Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Starting winter term 2013

The winter term begins today. I am continuing with the Canadian politics PhD seminar from last term, as well as the international relations course where I am working as a teaching assistant. I am picking up a new Canadian politics course taught by Peter Russell called: “Canada in Question – a Country Founded on Incomplete Conquests“.

I am also hoping to audit Jordan Peterson’s psychology course: “Self-Deception: A Comprehensive Analysis” and perhaps continue to drop in on some of Nick Mount’s “Literature for Our Time” lectures.

Intrigue

From Kipling’s Kim:

“It was intrigue,— of course he knew that much, as he had known all evil since he could speak,— but what he loved was the game for its own sake — the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of the women’s world on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark.”

D.L. Rosenhan and the evaluation of sanity

One interesting bit of research described in Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape concerns the ability of psychiatric hospitals to distinguish the sane from the insane:

Of course, there are many other other ways in which we can be misled by context. Few studies illustrate this more powerfully than one conducted by the psychologist David L. Rosenhan, in which he and seven confederates had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals in five different states in order to determine whether mental health professionals could detect the presence of the sane among the mentally ill. In order to get committed, each researcher complained of hearing a voice repeating the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Beyond that, each behaved perfectly normally. Upon winning admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatients stopped complaining of their symptoms and immediately sought to convince the doctors, nurses, and staff that they felt fine and were fit to be released. This proved surprisingly difficult. While these genuinely sane patients wanted to leave the hospital, repeatedly declared that they experienced no symptoms, and became “paragons of cooperation,” their average length of hospitalization was nineteen days (ranging from seven to fifty-two days), during which they were bombarded with an astounding range of powerful drugs (which they discreetly deposited in the toilet). None were pronounced healthy. Each was ultimately discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission” (with the exception of one who received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder). Interestingly, while the doctors, nurses, and staff were apparently blind to the presence of normal people on the ward, actual mental patients frequently remarked on the obvious sanity of the researchers, saying things like “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist.”

In a brilliant response to the skeptics at one hospital who had heard of this research before it was published, Rosenhan announced that he would send a few confederates their way and challenged them to spot the coming pseudopatients. The hospital kept vigil, while Rosenhan, in fact, sent no one. This did not stop the hospital from “detecting” a steady stream of psedopatients. Over a period of a few months fully 10 percent of their new patients were deemed to be shamming by both a psychiatrist and a member of the staff. While we have all grown familiar with phenomena of this sort, it is startling to see the principle so clearly demonstrated: expectation can be, if not everything, almost everything. Rosenhan concluded his paper with this damning summary: “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.”

Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape. p.141-2 (hardcover)

I believe this is the research being referenced: Rosenhan, D.L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Santa Clara Lawyer 379 (1972-1973).

This doesn’t seem like the most scientific or ethical research, but it is certainly interesting.

Runaway climate change as an investment risk

In a worst-case scenario, climate change could put the survival of the human species into doubt. Along with the tremendous human suffering that would involve, it would also eliminate the value of all investments, including real estate, stocks, bonds, holdings of precious metals, etc.

Perhaps if climate change were understood as a possible 100% loss in the value of all investments, people would be willing to spend more and take more action to reduce its seriousness.

The ‘phone’ part of the iPhone can be very distracting

Sometimes, I wish I could uninstall the ‘Phone’ app from my iPhone. It’s amazing to be able to access email and websites from anywhere, without needing to rely on the availability of WiFi. It’s less amazing for people to be able to initiate immediate verbal communication with me at any time of day or night.

Between working as a TA and taking courses, I think it’s pretty difficult for doctoral students in the first couple of years to do much substantive reading and thinking about their thesis topic. In order to counter that, I am trying to do what I can to reduce the number of apparently urgent items popping up in my attention stream.

I wish the iPhone was a bit more granular in terms of which services you can turn off. It’s great that the iPhone has an ‘airplane mode‘ that kills both access to the cellular network and access to WiFi. It’s also great that you can turn on airplane mode with WiFi enabled (for internet access with no phone calls or text messages). I wish you could allow the phone to use the cellular network for email and web browsing but disable it for text messages and phone calls.

Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

Psychologically active drugs may be the least rationally regulated part of our society, with one dangerous and addictive drug advertised and available everywhere (alcohol) and only nudges to disocurage the use of another that kills five million people a year globally (tobacco). Meanwhile, police forces and court systems around the world tie themselves up with investigating, processing, and incarcerating people who own or sell small quantities of much less dangerous substances.

David Nutt was appointed as chairman of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2008: an expert panel intended to provide non-partisan advice on drugs to the government. He was fired in 2009 after pointing out that the chances of getting hurt from an hour of horseback riding are about 30 times greater than the odds of dying from taking a pill of MDMA (ecstasy). His book Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs covers some extremely interesting ground in a convincing and well-argued way.

Nutt describes how policy-making in the area of drugs is often driven by a combination of media-enhanced hysteria and an effort on the part of politicians to seem ‘tough’ on the issue. He categorizes many of the harms that result from this, ranging from criminal records acquired by youth (which harm their lives much more than drugs) to harsh restrictions on the availability of painkillers around the world, leaving many with terminal illnesses to die in a great deal of pain.

Nutt also provides a nuanced and interesting description of the nature of addiction, distinguishing between people who rely on steady access to a drug to control and underlying condition (as diabetics use insulin) and those whose use of a drug has been sufficient to give them harsh withdrawal symptoms when they stop using it, which in turn drives them into a cycle of continuous use. Nutt argues that treating addicts as criminals causes a great deal of harm to the addicts themselves and to society at large, through mechanisms including the suppression of scientific research, the discrediting of the law through its obviously unjust application, the enrichment of criminal gangs, increasing the spread of infectious disease, diverting attention from controlling alcohol and tobacco, and the indirect encouragement of more harmful drug-taking practices because safer alternatives are not available.

My copy of the book is sprinkled with a few typographic errors which I am told have already been corrected in the newest printing. It’s also a bit challenging to square a few of the claims about the relative dangerousness of drugs. Early in the book, Nutt describes a complex exercise in which multi-criteria decision analysis was used to evaluate the relative harmfulness of a variety of legal and illegal drugs across sixteen dimensions, encompassing both harm to the individual and harm to society. The ranking found alcohol to be the most destructive drug overall, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Methamphetamine, powder cocaine, and tobacco follow. Lower in the list are amphetamine, cannabis, GHB, and benzodiazepines. At the bottom of the scale are ecstasy, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms. Between ecstasy and benzodiazepines – about 1/3 of the way up the harmfulness scale – Nutt lists ‘butane’ – an inhalant. Later in the book, however, he characterizes butane as extremely dangerous and capable of killing people on the first use if misused. Perhaps the scale is based on the proper administration of the drug. Still, it seems like a drug that carries a significant risk of accidental fatal overdose should probably be rated as more harmful than drugs like cannabis which carry no such risk.

Regardless of the exact ranking of harmfulness that is most appropriate, the book contains a great deal of interesting information, as well as an informative chapter on what parents should tell their children about drugs. Nutt argues convincingly that treating drug addicts as people with a serious medical problem makes more sense than treating them as criminals, and lays out a good case for why the supposed ‘War on Drugs’ has failed. He also provides some interesting information on the functioning of the brain and makes some suggestions about how drugs of all sorts could be regulated to reduce harm. He does a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy in our treatment of tobacco and alcohol and makes some sensible suggestions for how states could effectively discourage the use of the latter.

All told, Nutt’s book provides a scientist’s take on the various substances people consume with the desire to change their thinking, as well as the consequences of the production and use of those substances for individuals and society. By repeatedly pointing out the many areas where policies are poorly informed by reality and counterproductive, he makes a strong case for the need for drug law reform. Both for individuals who wish to educate themselves about drugs and for policy-makers who aspire to regulate them more appropriately, this book could be a very useful reference.

Nutt is now associated with the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs which has a great deal of useful information about drugs and harm reduction on their website.

Gardiner on climate ethics and moral corruption

In A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen Gardiner addresses the argument that a green energy revolution could be an exciting opportunity that benefits the lives of those who are alive today as well as those in future generations.

He characterizes this perspective as potentially interesting empirically, but largely unimportant ethically. It would be good if we could solve climate change while benefitting ourselves, but we have a moral obligation to address it even if doing so requires sacrificing things that we value in our own lives.

Generally speaking, Gardiner’s strongest point is that we are strongly psychologically disinclined to take responsibility for our contribution or to do anything about it. Because we have an intense desire to persist in climate-altering behaviours, we are willing to accept logically weak arguments for why we ought not to do anything, why we have already done enough, why the problem will solve itself, etc. He refers to this as “moral corruption”. In my experience, this self-justifying and self-deceptive behaviour is especially evident when people try to justify activities that (a) contribute very substantially to their personal carbon footprint, and which are (b) basically entirely voluntary and recreational.

On political ‘science’

As a consequence of returning to school, I am asked several times a day about what my field of study is. This is a touch awkward, as I have never really believed in the ‘science’ part of ‘political science’. I don’t think political phenomena can generally be effectively studied using quantitative methods. Indeed, I would be a lot more comfortable in a discipline with a name like ‘politics, philosophy, and economics’.

Thankfully, I can often dodge the ‘science’ part by saying that I study ‘environmental politics’. Those with a strong interest in academic taxonomy will sometimes persist in questioning until I name a discipline that is formally recognized at this institution, but most people seem content to accept ‘environmental politics’ as a field of study.

There is science involved in this area of research, certainly, but it pertains mostly to how the physical world responds to human choices, not to attempts to understand human interaction and institutions numerically. The interaction between carbon dioxide and electromagnetic radiation can be well-explained mathematically – the relationship between what scientists know and how governments behave, much less so.

Massey College at the end of summer

Massey College is full of luxurious silence. At night, it is usually only possible to hear the water flowing into the pond in the main quad and the chirp of a few insects. The contrast with a room overlooking College Street is excessive, and the new transition has been a reminder of how important a home’s acoustic surroundings are for determining how pleasant or unpleasant it is to occupy.

We will see if the place becomes less tranquil as more of the junior fellows move in. For now, I am enjoying the ease with which I can pretend I am in rural Vermont, rather than the middle of Canada’s most sprawling metropolis.

It’s also remarkable to be living in a building designed by a single person (and a British Columbian) with the clear purpose of serving as a home for a group of young scholars. Some of this is revealed in tiny details, like how the desk chairs in the studies tuck elegantly against the side of the desk, or how the lamp behind the bed is designed to be easily turned on or off by a person reading. To get myself thinking about communal and intentional forms of living, I have been reading the Rule of Saint Benedict. It contains some good advice for people and communities in general, though I am glad not to be living in a place where supreme obedience to an abbot and scripture is a central part of life. Rather, the main aim will be to devote myself to scholarly work – research and writing.