Rachel’s Musings

A study published in the September edition of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior is in the news. The researchers, Debra Umberson and Hui Liu, looked at data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972-2003 to investigate the health of married and non-married people. Michigan State University summarized their findings:

The health of people who never marry is improving, narrowing the gap with their wedded counterparts, according to new research that suggests the practice of encouraging marriage to promote health may be misguided.
[...]
Further, the research shows that the health status of the never-married has improved for all race and gender groups examined: men, women, blacks and whites. (The health of married women also improved, while the health of married men remained stable.)

“Politicians and scholars continue to debate the value of marriage for Americans,” the researchers write in the study, “with some going so far as to establish social programs and policies to encourage marriage among those socials groups less inclined to marry, particularly the poor and minorities.”

But the research findings “highlight the complexity of this issue” and suggest that “encouraging marriage in order to promote health may be misguided.”

(Unfortunately, I don’t yet have free access to the actual journal article, so I am relying on press releases…)

News reports on the study differ in their take of the results: While some emphasize that marriage isn’t necessary to remain healthy, others still try to use it as encouragement for marriage. Yet, despite their headline, the news story admits that the changes in marital behavior had a positive impact on health of never-married people.

What is not clear from the news articles is whether the researchers distinguished between never-married singles and cohabiting people - both are unmarried. Cohabitation has increased and is widely viewed as an acceptable alternative to marriage. If, as Liu asserts, never-marrieds have “greater access to social support now than they did in the past” and that is an important reason for these findings, cohabitation would need to be factored into the equation.

Even with this caveat, the overall research finding is positive: We can be healthy no matter what our relationship status. And even though most of us singles and unmarrieds knew that, we now have the data to support the claim.

(Hat tip to Brian for pointing me to this study!)

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) by Phil Zimbardo has been for me an example of the astonishing things that we humans are capable of. I guess as an example of human gullibility, I had not been skeptical about the experiment, which lacks quite a few scientific markers (aside from its ethical problems). During a talk by Barbara Oakley, she was asked to comment about the SPE because it showed the influence the situation and roles could have on human behavior. She responded that there are quite a few questions about this experiment and pointed us to a summary of the critique at Wikipedia. I finally had a chance to review this and am retiring another holy cow now: the experiment is, well, crap not nearly as thoroughly tested against reality as we are led to believe… (Thanks to a discussion in the comments, I now understand that Zimbardo does deserve credit for pointing to the importance of situational influences. I still think, though, that he, at best, could use SPE for the development of hypotheses, not as support for a theory, as he seems to be doing. I find it mindboggling that someone can become famous with such shoddy research - of course, who am I to criticize the famous Zimbardo. Well, I am a human being with a brain and I occasionally use that to debunk things, mostly for myself, but also for the few people who read my blog).

     Continue reading this post » » »

There are a couple of interesting recent studies that provide updates to the gender and science discussion between Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke both pointing toward Spelke’s side of the argument that most, if not all, of the gender gap can be explained by the influence of social forces rather than by innate differences.

First, there is an interesting post on the Feminist Philosophers’ blog that summarizes a NY Times article on gender discrimination at universities, clearly supporting Spelke’s side by documenting differential treatment of applicants depending on gender. Although Pinker might be correct that there are innate differences, that does not excuse discrimination, though they might provide convenient self-justifications. If anything, the social forces are exaggerating these innate differences rather than compensating for them.

And then, articles here and here summarize a recent study using data collected by PISA, which

suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.^(source)

The overall result showed the usual pattern: Boys did better than girls in math and girls did better than boys in reading. But there was a catch: that result differed by country making the authors curious if there might be a relationship between the score differential and the status of women. They created a gender equality score and found that countries with very high gender equality do indeed have a much smaller math performance difference. Whereas countries with lower gender equality showed a much larger difference in math performance.

The correlations between gender equality and math scores held up under a statistical test designed to catch spurious associations. The authors even checked out the possibility of genetic effects not linked to the Y chromosome by examining whether genetic similarity between various European populations could account for these differences, but they found that it could not.^(source)

One of Pinker’s central arguments was that the gender gap was primarily prevalent in the extremes of the distribution. So, it is particularly interesting what this study found there:

The researchers also studied the percentage of students of each sex among the top scorers on the test. In the gender-equal countries, girls made up half or more of those who scored in the top one percent.^(source)

The results support Spelke’s argument, although it is interesting to note that Pinker never said that all of the gender gap can be explained by biology. His claim was that “the contribution of biology is greater than zero.” However, it seemed that he was using that to argue away the societal influences. We clearly cannot do that. This latest study shows the influence of gender inequality on girl’s math performance. It does not say that there are no innate differences. It simply highlights that the social forces Spelke pointed to have a dramatic effect. This study might also be the first step to the experiment Spelke suggested at the end of her talk: Remove the gender discrimination and biased treatment and then see what happens to the percentage of women in mathematics and science.

Timothy D. Wilson’s book Strangers To Ourselves provides compelling evidence for an adaptive unconscious, a part of us that evolved to make decisions for us. Wilson’s evidence came mostly from psychological experiments, which did not involve brain scans. There is also evidence from neuroscience for non-conscious decision making. The Wall Street Journal reports on several studies that found evidence in the brain of a decision made before it became conscious.

In one experiment with a small sample, researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience found

signals [of brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision] that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

Other researchers have shown similar predictive power from observing brain activity right before experiment participants verbalized their decision. They also found that different brain regions are involved during the preparation and the execution of a task. Already in the early 1980s, research was published that indicated that brain activity clearly preceded a conscious activity suggestion that an unconscious decision had been made before it became conscious.

Robert Lee Hotz, the WSJ science journalist, summarizes the implications of this research:

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut — not by thinking about them too much.

Wilson, for example, talks about letting the adaptive unconscious make decisions for us (p. 172):

The point is that we should not analyze the information in an overly deliberate, conscious manner, constantly making explicit lists of pluses and minuses. We should let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely.

Interestingly, the neuroscientists maintain that this does not preclude free will. Somehow because we’re studying how we think gives us free will. Hotz puts it this way:

All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring the brain’s physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through its reflection in the mirror of science.

“We are trying to understand who we are,” said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, “by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are.”

Daniel Dennett would agree with this assessment:

People have this strange antipathy for evolution and for materialism. They think that if evolution is true, then they’re just animals or automatons — that they won’t have freedom and they won’t have responsibility, and life will have no meaning. [...] On the contrary, it’s only when you understand life from an evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. You realize that it’s real. It’s different and better than the freedom of other animals, but it’s evolved. It’s not supernatural.

The role of the adaptive unconscious is to help us make decisions, to sort through the millions of pieces of information we are absorbing constantly. Then we can use our freedom to make better decisions: We can consciously intervene in the unconscious decision process, though sometimes that leads to ineffective decisions, or we can decide to learn to utilize the process better in a manner similar to what Wilson suggested. Either way, we’re free to decide.

(Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels for the link to the WSJ article).

In a recent talk by Barbara Oakley, she summarized some of her findings from her book Evil Genes. Essentially, she wanted to talk about people who have difficulty getting in touch with themselves. Similar to a Point of Inquiry interview with her, Oakley started with the story of how her sister stole their mother’s boyfriend long enough to go to Paris with him, which had been their mother’s life-long dream, and then dump the guy. As Oakley was traveling in Europe, Milosevic was on trial in Den Haag. When he was asked about mass graves, he replied “I can’t hear you. My earpiece is not working.” That struck Oakley as something poignant in the behavior of people like Milosevic, Hitler, or her sister: They cannot hear what they don’t want to hear. To find out more, and especially to answer the question of motivation, Oakley started to research malignant narcissism, the personality disorder that seemed to describe these people best. Narcissists are known for their lack of empathy and their self-centeredness. To her surprise, despite all the talk about narcissism there was “no science there.” However, there are two personality disorders that are well researched: Psychopathy, which is also called antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

     Continue reading this post » » »

During my exchange with Pat Frank in the comments to my post on the climate crisis, he raised a question about CO₂’s pollutant status. When I researched the question, I found a write up by Weather Underground that recounted the history of that question: It stems from a campaign founded by Exxon. An article on the Doubt Makers by Michelle Nijhuis describes how industries, starting with tobacco, use a similar tactic to create doubt: The climate science models are just too unreliable, therefore we don’t really have to do anything.

     Continue reading this post » » »