Ben R. Slugoski on why he became a psychologist

When the desire to study psychology began:

“If my developmental psychology colleagues are right, I began formulating conceptions of human psychological states and processes at about the age of three.”

On the shift of study emphasis from English to Psychology:

“… there was no antidote to a few hours deconstructing Coleridge or Blake like working out the expected mean squares for a tricky experimental design (a rakish sex-life not otherwise being in the cards!). [...]

“[...] Erudite though my English professorss were, they were only vessels for conveying the brilliance of the ‘Greats’ and as such were never particularly good models for an aspiring player. What ultimately determined my allegiance to psychology was the brilliance personified in my psychology lecturers [...] the late Kenneth Burstein, old school rat-runner, unabashed liberal, and the person whom you would least want as a relationship counsellor [...]“

Teaching styles:

“It is probably worthy of note in these days of multimedia, dot point-driven instruction that my beacons were invariably Socratic minimalists for whom the take-home message was quite subsidiary to the intellectual journey (seemingly) constructed in situ. Thus, I recall Burstein leading us from eye-blink conditioning with rabbits to human divorce statistics via a little sociobiology, Koopman had the class reinvent the correlation coefficient, and Marcia … well, Marcia had us ruminating about the conditions and consequences of sleeping with ones’ clients.”

(From over here.)

Security through obscurity

Vaughan at Mind Hacks writes:

“Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material.”

Any test with good test-retest reliability does not require this, and there are a few of those around.  But irrespective of this, there is a hidden assumption that psychologists are somehow out to trick people into revealing their psychological properties.  Undergraduate students, for instance, often complain that personality questionnaires—and questionnaires in general—are rubbish because it’s obvious what they’re asking or what the answers “should” be.

I don’t think it’s a problem if what is being tested is transparent.  For instance take selection for a job or a university.  The point should be that a good selection process benefits both the candidate and the folk making the selection.  If you cheat your way into a job you’re not capable of doing by obsessively practicing a test, then it won’t be long until the pressures of performance will force you out.

This assumes that tests used for selection have predictive validity, of course. And… well you can imagine how this argument would continue, how some jobs might require people who are good at pretending, how validity might depend on people being motivated enough to try some practice IQ tests—acquisition of foreknowledge might (unknowingly to the tester) be part of the test—and so on and so forth…

For the application of clinical diagnosis, I find it quite frightening that tests should somehow trick patients into revealing their complaints. There is a diagnosis tool for autism spectrum conditions which works basically by tricking people into revealing how socially inept they are by various “social presses”, including during a period which appears to be a break between testing sections. The most frightening part of this was the obvious power trip the person who explained this test to me was on everytime she used it.

Be suspicious of tests which are designed to trick people.

Winsorising

(Here’s a wikipedia link.)  Apparently named in honour of Charlie Winsor (Huber, 2002), with whom Tukey had (a mean of) 1.9 meals per day over a period of 3 years (Fernholz and Morgenthaler, 2003).  Winsor, an “engineer-turned-physiologist-turned-statistician”, converted Tukey to stats (Brillinger, 2002).

A nice biographical detail about Winsor (from here):

I have heard gossip
that he was brilliant,
lazy and died young.

I’d like to know more.

References

Peter J. Huber (2002).  John W. Tukey’s Contributions to Robust Statistics.  The Annals of Statistics, 30(6), 1640-1648.

Luisa Turrin Fernholz and Stephan Morgenthaler (2003).  A Conversation with John W. Tukey.   Statistical Science, 18(3), 346-356.

David R. Brillinger (2002).  John W. Tukey: his life and professional contributions. Annals of Statistics, 30, 1535-1575.

Brendan McGonigle

Wikipedia page over here.

Duncker

Here, have a bit of history:

Schnal, S. (1999).  Life as the problem: Karl Duncker’s context.  From Past to Future: Papers on the History of Psychology,  1(2), 13-28