Years ago, as an undergraduate student, I was taught about Abraham Maslow’s pyramid-shaped “hierarchy of needs.” I thought it was kinda neat. But I wasn’t a full-fledged critical thinker yet, so it didn’t dawn on me to question how Maslow knew that esteem was a higher need than love — indeed, that it was a basic need at all — and that self-actualization was the highest human need. Did Maslow conduct research? What cross-cultural data did he consult? Or was the pyramid idea the result of Maslow looking into the crystal ball of his creative intuition?
Because psychologists began to realize that Moslow’s model had all the weight of Styrofoam, it ceased being included in many general psychology texts. Including the one I last used in the classroom.
Recently I read of a renovation to Maslow’s pyramid by a team of psychologists and published in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences [source]. Allow me to present “before” and “after” images.
Before -
After -
The article announcing the re-build begins like this:
If you have ever felt that your children are your life’s work, then you may in fact be recognizing a high-level psychological need. Caring for your children, feeding them, nurturing them, educating them and making sure they get off on the right foot in life – all of the things that make parenting successful – may actually be deep rooted psychological urges that we fulfill as part of being human. [emphases added]
Hmmm. While I do prefer the newer version, I’m not sure about the whole pyramid design with higher and lower relationships. And I do wonder what data informed the revision.
The announcement ends with these words -
“The pyramid of needs is a wonderful idea of Maslow’s,” Kenrick said. “He just got some of it wrong. Now people are talking about it again, which will help us get it right.”
I was left with this question: perhaps the whole pyramid idea is off-base, and thus if we stick to it we will never “get it right.” Maybe a “snowflake/constellation of needs,” or something else, might provide a better foundation from which to build our understanding.
If you ask me, remodeling a one-time popular but bogus structure is not a good way to progress. Raze that pyramid and start anew.
[recycled post -- first appeared here]
It seems we now have a murder case to solve that stretches back 50,000 years plus. The statute of limitations is probably up, but inquiring minds want to know, “Who killed that Neanderthal?”
Here are the facts. A research team from Duke University have determined that the wound that killed a Neanderthal man came from a spear. Judging by the angle of the cut mark left in his “left ninth rib,” and other factors, the vic didn’t fall on his own weapon. Was it an innocent hunting accident? Or murder! [Cue dramatic music.]
A likely murder. So says not Gil Grissom, but Steven Churchill, a smarty-pants (in a good way) professor of evolutionary psychology at Duke. I wonder what actor we can get to play him for the television series I have in mind.
The extremely ancient incident occurred in what is now Iraq. While there was no way to dust for fingerprints, Churchill and four “investigators” -
…used a specially calibrated crossbow, copies of ancient stone points and numerous animal carcasses to make their deductions.
But wait, here’s the totally cool, exciting twist: This was not a case of Neanderthal on Neanderthal violence, but Human on Neanderthal! It seems that only stone points made by our ancestors could have killed that dude.
[Red-line background score now.]
Great Grandpa (to the xth degree) did it!
Cool! Who said science is boring!
(Not me.)
[source: Human Spear Likely Cause Of Death Of Neandertal. (I like the use of "likely." Where certainty is lacking, the wording of claims should reflect it.)]
Article headlines are crafted to grab our attention. While this one isn’t flashy, it does the job:
TV Viewing, Video Game Play Contribute to Kids’ Attention Problems, Study Finds
Opening paragraphs generally give a topic/finding overview and why the the subject is important.
Parents looking to get their kid’s attention — or keeping them focused at home and in the classroom — should try to limit their television viewing and video game play. That’s because a new study led by three Iowa State University psychologists has found that both viewing television and playing video games are associated with increased attention problems in youths. [emphases mine]
If you stopped reading there, however, you wouldn’t get the whole story. Just the advertisement and sales pitch, so to speak. It’s further down, into the body of the article, that you really learn the essential elements. Such as this:
The research, which included both elementary school-age and college-age participants, found that children who exceeded the two hours per day of screen time recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be above average in attention problems.
Details like these are important to know. Better science writing includes them. Worse science writing leaves them out entirely. And when they are left out we lose the opportunity to question. As for the above, a couple questions come to mind:
1. Does the “found that children” include the college-age participants?
2. Was the finding a statistical correlation? Seems so, as the use of the word “associated” in the lead paragraph strongly suggests. Because this is likely the case, how can we be sure that the media viewing is actually contributing to the attention problems, and not the other way around? Is it not possible that another factor or number of factors influence both media viewing and attention problems?
Way down at the foot of an article is where you will read the cautionary items. That most people don’t read that far is a bit of a problem when it comes to educated the public about science. In my opinion.
Consider these cautionary points:
[Co-author Edward] Swing points out that the associations between attention problems and TV and video game exposure are significant, but small.
“It is important to note that television or video game time cannot solely explain the development of attention problems,” he said. “Clearly other factors are involved.”
It’s rather odd that in terms of science, the better science, the more detailed and critical elements, get relatively buried in articles.
Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, has tirelessly argued that scientists need to get better at communicating science to the public. I would argue that science writers need to get better at presenting science more scientifically. We additionally need better educated “consumers” of science.
Rather than dumming down the material for the lay consumers into tasty, bite-sized morsels, why not present science as it really is: an ongoing search for answers? Emphasize upfront the nature of the ongoing inquiry and the current data collected. Then offer the possible meanings and conclusions. Rather than portraying science as the producer of facts and truths, why not portray it as the exciting, ongoing search for answers?
Of course, the education of the public to better understand and appreciate science would likely be most effective if started early in life. And maybe it ought to be presented in the form of video games. Among other things.
[recycled post, first appeared 9/12/08 on at evolvingmind.info]
Part 5 (of 5) Problematic Belief #4: Numbers Are Mere Exclamation Points
To review a chapter of textbook material, I sometimes use an activity I call the “Psychic Quiz.” Not only is it fun and different, but through it I gain another means of drawing students into “doing science,” informal as the case may be. Here’s how it works: I advance around the room, posing a true/false question to each student. But before I read their question, I ask them to give me the answer. They must use “psychic” powers to read my mind, or consult a spirit looking over my shoulder, or what have you, to intuit the correct response. Then I read the question. After hearing it, the students can change answers if their intellectual mind has come up with an answer that conflicts with what they attempted to divine via paranormal means. As I go about the room, I keep a running blackboard tally of all the hits and misses.
Only once have the results caused me to pause, searching for words. In that case, roughly ¾ of the students displayed negative psychic abilities (which, to me, makes as much sense as positive psychic abilities). The class displayed the noteworthy – yet ultimately meaningless – ability to guess wrong. Otherwise the results have been clearly unimpressive. Correction, the results have been clearly unimpressive to me. Thanks to one student, however, I have realized that even after giving a brief talk about probability and chance, not all students grasp the meaning.
The student – a middle-aged woman returning to school, an individual who boasted to the class that she was a former professional psychic – had asked me bluntly why I was giving no credit to those few students who had “gotten it right.” A hit is always a hit, isn’t it?
How can students ignorant of basic mathematical and statistical concepts truly understand science? Thanks to that episode and a number of similar experiences, I have been motivated to set aside precious class time to give my students a brush-up on such things as the meaning of average differences, change expressed as percentages, and the concept of statistical significance.
At the beginning of one class I will mention research that found a 30% increased chance that a man will be homosexual for every older brother he has. I ask the class, “Say I have 3 older brothers – what is the chance I am a homosexual?” Invariably, I hear the response, 90%. And so I explain that we need to know the original rate to understand the meaning of a percentage increase or decrease. In the case of my being homosexual, the original rate is roughly 2%. So with three older brothers, my chances of being homosexual increase to not 90%, but shy of 5%.
I drive the point home by asking how many students would pay $100 for my secret to increasing their chances of winning the lottery by 50%. Hands fly. I then admit I have no secret, but the point is they would be forking over $100 to increase their chances from about 1 in 28 million, to 1.5 in 28 million. Not what you’d call a steal of a deal.
I wish I had a dime for all the times I saw or heard a news report announcing a new scientific finding about something associated with an increased risk of cancer, and the amount of the increase was never mentioned. When they are used, numbers seem to be employed only to impress. A 30% increase? Holy smokes, that’s big!
When doing real science, we don’t use numbers to make a point. By and large, the numbers are the point. Any captivating rhetoric should be viewed not as the proverbial cake, but as the thin layer of icing spread above and around the substance of science. Until our culture becomes more mathematically literate, its ability to understand science will be handicapped.
Coupled with our culture’s innumeracy is its near total focus on reasoning. Any data gets overshadowed by the relatively dazzling language we use to deliver it. A widespread sentiment undoubtedly worthy of an entire essay, but here something I will address as a tangent, might be expressed this way: “what is reasonable is right.”
Students fall prey to this sentiment far too readily, as do American consumers by the score. How else do you explain the great wealth generated by sham treatments? Magnets to increase gas efficiency by aligning the fuel molecules — sure, sounds reasonable. Crystals to cleanse your personal energy field by canceling negative vibrations — sure, sounds reasonable. What goes MIA is the evidence supporting the claims. The same often goes for theories. Many perfectly reasonable-sounding psychological theories, to put my field under a spotlight, simple don’t hold up under scientific scrutiny. As a defense mechanism, do people habitually repress traumatic memories? Do responses to abstract stimuli, such as inkblots, provide us with reliable information about a person’s unconscious mind? The apparent reasonableness of an argument and any evidence in support of it can be two completely separate things.
As a corollary, there are also those tremendously robust theories that hardly seem reasonably, even to well-educated minds. Consider relativity and quantum theories: these are not reasonable ideas in an everyday sense. It is only thanks to scientific measurements that we are confident of their value.
An important and indispensable part of science is the language we use to explain and argue and theorize. But if the language part is not firmly tethered to data (to observation and measurement, to what I am here calling “numbers”), then our level of confidence in the explanation must reflect this.
Concluding Thought: The Authority of My Hunches
Turning my scientific inclinations back upon the workings of my own mind, I fully realize that what I have explored in this series of posts is emphatically not science. Pre- or para-scientific journalism, perhaps. What I have written may strike a number of you as reasonable, but that certainly doesn’t make it valid. To support my words, I have only my own bias-prone observations, without more weighty numbers to back up these observations. However, I am open and receptive to outside information and correction. If any of you skeptical readers have information pertaining to what I have discussed, please share it. Or if you have thoughts about how I might test the above, ditto.
[recycled post, first appeared 9/11/08 on at evolvingmind.info]
Part 4 (of 5) Problematic Belief #3: Answers Matter Most (and there always is one)
“Is this going to be on the test?” The student was clearly peeved when I replied, “well . . . no.” How could I waste her time with material she didn’t need to copy onto a flash card?
As an instructor in a rapidly changing field, I routinely present supplemental information that augments, updates, and/or challenges the material students encounter in their textbook. By doing this I aim to accomplish two things: 1. To embed important ideas and theories in a richer context (making them more meaningful and hopefully memorable). 2. To honestly disclose the gray areas of science. We have much to learn, and much of our present understanding is incomplete. This is particularly true in the social sciences.
The open-ended nature of science frustrates thinkers who prefer their education to be as complicated as obtaining a snack from a vending machine. Perhaps our contemporary media bears some responsibility. Most news and information today is served in small, colorful packets, highly convenient, but lacking real substance. Additionally, the area of science that gets the most press, thus making the biggest impression, is the frontier. At the frontier things are quite exciting, but they are also the most convoluted, potentially controversial, and the least likely to endure.
When learning, we often encounter something new and exciting. But we may also learn that something old is still valid. Or that something old is no longer valid. Or even that we don’t yet fully understand the subject. Those last two possibilities seem to exasperate many individuals and undercut their confidence in science. Why learn something if it is likely to change? Can you really trust science if an answer it provided yesterday turns out to be not-quite-right today? And if there is no certain answer, why bother with the question?
Is a low-fat diet good or bad for you? Should menopausal women take hormone-replacement medications or not? If science can’t resolve these issues, what does it really know? Are scientists a bunch of ostriches working their own patches of sand? Or are they perhaps a herd of cats, each casting a different vote for what is true?
You won’t soon see the evening news present marvelous disclosures such as these: With electromagnetic waves of greater length than those of visible light, microwave ovens continue to heat foods safely and efficiently! and, The lungs still provide for the transfer of atmospheric oxygen to the bloodstream!
Beyond the countless bits of scientific discovery that remain valid today, scientific knowledge is not so much about a static truth as it is an unfolding understanding of the universe. Understanding is not a thing, not the simple holding of correct answers, but an activity continually honed and improved. Human learning, after all, has progressed for millennia and will no doubt progress for millennia more.
A truly mind-altering education is achieved through acquiring skills, not by the mere collection of information easily fit on a cheat sheet. People asking for simple answers and final truths are likely seeking the wrong thing. Science fails only when we expect of it too much too soon.
[recycled post, first appeared 9/10/08 on at evolvingmind.info]
Part 3 (of 5) Problematic Belief #2: Science is for Nerds
A number of my psychology students have expressed to me, “I didn’t think the course was going to be so much about science.” I presume they imagined class-time consisting of sitting in a semi-circle and chatting, Oprah-style, about what motivated an individual’s controversial behavior and how they would go about fixing it.
Why would human psychology be scientific? Psychology, after all, is about people, and science is about calculators and laboratories. Ms. Winfrey knows people and you never see her holding a test-tube and pointing to a table of numbers.
Turning from one cultural icon to another, Einstein offered the opinion that science is the refinement of everyday thinking. In wholehearted agreement, I share examples of how this is the case on the very first meeting of my classes. I point out that whenever a person makes a decision or comes to a conclusion, he or she bases it upon information, whether that information is personal experience, the opinion of others, etc. For example, if a person is contemplating buying a used vehicle, she may talk to her neighbor about his car, which is the same make and model. Generally speaking, when we are more scientific in our thinking, we seek out better information, which usually means greater quantity and/or higher quality. In the case of the used automobile, our neighbor’s experience may be atypical, so the more scientific thinker might instead talk to a mechanic, or, better yet, look up what the Consumer Reports Buyer’s Guide has to say about the vehicle.
Although it may feel inhumane to move beyond personal experiences and feelings in the quest to understand human behavior and other topics, this is an essential step in the refining of our habits of thought. Unfortunately, the label for this refinement, “science,” is frequently viewed as a sterile and alien endeavor that requires special equipment, years of training and, to sustain interest, a perpetual coffee-making machine. I try to counter that sentiment by showing students that not only does science transform our everyday world into enticing puzzles to be solved – and who doesn’t love a puzzle, so long as it is not overly challenging – but it also requires a great deal of imagination.
Every semester my developmental psychology class debates this topic: Are dad’s expendable? Because an ovum needs a sperm for a zygote, fathers are definitely not expendable (at least at this moment in time). But what about dads, what about a father-figure in the house? Can a child do without a dad?
As you might guess, students get very excited about this topic. They just about jump out of their chairs, so eager are they to share their personal experience. Before opening the floor and taking on the role of a police officer gesticulating in the middle of heavy vocal traffic, however, I challenge my students to back up their opinion with material in the textbook. If they want to voice their opinion, they’ve got to back it up with something: a theory about personality development, a statistic about children of single parents . . . anything at all. But back it up.
Following our discussion — a discussion that never resolves the issue — I ask students to imagine how they might find or gather the best information to help move us toward resolving it. That type of creative thinking, I try to emphasize, is “doing science.” No, they haven’t gone the gamut from grant to publication, but science isn’t a sealed package deal. Science isn’t a thing; it’s an activity. And, to one degree or another, all can participate.
Unfortunately, the way our public schools teach science can backfire. First, they tend to focus exclusively on the products of science rather than the processes. Second, science is presented as a specialized field, fully separate from all others. There is science, and then there is everything else. And third, in the science classes themselves, far too often the focus is on learning the jargon and memorizing heaps of relatively dry information. To me, this akin to attempting to learn carpentry by visiting a furniture store.
There is another activity I use to draw students into doing science, into making a disciplined inquiry into a subject that interests them. I instruct my students to conduct an observational study into gender differences in public behavior. They pick a topic; they define a behavior to be counted; they count, compare and report. Do more male or female students wear sandals on campus? Do more men or women eat alone during lunchtime? They define a behavior and count it. Certainly, none of their findings are received as newly discovered truths – and they learn that, though some may wish to conclude otherwise. But these first steps are steps nonetheless. In essence, science is a more disciplined, and hence reliable, way of thinking about the universe. Rather than for nerds, science is for anyone who wants to more accurately understand the world.
