Machines + Society #11: Happiness; The Greatest Sumo; Pointless forecasting
machines + society
Mako Shen | June 30, 2020
I Am Happy (?)
Human research often requires subjective self-reports. Yet there is strong evidence that we are bad at introspection. How do we reconcile the two?
Here I claim that the inconsistency of human introspection is greatly underrated, which casts reported well-being as a methodology into serious doubt. I then explore some of the implications.
Go into the self-help section of any bookstore, and you’ll find a surfeit of books with warm yellow and blue covers. The graphic design will be very simple, often with just text, or a cropped picture of a single item. Perhaps a pie, or a smiley face. I am talking about the Happiness books.
Stumbling On Happiness. Authentic Happiness. The How of Happiness. These books promise ‘a scientific approach to getting the life you want’, ‘the secrets to daily joy and lasting fulfillment’, and ‘success in Work and Life’. Despite the guru-vibe, many of these books are based on recent research in the young field of positive psychology. (Positive psychology started in 1998 when Martin Seligman, the author of Authentic Happiness, chose the theme during his term as president of the American Psychology Association).
Two of the more prominent voices within positive psychology are Seligman who is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sonja Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness), a psychology professor at UC Riverside. They are highly credentialed and well-respected in the psychology community. Yet some of their key claims are deeply flawed.
One of Lyubomirsky’s more famous studies has 67 undergraduates practice gratitude and positive visualization (called ‘Best Possible Self’ practice) over four weeks. She finds that both gratitude and positive visualization practices cause a statistically significant increase in ‘raising positive mood’. How does she know this?
The standard tool used to measure positive affect/wellbeing/mood is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Basically, it asks some questions about how much you identify with 10 positive and 10 negative adjectives. You are supposed to answer on a 5-point scale.
Note here that, within the positive psychology literature, ‘positive mood’, ‘positive affect’, ‘wellbeing’, and ‘happiness’ are more-or-less interchangeable (though there are sometimes acknowledgements that ‘happiness’ may be different than long term ‘positive affect’).
Putting aside the various statistical faux-pas in the experiment (sample too small, unrepresentative sample, inconsistent intervals between different reports of satisfaction), along with the questionable conflation of happiness with positive affect, Lyubomirsky makes a seriously flawed assumption. She, along with most positive psychology researchers, believes that people are reliable reporters of their past and present experience.
I don’t think they are.
(For a critique of Lyubomirsky’s statistical methods, see Andrew Gelman’s post)
Note: I wondered for a moment if I was being too harsh on positive psychology, but looking at the actual PANAS survey, I see just how ridiculously crude this tool is. Were you feeling ‘Very Slightly or Not at All’, or ‘A Little’ interested over this past week? Yet this is the best tool we have for gauging people’s emotions.
There are two types of evidence that have made me very skeptical about our ability to introspect. The first is empirical, the second is personal.
Let’s start with the empirical evidence. One of the several fascinating studies from Daniel Kahneman is ‘When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End’ (1993). Thirty-two students were subject to two versions of a mildly unpleasant experience: submerging a hand in cold (14 degrees Centigrade) water. In the first trial, the water was kept at 14 degrees for 60 seconds. In the second trial, the water was also kept at 14 degrees for 60 seconds, but was afterwards raised to 15 degrees for another 30 seconds. The students were asked which trial they would prefer to repeat. If the students were acting to minimize their pain, 0 would have chosen to repeat the longer second trial (since it includes all the pain of the first trial, but with a slightly less painful experience tacked on). Instead, a majority (22/32) of the students chose to repeat the second trial.
While Kahneman’s experiment is subject to similar statistical concerns of unrepresentative samples, low statistical power, experiment specificity (i.e. this only happens for dipping hands into cold water), it has two vital factors going for it. For one, there have been several subsequent studies demonstrating the same effect. Second, as I will later explain, this study assumes far less about how the mind works.
The second piece of research that has shaken my belief in introspection is the set of split brain experiments by the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. Split brain patients have their right hemisphere of the brain (which does really have language capacity) is disconnected from the left hemisphere (where the language modules are located).
Modified from , with permission.
To quote from a recent review: “Example of the left hemisphere interpreter. In a classic test, a chicken claw was shown to the (speaking) left hemisphere and a snow scene was shown to the (silent) right hemisphere. Patient P.S. easily picked out related pictures from a set of eight options. His left hand chose a snow shovel and his right hand chose a chicken. When asked why he had picked those particular pictures, P.S. said, ‘Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed’.”
This result raises a lot of very serious questions (what does this mean for personal identity? Are there multiple consciousnesses in a brain?) and I’m hesitant to conclude too much from this single experiment. To me, the most salient point is that we all have an ‘interpreter module’ (to use Gazzaniga’s term) that offers up an explanation without an understanding of the situation. That is why we can’t reliably introspect.
(Sidenote on replicability: some research on social priming that Kahneman cites in Thinking, Fast and Slow has failed to replicate, something Kahneman has since acknowledged. Further, there is some recent concern about the replicability of the split-brain experiment, but the effect seems to stand in subsequent cases.)
It may seem strange at first to use some psychological studies to criticize the methodology of other psychological studies, but there is a key difference between Kahneman’s and Gazzaniga’s studies and the happiness-boosting experiments by Lyubomirsky et al. in the positive psychology community. It can be summed up in one word: parsimony.
Kahneman and Gazzaniga assume very little about how the mind works; they study the behavior of the participants, and only interpret responses in light of their actions. Lyubomirsky and other purveyors of that ridiculous PANAS methodology implicitly assume that humans have a good ability to perceive their emotions, that they are able to faithfully remember their perceptions of emotions, and that these memories can be accurately captured responding to 10 adjectives on a page. None of these three assumptions are clear-cut to me.
Another significant part of my increased skepticism about introspection has been from personal experience.
For a long time, I’ve hated the time between 3pm and 4pm in the afternoon. My mid-afternoon slump was as reliable as it was unpleasant. I would sigh, lose motivation, and feel gloomy. At first I thought that my subconscious had somehow internalized that it was the middle of the day and dreaded the looming schoolwork. Yet I realized that this persisted even when I had little work to do. Next, I thought that the sun’s position in the sky was making me lethargic. Winter came around, but my slump persisted. Nope and nope.
It was only during a school holiday that I realized what it was: hunger. When I was able to snack throughout the day, the slump was no longer as reliable and often went away. My consistent lunch hours meant that I was always subconsciously hungry around a similar time, and that dimmed my motivation and made me grumpy.
This is a trivial example, but the fact that something as simple as hunger evaded my attention really shocked me. What else could I be missing about my mood? Am I the only person who is this oblivious?
After I started to work with children as a counselor at a summer camp, I began to see how prevalent this quiet ‘hangriness’ (hunger-angriness) was. The children would cry and stomp for no apparent reason, unable to explain why they were upset. Often, they would be laughing and playing after a quick snack. I saw something similar on a milder scale apply to my peers. A friend would be irritated, and I would point out that it was probably because he slept for five hours the previous night. I’m convinced that we don’t develop a much greater self-awareness as adults. We adults are less temperamental than the children, so it is harder to tell when we are ‘hangry’, but we are no less blind to the quiet currents that drive us.
How are we supposed to properly introspect?
Some brief thoughts; it’s important to have a record of your experience outside of your head. For me that is a journal, but it’s helpful to reduce the bias of that particular mode of recording by using other media (audio recording, videos, letters to people).
Friends and family also can serve as a check for your interpreter module (though they have their own interpreter module biases).
There is also a six thousand year-old philosophy that is deeply concerned with fostering accurate introspection. It is called Buddhism. Specifically, Vipassana is targeted towards dispelling the mind’s illusions. There are also a number of similar practices in other Eastern religions.
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I must thank Eric Schwitzgebel for his paper The Unreliability of Naive Introspection, which provided the initial kindling for this essay. It is a far more philosophical than my own reflections, but provides great additional reading material.
📰 Assorted Links 📰
What I'm Reading
The Economist as liberal Lodestar; The Economist was notably pro-Pinochet in Chile and hesitant to open their staff to non-Oxford graduates. “The Economist invokes the glamour of élitism. “It’s lonely at the top,” one of its ads says, “but at least there’s something to read.” Its articles, almost all of which are unsigned, were until recently edited from an office in St. James’s, London, a redoubt of posh Englishness, with private clubs, cigar merchants, hatters, and tailors…. In any case, by the seventies, the magazine’s editors were increasingly taking their inspiration from economics departments and think tanks, where the pure neoliberal principles of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were dominant, rather than from such liberal theorists of justice as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen.” [source: New Yorker]
Google faces $5 billion lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode. Nice.
Sins of Omission and the Practice of Economics. A nobel laureate Economist reflects on the shortcomings of his own field. “… economics, as a discipline, gives rewards that favor the “hard” and disfavor the “soft.” Such bias leads economic research to ignore important topics and problems that are difficult to approach in a “hard” way— thereby resulting in “sins of omission…. economists ‘see them- selves at or near the top of the pecking order among the social scientists’… This desire for place in the pecking order, I would argue, is a leading motive for hardness bias” [source: Journal of Economic Literature]
Nassim Taleb: “both forecasters and their critics are wrong” (tl;dr point forecasts are stupid— you should forecast the shape of distribution). His Econtalk interview (“the person who advocates a minimum wage… in case there are adverse consequences, will not be paying for it. So it's much better to let people who have skin in the game decide on whether there should be minimum wage.”) His beef with Philip Tetlock (of Superforecasting) is somewhat interesting. See his ‘smear page’. For all the controversy that he courts, I have yet to see a solid critique of Taleb’s technical concerns. His writing on risk and probability is some of the most interesting and compelling commentary I’ve read.
Andrew Gelman (the statistician) writes about how Cass Sunstein, the famous Harvard Law professor (author with Richard Thaler of Nudge), has not admitted significant mistakes. Most notably, as late as Feb 28, Sunstein wrote that “At this stage, no one can specify the magnitude of the threat from the coronavirus. But one thing is clear: A lot of people are more scared than they have any reason to be…” While you’re thinking about Sunstein, here is a pretty good interview he has with Tyler Cowen. I like Sunstein’s writing, and this post is a good reminder for me to question my idols. (Taleb also dislikes Sunstein).
Could Donald Trump claim a national security threat to shut down the internet? [source: Brookings] In short: legally, yes, but the chance seems very remote. I believe Tom Wheeler’s point in this article is to point out the possibility to try and reduce its likelihood.
Miscellaneous:
Indira Ghandi’s campaign of forced mass sterilizations. This is a really interesting real-world example of a population ethics question. My understanding is that Ghandi thought that by preventing births of millions in poverty, she was relieving suffering in the world. It reminds me of Ozymandias’ stance in the Watchmen. “The villagers of Uttawar were shaken from their sleep by loudspeakers ordering the menfolk—all above 15—to assemble at the bus-stop on the main Nuh-Hodol road. When they emerged, the found the whole village surrounded by the police. With the menfolk on the road, the police went into the village to see if anyone was hiding…as the villagers tell it, the men on the road were sorted into eligible cases. . . and they were taken from there to clinics to be sterilized”.
Hakuho Shō: The Best Sumo of All Time. 12 fascinating minutes.
Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. From Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Favorite purchases for quarantine:
TheraBand Resistance Bands (a $12 home gym. Throw in milk jugs as dumbbells and what else could you want?)
Mosquito Head Net (there are few things on earth as annoying as gnats flying around your ears. This solves the problem.)
Arteck Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (for some reason I was getting painful neck strain. Now I prop my laptop up on a pile of books and use these wireless attachments to type at a distance.)
Poem of the month
The Garden of Love
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst.
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ upon the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
- William Blake
🎧 Music 🎧
Highlights:
Summertime — The Zombies. “Your daddy’s rich, and your momma’s good-looking…” Mild-rock rendition of the Jazz standard.
Early Summer — Ryo Fukui. Containing one of my all time favorite jazz piano solos.
If you liked this publication, please feel free to forward it to a friend (or foe), like it on the Substack page, or send me a note. I think (but can’t guarantee) that it makes me happier, and it definitely encourages me to write more (n=12). If you spot any errors, please let me know and I’ll correct them as soon as convenient.