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[Link] Lifehack article promoting rationality-themed ideas, namely long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency

9 Gleb_Tsipursky 11 January 2016 08:14PM

Here's my article in Lifehack, one of the most prominent self-improvement websites, bringing rationality-style ideas to a broad audience, specifically long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency :-)

 

P.S. Based on feedback from the LessWrong community, I made sure to avoid mentioning LessWrong or rationality in the article.

The File Drawer Effect and Conformity Bias (Election Edition)

31 Salemicus 08 May 2015 04:51PM

As many of you may be aware, the UK general election took place yesterday, resulting in a surprising victory for the Conservative Party. The pre-election opinion polls predicted that the Conservatives and Labour would be roughly equal in terms of votes cast, with perhaps a small Conservative advantage leading to a hung parliament; instead the Conservatives got 36.9% of the vote to Labour's 30.4%, and won the election outright.

There has already been a lot of discussion about why the polls were wrong, from methodological problems to incorrect adjustments. But perhaps more interesting is the possibility that the polls were right! For example, Survation did a poll on the evening before the election, which predicted the correct result (Conservatives 37%, Labour 31%). However, that poll was never published because the results seemed "out of line." Survation didn't want to look silly by breaking with the herd, so they just kept quiet about their results. Naturally this makes me wonder about the existence of other unpublished polls with similar readings.

This seems to be a case of two well know problems colliding with devastating effect. Conformity bias caused Survation to ignore the data and go with what they "knew" to be the case (for which they have now paid dearly). And then the file drawer effect meant that the generally available data was skewed, misleading third parties. The scientific thing to do is to publish all data, including "outliers," both so that information can change over time rather than be anchored, and to avoid artificially compressing the variance. Interestingly, the exit poll, which had a methodology agreed beforehand and was previously committed to be published, was basically right.

This is now the third time in living memory that opinion polls have been embarrassingly wrong about the UK general election. Each time this has lead to big changes in the polling industry. I would suggest that one important scientific improvement is for polling companies to announce the methodology of a poll and any adjustments to be made before the poll takes place, and commit to publishing all polls they carry out. Once this became the norm, data from any polling company that didn't follow this practice would be rightly seen as unreliable by comparison.

[Link] Is the Endowment Effect Real?

7 Matt_Simpson 26 February 2013 10:47PM

Under fairly weak assumptions, the most a standard rational economic agent is willing to pay for an item they don't own (WTP) and the least they're willing to accept in exchange for that item if they already own it (WTA) should be identical. In experiments with humans, psychologists and economists have repeatedly found WTP-WTA gaps suggesting that humans aren't rational in at least this specific way. This has been interpreted as the endowment effect* and evidence for prospect theory. According to prospect theory, people are loss averse. Roughly this means that that, given their current ownership set, people value not losing stuff more highly than gaining stuff. Thus once someone gains ownership of something they suddenly value it much more highly. This "endowment effect"* on one's valuation of an item has been put forth as an explanation for the observed WTP - WTA gaps.

*Wikipedia confusingly defines the endowment effect as the gap itself, i.e. as the phenomena to be explained instead of the explanation. I suspect this is a difference in terminology among economists and psychologists, where psychologists use the wiki definition and economists use the definition I give here. However, calling the WTP-WTA gap an "endowment effect" is a bit misleading because a priori the gap may not have anything to endowments at all.

A paper (pdf) by Charlie Plott and Kathryn Zeiler investigates WTP-WTA gaps and it turns out that they may just be due to subjects not quite understanding the experimental protocols, particularly in the value elicitation process. Here's an important quote from their conclusion, but do read the paper for details: 

The issue explored here is not whether a WTP-WTA gap can be observed. Clearly, the experiments of KKT and others show not only that gaps can be observed, but also that they are replicable. Instead, our interest lies in the interpretation of observed gaps. The primary conclusion derived from the data reported here is that observed WTP-WTA gaps do not reflect a fundamental feature of human preferences. That is, endowment effect theory does not seem to explain observed gaps. In addition, our results suggest that observed gaps should not be interpreted as support for prospect theory.

A review of the literature reveals that WTP-WTA gaps are not reliably observed across experimental designs. Given the nature of reported experimental designs, we posited that differences in experimental procedures might account for the differences across reported results. This conjecture prompted us to develop procedures to test for the robustness of the phenomenon. We conducted comparative experiments using procedures commonly used in studies that report observed gaps (i.e., KKT). We also employed a "revealed theory" methodology to identify procedures reported in the literature that provide clues about experimenter notions regarding subject misconceptions. We then conducted experiments that implemented the union of procedures used by experimentalists to control for subject misconceptions. The comparative experiments demonstrate that WTP-WTA gaps are indeed sensitive to experimental procedures. By implementing different procedures, the phenomenon can be turned on and off. When procedures used in studies that report the gap are employed, the gap is readily observed. When a full set of controls is implemented, the gap is not observed.

The fact that the gap can be turned on and off demonstrates that interpreting gaps as support for endowment effect theory is problematic. The mere observation of the phenomenon does not support loss aversion-a very special form of preferences in which gains are valued less than losses. That the phenomenon can be turned on and off while holding the good constant supports a strong rejection of the claim that WTP-WTA gaps support a particular theory of preferences posited by prospect theory. Loss aversion might in some sense characterize preferences, but such a theory most likely does not explain observed WTP-WTA gaps. Exactly what accounts for observed WTP-WTA gaps? The thesis of this paper is that observed gaps are symptomatic of subjects' misconceptions about the nature of the experimental task. The differences reported in the literature reflect differences in experimental controls for misconceptions as opposed to differences in the nature of the commodity (e.g., candy, money, mugs, lotteries, etc.) under study.

 

[Link] "First Is Best" - The serial position effect / primacy effect

4 aelephant 05 July 2012 03:01AM

"First is Best"

Abstract
We experience the world serially rather than simultaneously. A century of research on human and nonhuman animals has suggested that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged. We report three experiments designed to test the effect of first position on implicit preference and choice using targets that range from individual humans and social groups to consumer goods.

While this effect has been known about for many years, these researchers added an interesting component, an "Implicit Association Test (IAT)":

Each option within a pair was presented sequentially for 30-seconds and participants were forced to maximally consider both options. Immediately after each choice-pair was presented, participants completed a measure which assessed automatic preference for each option (an Implicit Association Test, or IAT) [22].

and

Regardless of the actual option, the one presented first compared to the one presented next was significantly more strongly associated with the concept ‘‘better’’ rather than ‘‘worse’’, F(1, 121) =20.20, p,.001; effect size r =.38 (Figure 1). There was no difference in self-reported preference for firsts versus seconds, F(1, 121) =.08, p= .78.

I was surprised to find there is no reference to "recency", "primacy" or "serial position" on the LessWrong Wiki. A search on LessWrong.com for "recency effect" turns up 8 posts that mention it but don't give it a thorough discussion as far as I can tell; "primacy effect" turns up 1 post about Rationality & Criminal Law; and "serial position" turns up nothing. Is there another name for this effect that I'm missing?

Wikipedia has some discussion of the serial position effect here, although from a quick skim it doesn't appear that they talk about preference at all.

Social status & testosterone

28 gwern 20 October 2011 02:05PM

We’ve discussed signaling and status endlessly on LW; I think this is right up our vein: a 2011 review of research on the connections between famous male hormone testosterone and various forms of social interaction and especially social status, Eisenegger et al’s “The role of testosterone in social interaction”. (I grabbed this PDF in the short time Elsevier left full-text available, but only now, with some modafinil-powered spare time, have gotten around to excerpting it for you guys.)

1 Abstract

Although animal researchers established the role of testosterone as a ‘social hormone’ decades ago, the investigation of its causal influence on human social behaviors has only recently begun. Here, we review and discuss recent studies showing the causal effects of testosterone on social interactions in animals and humans, and outline the basic neurobiological mechanisms that might underlie these effects. Based on these recent findings, we argue that the role of testosterone in human social behavior might be best understood in terms of the search for, and maintenance of, social status.

continue reading »

Mental Rebooting: "Your Brain on Porn"...

11 [deleted] 15 October 2011 05:14PM

... or "How to Operate Your Limbic System", or "A Practical Guide to Superstimulus". That's how I see it, anyway.

Your Brain on Porn is a website mainly dedicated to exposing the addictive aspects of pornographyinterpreting this in light of the blind idiot god; and then forming a community around "rebooting", or prolonged abstinence that allows the brain to re-sensitize itself to, at the least, non-fetishistic sexual pleasure. By consistently NOT accessing whatever circuit is driving one's, well, drive, one sends this loop into atrophy. Eventually, one becomes able to quit. And then one finds alternatives.

Here is why I find this site so valuable: frequently during the arguments the site owner sets up, he doesn't just bring up pornography as the culprit here. To form his clauses he draws upon research on  addictions to junk food, or video games, and then tries to draw parallels to porn's effects: the escalating need of novelty due to rapidly declining pleasure response.

So I don't think it stops with porn. For me, any superstimulus is a bad superstimulus, despite the fact that some sirens are more necessary to listen to than others. It could be worth reflecting on what would actually count as a superstimulus; and then asking if one would benefit from a long hiatus from that stimulus. I'm not sure how long that cycle would be, but many "rebooters" proclaim seeing effects after three weeks, up to three months. It might not be enough to simply manage akrasia, as there could still be a chronic sensitivity problem in place. That would require time.

Here's what I thought of, so far.

Superstimulus List:

  • Porn.
  • Tab explosions and social networks -- the online kind. (This could be the most challenging one: More often than not, a computer is needed for productivity. Who can afford taking a three-month break?)
  • Video games.
  • Disorganizations, mess, and clutter.
  • Junk food. (I'm tentative about this one, because I'm still trying to figure out what counts as "junk". As far as I've seen, this word usually gets ascribed to high calorie, high fat foods... but that possibly doesn't matter, as I see proportionally high-fat content paleo diets. Or it's a combination of fat and sugar that becomes addictive, but either/or is manageable.)
  • Loud music. (Shameless speculation.)
  • Much of advertising today seems to focus on getting our attention with superstimulus. Thus, being mindful when one is exposed could minimize possible effects.
Replacements:
  • Touch. If you really need to show some love,  Karezza  is popular amongst those who have rebooted.
  • Meditation and N-Back. Since this really does require mental discipline, it would be worth practising these attention-management strategies.
  • Exercise.
  • Fasting. (In small doses,  it's probably healthier than you think  and, broadly speaking, also results in some sort of re-sensitization. [scroll down])
Potential Benefits:
  • Reduction of social anxiety. (Socially dominant monkeys have a greater density of dopamine receptors in the striatum than their less-dominant counterparts. I'm not saying that abstaining from porn will turn you into the CEO of a corporation with three girlfriends and a gimp -- I wish! -- but it sure as hell wouldn't hurt.)
  • Clearer focus. (This may come from lack of wont than an actual greater ability to focus, which is fine.)
  • Greater motivation.
Think of it like this: if all your adaptive needs are fulfilled, what incentive is there for your body to maximize your fitness? For all  it  knows, you've done a great job: you are now in the dreaded Comfort Zone.
Abstinence puts one outside of the realm of comfort, but not to the point of putting one in harm's way. It requires no "push", just self-awareness; something I would consider as the lowest hanging fruit of self-improvement.
None of these lists are exhaustive. The whole principle could be unsound; I am only a third into  just trying it  and this excludes Internet use management.

Another Mechanism for the Placebo Effect?

6 jimrandomh 05 October 2011 01:55AM

The placebo effect (benefit in groups receiving fake pills) and nocebo effect (detriment in those same groups) have frequently been the bane of medical research. They are usually explained in terms of psychology: because people receiving placebos believe they have been treated, they get psychosomatic effects that cure symptoms and create side effects. This explanation is supported by the fact that the placebo effect is strongest when the effect being studied is subjective - eg, tests of painkillers and antidepressants. This explanation is neat, tidy, and in my opinion, altogether unsatisfying.

I have an alternative theory. Most people in medical studies take more than one medication; in addition to the drug being studied, they take unrelated drugs and supplements, usually including a multivitamin and often including other things they were prescribed. However, many people take their pills inconsistently; they miss or mistime some fraction of their doses. This is especially true of depressed people. Prescribing a placebo, however, fixes this; when they take their placebo pill in the morning, they are reminded to take everything else they should be taking. In addition to making pill-taking more salient, being prescribed a placebo may also cause some people to fix the organization and affordances they have for taking pills.

I suspect that many of the benefits attributed from placebos may in fact be due to increased compliance with unrelated prescriptions and correction of vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Arranging a study to test this should be fairly straightforward; simply measure the rate at which unrelated prescriptions are refilled in two groups, one of which receives sugar pills and one of which does not.