Perspectives on Inference

            The following paper was submitted by me as a final project for a Hampshire College cognitive science course. It has been edited into a second draft, and has also been edited and formatted significantly from its original version for pulication on this site.

            Numbers never lie is a phrase etched into our collective minds at a young age. Unfortunately this could not be further from the truth, especially in regards to statistics. In fact, one professor went as far to say that statistics is often classified as a subcategory of lying. (Moore 1985). As powerful tools of inference, statistical tests are able to give us insights from the data we collect about the world around us. However, these insights are generalizations and are open into interpretation; just as a translation can only ever be an interpretation, statistical results are also only interpretations of data and variables.

            Before this paper begins, it is important to start with a disclaimer. By no means am I stating that the statistical inferences we have today are the “begin and end all” of data assessment. If anything, they are just another perspective to assimilate data and makes the data easier to “work” with. For instance, the student’s T-test is much more conservative in terms of data analysis than the z test, although there is criterion for using each; even then this criterion can be vague. One textbook I have states that you should use the z-test when you have a sample size under 30 (Diez, 2012). But this is by no means a standardized rule, and can be up to the researcher’s discretion.  

            As a result of this amalgamation of what statistics can mean, different groups of people have different ways of perceiving their intended use and for the layperson, the media, students, and academics, statistics analysis have very different meanings. I would like to explore what these perceptions are. Before that, I would also like to present some ways in which statistics can be altered in malicious ways in order to suit the needs of a researcher. While not the only ways one can be dishonest in academic literate, doing so will demonstrate how easy such feats can be.            
            A very simply way one could change their statistically insignificant results to statistically significant results would be to change their one tailed test to a two tailed test. Doing so would lover the p-value (the probability of getting your result if the null hypothesis is true) of your result, possibly changing the outcome of your study. This is dishonest because you need to start off with a good reason as to why you are using a one or two-tailed test, One–tailed tests are for studies where we know that there will be no sort of adverse result, or studies where we are not interested in that result for a valid reason. For example, if we were testing the effects of meditation on blood pressure, we would not expect meditation to increase a subject’s blood pressure. As a result, your alpha level (where one’s p-value needs to fall in order to reject the null) is only on one side of a distribution and would be five percent. However, if we were to test some sort of new way for students to study, we would want to see if our independant variable increased or decreased subbects' scores Therefore we would 

(Different image used for online article, image from The heritiage foundation.)

split the 0.05 alpha level between the two tails of the distribution, so that it is now 0.025. If we were to run our "new study method" experiment, and at the end we get a p-value of 0.033; if we decided that we wanted to change our study to a one-tail experiment, this would be dishonest.
            One of a more obvious way to misinterpret statistics is to literally change the perspective of the visual representation of your data. In the following example, the samples closest to us would be considered larger, because they appear larger.

(Chartingcontrol.com)

A verbal example of the same phenomena would be how you expressed your figure. Would you like to say that you had a one percent return on sales, a fifteen percent return on investment, a ten-million dollar profit, or a sixty percent decrease from last year (Huff, 1954)? This topic alone could be covered in volumes (such as the one just cited), however I am trying to show that there are many different ways one can misrepresent, and misinterpret statistical information. One could write multiple papers as well on each of these subjects (performing logical fallacies, such as asking loaded questions, throwing out data, manipulating data, have biased samples, etcetera). I just wanted to show how one can present data in such a way that it would appear to be justified to an uninformed reader.

            There are many real world examples of studies that misrepresent their data or have had their data misrepresented by others, whether it was an accident or just a simple mistake. Duncan MacDougall’s attempt to find the weight of the human soul in the twentieth century is something that has entered Americans’ minds as a faucet of pop-science. While MacDougall reported that the human soul might have an average weight of about twenty-one grams. The truth is that his methodology was seriously lacking. MacDougall only had a sample size of six, two of which were discarded, with the rest there was trouble with determining the exact time of death. The weight of subjects often fluctuated after death, and contemporaries of the time provided a laundry list of physiologically plausable alternitive reasons as to why the subjects would have lost weight (Evans, 1947). Never the less, MacDougall continued his research and his results found no difference in weight with dying dogs.

            Still today, MacDougall’s research is something I have been told by others with conviction is a scientific fact. I personally have had a high-school history teacher relate this faux factoid to us. “A scientist once measured the human soul” she began. A few students backed her up, they too had heard about the doctor who was able to weigh the human soul and that because he was a scientist, there was some validity to the point being made. While this example is mostly harmless, being confined to everyday “did you know?” situations, misinterpreted studies can become toxic in the realm of news media.

Take the television show Ancient Aliens as another example many should be familiar with. While there is virtually no manipulation of statistics in the show, there is vast falsifying of information and misinterpretation of current archeologist evidence making such absurd claims such as the pyramids were carved out of lasers, and ancient peoples having the ability to build aircrafts (Heiser, 2012). An example more related to Neuroscience and statistics would the studies on average brain size often distributed by ignorant racists to support their beliefs that certain races of people are more intelligent. With the cited papers (an example would be: Witelson, 2005), these racists claim that other races have smaller brains, and then insinuate that this somehow means they must be less intelligent. Besides the fact that the results of the study provided; many others like it are almost always either insignificant or too vague to come to a solid conclusion, it is still a red herring to say that brain size is related to or correlated with intelligence. However, this is not an inference that an average layperson may make, and they could be led to believe that certain bigoted viewpoints have some sort of validity. Here is a different example from May of this year (2012 at the time of submission), CNBC reported a story with the headline “The Inflation of Life, The Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared" (CNBC). The article states that the cost of raising a child has raised 25%. What they don’t state is that this can be reflected in ten years of inflation (Olitsky, 2012).

Students are also prone to these mistakes. Any person who spends some time in a psychology class is eventually bound to hear something along the lines of “Therefore this study proved X”. I am not accusing these students of being malicious, and it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard that we should the media, specifically news outlets and a television channel that claims to have history as the primary subject matter. This may partially be due to the fact that statistics are rarely taught outside of higher education, and even then statistics may not be offered or required outside of certain programs. One may argue as to why a high-school student or English major would need to take statistics, but when statistics are used every day, it is important for a more general understanding of what they mean, and how they are used.

We can take a step further and examine who exactly are teaching these statistics course. The author of the book Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference, Chamont Wang, claims that many researchers do not even understand the statistical methods they are applying. He cites a paper that approximated half of the articles published in medical journals at the time used statistical methods incorrectly (Wang, 1993. Glantz, 1980). And at this level of academic research, a major problem is conflict of interest. Many professors are in a situation where they are pressured to publish significant research in order to keep their jobs. Deemed “publish or perish” this environment  is lethal for the integrity of science as it puts many academics in situations where they can easily manipulate their data in order to just keep their jobs, or to continue funding. A simple Google search of “scientific misconduct” will yield thousands of studies that have been deemed invalid or fraudulent in the last decade alone.

In closing, there are an exhausting number of ways to misrepresent data, and what has been presented here is a brief overview that does not even being to scratch the surface of misinterpreting statistics. I would have liked to expanded more and more on each one of these subjects provided, but I don’t know if I would have known when to stop. While this paper has been rather bleak, I would like to note that one of the beautiful things about science is that it is always open for discussion and criticism, and with due time we may hopfully be able to cast out instances of bad research as examples of what is naught to be done.

Works Cited

Ancient Aliens Debunked. Dir. Mike Heiser. N.p., 30 Sept. 2012. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.

Diez, David M., Christopher D. Barr, and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel. OpenIntro Statistics. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2012. Print.

Evans, Bergen. The Natural History of Nonsense,. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1947. Print.

Glantz, S. A. (1980). Biostatistics: How to Detect, Correct and Prevent Errors in The Medical Literature. Vol. 61, 1-7.

Huff, Darrell, and Irving Geis. How to Lie with Statistics. New York: Norton, 1954. Print.

Introduction to SAS.  UCLA: Statistical Consulting Group. (accessed December 5, 2012).

Moore, David S. Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1985. Print.

Olitsky, Morris. "Misuse of Statistics a National Problem. Amstat News, 1 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2012. .

Pie3d. N.d. Photograph. Charting Control. Chartin Control. 2012. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

"The Inflation of Life - Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared." Yahoo! Finance. CNBC, 7 May 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.

Wang, Chamont. Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference: Controversy, Misuse, and Subtlety. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1993. Print.

Witelson, S. F. "Intelligence and Brain Size in 100 Postmortem Brains: Sex, Lateralization and Age Factors." Brain 129.2 (2005): 386-98. Print.

Can Cats Play Three Card Monte?

What may seem as a testament to animal cognition, this video boils down to a simple three-card monte game; as such it is an employer of misdirection and slight of hand. The commentors to the video state that the cat "understands what is happening and can play the game", or "he is finding the ball" both are false. Let us take into consideration the following:

1. There is a bell inside the cups, the cat never even needs to see what's inside. A misdirection in a sense that you think the cat is playing three card monte, when all it is doing is listening for a sound that can be heard anytime the cup is touched.

2. You never see the inside of the cups. There could simply be cat-nip or food taped on the inside. A form of slight of hand could be taking place.

3. Multiple takes were probably done until the desired results occurred.

4. The cat could have simply been conditioned to tap the "correct" shell.

5. Domesticated animals take cues from their owners and humans in general. For all the viewer knows, the owner is looking right at the correct cup, or giving off another subtle cue without even realizing she is doing it!

This video is a little more impressive as it challenges the previous criteria a little more, however the cat completes the task two out of three times. Also, the skeptic in me wants to know once again what is in that paper ball, as at the end of the video the cat knocks it down and goes for it. It all seems reminiscent of the tic-tac-toe chicken.

People tend to stare longer at things they find interesting. For example, a child without established object permanence will stare longer when an object "appears" (peek-a-boo). It would be interesting to see if when slight of hand is applied against a cat, whether or not the cat would stare longer (or at all for that matter). I just wonder which shelter would let me play three card monte with their cats for hours on end, never mind which shelters have cats well trained enough to watch. So, can cats play three card monte? I am skeptical of it, but not dismissive. A study in a controlled environment with many cats would yield an answer. If anyone  knows of studies that tested similar criteria, don't hesitate to drop a line.

"Dark Psychology"

As far as I can tell there is no definition for the term "dark psychology". If I had to guess, I would say that it is something along the lines of; "the influence on people to do things they normally would not do in the first place through exploitation of irrational and unconscious fears". Does anyone else think this is also a fitting description for advertising? (Recently a new website popped up called "darkpsychology.co", but as far as I can tell it is a spam blog. How appropriate.) Quebec's ban on Fast-food advertising reduced fast-food expenditures by 13 percent per week in French-speaking households. Even the price of a product may affect your perceived quality of it.

Woman in particular have been assaulted with ads, informing them of problems they did not know they had until the they were told so:

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.
Link.

Another example: vaginal cleansing advertisements. I am certain your vagina is not supposed to smell like a fresh meadow.

There is a BBC documentary called The Century of The Self which touches upon all of this. It is about Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's American nephew that; helped tie smoking to the woman's rights movement, increased Betty Croker sales by adding an egg to their instant mix, worked for Woodrow Wilson, and established the idea that people needed objects to express their inner self to others. Simply put, he was able to influence large amounts of people through linking products with the unconscious fears of people.
This is the exploitative foundation that modern advertising has been built on top of.

Public Speaking

My biggest fear? Speaking in front of a room full of spiders.

The Internet went out for a few hours today, and with an upset stomach, and nothing to do; I started to wonder about why so many people fear public speaking. Why are so many of us adverse to it? Supposedly seventy-five percent of people experience some sort of anxiety when publicly speaking. Sometimes it happens to me, all of a sudden my sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and I start to get sweaty, and my heart races, and oh jeez.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that our fears have been hardwired into our brains. We fear heights, spiders, and the dark because our ancestors that didn't, were promptly genetically pruned. Of course the problem with this theory is that there is no way to test it without a time machine.

Can the same be true to public speaking? Would expressing your views to a group put you in as much danger as being somewhere high up, or being attacked by a wild animal? Ostracization could have certainly meant death in certain situations. Then again, many people who do speak out are put in danger (Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Yitzhak Rabin, Gandai, Larry Flint, Jesus, George Harrison, Alan Berg).

But the concept of public speaking being so dangerous is astounding to me. Perhaps  it is the same reason why the judgment of others is so important to us? I don't know... only questions to think about...

Advertisements

We have all seen TV advertisements that make us go "huh"? The end result of an ad is to get you to buy something and in order to do that, they (the advertisers) are supposed to get us (the audience) to notice the commercials. In the past few years more and more commercials have been getting absurd. Perhaps you have noticed?

It might also serve to explain why these commercials have been so successful for Old Spice:

Of course there is a reason for this, and that is humans pay attention to things that are odd and do not match up with our framework of what it normal or expected. This develops when children learn object permanence - that is that awareness that objects continue to exists when not perceived.. At the age of eight months, infants are able to utilize this skill. This is something that is usually covered in early psychology classes.

Kicking ass at cognitive tasks!

In the study an infant is placed in front of an object, perhaps a couch. A small toy then disappears behind the couch. A child who does not have object permanence will not look for it. This can also be done with a screen. A child who has object permanence will stare at an object or toy that disappears behind a screen, children without this ability will not. You can get the same result by changing the number of toys or objects as well. The fact the the children stare mean that they are paying attention and thinking. It is the same effect as when people are shown a magic trick for example.

What does this mean about advertising? I would suggest that advertisers are trying to get us to look at their ads, holding our attention by altering permanence of objects, and breaking the rules and schemas we have developed about the world around us by showing us pigs in cars with pinwheels and things turning suddenly into diamonds.

Now you're playing with power!
(image from UGR)

One way to study this would be through an ERP (event related potential) experiment. Basically you cap somebody with a bunch of little electrodes. Then you present the subject with some stimuli, in this case perhaps one of the commercials from above. A computer hooked up to your ERP machine then measures electrical signals being set off by the subject's brain due to neurons firing. If you're lucky you will get some sort of significant waveform.

There have already been other waveforms linked with attention and there are many others. It would be a cool study to try out, if it has not already been done. I personally, would guess that people are going to look at these ads longer. The only problem is that you would need some sort of appropriate control stimuli. Maybe the control could be averaged waveforms of "unabsurd" commercials which would be matched against the averaged waveforms of the "absurd" commercials.

Nonetheless the point I am getting at is that advertisers want you to go "what the hell was that all about?" when you watch their commercials. By doing so they make you pay attention to their ad, and therefore more likely to get you to start thinking and talking about their products.

Why Cognitive Science is Important

I spent an evening in the dressing room of  

Howard Thurston the last time he appeared on Broadway - 

Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians. For forty 

years he had traveled all over the world, time and again, 

creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making 

people gasp with astonishment. More than 60 million 

people had paid admission to his show, and he had made 

almost $2 million in profit. 

I asked Mr. Thurston to tell me the secret of his success.   

His schooling certainly had nothing to do with it,  

for he ran away from home as a small boy, became a  

hobo, rode in boxcars, slept in haystacks, begged his  

food from door to door, and learned to read by looking  

out of boxcars at signs along the railway. 

Did he have a superior knowledge of magic? No, he 

told me hundreds of books had been written about legerdemain 

and scores of people knew as much about it as 

he did. But he had two things that the others didn't have. 

First, he had the ability to put his personality across the 

footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human 

nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation 

of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow had been 

carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions were 

timed to split seconds. But, in addition to that, Thurston   

had a genuine interest in people.

                                                                                            -  Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (get the full text here).

See also: the Wikipedia article for Cognitive Science

Every time I meet a new professor at college, there is a conversation that assuredly takes place. You've probably had the same experience many times over. When they ask you what your major is. "Cognitive Science, what exactly is that" or "why study that"? To be honest my answer is never the same, because cognitive science is interdisciplinary; it incorporates multiple fields of study, and they are all important in their own right. Simply put, it is the study of thought.

After graduation I want to have some meaningful, and useful skills outside of a couple of degrees, which is why I am also trying to master a language while in college. A combination of these sentences and others is usually what my response is, and are dependant on what I think will impress the inquirer the most. If I had to give a straight answer, it would have to be that Cognitive Science is the study of stumli processing in the brain. How we process information, and insights that can lead us into human behaviour, biology, and psychology. On top of that, I just really want to do lab research.

My Cognitive Science major is not offered at my school. I was able to get it through the BDIC (bachelors degree of individual concentration) program which is offered through UMASS. I had to go through a lengthy process of paperwork, and I was not necessarily guaranteed to get into the program.I take a most of my Cognitice Science classes at Hampshire College, which actually has a school of Cognitive Science. While this does add to the legitimacy of the major, my German major advisor warned me that while he thinks Cognitive Science is a great thing to study, I may be met with skepticism from some Germans during the time I will be studying in Germany. I will be sure to let ypou all know how that goes when I cross that bridge. Whether or not you think Cognitive Science is important, consider this. Every person can interpret stimuli differently, and that is really important.

1000 different people could see this painting 1000 different ways. Suspended Animation by Swarez.

Another writer, over at the site Everyday Psychology had a great post about this:

An individual who is a heavy drug user is told by their family that they need to seek drug rehab in order to quit their drug use.

The individual may perceive their family's suggestion as either:

1. Genuine concern, and be willing to undergo drug rehabilitation.2. An attempt to control their life, and refuse to undergo drug rehab.

The drug user may preceive their family's actions as an attempt to control their life, when in reality the family's actions are genuine concern. If you want to know how people think, you have to understand the reality they are perceiving. Some of my friends go as far as to say that colors are experienced differently by everyone. While I would not go as far as to say that (if certain colors mean the same thing to us, how can we see them as different?), it is possible that we each individually associate different good or bad memories with different colors.

This is why Cognitive Science is important. The master magician that can captivate an audience needs to understand people, the  study of multiple fields and tying them together is important from the progression of scientific research, and finally the understanding of why we see things the way we do, whether these things be objects and images we interact with, or simply abstract concepts. Understanding these processes gives us insight into out evolutionary history as well as our nature.

Cognitive Bias

Humans have so much stimuli coming in all the time that we have to unconsciously cut corners in order to do mental tasks. We do this with our vision, our reasoning, and our memory. (For example, when we look at a picture or a field we know that objects that at are in front of other things must be closer because well... it is in the front!) However, when we draw incorrect conclusions based on these shortcuts. cognitive bias happens. These are call heuristics, simple rules for our brains to compute things, but incidentally can introduce errors.

A page from the cognitive biases study guide.

Somebody over on Scribd put together a great study guide of all the cognitive biases. It includes cool little images that will help you remember the biases. However a lot of the information came from a wiki, I am not sure how reliable it is. Although it seems that the same people who put this guide together are the same that have been editing the wiki page that all of these came from. Nonetheless a lot of this information can be found in any Cognitive Science or Cognitive Psychology textbook or website.

Cognitive Biases are really important to know about when dealing with people for two reasons. First you will be able to know when someone is bullshitting you or them self with one of these. Second, you will be able to know when you are appealing one of these biases. In a way, it is almost a form of enlightenment because you are able to know you are making an error. In fact, the blind spot bias is "the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases. Memorize these, and apply them every day. If you ever take a psych class you will have to know about a few of them anyways.

Learning Motivation

One of the things I hate is when people say they can't do something. "You're learning a language? Great! I could never do that". Well duh, with that attitude like that you can't do anything. While this post is mostly concerned with language learning, it can be applied to anything. Just replace language learning with exercising, reading, quiting smoking, ________ .

It is tougher for adults to learn a language, we do know that. Once psychologists thought that adults could never learn a second language. We now know that even adults have brain plasticity, not as much as developing children, but it's there. If we did not have plasticity, we would not be able to learn anything new. Once in a while a book on Linguistics will argue that a native speaker can never fully learn a new language. My personal stance on that is that while we do not fully comprehend how children are able to grasp language, other than the fact that their brains are developing at incredible rates during the critical period, we therefore can not fully understand whether or not a non native speaker can fully grasp a new language.

Nevertheless I still struggle learning German, and to learn a new language in adulthood is a pain in the neck. That doesn't mean that someone cannot do it. But telling yourself you cannot do something before even trying will not get you anywhere.

Take for example this study conducted by a graduate student in 1939, completely unethical by today's standards

In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor began an experiment with local orphans, warning them that they were showing signs of stuttering and lecturing them whenever they repeated a word. The children became acutely self-conscious, and many began to stutter, fulfilling the theory that “the affliction is caused by the diagnosis.”

The article is actually about how one of the subject wrote her a letter years later accusing her of being a monster and how the study ruined his life. Jesus Christ!

Nonetheless the study goes to show that "the affliction is caused by the diagnosis."If you say you cannot do something, you cant. Tell yourself you know you can. Not only that, but use positive thoughts and motivation not only but your self, but others! What have you got to lose?

Political Rheoric

Steven Pinker is the man.

 

THE MAN

On top of being the man, he is also a professor of psychology at Harvard College, and a linguist. He has also been on The Colbert Report. Multiple times. I was going to hold off writing about him but I recently read an article Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy) wrote over ten years ago entitled How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love The Internet. In the article, where he writes concerning people who thought the Internet was just a fad, he mentions Steven Pinker. Today it might be a bore to read because it is redundant about how the Internet has turned out.

"Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.

However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find."

Douglas Adams Playing With Pink Floyd on His 42nd Birthday.

Why I'm writing about Dr. Pinker today is because I want to post one of my favorite videos of him. It is about how politicians use empty rhetoric in order to get their messages across because they do not want to tick anyone off. At the same time we the voters push the candidates into a corner because we don't want them to support anything we are against. Check out the video:

I for one blame the two party system. If you're at all interested in psycholinguistics, reading any book by Steven Pinker is a must, and used copies go for a few bucks.

(revised 11/25/2012)