No one noticed when this man's speech was fed to him by a 12-year-old. Welcome to the Cyranoid Illusion

Imagine if the words that came out of your mouth were spoken by another person. Would anyone notice? This idea was explored by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, famous for his studies into obedience, but he never published his results.

Milgram called the hybrid of one person's body and another person's mind, a Cyranoid, after the play Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the handsome Christian woos a woman using the graceful words provided by plain-looking Cyrano. Now the concept has been resurrected by a pair of British researchers, Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespie, who say the approach has huge potential as a paradigm in social psychology.

The first study was a proof of concept. Forty participants (average age 30; 22 women) spent 10 minutes in conversation with a 26-year-old man, getting to know him. They thought this man was another participant, but in fact he was working for the researchers. For half the participants, the man spoke freely as himself. For the other half, he was a Cyranoid and spoke the words of a 23-year-old woman hidden in an adjacent room. In this condition, the woman could see and hear the man's interactions, and she fed him what to say live, via the wireless earpiece he was wearing.

Afterwards, the participants were asked whether they thought the man had spoken his own thoughts, or whether his answers were scripted. Only a tiny minority of participants in both groups thought this might be true. None of them thought he'd had his words fed to him by radio. The participants in the Cyranoid condition were astonished and amused when told the truth of the situation.

A second study went further. This time, panels of between three and five participants interrogated either a 37-year-old man or a 12-year-old boy about who they are and what they know about science, literature, history and current affairs. For half the participants, the man and boy simply answered as themselves. For the other participants, the boy or man was Cyranoid. If the Cyranoid boy was present before the panel, his answers were fed to him by the man; if the Cyranoid man was present, the words he spoke came from the boy.

Amazingly, the participants in the Cyranoid conditions were no more likely to say afterwards that they thought their interviewee had given scripted responses, spoken words relayed by radio, or wasn't speaking his own thoughts. No participants raised any spontaneous suspicions about the interviewees' autonomy during the interviews. And afterwards, when prompted directly, only one person out of 17 in each condition (two Cyranoid conditions and two normal) believed their interviewee's answers had been fed to them.

The Cyranoid set-up is especially intriguing to social psychologists because it allows the influence of a person's appearance to be weighed against the influence of their words, as spoken by another person. In this study, the participants rated the personality and intelligence of the man and boy equally positively when they spoke as themselves. Yet when the man spoke the words of the boy, he was given more negative ratings. This is in spite of the fact the participants failed to adjust the difficulty of their questions in this condition, presumably so as not to patronise the man publicly.

You can begin to see how the Cyranoid paradigm can illuminate issues to do with social stereotypes triggered by appearances and words, and the differences in people's responses in terms of their private thoughts and public actions. Another angle is the issue of how a person's speech is changed by the fact they are speaking through another body. In this case, the man and boy were trained to speak as themselves, yet the man shortened his sentences when speaking through the boy. The boy did not increase the length of his utterances when speaking as the man, perhaps because of the difficulty of doing so.

There could also be practical applications for this technique - for instance, imagine helping people with social anxiety. They could occupy an intimidating situation bodily, but have their words dictated by someone else; or conversely, they could practice providing the speech in such a situation while having the relative comfort of speaking their words through someone else's body.

"Though Milgram did not live to see his Cyranoid method come to fruition, the current research provides ample basis for the continued exploration of this intriguing methodological paradigm," the researchers said. "Indeed, the Cyranoid method may yet prove to be a long overdue addition to the social psychologist's toolkit."

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Corti, K., & Gillespie, A. (2014). Revisiting Milgram’s Cyranoid Method: Experimenting With Hybrid Human Agents The Journal of Social Psychology, 155 (1), 30-56 DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2014.959885

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest. 

One in ten student research participants don't make an effort

It's near the end of your university semester, you're tired and now you've got to sit through 90 minutes of monotonous psychology tests to fulfil the requirements for your course. This is a familiar situation for psychology undergrads, many of whom form the sample pools for thousands of psychology studies.

Concerns have been raised before that psychology findings are being skewed by the (lack of) effort students put into their performance as research participants. Last year, for example, researchers found that students who volunteer near the end of term perform worse on psychology tests than those who volunteer earlier.

Now Jonathan DeRight and Randall Jorgensen at Syracuse University have investigated student effort in 90 minutes of computerised neuropsychology tests designed to measure attention, memory, verbal ability and more. The session, which took place either during a morning or afternoon late in the Spring semester, involved the students taking the same broad battery of tests twice, with a short gap in between. The students received course credits for their time.

To test whether the students were making a proper effort, the researchers embedded several measures - for example, performing worse than chance on a multiple-choice style verbal memory challenge was taken as a sign of low effort; so was performing more slowly on an easier version of a mental control task than on the more difficult version.

Among the 77 healthy student participants who took part (average age 19; 36 women), the researchers identified 12 per cent who failed at least one of the embedded measures of effort during the first battery of neuropsych tests; 11 per cent also failed one or more measures during the second battery. The vast majority of those who showed low effort had participated in the morning. In fact, focusing only on the morning participants, one in four displayed low effort.

Unsurprisingly, low effort also went hand in hand with poorer performance on the neuropsych tests, especially one of the longest and most dull cognitive tests (the "continuous performance task"), and especially during the second battery. A consistent exception was a particularly complex version of a test of mental self-control (the Stroop task) - perhaps because the challenge of the task provoked more concentration, even from students who were mostly not trying hard.

The estimate from this study of the fraction of student research participants not making an effort are consistent with some prior studies, but not others (the latter research found less evidence of poor effort). Clearly more research is needed. DeRight and Jorgensen concluded that "healthy non-clinical samples cannot necessarily be assumed to have put forth adequate effort or valid responding." They added: "Assessing for effort in this population is imperative, especially when the study is designed to provide meaningful results to be used in clinical practice." This last, important point is a reference to the fact that results from students are often used to establish estimates of "normal" performance on neuropsychology tests, for comparison when investigating patients with brain damage or other problems.

_________________________________

DeRight, J., & Jorgensen, R. (2014). I Just Want My Research Credit: Frequency of Suboptimal Effort in a Non-Clinical Healthy Undergraduate Sample The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 1-17 DOI: 10.1080/13854046.2014.989267

--further reading from The Psychologist--
Improving the student participant experience
The use and abuse of student participants

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Reformers say psychologists should change how they report their results, but does anyone understand the alternative?

The rectangular bars indicate sample
means and the red lines represent the
confidence intervals surrounding them.
Image: Audriusa/Wikipedia

Psychological science is undergoing a process of soul-searching and self-improvement. The reasons vary but include failed replications of high-profile findings, evidence of bias in what gets published, and surveys suggestive of questionable research practices.

Among the proposed solutions is that psychologists should change the way they report their findings. Traditionally, most research papers report a "p value" that indicates whether the results are statistically significant or not. Critics say this approach encourages "p hacking" - tweaking the experimental protocol until the results reach the magic threshold of significance.

An alternative approach proposed by some reformers is to report "confidence intervals" - these indicate an upper and lower range within which the true mean score might lie (the "true mean" here refers to the average score or measure of a population, as opposed to the average score of your particular sample. Imagine sampling the height of 100 men to try to estimate the "true" average height of men in the country).

Confidence intervals are less prone to misinterpretation, say advocates, and they help avoid dichotomous thinking - the idea that a result is either significant or it isn't. The American Psychological Association strongly endorses the use of confidence intervals.

Now a group of psychologists in The Netherlands has tested whether confidence intervals really are as well understood as their supporters claim. Rink Hoekstra and his colleagues surveyed 442 first-year psychology students who had yet to complete any statistics classes; 34 masters students; and 120 psychology researchers including doctoral students and lecturers.

All the participants were presented with a basic research premise:

Professor Bumbledorf conducts an experiment, analyses the data, and reports: "The 95% confidence interval for the mean ranges from 0.1 to 0.4!"

The participants were then presented with six statements that follow from Bumbledorf's result. In each case they had to indicate whether the statement was true or false. They were told that it was possible all the statements were true, all were false, or that there was a mix of true and false. Here are three of them:

• The probability that the true mean is greater than 0 is at least 95%

• There is a 95 per cent probability that the true mean lies between 0.1 and 0.4

• If we were to repeat the experiment over and over, then 95% of the time the true mean falls between 0.1 and 0.4

In actual fact all six of the statements were false, and the alarming result is that many were incorrectly endorsed, not just by the students but also by the established psychology researchers. On average, the first-year students endorsed 3.51 statements, the masters students 3.24, and the researchers 3.45. The survey also included a question about experience with statistics. Participants who reported more experience of statistics endorsed just as many of the false statements.

The correct interpretation of Bumbledorf's statement is that in 100 samples obtained using his methods, you would expect the true value of the mean to lie in the 95 per cent confidence interval for 95 of those samples. Note that each sample would have its own interval (i.e its own upper and lower limit), a fact which is inconsistent with the three test statements shown above.

Hoekstra and his colleagues said their results showed "dramatic and similar levels of misinterpretation among both researchers and students." They added: "One could question whether our findings indicate a serious problem in scientific practice, rather than merely an academic issue. We argue that they do indicate a serious problem, one closely related to what some authors refer to as a crisis in the social and behavioural sciences."

_________________________________

Hoekstra, R., Morey, R., Rouder, J., & Wagenmakers, E. (2014). Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21 (5), 1157-1164 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0572-3

--further reading--
Made it! An uncanny number of psychology findings manage to scrape into statistical significance

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Publication bias afflicts the whole of psychology

In the last few years the social sciences, including psychology, have been taking a good look at themselves. While incidences of fraud hit the headlines, pervasive issues are just as important to address, such as publication bias, the phenomenon where non-significant results never see the light of day thanks to editors rejecting them or savvy researchers recasting their experiments around unexpected results and not reporting the disappointments. Statistical research has shown the extent of this misrepresentation in pockets of social science, such as specific journals, but a new meta-analysis suggests that the problem may infect the entire discipline of psychology.

A team of psychologists based in Salzburg looked at “effect sizes”, which provide a measure of how much experimental variables actually change an outcome. The researchers randomly sampled the PsycINFO database to collect 1000 psychology articles across the discipline published in 2007, and then winnowed the list down to 395 by focusing only on those that used quantitative data to test hypotheses. For each main finding, the researchers extracted or calculated the effect size.

Studies with lots of participants (500 or more) had an average effect size in the moderate range r=.25. But studies with a smaller sample tended to have formidable effect sizes, as high as .48 for studies with under 50 participants. This resulted in a strong negative relationship between number of participants and size of effect, when statistically the two should be unrelated. As studies with more participants make more precise measurements, .25 is the better estimate of a typical psychology effect size, so the higher estimates suggest some sort of inflation.

The authors, led by Anton Kühberger, argue that the literature is thin on modest effect sizes thanks to the non-publication of non-significant findings (rejection by journals would be especially plausible for non-significant smaller studies), and the over-representation of spurious large effects, due to researchers retrospectively constructing their papers around surprising effects that were only stumbled across thanks to inventive statistical methods.

The analysts rejected one alternative explanation. To detect powerful effects a small sample is sufficient, so researchers who anticipate a big effect thanks to an initial "power analysis" might deliberately plan on small samples. But only 13 per cent of the papers in this report mentioned power, and the pattern of correlation in these specific papers appears no different to that found in the ones who never mention power. Moreover, the original 1000 authors were surveyed as to what they expected the relationship between effect size and sample size to be. Many respondents expected no effect, and even more expected that studies with more participants would have larger effects. This suggests that an up-front principled power analysis decision is unlikely to have been driving the main result.

Kühberger and his co-analysts recommend that in future we give more weight to how precise study findings are likely to be, by considering their sample size. One way of doing this is by reporting a statistic that takes sample size into account, the “confidence interval”, which describes effect size not as a single value but as a range that we can be confident the true effect size falls within. As we all want to maintain confidence in psychological science, it’s a recommendation worth considering (but see here for an alternative view).

_________________________________

Kühberger, A., Fritz, A., & Scherndl, T. (2014). Publication Bias in Psychology: A Diagnosis Based on the Correlation between Effect Size and Sample Size PLoS ONE, 9 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105825

--further reading--
Questionable research practices are rife in psychology, survey suggests
Serious power failure threatens the entire field of neuroscience
Made it! An uncanny number of psychology findings manage to scrape into statistical significance
Fake data or scientific mistake?

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

Can a brain scan tell us anything about the art of creative writing?

When an accomplished creative writer gets on with their craft, their brain operates in a somewhat different way to a novice's. A new imaging study suggests that the expert approach may be more streamlined, emotionally literate, and initially unfiltered.

Katharina Erhard with her colleagues from the German universities of Greifswald and Hildesheim asked participants to read a fragment of a story, to brainstorm what could continue the narrative, and then, for two minutes, to write a continuation of the story. Their brains were scanned throughout. This is an improvement on previous studies that have simply involved participants imagining a story while lying in a scanner.

Participants were 20 experts - students on competitive creative writing courses with over 10 years experience and a weekly average of 21 hours practice - and 28 novices practicing less than an hour per week. Independent judges considered the experts' writing significantly more creative: "unmade laundry, unloved days" was how one expert closed his response to an account of a bitter bachelor killing himself in a laundry, whereas a tale of a violinist losing his instrument in the snow conjured this image: "the glacier, winding its tongue around the sounds, suddenly gulped the violin". The differences between expert and novice brain activation during the writing phase offers some tantalising clues to how such quality emerges.

In the frontal cortex, expert brains showed greater activity in areas crucial to language and goal selection, including across the inferior frontal gyri (IFG). Verbal creativity has been associated with left IFG activation many times before, but involvement of the right IFG was unexpected. The area is associated with emotional language processing, such as interpreting expressive gestures, so this may suggest that experts are attending more deeply to the emotional currents of text and their ideas. Together with recent evidence that metaphor comprehension recruits the right temporal lobe, this suggests a role for processes housed in the right hemisphere when a verbal task is more abstract and less factual.

Expert writing also involved more activation in the left caudate. This is part of the basal ganglia, long known to be critical to learning and expert performance, and seems to reflect ordinarily cortical cognitive processes becoming automatised and bundled together within the deeper brain. In this case, these may be to do with visually processing text, as the experts showed less activation in occipital areas involved in visual and perceptual processing.

One final finding: during brainstorming, expert brains showed increased activation relative to novices in several regions associated with speech production. Taking these findings together, they paint a picture of expert creative writers: ideas bubble within them, already on the road from concept to expression, readily communicable, almost rising into their throats. These are handled by neural systems streamlined to take care of the basics, while the writer devotes greater attention to the emotional interpretation of their text. It will be down to future researchers to verify or reject this characterisation - and hopefully, some great future writers to tell us about it. Maybe you.

_________________________________

Erhard, K., Kessler, F., Neumann, N., Ortheil, H., & Lotze, M. (2014). Professional training in creative writing is associated with enhanced fronto-striatal activity in a literary text continuation task NeuroImage, 100, 15-23 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.05.076

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

Decades of lie detection research has been unrealistic

According to decades of psychology research, most people, including law enforcement professionals, are useless at detecting lies. But in a new paper, a team led by Tim Levine argues that nearly all previous research has been unrealistic. The field has been dominated by studies that place the "lie detector" in a passive role, tasked with spotting "tells" leaked by the liar. But this just isn't how deception detection works in real life, say Levine and his team. Rather, the interrogator interacts with the suspect and asks strategic questions to extract the truth. In this context, the researchers predicted that expert lie detection performance would be high.

To test this, they first invited 33 students to take part in a difficult quiz with cash prizes for correct answers. They played in pairs with what they thought was another student but was really an accomplice of the researchers. When the researcher left the room for a short spell, the student participants had a chance to cheat by looking at the answer sheet. Four of them cheated in this way.

After the quiz, all the students were interviewed about what had happened during the quiz. Unbeknown to the students, their questioner was an expert interrogator, qualified in the Reid Technique and a trainer of the police and military in interrogation techniques.

The interviews lasted about four minutes, during which time the questioner asked the students how they knew the answers they'd got right. They were also asked, if someone were to cheat, how they would have gone about it. They were also told that their partner would be interviewed next, and asked what they thought he/she would say. The questioner threatened an investigation if the student had cheated to sabotage the study, but told them that it wouldn't be so bad if they'd cheated for money.

All four of the cheaters confessed about their transgression before the end of the interview. There were no false confessions. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the questioner achieved 100 per cent accuracy after the interviews when asked to identify the cheaters from among the 33 interviewees.

The tapes of the interviews were then shown to 136 more student participants who were asked to identify the cheaters. They achieved 92.7 per cent accuracy. This is consistent with the idea that strategic questioning can provoke "diagnostic answers" that anyone can interpret because they reveal the truth about what happened.

A follow-up study was similar but this time there were five expert interrogators (one woman), all of them federal agents in the US. They each had different styles of questioning and the interviews varied from 3 minutes to 18 minutes. This time, 40 of the 89 students who played the quiz cheated, or their partner did (remember, they didn't know it but their partner was actually a research assistant).

During the ensuing interviews, confessions about cheating were obtained for 34 out of 40 of the cheating episodes. There were no false confessions. The interviewers' accuracy at correctly detecting whether cheating had occurred varied from 100 per cent (for three of them) to 94.7 per cent. The interviewers identified the specific true culprit (the student or their partner) in 95.5 per cent of interviews. When the video clips were played to 34 more students, these students achieved 93.6 per cent accuracy in judging whether cheating had occurred.

"These findings suggest that high levels of deception detection may be possible," the researchers said, "but require that the right questions are asked the right way in a situation where message content is useful and where the solicitation of honesty is a viable strategy."

_________________________________

Levine, T., Clare, D., Blair, J., McCornack, S., Morrison, K., & Park, H. (2014). Expertise in Deception Detection Involves Actively Prompting Diagnostic Information Rather Than Passive Behavioral Observation Human Communication Research, 40 (4), 442-462 DOI: 10.1111/hcre.12032

--further reading--
Just how good are police officers at detecting liars?
Forget good cop, bad cop - here's the real psychology of two-person interrogation
Skilled liars make great lie detectors

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Are sweet-toothed people also sweet by nature?

Three years ago psychologists reported that we assume people who like sweet food are also sweet natured. More surprisingly perhaps, Brian Meier and his colleagues also found that the sweet-toothed really do have more agreeable personalities and are more inclined to behave altruistically.

How far can we trust these eye-catching results? There is a growing recognition in psychology of the need to attempt replications of past findings. In that spirit, a new paper led by Michael Ashton has attempted to replicate the specific finding that people who like sweet things are also more sweet natured.

Over 600 student participants completed personality and taste preference tests in pairs; a much larger sample than in the earlier research. In each pair both parties had known each other for at least six months. They scored their own personality and taste preferences, and in private they scored the personality of their friend. This is an advantage over the research from three years ago, which relied solely on people's self-reports of their own personality. Another advantage of the new study is that the researchers used two different personality scales - a measure of the Big Five factors used previously and also a measure of the so-called HEXACO personality dimensions, including honesty and humility.

A preference for sweet tasting foods did correlate with having more agreeable or prosocial personality traits using the HEXACO dimensions, but only weakly: 0.15 based on self-reports of personality and less than 0.10 based on the personality scores given by a friend. This rose to 0.19 and dropped to 0.06 using measures of the Big Five factor of agreeableness. These are modest associations and they're less than half the strength reported by Brian Meier and his colleagues three years ago.

Ashton and his colleagues aren't surprised that with a larger sample and more comprehensive personality measures they found a greatly reduced association between preference for sweet foods and having a sweet personality. They believe there's no compelling psychological explanation for why sweet-natured people should prefer sweet foods. After all, you could just as easily reason that a sweet-natured person doesn't need to seek out sweet tastes because they're sweet enough already, as reason that a sweet natured person is drawn to sweet tastes (this reminds me of a tea-shop waitress I encountered recently who asked every table "Would you like sugar or are you sweet enough already?").

If there isn't really a link between being sweet-natured and sweet-toothed (or only a very weak link), why is it our convention to describe altruistic, kind people as "sweet"? Ashton's team have a simple explanation: "... because sweet foods are generally liked very much, people may use 'sweet' and related words to describe anything - or anyone - that is especially appreciated or enjoyed."

_________________________________

Ashton, M., Pilkington, A., & Lee, K. (2014). Do prosocial people prefer sweet-tasting foods? An attempted replication of Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012) Journal of Research in Personality, 52, 42-46 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.06.006

--further reading--
Sweet-toothed and sweet natured - how people who like sweet things are sweet
Not so easy to spot: A failure to replicate the Macbeth Effect across three continents
A replication tour de force

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Did a five-day camp without digital devices really boost children's interpersonal skills?

"There's a brilliant study that came out two weeks ago," Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield said at a recent event promoting her new book, "... they took away all [the pre-teens'] digital devices for five days and sent them to summer camp ... and tested their interpersonal skills, and guess what, even within five days they'd changed."

Greenfield highlighted this study in the context of her dire warnings about the harmful psychological effects of modern screen- and internet-based technologies. She is clearly tapping into a wider societal anxiety around how much time we now spend online and plugged in. But the Baroness' critics argue that her pronouncements are vague, sensationalised and evidence-lite. The fact she mentioned this specific new study provides a rare opportunity to examine what she considers to be strong evidence backing her claims. Let's take a look.

The research team led by Yalda Uhls studied two groups of pupils at a state school in Southern California. Both had an average age of 11 years and said they usually spent an average of 4.5 hours a day texting, watching TV and video-gaming. One group of 51 children was sent on a five-day outdoor education camp 70 miles outside of California. Mobile devices, computers and TVs were banned. The children lived together in cabins, went on hikes, and worked as a team to build emergency shelters. The other group of 54 children attended five days of school as usual.

On Monday at the beginning of the week, both groups completed two psychological tests. The first required that they identify the emotions displayed by photographs of actors' faces. The second involved identifying the emotions displayed by characters in short video clips of social scenes, in which the sound was switched off. At the end of the week, on Friday, both groups completed the tests again.

Uhls and her colleagues highlight the fact that the summer camp group improved more on the face test over the course of the week, as compared with the school group. The summer camp group also showed improvement on the video test, whereas the school group showed no such improvement (the camp scores rose from 26 per cent correct to 31 per cent; the school group flatlined at 28 per cent). The researchers' conclusion: "This study provides evidence that, in five days of being limited to in-person interaction without access to screen-based or media device for communication, preteens improved on measures of nonverbal emotion understanding, significantly more than the control group."

Unfortunately there are a number of acute problems with this study, which make this conclusion insupportable. Above all, the experiences of the two groups of children varied in so many different ways, other than the fact that one group was banned from screen technologies, that it is impossible to know what factors may have led to any group differences.

It's also notable that the summer camp group performed worse at the two tests at the start of the week as compared with the school group. For example, they began with an average of 14 errors on the face task whereas the school group made an average of just 9. Perhaps the camp kids were distracted because they were excited or anxious about the week ahead. We don't know because the researchers didn't measure any other psychological factors such as mood or motivation. By the end of the week, the two groups registered a similar number of errors on the face task. In other words, the technology-free summer camp kids didn't end the week with super interpersonal skills, they'd merely caught up with their screen-addled school colleagues.

We can also speculate about why the school kids didn't show improvement on the video task, whereas the summer campers did. Perhaps, after a long school week, the children at school were tired out. The campers, by contrast, may well have been on a high after their week in the wilderness with friends. Technology might have had nothing to do with it.

Other problems with the study are more generic, but just as serious. The children were not randomised to the two conditions. There's no mention that the people administering the emotional tests were blinded to which children were allocated to which condition, nor to the aims of the study, which introduces the risk they might have inadvertently influenced the results.

In fairness, Uhls and her team admit to many of these shortcomings in their paper, but it doesn't stop them from interpreting their results in line with their prior beliefs about the likely harmful effects of digital technologies, which they outline at the start of their paper. They couch their findings firmly in the wider context of technology fears, and they hope their paper will be "a call to action for research that thoroughly and systematically examines the effects of digital media on children's social development."

Is it easy to understand why Baroness Professor Greenfield was pleased with this study. I will leave you to judge whether she was right to label it "brilliant", and whether the results do anything to support her arguments about the adverse effects of digital technology on developing minds.
_________________________________

 
Uhls, Y., Michikyan, M., Morris, J., Garcia, D., Small, G., Zgourou, E., & Greenfield, P. (2014). Five days at outdoor education camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues Computers in Human Behavior, 39, 387-392 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036

--further reading--
Do television and video games impact on the wellbeing of younger children?
The internet probably isn't ruining your teenager's brain.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The 10 most controversial psychology studies ever published

Controversy is essential to scientific progress. As Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Nothing is taken on faith, all assumptions are open to further scrutiny. It's a healthy sign therefore that psychology studies continue to generate great controversy. Often the heat is created by arguments about the logic or ethics of the methods, other times it's because of disagreements about the implications of the findings to our understanding of human nature. Here we digest ten of the most controversial studies in psychology's history. Please use the comments to have your say on these controversies, or to highlight provocative studies that you think should have made it onto our list.

1. The Stanford Prison Experiment
Conducted in 1971, Philip Zimbardo's experiment had to be aborted when students allocated to the role of prison guards began abusing students who were acting as prisoners. Zimbardo interpreted the events as showing that certain situations inevitably turn good people bad, a theoretical stance he later applied to the acts of abuse that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison camp in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. This situationist interpretation has been challenged, most forcibly by the British psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam. The pair argue, on the basis of their own BBC Prison study and real-life instances of prisoner resistance, that people do not yield mindlessly to toxic environments. Rather, in any situation, power resides in the group that manages to establish a sense of shared identity. Critics also point out that Zimbardo led and inspired his abusive prison guards; that the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) may have attracted particular personality types; and that many guards did behave appropriately. The debate continues, as does the influence of the SPE on popular culture, so far inspiring at least two feature length movies.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1972). Comment: Pathology of imprisonment. Society, 9(6), 4-8. Google Scholar Citations: 324.
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews, 9(1-17). Google Scholar Citations: 216.


2. The Milgram "Shock Experiments"

Stanley Milgram's studies conducted in the 1960s appeared to show that many people are incredibly obedient to authority.  Given the instruction from a scientist, many participants applied what they thought were deadly levels of electricity to an innocent person. Not one study, but several, Milgram's research has inspired many imitations, including in virtual reality and in the form of a French TV show. The original studies have attracted huge controversy, not only because of their ethically dubious nature, but also because of the way they have been interpreted and used to explain historical events such as the supposedly blind obedience to authority in the Nazi era. Haslam and Reicher have again been at the forefront of counter-arguments. Most recently, based on archived feedback from Milgram's participants, the pair argue that the observed obedience was far from blind - in fact many participants were pleased to have taken part, so convinced were they that their efforts were making an important contribution to science. It's also notable that many participants in fact disobeyed instructions, and in such cases, verbal prompts from the scientist were largely ineffective.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371. Google Scholar Citations: 3474


3. The "Elderly-related Words Provoke Slow Walking" Experiment (and other social priming research)

One of the experiments in a 1996 paper published by John Bargh and colleagues showed that when people were exposed to words that pertained to being old, they subsequently walked away from the lab more slowly. This finding is just one of many in the field of "social priming" research, all of which suggest our minds are far more open to influence than we realise. In 2012, a different lab tried to replicate the elderly words study and failed. Professor Bargh reacted angrily. Ever since, the controversy over his study and other related findings has only intensified. Highlights of the furore include an open letter from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman to researchers working in the area, and a mass replication attempt of several studies in social psychology, including social priming effects. Much of the disagreement centres around whether replication attempts in this area fail because the original effects don't exist, or because those attempting a replication lack the necessary research skills, make statistical errors, or fail to perfectly match the original research design.

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of personality and social psychology, 71(2), 230. Google Scholar Citations: 3276


4. The Conditioning of Little Albert

Back in 1920 John Watson and his future wife Rosalie Rayner deliberately induced fears in an 11-month-old baby. They did this by exposing him to a particular animal, such as a white rat, at the same time as banging a steel bar behind his head. The research is controversial not just because it seems so unethical, but also because the results have tended to be reported in an inaccurate and overly simplified way. Many textbooks claim the study shows how fears are easily conditioned and generalised to similar stimuli; they say that after being conditioned to fear a white rat, Little Albert subsequently feared all things that were white and fluffy. In fact, the results were far messier and more inconsistent than that, and the methodology was poorly controlled. Over the last few years, controversy has also developed around the identity of poor Little Albert. In 2009, a team led by Hall Beck claimed that the baby was in fact Douglas Merritte. They later claimed that Merritte was neurologically impaired, which if true would only add to the unethical nature of the original research. However, a new paper published this year by Ben Harris and colleagues argues that Little Albert was actually a child known as Albert Barger.

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(1), 1. Google Scholar Citations: 2031

5. Loftus' "Lost in The Mall" Study
In 1995 and '96, Elizabeth Loftus, James Coan and Jacqueline Pickrell documented how easy it was to implant in people a fictitious memory of having been lost in a shopping mall as a child. The false childhood event is simply described to a participant alongside true events, and over a few interviews it soon becomes absorbed into the person's true memories, so that they think the experience really happened. The research and other related findings became hugely controversial because they showed how unreliable and suggestible memory can be. In particular, this cast doubt on so-called "recovered memories" of abuse that originated during sessions of psychotherapy. This is a highly sensitive area and experts continue to debate the nature of false memories, repression and recovered memories. One challenge to the "lost in the mall" study was that participants may really have had the childhood experience of having been lost, in which case Loftus' methodology was recovering lost memories of the incident rather than implanting false memories. This criticism was refuted in a later study (pdf) in which Loftus and her colleagues implanted in people the memory of having met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Cartoon aficionados will understand why this memory was definitely false.

Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric annals, 25(12), 720-725. Google Scholar Citations: 677
Loftus, E. F., Coan, J. A., & Pickrell, J. E. (1996). Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. Implicit memory and metacognition, 195-220. Google Scholar Citations: 71
Loftus, E. F. (1993). The reality of repressed memories. American psychologist, 48(5), 518. Google Scholar Citations: 1413

6. The Daryl Bem Pre-cognition Study
In 2010 social psychologist Daryl Bem attracted huge attention when he claimed to have shown that many established psychological phenomena work backwards in time. For instance, in one of his experiments, he found that people performed better at a memory task for words they revised in the future. Bem interpreted this as evidence for pre-cognition, or psi - that is, effects that can't be explained by current scientific understanding. Superficially at least, Bem's methodology appeared robust, and he took the laudable step of making his procedures readily available to other researchers. However, many experts have since criticised Bem's methods and statistical analyses (pdf), and many replication attempts have failed to support the original findings. Further controversy came from the the fact that the journal that published Bem's results refused at first to publish any replication attempts. This prompted uproar in the research community and contributed to what's become known as the "replication crisis" or "replication wars" in psychology. Unabashed, Bem published a meta-analysis this year (an analysis that collated results from 90 attempts to replicate his 2010 findings) and he concluded that overall there was solid support for his earlier work. Where will this controversy head next? If Bem's right, you probably know the answer already.

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(3), 407. Google Scholar Citations: 276

7. The Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience study
This paper was released online before print, where it initially bore the provocative title "Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience". Voodoo in this sense meant non-existent or spurious. Ed Vul and his colleagues had analysed over 50 studies that linked localised patterns of brain activity with specific aspects of behaviour or emotion, such as one that reported feelings of rejection were correlated highly with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. Vul and his team said the high correlations reported in these papers were due to the use of inappropriate analyses - a form of "double-dipping" in which researchers took two or more steps: first identifying a region, or even a single voxel, linked with a certain behaviour, and then performing further analyses on just that area. The paper caused great offence to the many brain imaging researchers in social neuroscience whose work had been targeted. "Several of [Vul et al's] conclusions are incorrect due to flawed reasoning, statistical errors, and sampling anomalies," said the authors of one rebuttal paper. However, concerns about the statistical analyses used in imaging neuroscience haven't gone away. For example, in 2012 Joshua Carp wrote a paper claiming that most imaging papers fail to provide enough methodological detail to allow others to attempt replications.

Vul, E., Harris, C., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2009). Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition. Perspectives on psychological science, 4(3), 274-290. Google Scholar Citations: 688.

8. The Kirsch Anti-Depressant Placebo Effect Study
In 2008 Irving Kirsch, a psychologist who was then based at the University of Hull in the UK, analysed all the trial data on anti-depressants, published and unpublished, submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration. He and his colleagues concluded that for most people with mild or moderate depression, the extra benefit of anti-depressants versus placebo is not clinically meaningful.  The results led to headlines like "Depression drugs don't work" and provided ammunition for people concerned with the overprescription of antidepressant medication. But there was also a backlash. Other experts analysed Kirsch's dataset using different methods and came to different conclusions. Another group made similar findings to Kirsch, but interpreted them very differently - as showing that drugs are more effective than placebo. Kirsch is standing his ground. Writing earlier this year, he said: "Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future."

Kirsch, I., Deacon, B. J., Huedo-Medina, T. B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T. J., & Johnson, B. T. (2008). Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS medicine, 5(2), e45. Google Scholar Citations: 1450.

9. Judith Rich Harris and the "Nurture Assumption"
You could fill a library or two with all the books that have been published on how to be a better parent. The implicit assumption, of course, is that parents play a profound role in shaping their offspring. Judith Rich Harris challenged this idea with a provocative paper published in 1995 in which she proposed that children are shaped principally by their peer groups and their experiences outside of the home. She followed this up with two best-selling books: The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. Writing for the BPS Research Digest in 2007, Harris described some of the evidence that supports her claims: "identical twins reared by different parents are (on average) as similar in personality as those reared by the same parents ... adoptive siblings reared by the same parents are as dissimilar as those reared by different parents ... [and] ... children reared by immigrant parents have the personality characteristics of the country they were reared in, rather than those of their parents' native land." Harris has powerful supporters, Steven Pinker among them, but her ideas also unleashed a storm of controversy and criticism. "I am embarrassed for psychology," Jerome Kagan told Newsweek after the publication of Harris' Nurture Assumption.

Harris, J. R. (1995). Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological review, 102(3), 458. Google Scholar Citations: 1535

10. Libet's Challenge to Free Will

Your decisions feel like your own, but Benjamin Libet's study using electroencephalography (EEG) appeared to show that preparatory brain activity precedes your conscious decisions of when to move. One controversial interpretation is that this challenges the notion that you have free will. The decision of when to move is made non-consciously, so the argument goes, and then your subjective sense of having willed that act is tagged on afterwards. Libet's study and others like it have inspired deep philosophical debate. Some philosophers like Daniel Dennett believe that neuroscientists have overstated the implications of these kinds of findings for people's conception of free will. Other researchers have pointed out flaws in Libet's research, such as people's inaccuracy in judging the instant of their own will. However, the principle of non-conscious neural activity preceding conscious will has been replicated using fMRI, and influential neuroscientists like Sam Harris continue to argue that Libet's work undermines the idea of free will.

Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential) the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106(3), 623-642. Google Scholar Citations: 1483

Where do you stand on the implications and interpretations of these 10 psychology studies/theories? Which controversial studies do you think should have made it onto our list?
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How burnt-out students could be skewing psychology research

It's well known that psychology research relies too heavily on student volunteers. So many findings are assumed to apply to people in general, when they could be a quirk unique to undergrads. Now Michael Nicholls and his colleagues have drawn attention to another problem with relying on student participants - those who volunteer late in their university term or semester lack motivation and tend to perform worse than those who volunteer early.

A little background about student research participants. Psychology students often volunteer for numerous studies throughout a semester. Usually, they're compelled to do this at least once in return for course credits that count towards their degree. Other times they receive cash or other forms of compensation. When in the semester they opt to volunteer for course credit is usually down to their discretion. To over-generalise, conscientious students tend to volunteer early in semester, whereas less disciplined students leave it until last minute, when time is short and deadlines are pressing.

Nicholls team first recruited 40 students participants (18 men) at Flinders University during the third week of a 14-week semester.  Half of them were first years who'd chosen to volunteer early in return for course credits. The other half of the participants, who hailed from various year groups, had chosen the option to receive $10 compensation. The challenge for both groups of students was the same - to perform 360 trials of a sustained attention task. Each trial they had to press a button as fast as possible if they saw any number between 1 and 9, except for the number 3, in which case they were to withhold responding.

At this early stage of the semester there was no difference in the performance (based on speed and accuracy) of the students who volunteered for course credit or for money. There was also no difference in their motivation levels, as revealed in a questionnaire.

Later in the semester, between weeks 9 to 12, the researchers repeated the exercise, with 20 more students who'd enrolled for course credit and 20 more who'd applied to participate in return for cash compensation. Now the researchers found a difference between the groups. Those participants receiving financial payment outperformed those who had volunteered in return for course credit. The latter group also showed more variability in their performance than their course-credit counterparts had done at the start of the semester, and they reported having lower motivation.

These results suggest that students who wait to volunteer for course credit until late in the semester lack motivation and their performance suffers as a result. Nicholls and his colleagues explained that their findings have serious implications for experimental design. "A lack of motivation and/or poorer performance may introduce noise into the data and obscure effects that may have been significant otherwise. Such effects become particularly problematic when experiments are conducted at different times of semester and the results are compared."

One possible solution for researchers planning to compare findings across experiments conducted at different ends of a semester, is to ensure that they only test paid participants. Unlike participants who are volunteering for course credit, those who are paid seem to have consistent performance and motivation across the semester.

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Nicholls, M., Loveless, K., Thomas, N., Loetscher, T., & Churches, O. (2014). Some participants may be better than others: Sustained attention and motivation are higher early in semester The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-19 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.925481

--further reading--
The use and abuse of student participants
Improving the student participant experience

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.