Category Archives: Scientific Encounters

Red Flags of Bad Science and Pseudoscience, Part II

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

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

Stressing status and appealing to authority: “People who use this tactic try to convince you by quoting some ‘authority’ who agrees with their claims and pointing to that person’s status, position or qualifications, instead of producing real-world evidence. The tactic is known as the argument from authority.”

I’ll be relying on Jon Kabat-Zinn to illustrate this Red Flag. Kabat-Zinn is a well-known Mindfulness advocate. All examples here 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).

Throughout Full Catastrophe Living, Kabat-Zinn uses markers of authority and status to sell his message. Here are some examples (all pages numbers are for Kindle; underlines and comments are mine):

“A recent headline in Science, one of the most prestigious and high-impact  scientific journals in the world, read: ‘A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’. 346

           “Norman Cousins, the prominent magazine editor and leading intellectual…” 7846

  “…the highly respected television journalist, Bill Moyers, had his own body burden      of toxic chemicals tested.” 8759

  “…the highly respected economist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned   and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs      to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a   country, and, by implication, as a world.” 9275

“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

 Kabat-Zinn occasionally uses technical terms like “allostatic load” to confer scientific respectability to his assertions. His use of “the modern terminology” is interesting: makes it sound like there is one modern terminology that serves as an authoritative standard.

“Some doctors believe that time stress is a fundamental cause of disease in the present era.” 7811

This is one of those statements that give an aura of authority (“Some doctors”) but which is so vague you don’t know what to make of it. Who are these “doctors”? Are they researchers? Epidemiologists? Medical doctors? Doctors of Theology?

“Pioneering work over more than thirty years by Dr. Dean Ornish and his             collaborators…. has consistently demonstrated that by changing your lifestyle      [including meditation, yoga, and a mostly vegetarian diet]…you can slow down,   stop,   and even reverse the progression of severe coronary heart disease as well as     early-    stage prostate cancer.” 8697

[For a little balance on Dean Ornish, check out:  www.scientificamerican.com 2015-4-22 Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says about Nutrition Is Wrong]

 

Red Flags of Bad Science and Pseudoscience, Part I

Scientific Encounters

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

  1. The ‘scientifically proven’ subterfuge: claiming an “idea/discovery/product is valid because it has been ‘scientifically proven’” or refusing “to accept someone else’s claim unless it can be ‘scientifically proven’”.

Example: “Until Proven Otherwise, GMOs Aren’t Safe”

The problem with the concept of ‘proof’ is that it implies certainty – and science isn’t about certainty. Science is about proposing and testing hypotheses and then drawing provisional conclusions with the understanding that future evidence may lead to revision or rejection of those conclusions. The language of science is cautious and tentative.

As Bruce Railsback puts it:

“Ask a scientist about an issue that’s not directly observable, and you probably hear an answer that starts with something like “The evidence suggests that . . .” or “Our current understanding is . . .”. You’re not hearing waffling or indecision. You’re hearing a reasoned recognition that we can’t know many things with absolute certainty – we only know the observable evidence.”

  1. Persecuted prophets and maligned mavericks: “belonging to a tradition of mavericks who have been responsible for great advances despite being persecuted by mainstream science.”

The following quote is much beloved of this group: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer. Example: The Three Stages of Truth, in which the author warns us about “GMOs, pharmaceuticals, the cancer industry and mandatory vaccines”.

These individuals often characterize their detractors as “orthodox”, “conventional”, “mainstream” or “the scientific establishment”. Example: Why Conventional Medicine Hates Homeopathy. Favorite phrases include “thinking outside the box” and “new paradigm”.

 

The Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: Just One Dissenter can make a World of Difference

Scientific Encounters

Minimalist synopsis of the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: subjects were willing to hurt others if they thought this was what authority figures wanted from them. Both studies serve as cautionary tales of how easily humans can be manipulated by authority figures into committing atrocious acts against their fellows.

For me, the main lesson of these studies is a bit different – it is the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed. Humans typically seek social validation of their views – without which, niggling reservations rarely rise to the level of conviction. And without the courage of conviction, it’s awfully hard to resist the powers that be. We’ll just follow orders, however uncomfortable we feel about them.

Sometimes all you need is one discordant voice making waves to bring out your own doubts and give you the courage to take a stand: no, I won’t. For instance, in Milgram’s study, only 4 of 40 subjects agreed to continue in the experiment if they observed just one other person refusing to comply.

What this tells me is that when everyone in one’s reference group appears to agree on something, it’s hard not to go along.  And it’s hard to think otherwise, because we don’t have sounding boards for working out our thoughts. We don’t have models to give us the courage to say something. To cultivate critical thinking and the ability to disagree, we need to resist the tendency to surround ourselves with the like-minded and be willing to engage those who see things differently.

A Less Happy Mind is not an Unhappy Mind

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

Comment on: A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert; 12 November 2010 Vol 330 Science p. 932

In this study, the authors asked study participants to rate their feelings, current activities and mind wandering. The authors state that the results revealed study participants “were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics… or unpleasant topics than about their current activity”. Although participants’ minds “were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), they were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity.” The authors conclude “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.

Is this a reasonable conclusion? Let’s look more closely at the evidence:  subjects answered a happiness question (“How are you feeling right now?”) on a continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100). Now I’m assuming that for most people, anything under 50 would be leaning unhappy – from a little bit to a whole lot – and anything over 50 would be leaning happy. Here are the approximate* mean happiness scores for mind wandering categories: pleasant mind wandering – 69; neutral mind wandering – 61; and, unpleasant mind wandering – 42. Ok, stating the obvious: except for unpleasant mind wandering, these means do not reflect unhappiness. And is it even newsworthy that unpleasant mind wandering is associated with unhappiness, given that “unpleasant” and “unhappy” generally go together? It’s like saying “When I think unhappy thoughts, I feel unhappy”. Duh.

The authors’ unwarranted conclusion, and the title of their paper,  isn’t even an example of calling the glass  half empty. It’s calling a glass that’s three-quarters full half empty.

—

*I say “approximate” because for some reason the authors only show the means as bubbles on a graph but don’t provide the exact numbers.

Does psychotherapy work and why

Explorations Outside the Box, Scientific Encounters

Let’s define “work” simply as of perceived benefit to the individual.

In a previous Scientific Encounters post, I provided “percentage of variability of outcomes” in psychotherapy – care of Laska and Gurman (2014) and Lambert and Bergin (1994).

Here they are again:

Factors common to all effective therapies: 43%

Differences between treatments – <1.0

Specific ingredients of therapies and treatments – 0.0

Adherence to protocol – <0.1

Rated competence in delivering particular treatment – 0.5

Extra-therapeutic events: 40%

Placebo effect (expectations): 15%

Per Laska and Gurman, “common factors” are those that are “necessary and sufficient for change: (a) an emotionally charged bond between the therapist and patient, (b) a confiding healing setting in which therapy takes place, (c) a therapist who provides a psychologically derived and culturally embedded explanation for emotional distress, (d) an explanation that is adaptive (i.e., provides viable and believable options for overcoming specific difficulties) and is accepted by the patient, and (e) a set of procedures or rituals engaged by the patient and therapist that leads the patient to enact something that is positive, helpful, or adaptive.” (p. 469)

Given that trust in a therapist and an “adaptive” explanation create expectations of improvement, it seems to me that the distinction between common factors and the placebo effect is somewhat arbitrary and artificial. Be that as it may, the picture in clear: subtract common factors, placebo effect, and life events, and the actual type of therapy doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

I don’t quite buy it. Partly because separating out the variables in such a clean-cut way is devilishly hard. For instance, did the authors of these studies distinguish between “extra-therapeutic events” that were probably independent of therapy, such as inheriting a ton of money, and those that may have come about, at least in part, because of therapy, such as finding a soul mate. After all, certain behaviors make certain events more or less likely and therapy often targets behavior and the things that influence behavior, like anxiety, social competence and self-confidence.

It may be that successful therapies work not only because of the common factors and  placebo effect but because they include specific ingredients that make it more likely beneficial life events will occur. The efficacy of these ingredients may be hard to detect, because their effects vary according to the person and situation. Some approaches/skills/strategies are useful for some individuals and situations but not for others – no one size fits all. But that isn’t saying the effects aren’t there.

References

Kevin M. Laska and Alan S. Gurman Expanding the Lens of Evidence-Based Practice in Psychotherapy: A Common Factors Perspective 2014, Vol. 51, No. 4, 467–481.

Lambert, M. J., & Bergin, A. E. (1994). The effectiveness of psychotherapy. In A. E. Bergin & S. L. Garfield (Eds.), Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (4th ed., pp. 143–189). New York, NY: Wiley.

Honey Bees, Pesticides, and Dose Effects

Scientific Encounters, The Environment

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the EPA has found a clear level of concentration of the pesticide imidacloprid in which things start to go badly for the local honey bee population:

“If nectar brought back to the hive from worker bees had more than 25parts per billion of the chemical, ‘there’s a significant effect,’ namely fewer bees, less honey and ‘a less robust hive,’ said Jim Jones, EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. But if the nectar chemical level was below 25 parts per billion, it was as if there were no imidacloprid at all, with no ill effects, Jones said. It was a clear line of harm or no harm, he said.”

The level of chemical also interacted with type of crop. For instance, concentrations that     were harmful in cotton and citrus fruits were not harmful for corn. And treating seeds with the chemical didn’t seem to harm bees.

This is a wonderful example of dose effects: it’s not the substance but how much of the substance that counts. And the relation between dose and effects is not linear. The question is not: “is this toxic” but: “at what dose does this become toxic?” Often what is harmful at high doses is benign or even beneficial at low doses. Something to keep in mind whether we’re talking about pesticides or sweeteners in tea.

 

Observing Thoughts Changes Their Trajectory

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

Our brains engage in two distinct cognitive modes: the attention-demanding “task-positive mode” and the go-with-the-flow task-negative mode, also known as the default mode. Observing thoughts is a cognitive task; the thoughts themselves arise while the brain is in default mode. Here’s the thing: these two modes reciprocally inhibit each other; that is, our brain can’t be in both modes at the same time. They alternate. Therefore, we can’t observe thoughts “as they unfold”, because their unfolding happens in the default mode and our observing happens in the task-positive mode. So observing thoughts is not simultaneous with their production but happens after they are produced: observing is remembering – even if a split-second later.

The converse of this is while we’re “observing” thoughts, we’re not producing them. We alternate modes. And if we’re doing a lot of observing, we’re also doing a lot of disrupting of what we’re observing. Hence, what we’re observing is not a natural unfolding of thoughts but a constantly disrupted stop-and-go of thoughts.

Ref: Neuroimage. 2013 Feb 1;66:385-401. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061. Epub 2012 Oct 27. fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. Jack AI1, Dawson AJ2, Begany KL2, Leckie RL2, Barry KP2, Ciccia AH3, Snyder AZ4.

The Fundamental Attribution Error and Its Discontents

Scientific Encounters

Most of us who have taken an introductory psychology course have learned about the “fundamental attribution error”, which is the tendency to attribute behavior to individual characteristics instead of situational factors. The assumption here is that situations exert much greater influence on behavior than personal attributes like desires, emotions, goals, personality, or temperament. The FAE has achieved the status as received wisdom – a solid scientific fact. It’s hard to find criticism of the concept.

However, as John Harvey and colleagues pointed out years ago, you can’t talk about “error” without addressing the accuracy of the attribution in specific instances. Imputing dispositional characteristics can be both a logical and empirically tenable explanation for behavior. FAE defenders might respond: well, when everybody does the same thing in the same situation, obviously the situation is calling the shots. Take, for instance, the Milgram experiments where just almost all subjects ending up administering what they thought were painful electrical shocks to other participants in the study. Their personality and moral qualms weren’t worth diddly-squat.

To which I would respond: you can’t use extreme example to prove a general case. Just about everyone breaks under torture too, provided it’s painful or long enough. That doesn’t mean everyone reacts the same way to, say, mild stomach discomfort. And even though everyone “ultimately” ends up behaving a certain way in some types of situations, the details matter. In the Milgram studies, subjects varied in how much and how long they resisted before caving in to the researchers’ requests. If the experiments had stopped earlier, there would have been a lot of individual variation – and since the experimental situation was the same for all subjects, attributing behavior variation to characteristics of the individual subjects would have been reasonable and not erroneous.

And then there’s the idea that people from “individualist” western cultures are more prone to the fundamental attribution error than people from “collectivist” Asian cultures since the latter are more likely to explain behavior in situational terms than individualist westerners. But attributions aren’t just something one absorbs from the wider culture – they are something people use to predict and influence the behavior of others. An attribution has staying power when it helps us navigate the social environment. An inaccurate attribution isn’t a particularly useful attribution. If you live in a society that values adherence to situation-specific social rules over individual expression, it’s probably more accurate to attribute behavior to situations in those societies – but less so in individualist societies. Context matters.

Let’s change the terminology and call the FAE an “attribution heuristic”. Heuristics are general rules of thumb that often work well enough but sometimes don’t. The Fundamental Attribution Error is dead! Long live the Attribution Heuristic!

Reference:

Harvey, John H.; Town, Jerri P.; Yarkin, Kerry L. How fundamental is “the fundamental attribution error”? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 40(2), Feb 1981, 346-349.

Attention, Working Memory and Cognitive De-Coupling

Scientific Encounters

Attention can be directed or involuntary. Insofar as different brain networks are involved in directed and involuntary attention, they reflect categorically distinct processes. This dual-process model of attention has been criticized, however. Rather than conceiving directed and involuntary attention as mutually exclusive categories, some argue it would be more accurate to consider their differences as matters of degree. From this perspective, the attributes of attention vary along a continuum, with directed and involuntary attention representing opposite poles of the continuum. For example, directed attention is more controlled and goal-driven and less automatic and stimulus-driven than involuntary attention (Moors and De Houwer; 2006).

However, since separate brain regions are involved in the different types of attention, they probably have some defining characteristics that do not overlap. This is the position of Evans and Stanovich (2013) who support the dual-process theory of cognition and say the key feature of Type 1 (associated with involuntary attention) is “autonomous processing” and the key feature of Type 2 (associated with directed attention) is “the ability to sustain the decoupling of secondary representations—a key feature of all working memory tasks.” Cognitive decoupling happens when we distinguish what we suppose to be true from what might actually be the case. Type 2 processing involves experiencing beliefs as beliefs, as windows-in-themselves and not windows-on-the-world.  So, when we are coupling cognitive-wise, we are considering cognitions as objects of attention – much like when we are “observing thoughts”.

Evans and Stanovich call Type 1 the default process and Type 2 the interventionist process. Thus when we consider our intuitions, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts as such, we are intervening with their unfolding. We have paused them.

References:

Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 297–326.

Evans, Jonathan St. B. T. and Stanovich, Keith E. Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition Advancing the Debate Perspectives on Psychological Science May 2013 vol. 8 no. 3 223-241.

What’s Going On in Our Heads?

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

We’re in a resting state when we’re not performing a task, when the brain is “at ease, sir”, doing its thing in the default mode. Hurlburt and colleagues just published a paper comparing “resting state” in two conditions: in an MRI scanner and the natural environment of the subjects.  They found that resting states have five characteristics: inner seeing (visual images), inner speaking, sensory awareness, feelings (i.e., emotions), and unsymbolized thinking (wordless, imageless, but there doing something – like wondering or questioning or realizing – but without words).

In this study, the five subjects were beeped at random times to provide immediate reports of their experience. The frequency of rest=state experiences varied according to the environment. Across subjects, inner seeing occurred more often in the scanner than in natural environments (4 of 5 subjects), as did inner speaking (5 of 5), and unsymbolized thinking (5 of 5). Sensory awareness (3 of 5) and feelings (5 of 5) occurred more in natural environments than in the scanner.

The average amount of time spent in different types of resting-state experiences also varied according to environment. In natural environments, sensory awareness (mean: 65.6%) and Feelings (mean: 29.4%) were experienced more often than Inner Speaking (mean: 18.2%). In the scanner, Inner Speaking was more common than Feelings: mean of 29.0%, compared to 8.4%. (Note: percentages do not add to 100 because experiences can have more than one characteristic.)

The authors also found substantial individual differences in resting-state experience across their subjects. For example, between subjects, the resting-state frequency of sensory awareness ranged from 19 to 78%; inner seeing ranged from 19 to 67%; and, inner speaking ranged from 14 to 53%. Hurlburt et al found similarly wide ranges in the natural environment. However, there was substantial within-subject consistency: each subject’s experiential frequencies in the natural environment were similar in the scanner.

Interestingly, most of the subjects’ resting-state experiences were not verbal nor did they involve planning for the future – regardless of environment (scanner or natural).

Reference:

What goes on in the resting-state? A qualitative glimpse into resting-state experience in the scanner Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C.s and Kühn, S. Frontiers in Psychology www.frontiersin.org October 2015 Volume6 Article1535 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01535