Reference: Wilhelm Hofmann, Roy F. Baumeister, Georg Förster, and Kathleen D. Vohs (2012) Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study of Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 102, No. 6, 1318–1335.

Behavior is motivated by desire to do or have something, either for pleasure or the relief of discomfort. Conflict is the perception that there’s a reason not to act on the desire. Temptations are desires that conflict with one or more of our goals.  We resist temptations through exercising self-control. Successful resistance means we didn’t act on the temptation.   In brief, the four parts of this model are: desire, conflict, resistance, and behavior.

Using beepers, the authors sampled thousands of “desire episodes” of 205 adult subjects, who had also taken personality tests. Here is some of what they found:

• Subjects were in a state of desire about half the time.
• They are conflicted about their desires about half the time.
• Alcohol increases desire strength, sense of conflict, and the likelihood a temptation will be acted on.
• Self-control (resistance) reduced enactment of desire-related behavior from 70% to 17%.
• Resisting an “irresistible” desire reduced enactment from 71% to 26%.
• The personality trait of self-control predicted less intense desire, less conflict, and less resistance to temptations.
• A sense of “narcissistic entitlement” predicted less conflict about desires.
• The presence of other people made it less likely one would give in to temptation.
• However, subjects were more likely to act on temptations if they were in the presence of others doing the same.

A couple take-aways: Self-control works most of the time. The trait of self-control works through anticipatory coping and establishing useful habits and routines, rather than active resistance to temptations.

I work in scientific research and have seen its dirty underbelly. Diving in headlong, full of idealism about the scientific method and its inherent humility.  What I’ve seen is ambition, hype, and a willingness to avoid hard questions in favor of advancing one’s pet theory of how things work and should be. I see self-proclaimed “skeptics” apply their corrosive reason inconsistently, mainly to make easy targets look stupid but sparing those they see as on the “same side”. Rationalization and hypocrisy: quick to find flaws and quick to forgive flaws, depending.

One thing I love about the scientific mindset is its humility. Scientific proposals about the nature of reality are tentative, provisional, and mindful of their limitations. That very humility feeds the wonderful feeling of awe and adventure that accompanies the scientific quest to understand something better.

People who are wary of science often stress its role as a source of power and authority – therefore to be resisted by free thinkers everywhere. Some people look askance at scientific insistence on measure and quantity (an insistence that springs from an appreciation of the limitations of human intuition and sense of certainty), which they see as at odds with a more spiritual, philosophical, or poetic experiencing of the world. As if an agronomist couldn’t be swept away by a thing of beauty.

As Vladimir Nabokov  once observed,  “a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

In a randomized controlled trial, individuals with MS who played a research version of the Posit Science brain training game “Brain HQ” improved 29% on neuropsychological tests, compared to 15% improvement in the control group who played “ordinary video games.”  Both groups received weekly coaching sessions. The “placebo group” was actually more compliant in the study, playing on average 19 hours more than their study counterparts.

I’m curious why the researchers called the control group a “placebo” group, which assumes any effects are essentially psychological. Given that playing some “ordinary” video games have been associated with cortical changes, what is the basis of this assumption? I also want to know more about the expectations of study participants. Did these expectations differ depending on study condition?  I suspect the reason  the controls played their games a lot more was they were having more fun. If one condition was more effortful and less fun than the other,  would the groups differ in any systematic way in their  expectations of cognitive change or in how they approach the post-training  assessment tests?

I was recently involved in a study involving game-assisted cognitive training and remember a participant who cancelled a post-training assessment because he hadn’t gotten much sleep and didn’t want to take the tests when tired. Would he have still cancelled if he had no hope or expectation of improvement? When you invest a lot of time and effort in something, you want something to show for it. It doesn’t matter that participants aren’t informed of testing results;  some participants will probably still be motivated to do better. But if participation is all fun and little work, would a participant be as motivated?

There are plenty of papers about the connection between expectations, personal investment and tests scores in academic contexts – but I couldn’t find any on the role of these factors on assessments in research. Please, someone, do a study!

References:

NYU Langone Medical Center / New York University School of Medicine. “At-home cognitive remediation may help cognitive symptoms in multiple sclerosis.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 April 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160416094758.htm>.

Abstract: P2.170 – An Adaptive Computer-Based Cognitive Training Program Improves Cognitive Functioning in Adults with Multiple Sclerosis (MS): Results of a Double-Blind Randomized Active-Placebo-Controlled 12-Week Trial

“The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance. But once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them – how to think freely at all – and ideas perish at conception.” George Packer, p.20, The New Yorker April 13, 2015.

So, how to reduce self-censorship in science?  A few ways: anyone writing or speaking about scientific opinions (theories, hypotheses, summaries of evidence) should:

• Avoid appealing to indicators of authority or status in reference to those scientific opinions. That means no “highly respected”,  “renowned”, or “leader in his/her field”.
• Avoid assigning scientists into  in- and out-groups.  It doesn’t matter if the in-group is the “consensus” or the “anti-orthodoxy rebels” – anything that triggers belonging needs interferes with independent judgment.  Anything that encourages an “us versus them” attitude impoverishes scientific discourse, because it makes it that much harder to speak up.
• Expunge the concept of “proof” in science, as proofs apply only to the domains of mathematics and logic.
• Assume a skeptical attitude. Skepticism means appreciating we may be wrong on many levels – not just the “facts”. We may be wrongly interpreting the facts, or not seeing them in the proper context, or misestimating their importance in relation to some other facts. There are so many ways we can be wrong – we need to remain alert to their possibilities. We need people around who alert us.

These Red Flags and their definitions are from the website Science or Not? The examples and comments are mine.

Technobabble and tenuous terminology: the use of pseudo scientific language In this tactic, people use invented terms that sound “sciencey” or co-opt real science terms and apply them incorrectly.

Once again, I’ll be relying on Jon Kabat-Zinn to illustrate this Red Flag. Kabat-Zinn is a well-known  advocate of Mindfulness. The following are some quotes from Kabat-Zinn – all from Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition 2013; Bantam Books, New York. The pages are Kindle page numbers. The italics are mine.

“Living organisms have developed impressive ways of protecting themselves from all the unpredictable fluctuations in the environment and of preserving the basic internal conditions of life against too much change. …regulatory responses, all accomplished via feedback loops, preserve the dynamic internal balance, called homeostasis, or now, more precisely allostasis, by keeping the corresponding fluctuations of the organism within certain limits” 5315-22

“The modern terminology for biological wear and tear is allostatic load, a term introduced by Bruce McEwen, a renowned stress researcher at Rockefeller University.” 5354

Of course, homeostasis, allostasis and allostatic load are real scientific terms. Kabat-Zinn is not using them incorrectly in the above quotes, but he is co-opting them to support his broader case about how fragile our physical “inner balance” is, so much so that unless we practice mindfulness we are at risk of disease and early death. Between “toxic” thoughts and feelings, unawareness, cancer-prone personalities, and just plain ol’ stress*, the unmindful among us are in mortal danger. Delicate homeostatic inner balance has been put to the service of New Age fear-mongering.

I also want to point out how, in the above quotes, Kabat-Zinn associates the italicized technical terms with markers of status and authority. Some of these markers are obvious, like “renowned”; some slightly less obvious, like “The modern terminology” – why point out that something is “modern”, except to give it a bit more cachet? And then we get subtle: “called”, as in “called homeostasis”. Check out some of the synonyms for ‘call’: demand, announce, summon, order, command, and designate. In sports, a call is a decision made by a referee or umpire. There is something definitive or compelling about calling: to call the outcome of an election, to be called to a vocation. To call is something parents often do: call the kids in for dinner. And so when we are told that a dynamic inner balance is called homeostasis, the term assumes an air of authority conferred upon by the parental scientific community.

* For instance: “Some doctors believe that time stress is a fundamental cause of disease in the present era” (7811).

These Red Flags and their definitions are from the website Science or Not?  The examples and comments are mine.

Cherry picking: “In cherry-picking, people use legitimate evidence, but not all of the evidence. They select segments of evidence that appear to support their argument and hide or ignore the rest of the evidence which tends to refute it.”

Once again, I’ll be relying on Jon Kabat-Zinn to illustrate this Red Flag. Kabat-Zinn is a well-known Mindfulness advocate.  Examples are from:

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition 2013; Bantam Books, New York.

In this book, Kabat-Zinn refers to a study that apparently showed

“…a lack of closeness to one’s parents during childhood was associated with a risk of cancer. We might speculate that this has something to do with the extreme importance of early experience s of connectedness to later health as an adult.” 4937

The study Kabat-Zinn cites was included in a recent meta-analysis, which concluded: “This review comprises only longitudinal, truly prospective studies (N=70). It was concluded that there is not any psychological factor for which an influence on cancer development has been convincingly demonstrated… (My italics)

(On a side note, I also want to point out Kabat-Zinn’s tendency to use inflated language, as in the “extreme” importance of early experience of connectedness to later health. How does he conclude early childhood experiences are ‘extremely” important to later health? What other things might poor “connectedness” in childhood co-vary with? How about poverty, family disruption, bad neighborhoods, health behaviors, etc.? And how much disconnection is necessary to have this deleterious long term effect? Just some, or only at the extreme ends of the continuum? If only extreme cases, what co-varies in the childhood environment with extreme lack of connection? Unfortunately, Kabat-Zinn addresses none of these questions.)

In another example, Kabat-Zinn writes at length about the benefits of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), citing at one point a study by Teasdale et al, in which:

“people with a prior history of three of more episodes of major depression taking the MBCT program relapsed at half the rate of the control group, which only received routine health care from their doctor…This was a staggering result…” 7322 (Kindle page)

What the Abstract for Teasdale et al study actually says: “For patients with 3 or more previous episodes of depression (77% of the sample), MBCT significantly reduced risk of relapse/recurrence. For patients with only 2 previous episodes, MBCT did not reduce relapse/recurrence.” Later in the paper, the authors note “It is clear that the intervention did not reduce risks of major depression in the normal range.”(p. 621)

Not a refutation – but hardly “staggering”.

References:

Garssen B. Psychological factors and cancer development: evidence after 30 years of research. Clinical Psychology Review 2004 Jul; 24(3):315-38.

John D. Teasdale et al Prevention of Relapse/Recurrence in Major Depression by Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 2000, Vol. 68, No. 4, 615-623.