Self-Knowledge . . . ?

This past week’s readings on the self dealt with the topic of “self-knowledge.” Do we have self-knowledge? Are we aware of what motivates or influences us? More specifically, the papers were investigations into how well we can recognize, predict, and explain our own behaviors. And, apparently, the general conclusion is that we are not very good at it at all.

Firstly, we often overestimate our performances in most domains. In general, we think we are better than average, while everyone else is at or lower than average. As well, we overestimate how much group successes are due to our individual effort, whereas we underestimate how much we contribute to group failures. We even overestimate predictions of our own future behaviors, compared to our predictions of the future behavior of random people. For instance, we might think that we are more likely to vote in future elections than a random person that we haven’t met before. Such errors in estimation are often due to cognitive biases that make us rely on self-assessments, while ignoring population base rates. As per the voting example, perhaps we know that we’ve voted before, and through that self-assessment we think that we’ll be more likely to vote again compared to a random person. Yet we ignore the fact that there’s always a significant proportion of the population that doesn’t vote in a given election. So, in other words, we’re very ego-centric! We aren’t very good about thinking of ourselves in statistical terms. Yet, we seem to be more accurate in making judgments of others. Why is this? Is it because we are unconsciously self-enhancing? Are we trying to heighten our self-esteem?

Anthony Greenwald calls these biases, the “totalitarian ego.” The totalitarian ego is comprised of three major cognitive biases that serve to preserve order in “intrapsychic” organization. Beneffectance is the tendency to take credit for success while denying responsibility for failure. Cognitive conservatism is the tendency to preserve existing knowledge structures (e.g., memories, schemata, etc.). And egocentricity is the over-perception of the self as influencer of events beyond realistic control, as well as the over-perception of the self as the targets of other’s actions (e.g., paranoia). With these biases, we can rewrite memories to fit the existing cognitive structure. The totalitarian ego makes us unable to accurately report on stimuli that influences our behavior. We even fail to realize a change in our past attitudes to those of our present attitudes when a change does occur. Take the very simplistic example: Suppose that you used to hate chocolate. And then, I started making you eat chocolate, but only after you took a pill that activated some “pleasure center” of the brain. And perhaps I told you that this pill was just a placebo that would have no perceivable effect on your body. Well, you would probably start liking chocolate. Now if I asked you, “why do you like chocolate?,” you’d probably answer that it tasted good. You wouldn’t realize that you were influenced by the pill. So, then I blatantly tell you what the pill did as you ate chocolate. You would likely still fail to acknowledge that the pill had any effect on your chocolate preference. Even more interestingly, you may not even realize that you used to hate eating chocolate in the first place. Weird.

Part of this may be due to those cognitive biases of the totalitarian ego, and then there’s the concept called the “adaptive unconscious.” As Wilson and Dunn explain, much of the processing that goes on in our minds is unconscious and we are simply unable to access this information into conscious processing. So much goes on around us. There is an infinite amount of information out there, and it would be completely exhausting to take it all in and analyze it. So we perceive the stimuli around us through our adaptive unconscious, to help us get around and make quick split decisions. Yet, just because we perceive it, doesn’t mean we can remember it. Only things that enter conscious awareness can enter into our short-term, and eventually long-term, memory.

So that’s essentially the gist of our readings. We have self-knowledge, but only to the point that we might realize the behaviors we are currently doing. But when we’re asked why we are doing them, how good are we at doing them, if we did them before, and will we do them again, we seem to answer with a story that we make up for ourselves, unconsciously, to fit this idea of who we think we are. Fun stuff.

Here are citations of the articles we read, in case you’re interested:

Epley, N., & Dunning, D. (2006). The mixed blessings of self-knowledge in behavioral prediction: Enhanced discrimination but exacerbated bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 641-655.

Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603-618.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121-1134.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.

Wilson, T.D., & Dunn, E. (2004). Self-knowledge: Its limits, value, and potential for improvement. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 493-518.

New Psychology Blogs! (well, new to me anyways)

For those interested in psychological science, and perhaps some pop psychology too, you might be interested in knowing that Psychology Today (a popular psychology magazine) is now hosting a myriad of psychology blogs!

I just found out about this recently, from my advisor. There are really a lot of different psych blogs listed in their index, each devoted to a specific topic. It's pretty cool and you should be able to find various blogs that appeal to your interests, whether it be behaviroal economics, autism, self-help, or even sleep. Plus, the blogs are opened to commenting, so you can always put your own 5 cents in.

What's also cool is that there are some really famous (well, in my eyes!) psychologists who find their blogging home there.

So far my favorites are:

The Attractionologists - by social psychologists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick

Cultural Animal - by social psychologist Roy Baumiester

Lonliness - by social psychologist/neuroscientist John Cacioppo

The Scientific Fundamentalist - by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa

Twofold - by twin researcher/evolutinary psychologist Nancy Segal

and lastly,

Connections - by social psychologist (and my current mentor) C. Nathan DeWall

But really, there's a plethora more of psych blogs to go through over at Psychology Today, so there's a lot of really good ones that I haven't read yet. So, if you're interested, go check them out!

The Social Self

For our “Self” proseminar this semester, we have to write a “thought paper” each week based off of the assigned readings. Since it’s just a short little paper, it should make for a good source of blogging material. On that note, let’s get started!

For our first week, the readings were more general and focused on defining the self. What is the self? Is it one higher-level construct? Or is it a small set of mechanisms with one function? These were questions that the readings were trying to answer.

Well, after finishing the material I was struck most by discovering just how social the self really is. At first glance, the concept of self seems almost contrary to sociality. The self appears to be opposite of others. But as William James pointed out in his Principles of Psychology, a man’s “me” is partly shaped by the recognition he gets from others, as well as those representations they create. He explains that a person has as many “social selves” as people he or she knows. Predicting the “need to belong” (a topic that I’m very interested in), James presumes that humans have an “innate propensity” to get noticed. He even states that no punishment could be worse for a person, than to live in a society where one goes completely unnoticed. It’s astounding how current research supports ideas like this one, which was predicted back in the late 1800’s. The “need to belong” has been supported by years of research, and interest in the phenomenon continues to fuel new studies (see Baumeister & Leary, 1995). A crucial component of the self seems to come from the different conceptions of ourselves that we take from others, whether these representations are accurate or not.

In a related vain, Leary and Tangney explained that the self has the ability to mediate motives in order to relieve certain underlying pressures. I immediately thought of the sociometer hypothesis. In sociometer theory, self-esteem is really a gauge of our own social standing (i.e., how likely we are to be accepted or rejected). If our interactions with others play a significant role in our own self-concept, then the function of the self-esteem motive as protecting social standing is very plausible. It is even likely that the self initially emerged in humans for this very purpose. As Kurzban and Aktipis explained in their article, the self is much less a high-level construct and, instead, is much more of a set of cognitive mechanisms that evolved with the purpose of helping us function socially. The benefits of social groups are countless for the human species. We don’t have sharp claws or teeth, neither do we have thick coats of fur, etc. Additionally, we take longer to mature than many other species and are completely defenseless as small children. Anything that would have helped us cooperate with each other for food, shelter, defense, etc., would have tremendous selection value. The social cognitive interface, as Kurzban and Aktipis call the self, was designed to help us persuade others in our social world. With the help of the SCI, we are better able to compete for social benefits, such as mates and cooperation from others. It’s even plausible that we would not have developed a sense of self without our complex social lifestyle.

Well, it’s something to think about anyways. Below is the list of assigned readings, in case you are interested. As well, I also have some supplemental citations of interest.

Readings:

Baumeister, R. F. (1987). How the self became a problem: A psychological review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 163-176.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Chapter on "The Self"). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Kurzban, R., & Aktipis, C. A. (2007). Modularity and the social mind: Are psychologists too self-ish? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 131-149.

Leary, M.R. & Tangney, J.P. (2003). The self as an organizing construct in the behavioral and social sciences. In M.R. Leary and J.P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity, (pp. 3-14). New York: Guilford.

Sedikides, C., & Skowronski, J. J. (1997). The symbolic self in evolutionary context. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1, 80-102.

Supplemental Material:

Baumeister, R. F. & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529.

Leary, M. R. (2002). The self as a source of relational difficulties. Self and Identity, 1, 137-142.

New Homepage!

Photo by Sam Brown

For anyone interested, I have a new web page up on University of Kentucky's student web server. I'm mostly using this for professional/academic purposes, but anyone can access it. It's a place where people can find out information about my research interests and such. I also have my Curriculum Vitae available on that page. But if you want to check it out, there's a link to it on the left sidebar under the "My Schools & Departments" tab. Let me know what you think!

more on Zajonc . . .

Just in case you don't already know, the New York Times did release a nice piece on the life and death of Robert Zajonc. In it you'll see a more extensive coverage of his research, than just the mere exposure effect and social facilitation. It's pretty good, plus there's a lot of interesting facts about Zajonc that I did not know. For instance, here's a little snippet on his life during WWII:

"Robert Boleslaw Zajonc, an only child, was born in Lodz, Poland, on Nov. 23, 1923. In 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland and headed toward Lodz, he and his parents fled to Warsaw. There, the building in which they were staying was bombed, and Robert’s parents were killed. Robert woke up in a hospital, seriously injured.

He attended an underground university in Warsaw before being dispatched to a labor camp in Germany. He escaped and, recaptured, was sent to a political prison in France. Escaping again, he joined the French Resistance and studied at the University of Paris. Reaching England in 1944, he worked as a translator for American forces in the European campaign."

Wow. If you have time, you should really read the full article. It's good. Zajonc was a remarkable man.

Robert Zajonc (1923 - 2008)

This is unfortunate news for social psychologists. I just found out that Robert Zajonc, an early contributor to social psychology and simply a superstar of the field, died Wednesday (Dec. 3rd).

Amazingly, I still haven't found an obituary for him. Actually, I was searching for a paper of his and went to the Social Psychology Network profile previously linked, and that's how I found out. Not something that I was expecting.

Robert Zajonc was (and still is) an important figure in the field of social psychology. He held positions at the University of Michigan as the director to both, the Institute for Social Research and the Research Center for Group Dynamics. He later joined Stanford University, eventually becoming Professor Emeritus of Psychology.

He is known for his research in a myriad of areas, but what I perhaps know best is his work on the mere exposure effect (the tendency to like something more after being repeatedly exposed to it). In 1968, Zajonc conducted 3 studies showing that the more people were exposed to stimuli, such as Turkish words, Chinese characters and yearbook photographs, the more they liked them. This effect even occurs in animals, like chickens (Zajonc et al., 1973).

Another area that Zajonc was an early contributor to was social facilitation theory. At the time (1960's), research was showing that people performed better on certain tasks if they were in the presence of others. Yet, at the same time, research also showed that people performed worse on tasks if in the presence of others (known as social loafing). Zajonc offered an explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings, proposing a "dominant response" theory of social facilitation. He explained that being in the presence of others causes physiological arousal. For instance, imagine giving a lecture in front of 100 people. You'll probably breathe faster, have a faster heart beat, sweat, etc. Zajonc believed that this arousal causes people to react in situations with their most dominant response. In other words, when we are in the presence of others, we'll feel heightened arousal, and this arousal will provoke behaviors that we most commonly elicit or display in the given situation. Take the following example, say you usually choose to drink coke over sweet tea, even though sometimes you do in fact enjoy a glass of tea. Then choosing coke is your dominant response. So when others are present, you will be even more likely to choose coke over sweet tea.

Zajonc's theory helps explain why the presence of others can help or hinder your performance on certain tasks. With tasks that seem simple or familiar, your dominant response is to perform well. On the other hand, with unfamiliar or difficult tasks your dominant response is to perform more poorly. So when you are around people while carrying out familiar tasks, you'll perform even better. And when you are performing on more complex tasks, you'll make more mistakes when others are watching you. The dominant response effect is so robust that it even occurs in cockroaches! Zajonc and his colleagues (1969) found that cockroaches completed simple mazes quicker when they performed with four other cockroaches present than when alone. Yet they were slower on difficult mazes when other cockroaches were present, rather than alone. Pretty cool eh?

Well, to sum up, this is just a sampling of the great ideas that Robert Zajonc contributed to the field. Social psychology definitely suffered a loss this week.

If you are interested, below are some citations that cover the mere exposure effect and social facilitation . . . enjoy!

Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement, 9, 1 - 27.

Zajonc, R. B., Reimer, D. J., & Hausser, D. (1973). Imprinting and the development of object preference in chicks by mere exposure. Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology, 83, 434 - 440.

Zajonc, R.B., Heingartner, A., & Herman, E.M. (1969). Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 83-92.

New Journal in Evolutionary Neuroscience

Hello there ladies and gents. It appears that there is a new online journal out there. It's called, Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. It's a sub-genre of the more general Frontiers of Neuroscience.

There's yet to be an article published in the new journal, but it looks like some really cool stuff will be represented. Here's the mission statement of FEN:

"Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience is a first-tier electronic journal devoted to understanding the evolution of neural processes, neuroanatomical structure, neural structure - function relationships, and cognition and behavior. Brains regulate behavior and as such have been designed by evolution to solve specific adaptive problems faced by organisms during evolutionary history. Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience is dedicated to publishing papers that lead the field in discovering mechanisms that have undergone selection pressures resulting in evolution (divergent or convergent) of structure or function that leads to a greater understanding of 1) the neural processes of animals and humans; 2) neuropsychiatric disease states and the paths in which normal neural processes have gone off course; 3) the genetics underlying variations across species in neurocomputational hardware and behavior; and 4) evolutionary underpinnings that gave rise to advanced social and cognitive capacities. Evolutionary neuroscience is the discipline poised to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the nervous system such as the degree to which behavioral, cognitive, and neural modularity exists (e.g., domain specificity versus domain general processing); heritability and variations (species, regional, cultural, ethnic, and individual) in intellectual, social, and personality characteristics; make predictions about ancestral neural states (paleoneurology); and inform behavior and clinical modification programs from an evolutionary perspective. The journal welcomes submissions that tackle questions from a broad spectrum of disciplines and use myriad methodologies including, but not limited to: comparative genetics and genomics; investigations of allelic variations of behavior, cognition, and neural structure and function; comparative investigations of animal and human behavior that address the underlying cognitive and neural architecture; and functional neuroimaging studies that have been guided by an evolutionary framework."

I'm excited to see how this journal will turn out.

shame on me . . .

Wow, so I have not kept up with my blog lately. I really can't believe that it's November already though. It's just going by too fast!

Well, my wife and I are adjusting to life here in Kentucky very nicely. We really like it here, so that's always good. Yet I feel about 10 times more busy here than I was at William & Mary. I suppose that is to be expected for a doctoral program.

On another note, I added some new links to my blog. You should check them out. One leads to the new blog of my office mate, called "medicine for melancholy." Another is the awesome flickr stream of my friend Chris. And then I even put my uncle's new accounting website on here (not necessarily psychology related, but what the hey, you might find something useful on there).

Anyways, I shall not let this slothful blogging behavior occur again. Though I know my time for extra-curricular activities has diminished. I will make sure that I keep a minimum of 2 posts a month, but my goal will be 2 posts a week . . . err, um, starting after Thanksgiving, haha. Well, enjoy those links and have a great Thanksgiving!

"i am statistically significant! p < .0001"

How cool!

Are you proud of your geekiness? Do you revel in your knowledge of statistics? Or maybe you are just a researcher with that extra sass . . . well maybe these t-shirts are for you! The company is called Sassy Statistics, and the shirts are hilarious. I think I will have to buy a couple. I especially like the "don't be mean," and the "i am statistically significant" shirts.

go check it out, even if just out of curiousity, haha.

Psychology Survey: Personality, Mental States, and Relationship Processes-- Help needed!

A couple of researchers are conducting an on-line study and need your help! The study is about personality and relationships, and they need more volunteers to get a nationally representative sample. Here is the relevant information:

"We are two psychologists doing an internet survey and we would appreciate if you could help us by filling it out. The survey is about your personality, your thoughts, and your relationships. It will take about 25 minutes to complete. Participation is completely voluntary and you can stop at anytime. As well, your participation is anonymous and you will never be asked to provide your name. Please note that you must be over 18 to participate in this survey.

If you would like to participate, please go to the following link.

Thank you for your help!

Dr. C. Nathan DeWall
Department of Psychology
University of Kentucky

Dr. Brad J. Bushman
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan"

So if the topic interests you, and you have the time to take it, then visit the site. You'll be doing your part in advancing scientific knowledge about social processes, plus taking surveys is fun! . . . right? Well, anyways, I know that the researchers will appreciate it very much!

No! Not Carlin!

This isn't directly related to psychological science in any way, but still worth note.

As many people know by now, George Carlin died yesterday. This is perhaps the saddest news I have heard in a right good while. He was undeniably one of my heroes growing up and still is today. I love his comedy and have always been inspired by his brutal assault on irrationality. I regret that I never got to see him live.

Identical Twins Aren't Identical?

Now here's an interesting topic; one that I have wanted to write a post about and now have the lovely time to do it!

For those who don't already know, a report was published in the February issue of
the American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG) concerning genetic differences between identical (i.e. monozygotic - arriving from one fertilized egg) twins. Weird. Identical twins are supposed to be identical through and through, right? Isn't that why they're called identical? Well, maybe not. I suppose that is pushing it a little.

Anyway, Carl Bruder, a geneticist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues compared the genomes of 19 sets of adult identical twins. What they found was that these people differed subtly from their twin in what's called, copy number variation (CNV) of their genes.

As Wikipedia states, CNV's refer to:

"differences in the number of copies of a particular gene present in the genome of an individual . . . Some people have deletions of some genes on only one chromosome while other people have multiple copies of some genes."

People typically have two copies of each gene within their genome, because they inherit one copy from each parent. Yet at various genome sites copy number variation occurs. One would expect that monzygotic twins would resemble each other in the amount of CNV's that occur in their genomes. Since the "identical" twins from the above study differed in genetic copy number variants, they aren't 100 % identical!

It's all very interesting. And I think such findings may trigger important implications to consider for further psychological research. In fact, I learned about this study through class discussion in a personality research class and am frankly surprised that it hasn't received as much attention as I thought it would through the various media outlets.

What's one of the major issues most everyone will learn about in any psychology course? Well how about the battle between nature and nurture? Everything's a nature/nurture problem. And the common way to decide the influence of nature on a psychological attribute is to conduct a twin study. The logic behind a twin study is that identical twins should be most related to each other, as compared to dizygotic twins, non-twin siblings and strangers. Therefore differences between monozygotic twins on, say, a personality variable (and we do occasionally find these types of differences) aught to be attributed to environmental influences. But if identical twins are not really genetically identical, then how do we know that a personality difference isn't genetic? Now the AJHG report does not completely destroy the picture created by twin study results. Monozygotic twins are still highly similar; again, the differences in CNV's are subtle. Yet the paper does add the implication that an observed personality difference cannot automatically be attributed to the environment.

Oh well, if you want to read more about it, there is a Scientific American article about it, as well you can visit the AJHG site are read the original article. Go check it out! Very cool stuff!

Happy Birthday to me!

picture by explodingdog

Graduation and other stuff . . .

Well graduation was this past Sunday for the College of William & Mary. As you can see, I decided to attend, and I brought my wife along. It was nice and short. And though there was some celebration, it ain't over yet! All my class requirements are completed, but there's still that little thing we call a thesis that needs to be defended. I have until July 18th to defend my thesis, which is plenty of time so I don't expect to run into any problems. But until then I suppose I can't officially consider myself an MA. My wife on the other hand has completed everything, including her thesis, and her graduation from VCU is this Saturday. Fun stuff.

So now we basically have about two months before we move to Lexington, KY and start our doctoral programs at the University of Kentucky. This is an exciting time for us. Of course, we don't have much to do right now. I do have thesis work to complete, as well I'm still working on a few other side research projects. Yet I still feel that I have a lot of free time on my hands. Part of this free time I plan to spend writing (both blog and academic writing). As well, I have started a writing schedule (under the advice of my future grad advisor) and I hope to use these two months to get used to scheduled writing. Hopefully then I will break my binge writing habits, haha.

As for the blog, I'm making myself the goal of at least three posts a week, though it'll be great if I can get to posting daliy. I let myself slack too much this past semester, so I need to make up for it. Anyways, more on that later! Congratulations to all my friends and colleagues who are now fellow graduates! Yea!

On another note, here's a collection of links to keep you busy. Each has to do with psychological science in some way or another:

* Firstly, here's a newly launched website called Personality and Social Psychology Comments. As you can guess from the title, it's an online database of comments on published papers in the areas of personality and social psychology. Here's a brief description of PSPC:

"In order to advance as a scientific field, we argue that personality and social psychology should be characterized by cumulative knowledge as well as a constant questioning and discussion about what has been previously established. To incorporate such an ideal, previous data and unpublished research should be far more accessible than it is today.

We believe that there is a great deal of well-conducted research such as replications, extensions of previous studies, and null findings that never reach the stage of publication. Thus, valuable information never gets accessible to the scientific community.

Most of all, however, we believe that scientific enterprise should be open and critical and there should be a space to express criticism and other viewpoints. PSPC is meant to provide a forum for these issues and hopefully function as a resource for researchers conducting reviews and meta-analyses as well."

PSPC seems like it could be a pretty useful tool, but no one has bothered to submit any comments yet. I'm not sure whether it's because the word just hasn't gotten out yet or what. But if it starts to garner some popularity, I imagine it's usefulness will become more apparent . . . especially those comments focusing on null findings.

* The second item concerns a society called, Psychologists for Social Responsibility. This is the first time that I have heard about them, though the group was founded 25 years ago. I found out about them through a social psychology listserv. It's basically a group that uses psychological knowledge to promote peace and social justice. I took a gander at their website. I suppose that if you are into peace or political psychology, this might be an interesting group to look at/consider.

* Finally, my last item concerns a new essay that Steven Pinker has just written in the New Republic. It concerns the concept of dignity, its uselessness in terms of bioethics, and how it's being used to stall the progress of basic scientific and medical research. It's a good essay, brief and to the point. Go check it out!

Roll up to the Magical Memory Tour?

Now here's something cool that I read about in the April edition of Observer. Psychologists from the Leeds Memory Group, at the University of Leeds, are conducting an online survey that aims to create the "biggest database of 'autobiographical memories' ever attempted."

How are they doing this? Interestingly, they are asking people to blog about their memories of the Beatles! And anyone who has a memory related to the Beatles can participate. You can find their online study here at the Magical Memory Tour.

On their website, you can blog about your own memories of the Beatles, as well as check out the memories of other people. You can even find out which albums or songs evoke the most positive or negative memories. You can even check out the top ten most viewed Beatles associations (so far, number one is John Lennon - In Memoriam).

The researchers hope to explore "how experiences from our lives might be associated with music, personality, and the public perception of the Beatles." Seems like a pretty cool project to me! Check it out!