Psychology, Science, and Life

Sometimes I get the sense that many of my students--especially those in Psych 60T and Psych 144-- think the only thing I care about is science or that I think that science is the only legitimate approach to understanding things.

But this is pretty far from the truth. I'm interested in all sorts of non-scientific things. For example, I love to read novels and play the guitar and banjo. And I do these things not because scientific research has proved them to be beneficial to people's health or happiness, but because I enjoy them. In the case of novels, I believe that the good ones also give me new ways to understand the world, including myself. And playing the banjo gives me a sense of accomplishment and helps define who I am.

I'm also interested in a lot of big philosophical questions, including ones about the nature of knowledge (e.g., What does it mean to know something? How do we know what we know?) and even the limitations of science. I'm extremely interested in ethics. How should we behave? Is it right for me to have as much money, food, and stuff as I have while there are billions of people in the world who have nothing ... and in fact are starving to death? (I feel pretty sure the answer is "no" but I'm not at all sure what to do about it.)

And I certainly didn't choose my spouse according to some computer algorithm or plan my family based on some scientific principle. (Maybe that explains why my two kids are a high school freshman and a kindergartener.)

I suspect that no one would be surprised by a chemistry professor who is "scientific" when doing and teaching chemistry but who has a wide variety of other interests and approaches to life. But it seems that taking a strong scientific approach to psychology implies a severely stunted world view. "If the guy can reduce questions about even love to numbers and graphs, then he must have some kind of a problem."

But here's a news flash. I'm not a literature, music, or philosophy professor. I'm a psychology professor. And psychology, by definition, is the scientific study of human behavior. Who says it's scientific? Well, the American Psychological Association, for starters. And just about every introductory textbook that's out there. The entire faculty in psychology at Fresno State says so, as do the faculty at just about every other university you can think of. Even Wikipedia says so!

So that's what I teach--psychology as an empirical science. And I bring into the classroom all the assumptions and attitudes that go along with that: empiricism, skepticism, and so on.

But I am not trying to convince anyone that science is the only legitimate approach to understanding things--least of all human behavior. What I do want is for my students to understand the scientific approach itself and appreciate it for what it does well: establishing general principles about the way things are. (More on this soon, I hope.)

OK, I've got to go put on my lab coat and safety goggles and then fire up the ol' Bunsen burner. Just kidding, of course. I think I'll play my banjo and listen to the birds sing.

The Learning Curve

What follows is a thinly veiled excuse for posting yet another wav file of myself playing the banjo. This time it's a tune called "Whiskey Before Breakfast."

I've been playing for about three and a half months and have made a lot of progress. In fact, I think I've climbed the steepest part of the famous "learning curve."

Now I'm guessing you've heard of this learning curve ... but I'm also guessing that many of you don't have a good sense of what it is. If you're in Psych 42 or 144 I can explain it using language from class.

The learning curve is the generic statistical relationship between the amount of time one spends studying information or practicing a skill (X, the independent variable) and one's knowledge or skill level (Y, the dependent variable). It's called a "curve" because it's a nonlinear relationship, with skill level increasing quickly at first but then slowing down and eventually leveling off.

For example, in my first week of banjo playing, I went from barely being able to strum a chord in good form to playing simple songs--a huge improvement. In my second week, I went from being able to play simple songs to being able to play somewhat more complex songs. I was on the "steep part" of the curve. But then it probably took two more months to make any really noticeable improvement. I was moving toward the "flat part" of the curve.

So the bad news is that my rate of improvement is slowing down quite dramatically. The good news, though, is that I'll probably continue to improve--even if the increments are very small--until either my hands or my brain start to give out. I don't worry about my eyes. I can play with them closed already.

Banjo Therapy

Well ... the football team lost to Wisconsin.

Immediately afterward, I sat alone in my darkened living room and composed a new tune. It's a bit more sad and reflective than my previous arrangement. I call this one "What Might Have Been."

Fight Varsity!

I've completed and recorded my very first banjo arrangement! It's a song called "Fight Varsity!" You might not recognize the name but see if you recognize the tune.

Fresno State vs. Wisconsin: Why Do I Care?

Like many people here in Fresno, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming football game against the University of Wisconsin. By kickoff, I'll be downright agitated.

In fact, I tend to get so worked up during big games that watching them is not even enjoyable. I'm usually on my feet, pacing, waking in and out of the room, and yelling things like, "Don't field the damn punt inside the ten!"

But, really, why do I care?

I don't know anyone on the Fresno State team, and my family and friends don't really care about the outcome. I do have friends at other universities for whom a Fresno State win would provide me with "bragging rights." But that just begs the question. What would I have to brag about?

So logically, being a diehard fan of a sports team doesn't make much sense. Psycho-logically, however, it's a different story.

Social psychologists have long maintained that we define ourselves in part by our many group memberships. This means that our groups' successes contribute to our own personal self-esteem. In Henri Tajfel's classic social identity theory, people's need for self-esteem leads them to exaggerate the good qualities of the groups they belong to ("ingroups") and diminish those of the groups they don't belong to ("outgroups"). Furthermore, they do this even when the groups are created arbitrarily. (I was able to use this fact a few years ago to show that people's probability judgments are biased in favor of what they want to be true. Here is the abstract of that study.)

So maybe this is why I care. Even though my association with Fresno State is essentially arbitrary (they happened to be hiring psych faculty with my area of expertise at the time I happened to be looking for a tenure-track job), my self-esteem goes up when the football team wins because this reflects favorably on my group ... and it goes down when they lose.

Pathetic, really.

Go 'Dogs!

The Psychology of Clawhammer Banjo

My big accomplishment of the summer was to start playing the banjo. I've played the guitar for about 15 years but have always wanted to try the banjo. I guess my wife got tired of hearing me talk about it so she got me one for my birthday. Now she's tired of hearing me play it.

Anyway, playing the banjo has got me thinking a lot about the process of learning a new physical skill. For the style I play (called "clawhammer"), the basic right-hand technique involves curling your hand up like a claw and plucking downward at the strings with the back of the fingernail of your index finger, which feels very awkward at first. The banjo is also tuned differently from the guitar, has five strings instead of six, and the fifth string only reaches about three-fourths of the way from the bridge to the peghead. This means that when you look down at your right hand while playing, you see five strings. But when you look up at your left, you see four. This can be confusing when you're looking back and forth between your hands while struggling with "Cluck Old Hen."

Slowly, however, I am getting the hang of it. Moves that seemed next to impossible at first are now fairly easy and some of the simpler songs that I've been learning are starting to sound pretty good. I'm starting to think that I might even be a "real" banjo player someday.

Experiencing and thinking about this reminded me that there is a well established area of psychology that is concerned with just this kind of thing. It is referred to as the study of "motor performance" or perhaps the study of "perception and action." There are laboratories, graduate programs, scientific journals, and textbooks devoted to understanding how we generate, control, and refine voluntary movements to do things like brush our teeth, catch a ball, drive a car, type, and so on.

Yes, a man might play the banjo as an act of passive aggression against his wife (I say might), and everyone would recognize this motivation as something "psychological." But the act itself of playing the banjo is psychological too. And many of us think that it is at least as worthy of study.

Now I've got to get back to working on "Four Wet Pigs."

Mere Exposure and What Everybody Knows

Students in my Intro to the Psych Major course recently had to read and review a pop psychology book. This is a great assignment, by the way, and I really enjoy reading the papers. If only I didn't have a zillion other things to read: research paper introductions, thesis drafts, articles submitted for publication that I've been asked to review, etc.

Anyway, one student reviewed a book on anger, in which the author made something like the following assertion: "You cannot forgive others until you forgive yourself." In his review, the student was using this critically as an example of something that everyone knows anyway. And of course I've heard this before too and was about to let it pass.

But then I thought, "Why not? Why can't you forgive others until you forgive yourself?"

And I sat there for a few minutes trying to think of any reason that this might be true. Not empirical evidence, mind you. Just any semi-logical, halfway plausible reason for the proposed relationship between other-forgiveness and self-forgiveness. But I couldn't do it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more meaningless the phrase became.

I suspect that the real reason that this assertion seems obvious--along with the kindred, "You cannot love another until you love yourself"--is just that we've heard them before. There is a phenomenon that research psychologists have termed the "mere exposure effect." Simply having been exposed to a stimulus before (even subliminally) causes that stimulus to be processed more easily, to seem more familiar, to be liked more, and--in the case of assertions--be perceived as more true.

This is making me think of all sorts of other related research-based stuff having to do with the automatic tendency to accept assertions as true and with different ways of processing persuasive messages. But I should probably get back to grading papers.