Tag: psychology

Courtroom evidence

In the 1970s, Loftus published a series of influential studies about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. She has been trying to make the implications of her findings known ever since, but only now is her work is beginning to have a real impact. As an expert witness, Loftus has testified on behalf of mass murderers, but that’s the least controversial aspect of her work. Her role in legal cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse based on recovered memories has made her the target of lawsuits and death threats, and her research into using false memories to modify behavior is regarded by some as highly unethical. The so-called “memory wars” began in 1990, when Loftus got a call from a lawyer defending George Franklin. Franklin’s daughter accused him of murdering her best friend decades earlier, after apparently recovering long-lost memories of the crime during therapy. “There I was, witnessing the conviction of a man based on nothing more than the claim of a repressed memory.” Intrigued, she scoured the scientific literature and, failing to find any convincing evidence for the claim that traumatic memories can be buried and recovered, testified to that effect in the trial.

Idiot Ads

some ad strategies are little games in themselves.

You’ve seen them. Peeking out from sidebars, jiggling and wiggling for your attention, popping up where you most expect them: those “One Weird Trick” ads. These crudely drawn Web advertisements promise easy tricks to reduce your belly fat, learn a new language, and boost your credit score by 217 points. They seem like obvious scams, but part of me has always wanted to follow the link. What, I wonder, makes the tricks so weird? How come only one trick (or sometimes “tip”), never more? Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? I’ve never pursued these questions, though, because a fear of computer viruses and identity theft has always stayed my hand. One curious click, I imagine, and I could wake up hogtied on an oil tanker headed to Nigeria.

If the flynn effect is true, the click through rate on these should decline over time as the dumbest get smarter.

If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past 6 years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)

Seasonal suicides

google search trends remains an underused tool to create interesting stories. instead we have poorly informed j school dropouts making shit up.

Search terms implied that people are 24% less likely to consider suicide in the summer, among other seasonal fluctuations that may be useful in epidemiology for illnesses that are difficult to track.

Future is closer

our perceptions of time are grounded in our experiences of movement through space: We tend to feel closer to the future because we feel like we’re moving toward it. this orientation toward the future isn’t merely a perceptual quirk; it serves an important purpose. Humans haven’t yet mastered the art of time travel, so we can’t change the past. But we can prepare ourselves for the future; perceiving future events as closer may be a psychological mechanism that helps us to approach, avoid, or otherwise cope with the events we encounter.

Human Misjudgement

so many human defects all in one place.

  1. Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’
  2. Psychological denial.
  3. Incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’
  4. Bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.
  5. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making.
  6. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect.
  7. Bias from over-influence by social proof — that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress.
  8. What made these economists love the efficient market theory is the math was so elegant.
  9. Bias from contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition.
  10. Bias from over-influence by authority.
  11. Bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed.
  12. Bias from envy/jealousy
  13. Bias from chemical dependency.
  14. Bias from mis-gambling compulsion
  15. Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked. Disliking distortion, bias from that, the reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked.
  16. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies on this list.
  17. Bias from over-influence by extra-vivid evidence
  18. Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures, creating sound generalizations developed in response to the question “Why?” Also, mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question “Why?” Also, failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.
  19. Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge
  20. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent
  21. other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse
  22. Development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome.

Predicting Deception

a text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.

61% is not very useful (close to a coin toss), but it is an interesting start. of course, this research suffers from the usual problems (only 5 samples, wtf?), but given a few 100K samples, might be much more accurate.

Patience is overrated

the loss of patience persists even when we’re not online. Digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more resistant to delays of all sorts — and perhaps more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli.

this is a cogent analysis of why the post office, checkout lines, etc need to be destroyed.