Comment author: AnlamK 01 April 2011 08:04:50PM 12 points [-]

If our situation controls our behavior (let's try to bracket "to what extent" and "how" it does so), then wouldn't it also control what kind of situation we will go for?

Here's an example from an Orwell essay: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."

And then I've always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?

Note that the folk do seem to allow for some 'situationism' - for example, when someone gets drunk, we admit they'll have a different persona and some more than others.

Comment author: jake987722 01 April 2011 11:17:10PM *  15 points [-]

If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?

Jones and Nisbett attempted to answer this question in their classic paper on actor-observer bias. It's an interesting read.

However, beware of falling into an overly strict interpretation of situationism (as I think Jones and Nisbett did) which amounts to little more than behaviorism in new clothes. People do tend to underestimate the extent to which their behavior and the behavior of others is driven by the environment, but there is nevertheless still good evidence that stable dispositions predict a respectable chunk of the variance in a person's behavior (where "respectable" means "similar in size to that for the situational data"). One of the errors of the strict situationist movement that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s is that it relied on an implicit endorsement of Kahneman and Tversky's "law of small numbers": situationist researchers erroneously expected a very small sample of a person's behavior (such as a single encounter with a person in need of help) to be representative of the general population of behaviors from which it was drawn. Not surprisingly, they found that stable dispositions are a modest predictor of these small samples of behavior. However, we have since learned that when behavior is properly aggregated across time, a robust effect of stable dispositions reliably emerges.

So in short, part of the reason that people have robust theories of character traits is almost surely that they actually map pretty well onto the territory. Situationism remains a useful paradigm, but it can easily be taken too far.

Comment author: jake987722 29 March 2011 06:34:54PM *  3 points [-]

Wikipedia has a page on Just-world phenomenon which lists the following references:

Lerner, M, & Simmons, CH. (1966). Observer reaction to the 'innocent victim': Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4 (2): 203–210.

Carli, L.L. (1999). Cognitive reconstruction, hindsight, and reactions to victims and perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979.

Lerner, M.J. & Miller, D.T. (1978). Just world research and the attribution process: Looking back and ahead. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 1030-1051.

I bet that a "related articles" search on ISI Web of Science for the Carli 1999 article will turn up some additional relevant, and hopefully more recent, papers.

Edit: Some additional references from Wiki page on Victim blaming

Janoffbulman, R. (1985). Cognitive biases in blaming the victim. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 21: 161–178.

Maes, Jürgen (1994). Blaming the victim: Belief in control or belief in justice? Social Justice Research 7: 69–90.

McCaul, K. D.; Veltum, L. G.; Boyechko, V.; Crawford, J. J. (1990). Understanding Attributions of Victim Blame for Rape: Sex, Violence, and Foreseeability. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 20: 1–26.

Comment author: teageegeepea 14 September 2010 06:22:45PM 2 points [-]

I don't want to address the introductory scenario much, but there's debate about what the IAT actually predicts.

Comment author: jake987722 15 September 2010 08:18:32AM 0 points [-]

I can report with some degree of confidence that the Blanton paper represents a skeptical view which is very much a minority in the field. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's biased or "wrong," but I think a LessWronger such as yourself will understand what this suggests regarding the intellectual status of their claims.

A couple papers to balance out the view from above:

Rebuttal to above by authors of "reanalyzed" study http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/hanges/Ziegert%20and%20Hanges%202009.pdf

Reply to a different but similar Tetlock-and-friends critique: http://www.columbia.edu/~dc2534/RIOB_jost.et.al.pdf

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 June 2010 01:46:45AM 0 points [-]

How do you apply that to cases where the response is a task that can stretch out over an hour?

Comment author: jake987722 01 July 2010 09:32:39PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure. You may not be able to in any feasible or satisfactory way, which was sort of my point.

Comment author: jake987722 21 June 2010 08:42:44PM 2 points [-]

This sort of conditioning works best when the reward is administered within about 500 ms of the response (sorry, don't have a citation). Something to keep in mind.

In response to comment by Kaj_Sotala on CogSci books
Comment author: taw 21 April 2010 04:01:45AM 0 points [-]

In my experience, Googling tends to give far deeper knowledge, as everything has explorable context - you can focus onto anything and out for wider view until it integrates well with your mental model of the world. This kind of integrated contextual knowledge together with some practice can go very deep.

Books just try to mindlessly ram information things through, but it just doesn't work for me. At all. I only ever use them for entertainment.

It's possible that people work differently, but I don't terribly like such hypotheses. It's also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don't yet have information available on the Internet - in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.

In response to comment by taw on CogSci books
Comment author: jake987722 22 April 2010 06:43:28AM *  4 points [-]

It's also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don't yet have information available on the Internet - in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.

It's not the first possibility, it's the second. I'm quite comfortable in saying that I am very capable at finding specific online content if it's out there to be found. The problem is that most of the disciplines I'm interested in reading about don't have the good, hard content available for free on the web. (Scientific journals can be accessed online, but these are just books.) It is not the "normal case" that far more information than one could want is available online for most domains, it is absolutely the abnormal case. To be frank, the idea that one could ever get a thorough grounding in any serious, empirical scientific discipline by scouring the Internet is, at least at this time, laughable.

In response to CogSci books
Comment author: jake987722 20 April 2010 11:43:43PM *  1 point [-]

That's a pretty good list they have going, but in my opinion the Gigerenzer et al. volume should be replaced by one published 3 years earlier by the same research group: Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. It's the same basic thing, but a bit more comprehensive and more directly relevant to cognitive psych (no chapters on animal rationality and etc).

Also, while the 1982 H&B volume is obviously very good and certainly belongs on the list, the picture is pretty incomplete without the updated 2002 H&B volume as well as Choices, Values, and Frames (1999).

Comment author: jake987722 17 April 2010 12:47:29AM 6 points [-]

Hi.

I'm a grad student studying social psychology, more or less in the heuristics & biases tradition. I've been loosely following the blog for maybe six months or so. The discussions are always thought provoking and frequently amusing. I hope to participate more in the near future.

Comment author: Cyan 23 February 2010 06:59:29PM *  2 points [-]

No criteria to decide on, just revising of probabilities?

The formal decision-making machinery involves picking a loss function and minimizing posterior expected loss.

Comment author: jake987722 23 February 2010 07:13:36PM 1 point [-]

Okay, but is it a part of the typical Bayesian routine to wield formal decision theory, or do we just calculate P(H|E) and call it a day?

Comment author: JohannesDahlstrom 23 February 2010 04:50:57PM *  9 points [-]

Selection bias. Those of us (including myself) who agreed with Alicorn probably didn't feel a need to reply just to signal their agreement.

Comment author: jake987722 23 February 2010 06:39:09PM 0 points [-]

We could just as easily imagine the selection bias having worked the other way (LessWrongers are hardly a representative sample and some have motivated reasons for choosing one way or another, especially having read through the thread), but you're of course right that, in any case, this sample isn't telling us much.

I thought the baby was cuter... but why bother voting in a meaningless poll like this? (No offense :P)

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