies, had learned to ignore job candidates’ quirks and strange mannerisms, to downplay socially inappropriate remarks, and instead, to focus on what the people could actually do.

Examples he gives include autistic people and those with Tourette’s syndrome.

Reference

Sutton, R  (2007). The No Asshole Rule. NY: Business Plus.

Profiles of intelligence

Johnson, W. & Bouchard, Jr., T. J. Sex Differences in Mental Abilities: g Masks the Dimensions on Which They Lie. Intelligence, 2007, 35, 23-39:

“… we have presented evidence supporting the idealized notion of general intelligence as a general-purpose mechanism that accesses a toolbox made up of components that vary from individual to individual. Though everyone clearly has most if not all of the same tools, individuals appear to differ not only in the skill with which they use their tools, but also in the specific tools they habitually use. For some of the more specific tools, it would appear that using one tool means failing to use another. [...] Performance on image rotation tasks is known to predict success in fields such as airplane piloting, engineering, physical sciences, and fine arts better than does general intelligence, and especially verbal ability. What has perhaps not been recognized is that inclusion of verbal ability in assessments used to recruit individuals to those fields may actually act to impair efforts to select those with the talents most relevant to the jobs in question.”

John Raven often quotes Spearman:

“Every normal man, woman and child is a genius at something … the problem is to identify at what … this must be a most difficult task because it occurs in only a minute proportion of circumstances … this cannot be done with any of the procedures in current use …”

(And Raven would still quite like to know how to fix psychometrics.)

"... we have presented evidence supporting the idealized notion of
general intelligence as a general-purpose mechanism that accesses a
toolbox made up of components that vary from individual to individual.
Though everyone clearly has most if not all of the same tools,
individuals appear to differ not only in the skill with which they use
their tools, but also in the specific tools they habitually use. For
some of the more specific tools, it would appear that using one tool
means failing to use another. [...] Performance on image rotation tasks
is known to predict success in fields such as airplane piloting,
engineering, physical sciences, and fine arts better than does general
intelligence, and especially verbal ability. What has perhaps not been
recognized is that inclusion of verbal ability in assessments used to
recruit individuals to those fields may actually act to impair efforts
to select those with the talents most relevant to the jobs in question."

Create your own economy (updated some more)

Recently I read Create your own economy by Tyler Cowen (thanks Michelle for the tip-off!). Interesting page-turner discussing autism, autistic(-like) traits in non-autistics, and implications for society.

Cowen points out (what is thankfully becoming more familiar) that although autism is often associated with tragedy, many autistics and not only savants have cognitive strengths, e.g., being infovores for their preferred areas of interest, better perceptual skills than non-autistics, less suspectiblity to false memories.  He argues that technological tools available today such as iTunes and Facebook allow non-autistics to have the same abilities.  Non-autistics are driven to do the same sort of organisation and searching for information as autistics are, and this is being made possible by technology. He argues that education is even designed to teach non-autistics some of the cognitive strengths of autism.

One side of autism mentioned in the book and not frequently discussed is that autistics are more likely to talk about feelings than make small talk (has this been studied? Is it true? I would like to know more). The emotional experience of autistics is rarely acknowledged.  Cowan gives examples of people who despite appearing outwardly aloof are deeply sensitive, caring, and who are shocked when they’re told otherwise.

There are plenty of examples in the book of people, real and fictional, who appear(ed) to have autistic traits. I found this a tad tiresome (there has been a lot of it about elsewhere), especially when suffixed with hedges saying that of course we don’t know whether they were autistic. The key point is that “what-we-call-what-it-is-that-I-am-talking-about” (to quote Cowan) probably ought not be derived from a name for a disorder. So viewed this way, most of the book is not about autism, but about a cognitive and emotional profile which many people in society have. This is not to say that autistics do not have cognitive strengths—and he discusses some examples in the book—but I do not see what is to be gained by conjecturing that people are/were autistic. What does this explain?  The details matter, not a one word label. (However this could be because I am deeply suspicious of labels in general!)

Lots of good stuff in the book. In general I think it does a great job of defending the eccentric, and argues successfully that many of the traits eccentrics possess are desirable. Good news for academics!

There are plenty of important points on respecting the individual. I like this of course, and am a big fan of positive individual differences research, e.g., discovering the strengths of people diagnosed with various developmental and psychiatric conditions. But I think my favourite sentence in the book is this (relatively unimportant) one:

“In June 2009, a group of Norwegian astronomers broadbast a Doritos ad to a distant star, forty-two light years away.”

This is genius, and I think it’s a good author indeed who can spot and report such facts. It’s these kinds of things that make society fun.

Individual differences (continued)

Continuing the theme.

“I am surprised that the author has used this data set. In my lab, when we collect data with such large individual differences, we refer to the data as ‘junk’. We then redesign our stimuli and/or experimental procedures, and run a new experiment. The junk data never appear in publications”
—An anonymous reviewer in 2005, commenting on research that sought to model individual differences in cognition.

From the intro to Navarro, D. J.; Griffiths, T. L.; Steyvers, M. & Lee, M. D. Modeling individual differences using Dirichlet processes. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 2006, 50, 101-122

Some quick thoughts on individual differences

Tom asked if I had any papers on the dangers of ignoring individual differences. Here goes with a bit of a brain dump.

I view individual differences as trying to pull out a little bit more from the residual term. Contrast these approaches:

1. If I do A to a load of people then on average B happens (but with a bit of noise).
2. If I do A to a load of people, then those who have property P do B, those with property Q do C (and there’s a bit of noise, but less than in setup 1). (Hence the derogatory response to individual differences research: “Oh you’re just modelling the noise term”.)

Much individual differences research is a bit dull, so I’m not surprised it is criticised: collect a load of data, preferably Gaussian distributed and obtained by summing many items, and examine the correlation structure (sometimes disguised with a spot of structural equation modelling).

Here’s a little example I happen to like. Some people interpret some A are B as meaning some and possibly all; others interpret it as some and not all. Two things you can do: try to force people towards one or other interpretation; or take an individual differences approach, find some other way to guess whether people are good at language pragmatics, and see if that predicts their interpretation of some A are B. I think both are important. The former is about trying to increase the probability that more people will understand what you mean (so you could imagine—and presumably psycholinguists do this—showing people big wads of text and seeing what influences ambiguity of interpretation). The individual differences approach is interesting as much of the information we deal with in life is ambiguous, and people seem to differ in how they deal with language and social context, how often they ask questions, etc, so it’s nice to leave things a bit ambiguous, one might even go as far as to say more ecologically valid, and characterise how people deal with it.

(Well actually there’s at least one other thing you can do: focus on areas of psychology where there are negligible individual differences: brick-to-skull manipulation and so on.)

Ignoring individual differences can be a bit dangerous. Suppose you want to model processes based on empirical data. If you assume everyone is doing the same thing, and just average across responses, then your model is not going to be very good. And forcing people to do the same thing can be a bit authoritarian.

I hate methodological papers. I like methodological asides in ordinary papers. Here’s one (from the abstract of Guasti et al 2005):

“… some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported.”

Or from Stenning and van Lambalgen (2005, p. 924):

“… although a considerable number of Byrne’s subjects (about 35%) withdraw the modus ponens inference after the second conditional premiss is presented, many more (about 65%) continue to draw the inference. What interpretation of the materials do these subjects have? If it is the same, then why do they not withdraw the inference too? And if it is different, then how can it be accommodated within the semantic framework that underpins the theory of reasoning? Does failure to suppress mean that these subjects have mental logics with inference rules (as Byrne would presumably would have interpreted the data if no subject had suppressed)? The psychological data is full of variation, but the psychological conclusions have been rather monolithic.”

I quite like this too, on the subject of longitudinal analyses but much more general (Bauer et al 2002, p. 202):

“The logic of deductive longitudinal analyses represents a clear advance over the assumption that all children follow a universal language trajectory. A priori hypotheses about group differences are evaluated with reference to individual developmental trajectories. However, individual variation that is not explained by group differences is relegated to a residual or error term. Given the crudeness of many of the hypotheses in the social sciences, it is often the case that much of the observed variation in individual trajectories is allocated to the residual term. The deductive approach thus seems to be at odds with an explicit focus on individual differences, in that departures from normative patterns are regarded as random error and typically are not investigated.

“The alternative, “inductive” approach seeks to maximize the information that can be gained from the individual trajectories themselves. In contrast to theory driven deductive methods, which evaluate differences between predefined groups, inductive methods are data driven and are used to examine the natural structure of individual differences. These methods are sometimes referred to as pattern oriented, person centered, or personalogic because they begin by examining similarities and differences in individual developmental patterns (see Cairns, Bergman, & Kagan, 1998, for a review). Using this bottom-up strategy, decision rules or clustering procedures are used to aggregate individuals into groups that display similar developmental patterns, irrespective of their status on theoretically relevant predictor variables.“

References

Bauer, D. J.; Goldfield, B. A. & Reznick, J. S. Alternative approaches to analyzing individual differences in the rate of early vocabulary development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 2002, 23, 313-335

Guasti, M. T.; Chierchia, G.; Crain, S.; Foppolo, F.; Gualmini, A. & Meroni, L. Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes, 2005, 20, 667-696

Stenning, K. & van Lambalgen, M. Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task. Cognitive Science, 2005, 29, 919-96

Sex differences in psychology

My take on this:

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

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

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

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

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

* Women are presumably better at giving birth, with a large effect size.

More on interpretation

From a piece by Jonathan Wolff on academic humour (hat tip: the marvellous Leiter Reports):

The logician in question, the late George Boolos, used to give a lecture in which he went through a number of popular phrases that, when analysed in terms of standard logic, mean something quite different from how we normally understand them.

The example everyone remembers is the popular song lyric “everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me”. From this, it logically follows that “I am my baby”.

I guess the idea is you formalise this as:

∀x. loves(x, My Baby)
∀x. loves(My Baby, x) → x = Me

In this formalisation, loves(My Baby, My Baby) follows from the first premise. Then from the second premise, we get My Baby = Me.

Hopefully Most Reasonable People restrict the domain over which the first x quantifies…

ETA: Actually I should have known there’d be individual differences in interpretation. See the comments.

Sex differences in theory of mind

Tamara Russell and colleagues have discovered that, despite the stereotypes, men did better in a theory of mind test than women. The authors argue that the men used a systemizing strategy, thus, I presume were just simulating empathy. Not sure I like this conclusion, though it is thought provoking. Just how can Baron-Cohen’s empathising/systemizing distinction be made in a solid way?