Category: psychology stuff

Reasons not to trust police witnesses (that aren’t because they’re bastards)

It is a feature of the legal system that an arresting officer will often end up testifying in the court case. It is also a feature in our legal system that the police don’t always tell, as they are supposed to, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have seen court cases wherein police evidence has suggested the defendant has somehow managed to magically be in two places at once, charging a police line from both ends while simultaneously fabricating a complicated full face and head garment. I have seen court cases where video evidence has revealed that rather than assaulting a police officer, the defendant was assaulted by police officers.

The usual explanation put forward for these “minor inconsistencies” is that the police are a bunch of corrupt, vile pigs. While this may be true, science suggests that they can’t help but misremember.

In a study entitled Witnesses in action: the effect of physical exertion on recall and recognition [paywalled, alas], police officers were tested for their ability to recall details following physical exertion, similar to the sort of activity that a copper might encounter while arresting someone. In short, their ability to remember what happened or recognise a suspect was sorely diminished.

The participants were 52 experienced police officers, mostly male (which reflects the make up of the police force). Half of the participants were asked to beat up a big heavy bag of water–a slightly unnatural task, but presumably the university ethics panel refused to allow the researchers to use students as beating material. After this task, all of the participants went to raid the trailer of an imaginary “known criminal”, where they encountered a living room full of weapons, and an angry stooge yelling at them.

The police officers who had beaten up water recalled significantly–hugely–less about the stooge than those who had not exerted themselves. The exerted participants often could not identify their suspect from a line up.

Now, while this task is somewhat unnatural, it certainly casts damning doubt on the credibility of police evidence: arrests tend to happen after the arresting officer has been physically exerted in some way, and often in a rather aggressive fashion. Why, then, would the police lie in court rather than say “I don’t remember”?

Again, they might just be a bunch of filthy, corrupt pigs, but there may be a more benign reason for police officers saying something that is diametrically opposed to the realms of plausibility. A classic psychology study from the seventies can shed light on this. Loftus and Palmer studied the effects of leading questions, and found that it was very easy to manipulate participants’ memories of a situation by simple phrasing of questions. On watching videos of traffic accidents, participants could be lead to estimate a far greater speed for the accidents if the question involved the word “smashed” rather than “contacted”, and recalled seeing broken glass where there was none depending on the wording of another question.

If police officers have a fuzzy enough memory of a situation, a lawyer asking just the right questions can persuade their minds to fill in the blanks and begin remembering things that did not happen.

The author of the exertion study summarises her research by saying:

“The legal system puts a great deal of emphasis on witness accounts, particularly those of professional witnesses like police officers.  Investigators and courts need to understand that an officer who cannot provide details about an encounter where physical exertion has played a role is not necessarily being deceptive or uncooperative.  An officer’s memory errors or omissions after an intense physical struggle should not unjustly affect his or her credibility.”

I disagree. This absolutely should affect their credibility. We need not necessarily feel angry at the police, but every judge, magistrate and potential juror in the country ought to know that the police account–with its added weight of credibility as it comes from a person with higher social status–is likely to be flawed and possibly outright untrue.

As for those who have found themselves on the wrong end of police untruths in court, is it still worth suing the officers when it may not be their fault? Absolutely. This sends a clear message that if the officer does not remember something they should say so in court. They should be aware of the shortcomings of their own memory, rather than this being used as a tool for implicating people in crime.

The system has capitalised upon these quirks and inconsistencies in human memory for too long. This needs to end.

 

The Taxpayers’ Alliance use evolutionary psychology: apparently their opposition isn’t getting laid

The Taxpayers’ Alliance are hardly famed for their intellectual analysis of situations, but this one takes the piss-soaked biscuit.

Those who oppose tax cuts for the rich are apparently suffering from sexual jealousy because the rich people get all of the best women. I am not making this up. Here are some select quotes I could be arsed to type out from page 92 of their latest report:

The successful hunter gatherer knows better than to resist the theft and he still garners some rewards–in terms of gratitude, prestige and sexual affairs–for his success. Among hunter gatherers, even the tiniest inequality is translated into more babies.

…

It was the still same in early agricultural societies: the man with  with the most corn or cattle had the most wives or concubines. And it is still true today: even in an age of working women, sexual continence and gender equality, the man with the most money still gets more sexual opportunities than the man with the least money. Ask them.

So no wonder we dislike inequality. No wonder we want to tax that money off a Vanderbilt before he grabs all the best women.

…

Who can really think that when confronted with all the middle-class benefits that flow from the taxpayer? No, at least it’s partly plain old sexual jealousy at the root.

This is actually a report that was actually commissioned and published, and I promise I haven’t just cherry-picked quotes to misrepresent their argument. It actually is that.

Now, it’s hard to begin deconstructing an argument as plainly stupid as this, so let’s all take a break to laugh until we shit ourselves. Once this is done, let’s pop on some clean pants and talk about how risibly wrong the TPA are.

The big glaring elephant in the room is that evolutionary psychology is almost entirely complete bollocks. It is largely speculation based on “these ancient people did this, and we do something similar SO WE EVOLVED IT AND IT’S NATURAL”. It is often used to justify existing inequalities, as it is being applied by the TPA.

The TPA are using the typical evolutionary psychology justification, but with a twist. They are actually more open about their lack of evidence than most evolutionary psychology papers: they suggest “asking” a rich man if he is having more sex than a poor man. I think we can all sing in chorus that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but seeing as the TPA have decided this is sufficient evidence, I will point out that I have had sex with nine people since the beginning of May and science says that the TPA publish these reports specifically to piss me off because they’re jealous of the sheer quantity of orgasms I have.

To damn the TPA with faint praise, it’s kind of gratifying to see that at least they don’t pretend that the rich are mostly men–in fact, given the wording of the report, it would seem that all of the rich are men. It’s also nice to see that on planet TPA, gender equality exists, presumably because all the women know their place in servicing the super-rich in harems while pointing and laughing at anyone without a diamond-encrusted helicopter.

Now I think about it, the TPA exist in the same dystopian universe as Catherine Hakim.

It’s interesting to note that at no point do the TPA acknowledge that this sex-surplus of the rich might boil down to the fact that they can afford to pay for it. By evolutionary psychology standards, actually, there’s some “evidence” to suggest it’s the most generous men who get the most sex.

So, basically, the TPA have, as always, commissioned a report that is complete and utter fuckwitted bollocks, and the only saving grace is that most people will never be bothered to read through a 400-page report to read this shit.

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Hat tip to Political Scrapbook for highlighting this and @MediocreDave for making sure I saw it and kicked off.

Fifty Shades Of Grey is probably shit, Kate Roiphe is wrong, and we need to discuss submission

There has been a lot of guff surrounding ascended Twilight fanfic Fifty Shades of Grey. For those of you living under rocks, this work of “literature” tells the story of Bella Swan Ana Steele, an ordinary high school girl college graduate, who meets the mysterious, brooding vampire businessman Edward Cullen Christian Grey and her world changes forever her world changes forever. The only thing that sets it apart from Twilight is the sex scenes, which are, apparently, terribly-written. Oh, and there’s BDSM. Lots and lots of BDSM. The sex in question, apparently, consists entirely of a dominant Christian and a submissive Ana, as apparently Ana isn’t actually all that into the kinky bits, and just goes along with it because she loves Christian.

I use the word “apparently” a lot here because I absolutely flat-out refuse to read the fucking thing.

Anyway, the entire premise sounds problematic as fuck, and not at all in keeping with the spirit of BDSM.

Enter Kate Roiphe, an alleged academic who once wrote a book about how feminism is spreading a fear of female sexuality, based on an experience she had in 1986. Roiphe has decided to lay out an argument suggesting that women are turned on by submitting to a man because we have too much free will these days and that’s “a burden”. Oh, and that feminists (presumably this same bunch of sex-catastrophisers from 1986, who definitely existed and are definitely the same as all feminists) are against the idea of submission and kink.

For an academic, Roiphe seems strangely coy about referencing any of the “facts” and “studies” which back up her own argument. Here’s a particularly egregious example:

Over the years researchers and psychologists have theorized that women harbor elaborate fantasies about sexual submission because they feel guilty or skittish about claiming responsibility for their own desires [citation needed]: they are more comfortable being wanted than wanting, in other words. But more recent studies [citation needed] show that the women who fantasize about being forced to have sex are actually less prone to guilt than those who don’t. In any event, that theory seems too simple or at least too 19th-century an answer for the modern woman: it is not as much guilt over sex but rather something more basically liberating about being overcome or overpowered.[citation needed]

Perhaps this plethora of unreferenced evidence really does back up her argument, but somehow I doubt it, as Roiphe’s theory seems distinctly unparsimonious.

See, there’s a much easier explanation for the rise in mainstream depictions of female submission in BDSM, and the number of women who admit to entertaining submissive fantasies and/or practice; an explanation that can be summed up in a single word: socialisation.

Let us remember that we inhabit a world wherein the fight for women’s sexual agency is only just beginning. While women are starting to view themselves–and be viewed–as active participants in sex rather than passive to the whims of a man. Heterosexism and patriarchy intersect to provide this set of conditions, and while it is subsiding, we’ve some way to go in overturning this culture. Everyone is socialised in this climate and internalises such beliefs to some extent or another. It is hardly surprising, then, that the first kink to “go mainstream” is one which fits most comfortably with existing attitudes: submissive woman, dominant man (it is worth noting that this set of attitudes equally permeates the kink scene: because I am a woman, I am often automatically assumed to be a sub by men).

So women, when asked about their fantasies–a deeply personal question which is charged with all sorts of social expectations–are far more likely to give the more “socially acceptable” answer. And the mainstream media is bound to crawl all over the things that are a little bit steamy, but close enough to “normal” to comprehend easily.

This is not to say, of course, that these women aren’t really into submission: most probably are, unlike the poor main character in Fifty Shades Of Arse-dripping Fuck-bollocks. What is missing, though, is the acknowledgement of the rainbow of sexuality, of kinks and quirks which are less congruent with heterosexist patriarchy. We have a hell of a long way to go before we get to this point: right now, female submission to men can be a choice, freely chosen, but the rest of the boundless possibilities are less easy to access, experience and even know of their existence. I have experienced precisely this shift myself. I started out subbing to men as it was the only option available. Gradually, with experience and meeting the right people, I evolved and discovered all sorts of delightfully sinful pleasures. This doesn’t dampen my enjoyment of occasionally subbing to men.

Ultimately, the discussion around female submission should not be whether it’s right or wrong: it’s sex, and the only time sex can be wrong is with a lack of enthusiastic consent. Instead, we ought to acknowledge the context and work to build an environment wherein sexual liberation and sexual choice–glorious, abundant choice–is genuinely, completely available.


Abstinence education: better than nothing (with bonus bullshit from the anti-choicers)

Anti-choice news-bender Life News has trumpeted proudly that abstinence education totally works, yo. Using the language of science–and some fancy-looking footnotes (which actually lead to, among other things, a book published by a Mormon abstinence education “research centre”)–Life News claims that abstinence education works.

Well, they’re sort of right. It does work. If taught as an intensive programme compared to reading a few textbooks that are also about abstinence. When tested in a study as full of holes as a colander [not paywalled, and published in a journal I hadn’t heard of].

The participants in the study were ninth-grade pupils in schools in Georgia, a state where abstinence education is already the norm. I’m sure this is a wholly unrelated point, but Georgia also has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the US. Six schools were selected, and parents were asked for consent for their children to participate. Less than 40% of pupils were allowed to participate in the study; among the sample, girls and African Americans were overrepresented demographically. On top of this minor issue is the fact that this means that participants were aware that they were participating in a research study, and had an awareness of whether they were in the intervention or control group. When this happens, results of studies tend to skew somewhat, inflating the positive effect of the intervention.

I am going to give some credit to the authors of the study: they actually made a brave attempt at using a theory to evaluate the intervention: you’d be surprised how many behavioural interventions are atheoretical clusterfucks with a mishmash of things the authors like chucked about willy nilly. Unfortunately, they picked the Theory of Planned Behaviour, which is rather simplistic. And they didn’t even use it that well: they forgot to measure one of the key theoretical constructs (perceived behavioural norms), and threw in a bunch of other measures of things like “hopefulness” which have absolutely nothing to do with the theory.

Perhaps most vitally, though, the authors failed to measure some very important behavioural measures. Sexual behaviour was measured entirely by asking on the questionnaire if participants had “gone all the way” (using those exact words). So there is no way of knowing whether they had been enjoying all of the other rainbow of sexual experience, and whether the participants chose to define what they were doing in such euphemistic terms. Secondly, the authors report that they were not able to measure whether the sex participants were having was safe: this was due to the politics of obtaining participants for the study.

With the measures this royally cocked-up and run in some dodgy circumstances, what can be concluded from the study? Firstly, that there’s a short-term effect of the more intensive abstinence programme, but in the longer-term the effect diminishes. It should be noted that the “long-term” follow-up happened just after the summer holidays, while the “short-term” follow-up happened just before the holidays. So, the effect of a more intensive abstinence programme diminishes in the space of a couple of months. It is worth noting, once again, that this is in comparison to doing nothing different from usual.

With this in mind, it is highly disingenuous–or thoroughly scientifically illiterate–of Life News to dress this study up as evidence that abstinence works. It shows nothing of the kind. It shows that in a study which inherently favours a slightly more intensive approach to teaching abstinence, there’s a slight effect for more intensive teaching of abstince, but that effect fucks off in the space of a summer holiday. And that’s the best they’ve got.

Gaslighting, power and differences of opinion

Trigger warning: this post discusses “gaslighting”, a form of emotional abuse

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse wherein the perpetrator causes the victim to doubt their perception of reality. It is a powerful tool for tormenting an individual, and may facilitate other abuse by causing even the victim to doubt whether the abuse has occurred. Its name comes from the play and 1944 film Gaslight, wherein the villain disorientates his wife in order to cover his plot. It is a brilliant film, with Ingrid Bergman powerfully portraying a woman who believes herself to be losing her mind as she sees the gaslights in the house dim and reignite and possessions vanishing as her husband convinces her that none of this is happening. I would strongly recommend watching, as it demonstrates the phenomenon so well, that it is little wonder it became its namesake.

After watching Gaslight, a discussion of gaslighting arose, and @a_y_alex posed a rather interesting question which is worth exploring:

Is gaslighting inherent to any difference of opinion within a system of dominance?

Many of us have encountered that frustrating situation wherein we are discussing privilege with a privileged person, and they refuse to believe that such a thing is possible: the pervasive notion that things cannot be anywhere near that bad for the oppressed. They fight their position tooth and nail, that any experience of oppression must be imaginary. Perhaps the derogatory terms will come out. The loony left. The hysterical feminists. The uppity black people. “You’re crazy,” they say, when confronted with a reality which differs from their own.

The effect of this can be quite powerful. When it piles on, it can fundamentally shake up a person’s perception of reality. When this has happened to me, I sometimes find myself seriously wondering if perhaps I have just imagined everything, put greater weight on little things I have experienced, things really aren’t so bad, and somehow twisted something perfectly normal into a victim complex. Having experienced gaslighting before, the effect can be much the same.

What complicates matters, though, is the intention. Gaslighting requires an attempt to cause the victim to doubt reality, by deliberately misleading and misinforming, by tampering with the physical space. In these scenarios, in the disagreements within a system of dominance, this is often not the case. What we get instead is two opposing perceptions of reality: for the less powerful, there is an experience of oppression; for the more powerful, how could such a thing exist when everything is so shiny and fine and the world is good and right? It is not a constructed, malicious attempt to disorientate a person into doubting reality, but rather, a difference of beliefs.

This is not to adopt the fence-sitting liberal position and say that both sides are right and have valid points: indeed, the privileged person is wrong in this instant. They just haven’t noticed because they cannot see the problem. It is something which is inherent to holding these kinds of conversation in an uneven power structure, but it is not gaslighting.

Well, not usually. Once in a while, you will encounter the utterly repulsive specimen who does intentionally, disingenuously mislead, who does attempt to resolve a difference of opinion by making the other person doubt themselves, to discredit and, ultimately, to win. Arguably, the system itself gaslights us: flagrantly denying and misdirecting us, pathologising dissent and painting those who criticise it as somehow mad.

So we often find ourselves in the situation where we feel the doubt, and that our perception of reality and our beliefs are shaken. There are ways of dealing with this. Most importantly, we must remember that we are right, feel stronger in our own beliefs. Upon feeling mislead, we should turn to those who share our critique and remind ourselves of why we are right. We must not be afraid of asking for help, for back up: just as gaslighting alienates and isolates its victims from support, so, too can this form of argument. Together, we can mitigate this impact. Together, we might just finally win.

Das erotische Kapital, volume II: Fucking numbers, how do they work?

Dr Catherine Hakim is a doctor of Sociology, with years of experience in data handling and a senior position at London School of Economics. It is thoroughly baffling, then, that she manages to consistently completely fuck up interpretation of data to the point that any person with a modicum of ability for critical thought can identify the glaring gaps in her claims of an evidential basis for her arguments.

Neither theoretical concept is adequately evidenced: erotic capital is a clusterfuck, and the notion of the male sex deficit is shaky at best.

The lion’s share of the “evidence” presented is in fact nothing of the kind: it is either unreferenced sweeping assertions from Hakim or anecdotes. These anecdotes take the form of “this is a thing that happened somewhere, and it definitely shows that it’s a good idea to get your tits out”, or sometimes might be excerpts from memoirs: the reference list is rife with citations of the works of Casanova, Belle du Jour and Hugh Hefner, to name but a few. Those untrained at looking at where the footnotes go might be fooled by the language Hakim uses to imply that somehow these stories represent empirical data.

While a personal history can sometimes constitute rich qualitative data, those presented by Hakim do nothing of the sort: they are popular memoirs precisely because they are sensational: they do not represent the bedroom habits of the ordinary person, but, rather, the sweaty aberrations providing titillation to the masses. To try to hang a theory on this is disingenuous.

Other evidence takes more of a scientific format, though again is thoroughly insufficient for proving any kind of point. The notion of the male sex deficit is–according to Hakim–backed up by “recent sex surveys”. Again, if one follows the footnotes, one discovers that these surveys are anything but recent: most are over ten years old, with some dating as far back as the nineties. If we pretend, for a minute, that a well-conducted survey from yesterday showed Hakim’s hypothesis–that men have more sex than women and want more sex than women–then it would still be fairly poor evidence.

The thing is, Hakim completely ignores the possibility of something which survey developers worry a lot about: response bias. This is something which often happens when people are aware they are being measured: they tend to give responses they think the experimenter wants to hear, sometimes falling victim to providing the “morally” right answers. Let us remember that sex is still A Big Deal in our society, and that men and women are expected to hold different values regarding sex: namely, men are supposed to want it more; women are supposed to want it less. Is it any surprise, then, that in a questionnaire, women respond with wanting less sex than men? The smart researcher will always interpret results in this light. Dr Catherine Hakim does not: the possibility that these self-reported statistics may not accurately represent the true feelings of respondents never enters her analysis at all: results are taken at face value.

And so she concludes that there must be some sort of sex deficit and that men aren’t getting laid as much as they want because women are a bit frigid.

To back up the concept of erotic capital, Hakim claims that it is measurable. It sort of is, in a way which is fraught with problems which are again wildly underplayed by Hakim. Although erotic capital is supposedly comprised of a variety of facets above and beyond attractiveness, almost all of the measures proposed are of attractiveness, which is acknowledged by most researchers in the field to be notoriously difficult to measure objectively. The most objective ways of measuring attractiveness involve using a computer to analyse facial symmetry or waist-to-hip ratio, and often more subjective measures–rating panels or self-report is used. Hakim also, amusingly, includes winning beauty contests as a useful measure of erotic capital.

Largely, the evidence presented for how erotic capital functions in everyday life is based on cross-sectional studies and correlational studies, neither of which are able to give a plausible causal link between erotic capital and outcome. I decided, therefore, using Hakim’s own ideas for measurement of erotic capital to conduct a slightly stronger empirical study of the effect. I got people who I found of varying levels of attractiveness to read me excerpts from Honey Money. My dependent variable was how convinced I was by what they were saying.

Ultimately, no matter how sexy the people were, Hakim’s thesis still sounded like utter nonsense.

As I touched upon in the first post, I am doubtful as to whether what I read is actually a theory at all. A theory requires novelty and distinction from other theories: erotic capital is impossible to unpick from the three other social assets–one requires economic capital to dress well and social capital for the social skills. A theory is also measurable–and many of the facets of erotic capital do not appear to be in any way measurable. Furthermore, a theory must be parsimonious, and much of what is presented in Honey Money is anything but a simple explanation: rather, it is a tortured exercise in reading correlations the wrong way.

The strongest empirical data presented is the “halo effect“, a manifestation of which is that attractive people are judged to be nicer, better and more intelligent. As a result, such people tend to lead charmed lives. This theory is adequate to explain much of the evidence presented in Honey Money, yet Hakim insists on adding extra variables based on little to no evidence, and repackaging it in a pseudo-economic analysis of sex as a scarce resource.

The more data Hakim presents, the less credible her argument becomes as she tortures her theory around a reality which fails to conform to the world inside her brain. The male sex deficit concept is brought in largely to account for the fact that men tend to benefit more from having “high erotic capital” than women, which is contrary to her prediction that women have the higher erotic capital. Due to the sex deficit, for reasons never coherently explained, apparently men “devalue women’s erotic capital”.

Once again, there are plenty of theories to explain why men often tend to do better than women, and these largely come from feminist schools of thought, which would be a useful theoretical lens through which to view many of Hakim’s findings. As we shall see, though, Hakim has some rather idiosyncratic reasons for dismissing feminism out of hand…

Das erotische Kapital:

Placebo buttons and the illusion of control

Some things are not what they seem. You perform an action, you get the desired result. You’re in charge. You have power, you have agency.

So you think.

In some cases, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what you do. Take, for example, pressing the the button at a road crossing. We are taught to believe that by pressing this button, the lights will know we’re waiting and they will change accordingly. In fact, most of these buttons do absolutely nothing, and the lights will change whenever they are scheduled to change, particularly at busy periods of the day. This is what is known as a “placebo button“, a button which is entirely useless but is there anyway. They are surprisingly prevalent: on many lifts, the “close door” button does absolutely nothing, as do the entirely decorative buttons for opening and closing doors on the Tube. In some office buildings, they will go so far as to fit fake thermostat knobs.

The purpose of a placebo button is to make the user feel in control of their environment. The illusion of control is a well-studied effect. It is an example of the cognitive short cuts our big old brains take to minimise processing power: we like to think we have an ability to influence outcomes. Often, the illusion of control springs up naturally: for example, when playing craps, many people tend to throw the dice harder if they want a high number and softer if they want a low number, despite the probability remaining exactly the same for any kind of throw. If the outcome is the one desired, people will believe they were responsible for it.

According to Self Regulation Theory, a fairly strong model of how thoughts translate into behaviour, the illusion of control is a reaction to stress or uncertainty about outcome. We cope with it by conjuring up a false sense of control over the circumstances and therefore feels as though we have reasserted control over the situation. Interestingly, people with depression are less susceptible to the illusion, having a more realistic view of the level of control they have over an outcome.

The illusion of control is considered to be a “positive illusion”, though it has some less pleasant real-world effects. In one study of stock market traders, it was found that those with the higher belief in their own control were rated as performing less well and tended to make less money in their investments. Their illusion of control could well have contributed to the financial crisis. With placebo buttons, there is some evidence to suggest that our own perception of time is warped. People who pressed the “door close” button on a lift several times believed the lift came on average two seconds faster than those who only pressed the button once. Merely interacting with the placebo button produced poor judgment.

The function of the illusion of control is fairly well-studied on an individual level, though there does not seem to be any research into the motivation for facilitating people for believing they have control. There are some anecdotes from managers and engineers involved in installing fake thermostat buttons in offices, which serves as semi-decent qualitative evidence:

“We had an employee that always complained of being hot,” recalls Greg Perakes, an HVACR instructor in Tennessee. “Our solution was to install a pneumatic thermostat. We ran the main air line to it inside of an enclosed I-beam. Then we just attached a short piece of tubing to the branch outlet (terminating inside the I-beam without being attached to any valves, etc.).”

The worker “could adjust her own temperature whenever she felt the need,” Perakes says, “thus enabling her to work more and complain less. When she heard the hissing air coming from inside the I-beam, she felt in control. We never heard another word about the situation from her again. Case solved.”

“Even though we were sure our system was working as it should and maintaining space temps to within one degree to two degrees, we could never completely satisfy the occupants of the space,” he wrote. “We mounted a ‘dummy stat’ (short for ‘dummy thermostat’) adjacent to the ‘controlling stat’ and gave the floor manager the key to the stat—now the occupants could ‘control’ their space as they desired with the permission of their manager.”

“The dummy stat did nothing except to give the occupants the impression that they had control of the HVAC system and the psychological effect of having control of their work environment,” continued Langless. “Our service calls disappeared, and to my knowledge, that system is still set up and working as it has since 1987.”

Here, it is clear that the motivation is to make people feel like they are in control without actually changing anything. The placebo button is seen to serve its purpose, stopping unrest and people becoming difficult.

On a grander scale, one can compare many of the methods in which we are encouraged to engage with politics. We are encouraged to vote, and told that it is our way of making our voices heard. In fact, under the current system, in most constituencies, your vote is merely a confirmation or rejection of a pre-determined outcome, with prevalent “safe seats” meaning that your vote is about as meaningful as pressing a button which lights up the word “WAIT”.  Even small changes to this system, such as AV, would make little difference to the level of control you would have.

Writing to an MP is about as effective as pressing the “open door” button on a Tube train. Remember that under the current whip system, they are likely to vote whichever way they are told to vote, and your concerns will only be raised in a debate if it cements what the party was planning on doing all along. Likewise, the government e-petition system has been explicitly linked to “making people feel more engaged“: while you may feel more engaged, all you have done is press a button and registered your opinion.

Ultimately, these encouraged methods mean nothing: they are placebo buttons put in place by structures of power which let us feel we have a sense of control, of agency, of involvement in a corrupt system. It is not true.

This realisation of powerlessness is upsetting, and cynically, I find myself wondering if the lack of illusory control is a contributor to depression.

The difference between political engagement and waiting for the traffic lights to change, though, is an important one. If we look beyond the placebo buttons of representative democracy, we can find a wealth of methods for achieving real change through direct action, towards building a direct model of democracy. While the things we are told give us power are meaningless, with creativity and a rejection of placebo, tangible, real results can be achieved.

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This post was inspired by a lovely conversation with Jed and Wail.

Jeremy Clarkson is not funny

Yesterday, millions of public sector workers went on strike. There was remarkable support for the industrial action–even the Daily Mail was polling 84% support. Most people, it would seem, are behind the idea that we should treat our public sector workers as human beings.

Enter Jeremy Clarkson, professional troll who is largely famous for driving cars and being a dripping fuckstain. Clarkson is not one of the vast majority who support the strikes. Quite the opposite, in fact. On never-watched light entertainment The One Show, he declared that strikers should be shot. He clarified with “they should be executed in front of their families.”

Naturally, the tosser brigade have leapt to Clarkson’s defence, declaring that it must be a joke, that he was being somehow “funny”, and the outcry was down to pearl-clutching from humourless hummus-munchers. It’s the last resort of the dribbling wanker, declaring that anyone who is not amused by a brazen display of utter dickery must be boring.

Rest assured, any hummus munchers who are not tickled by Clarkson’s “joke”. You are neither boring, nor humourless. The fact is, what Clarkson proposed flies in the face of what is actually counted as humour.

The truth is, we’re not entirely sure why (most) humans have a sense of humour and laugh at jokes. Evolutionary psychology suggests it’s because it gets us laid. Others suggest it’s a natural reaction to fear being relieved. Perhaps the theory with most research associated, though, is Incongruity Theory.

Incongruity Theory started with philosophy superhero Immanuel Kant, though has since continued into a rich body of research with many offshoots. It proposes that humour is the state of realising incongruity between a concept in a certain situation and the real objects which are thought to be related to the concept. To demonstrate, here are two potentially funny scenarios:

1. Jeremy Clarkson dies in a horrible car crash

2. Jeremy Clarkson is found dead following a tragic wanking accident with three quarters of a bicycle lodged into his rectum.

Chances are, you found the bicycle-bumming scenario far funnier than the car crash scenario. This is because the likelihood of Clarkson going near a bike, let alone incorporating it into an experimental wank, is highly improbable. It is incongruous, and the theory proposes that this is where humour comes from. Humour, according to this theory, can only happen when there is something unexpected, something surreal, something bizarre, something different from reality.

Clarkson’s declaration that strikers should be shot is not particularly incongruous with reality. History and the present are riddled with stories of people taking industrial action and ending up murdered by the forces in power, in precisely the way Clarkson lays out in his “joke”. In the present day UK, the likelihood of shooting strikers is becoming frighteningly more plausible. The police are already being authorised to use weapons of greater lethality in public order situations. Following the riots, a third of British people were baying for the use of live ammunition. Last winter, the police smugly backpatted themselves for not shooting student protesters. Shooting strikers is worryingly congruous with reality, and therefore thoroughly unfunny.

Of course, the joke may still amuse some. It will amuse those whose schema of reality cannot possibly perceive use of violence by the state to attack dissenters as a remotely plausible threat. It will amuse those whose minds are anaesthetised by endless rolling Sky News, growing fat on the lies fed to them by a dangerous system. It will amuse those with a vested interest in maintaining a system from which they benefit, counting wealth gained from forcing workers into ever worse conditions. It will amuse Clarkson himself, paid millions of public pounds, who will never have to face the terrifying possibility of ageing in poverty.

To most of us, though, this joke is not funny. It is a bleak vision of our future.

Female orgasms and cheating risk: in which evolutionary psychology actually tests a hypothesis

Regular readers will know that a particular bugbear of mine is evolutionary psychology and its persistent habit of throwing out hypotheses without ever bothering testing them. Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen. I found an instance where they test a hypothesis.

The study, “DO WOMEN PRETEND TO ORGASM TO RETAIN A MATE” is rooted in the “sperm selection” hypothesis of female orgasm–that women have orgasms so their wombs act as a kind of jizz-hoover, and they’re more likely to have an orgasm when having sex with a man with good genes. Following from this, men evolved interest in women’s sexual pleasure so that they can be sure their lady-friend is keeping the little deposited parcel of spunk. Women might therefore fake orgasms in order to keep a man interested and stop him from straying. Now, there’s a lot of assumptions in there, building on the sperm-sucking uterus idea. Can this possibly translate into decent research?

In short, not really. What came out of all of this hypothesising was something which can kindly be described as shaky.

The participants were a reasonably decent sample of college-age women, all of whom had been in a committed heterosexual relationship for more than six months. Participants were asked two questions to assess their perceived likelihood of their partner cheating, and filled in a 104-item survey of “mate retention behaviours” such as calling to check where the partner is, dressing nicely to retain interest and holding hands to when other women are around. I have no idea why the poor participants were subjected to a 104-item questionnaire when there’s one which does the job for the far less tedious 38 items. Pretending orgasms was measured by two questions: “During sexual intercourse with your current partner, have you ever pretended you were more sexually excited than you really were?” and “During sexual intercourse with your current partner, have you ever pretended you were having an orgasm when you really weren’t?”

Astute, observant people may notice a problem with the measurement of faking orgasms here. So could a seven year-old. The first question does not measure faking orgasms at all. Despite this rather obvious point, the authors insist on averaging together scores on not faking orgasms with scores on faking orgasms throughout the study. This is further compounded by each item being measured on a ten-point scale ranging from “definitely not” to “definitely yes”. The authors insist on referring to this score as “frequency of pretending orgasms”, but there is absolutely no measure of time in here. It is more a measure of how sure the survey respondent is that they have done this.

Because of this silly wording of the question, I would expect most of the respondents to the survey to reply with either a very low number if they had not faked orgasms, or a large number if they had. Unfortunately, I will never know if I’m right here, as the authors opted not to publish the mean and measure of spread for the responses to this question. In fact, they’re rather shy about providing a lot of this rather useful information.

After gathering some questionable data, the authors proceeded to performing what the scientific community call a metric fuckton of correlation analyses. When someone does a lot of the same sort of analysis on a big data set, they are likely to get a significant result based on chance alone, unless they adjust for this, which the authors didn’t. Furthermore, if the data isn’t continuous, e.g bunched up at the edges like the orgasm-faking data probably was, you can’t really do a correlation analysis on it. It is possible that that’s why they averaged faking-orgasm data with a behaviour that was not faking orgasms–to smooth it out somewhat and make it more continuous.

The authors pulled out the big guns and decided to do mediation analysis to see whether mate retention behaviours, faking orgasms and perceived infidelity risk correlated in a way where they influenced each other. I will spare you the dry statistical details, but they used a method called Baron and Kenny which is awful, awful, awful and can’t show what it says it shows.

Of course, the press has crawled all over this tripe and gone with the authors’ intepretation of their dodgy, dodgy findings. We women fake orgasms so our men won’t stray. Isn’t that sweet in an adorable lady-neurosis way?

Let us imagine, for a second, that the entire study wasn’t completely FUBAR. They properly measured frequency of women faking orgasms, they accounted for statistical problems, and it emerged, solidly, that perceived risk of cheating correlated with faking orgasms.

It still wouldn’t show that women fake orgasms to hold on to a partner, as it’s a correlation. Nowhere have I seen an alternative possibility explored: that women perceive a greater risk of cheating when their partner is crap in bed, or there’s some sort of sexual incompatability which means they feel the need to pretend. Or, more plausibly, the relationships where there is a high perceived risk of cheating and sex that is so unsatisfying as to necessitate faking orgasms are probably ones which are somewhat broken anyway, and the two factors have a common cause which was not measured in the study.

Essentially, female orgasms probably aren’t a method for holding on to a man. It also doesn’t strike me as particularly plausible that the sole reason female sexual pleasure evolved was to more efficiently funnel semen where it needs to be in the first place. What we have here is a study which is flawed from top to bottom, yet the media springs on it as it confirms societal expectations of women: that we want nothing more than to hold on to a man, and our orgasms are important only for making babies.

These tired tropes are trotted out time and time again, repeated without criticism. Most are, with scrutiny, utter rubbish.

…but is it evidence?

Have you ever found yourself in an argument with someone who claims they have “evidence” for something and will not shut up about it? Do you find yourself feeling uncomfortable with quarrelling with said “evidence”, even though you know the other person is wrong?

Here is a simple guide to spotting what is good evidence and what is not.

Is it even research?

This shouldn’t even need to be said, but I have seen a lot of people who believe a hypothesis to be evidence. It is not. This is particularly true in the case of evolutionary psychology: much of it is hypothesising without research. In other words, the authors publish a paper about what they think might be the case without actually testing whether it is the case.

It is perfectly possible to publish hypotheses without tests to stimulate discussion and debate. There is a whole journal dedicated to this! Medical Hypotheses has published some gems, including a particularly offensive paper about how “mongoloid” is an adequate name for people with Down’s Syndrome because like people from the Far East, people with Down’s Syndrome sit cross-legged and like eating food with MSG in it. Seriously. That was actually published.

Check whether the “evidence” contains data collection and statistical tests. If it does not, it is likely to be wild speculation, not evidence.

What sort of research is it?

This graphic is called the “pyramid of evidence“. It is a good way of looking at the best sorts of evidence in medicine, although it can be applied elsewhere. At the bottom is “background information”–upon which hypotheses are formed and, as seen above, sometimes published to stimulate debate. Moving up through the pyramid, we see better types of evidence: case studies, cohort studies, randomised controlled trials, and then, right at the top, systematic reviews. A systematic review is the “gold standard” of evidence. It takes all of the data for all of the tests of a theory, drug, medical intervention, etc, and puts it together into one data set, spitting out an “effect size” which tells us exactly how effective or “correct” the object in question is.

The differentiation between different types of research is important. Cohort studies are usually correlational: while it is not entirely true that correlation does not imply causation, correlational studies can only point us in the right direction. To properly establish causation, we need to manipulate some variables. Say, for example, we want to test whether exposure to feminist thought leads to lower levels of sexism. This can be tested by exposing one group of people to feminist thought, while having a control group of people who were not exposed to feminist thought. Before and after exposure, one would measure levels of sexism. This study has actually been done, and found that sexism decreased following exposure to feminism.

If the “evidence” being provided is one correlational study, then it might not be very good evidence. Ask if there’s any systematic reviews available, or at the very least an experimental study.

Quality of the evidence

On the evidence pyramid, there is a second dimension: quality of the research. Quality is made up of a number of important attributes, and it is important to check whether the evidence is good quality or not.

One crucial indicator is the sample. To get good results, the experiment needs to be conducted on a large group of people. The sample should, ideally, comprise of different people from different walks of life. Unfortunately, a lot of psychological research is conducted on psychology students, which throws a lot of it off-kilter, as students are younger and richer than most of the rest of us, and a lot wiser to taking psychological tests. Look and see who was in the study. It is a useful way of understanding how well the results apply to everyone else.

Another aspect of quality is the state of the comparison group. If there is no comparison group whatsoever, be very cautious: the evidence is probably terrible quality. I have seen many people try to draw conclusions about the differences between men and women based on studies of only men, or only women. The comparison group, if  present, needs to be, of course, comparable. If a study is testing the differences between men and women, and the women in the comparison group are less educated, for example, then the results could be down to education rather than gender.

For the sake of brevity, I point you towards this excellent (freely available) paper which teaches readers to critically evaluate the quality of a paper. Knowledge of this is power.

Popular science books are not evidence

Anyone can write and publish a book, particularly with the age of self-publishing. Even books from “big names” such as Steven Pinker are not good evidence, as books are not subject to peer review. Peer review is a process which is used in the academic community for checking whether a paper is valid: before anyone publishes the paper, it will be read through by several other experts in the same field of research. Often, the reviewers will want to see some of your data to verify your findings. They also, more often than not, send the paper back to you and tell you that perhaps you might want to reinterpret your findings or clarify certain bits of the research, or that you’ve made a massive honking error. They also ask you to draw attention to the limitations of your research, so readers can be aware of any of the possible pitfalls in the papers outlined above. It’s a lengthy process, but it means that  journals aren’t publishing any old crap.

For books, this is not the case. Often, the text is read by an editor with no experience in the field of research. If the writer fucks up somewhere, it won’t get caught and will be published anyway.

One example of this is the book The Spirit Level. There are a few holes in the evidence presented in the book which are dealt with in the reply book The Spirit Level Delusion. The author of Delusion rightly criticises problems which appear in the book, though, unfortunately, is tilting at windmills: most of the peer-reviewed evidence upon which The Spirit Level is based stands up pretty well. It is only some of the bits that didn’t get peer-reviewed and were thrown into the book anyway which can be picked apart. Essentially, The Spirit Level stands up, but due to the sloppiness of the book publication process, it left itself with some open goals in the form of downright shoddy analysis, leaving many (wrongly) thinking the entire theory disproved.

If the only evidence linked is books, be wary. Demand to see peer-reviewed evidence instead. These days, a lot of it is available for free, and even if a paper is not, you can usually see the abstract.

I hope this guide will be helpful for would-be troll-slayers. Use your knowledge. Use it wisely. Happy hunting!