Christopher F. Chabris, Patrick R. Heck, Jaclyn Mandart, Daniel J. Benjamin, and Daniel J. Simons, ‘No Evidence that Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth: Two Failures to Replicate Williams and Bargh (2008)’, Social Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000361 , open access pre-print here: https://psyarxiv.com/mvn9b.

In my last post I tried out a way of thinking about the replication crisis in psychology from a literary critic’s perspective. If social psychology is a very human science, I wondered, maybe inconstancy is inevitable, something to be understood as part of the conversation between experts trying to understand the mind. I didn’t end up satisfied with this attempt. It’s obviously not an appealing foundation for the scientists I talk to (I wouldn’t really dare to bring it up with more than a couple); the parsimonious way that conclusions are drawn and maintained is vital.
      And then today I read about this latest failed attempt to reproduce a famous finding in social psychology. Williams and Bargh found that physical warmth was associated with emotional warmth — specifically, that carrying a cup of coffee made subjects more positively disposed to new people. This finding makes intuitive and evolutionary sense (I mean: meet my cat, he really loves us in winter) but it’s also disarmingly counter-intuitive in the way it exposes what might be some very simple wiring in the embodied mind. And it’s very suggestive for literature too.
      Except… Chabris et al., in an essay that is critical about various aspects of the original experiments (sample size; statistical emphasis), report that they were unable to achieve the same results in a re-run of the experiment. Although a part of me is still thinking very slightly ‘yes but yes but yes but’, and wondering about when there’ll be a rejoinder from the warmed-up side of the debate, this feels like another palpable hit in this process.
      Shut-down until the New Year now — happy festive times to all — and then in 2019 it’s time to get properly stuck in to the subjective experience of remembering, flagged as a new direction in the annual round-up, not yet acted upon.

Ed Yong, ‘Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses’, The Atlantic, 19th Nov 2018: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/

In my last post I forecast a new direction, but November isn’t really a time at work when new directions get going easily, so here is something more reactive.

This is an interesting report on a big new attempt, including hundreds of people, to reproduce some famous psychological experiments. It isn’t scornful in doing so, but it clearly thinks that the failure of 50% of these replications poses a severe challenge to the scientific respectability of psychology, and especially the behavioural sort of social psychology that’s most often at stake. One reason this matters is that the studies being put in doubt are often the kinds of thing that cross over and get mainstream attention. But generally the assumption is that if you can’t get the same results when re-running the experiment under sufficiently similar circumstances, then we didn’t have the knowledge we thought we had, at all.
      I have written about replication problems a few times, such as here and here. I’ve generally found myself feeling sympathy for those who, in good faith, have persuaded the psychological community of their findings, and have then found themselves exposed to various kinds of negativity, implicit or explicit. I’m wondering now whether this is more than just a matter of human sympathy. I think my assessment of the value of findings in cognitive science is not decisively affected by replication problems — I’m less bothered than I could be, or should be. So I thought I’d try to write about why.
      Perhaps exact replication is something that is basically at odds with a focus on human beings as your source of data? Is it at all tenable to see each psychological experiment as an attempt to tell us something about the mind, which uses certain methods to get there, but stands as an argument (like one in the humanities even more than in the social sciences). People can disagree with it, try their own methods, construct new views: there will be periods of convergence and settling, but there will also be times when the debate shifts rapidly and contentiously.
      Perhaps the question is not why certain effects cannot be repeated in another population of individuals, but whether ‘generalizability’ of this sort is a necessary or clinching criterion for the value of a finding? For example, I used a phrase above, ‘sufficiently similar’. This refers to the careful efforts made in psychological experiments to create the right conditions for an experiment, and in replications to recreate those conditions. But there will, of course, be many differences between those populations and their situations, and the priority given to isolating something undeniable and identifiable that they share may not lead to the liveliest or most truthful conversations about how our minds work alone, let alone socially.
      So I am wondering how actively and explicitly to think that the replication crisis reveals to me what I get from psychological research, and may even reveal things about how to understand psychological research. When human beings are the subject, when we’re looking at ourselves, maybe we have to take on non-reproducibility more positively? I would happily say about Hamlet that my arguments will not be convincing to some people according to their principles (many of which I would share), and they will be set aside by future generations, and (this is the point) that’s something that makes them worth having, not something that makes them pointless. Could that possibly also be true of studies focusing on a selected population of people turning up one day to answer questions in a lab?
      I realise, having said these things, that I’m rehearsing entry-level stuff in the philosophy of science. And that it may have nothing whatsoever — least of all reassurance — to offer anyone trying to solve the practical problems of non-reproducibility or to work out where some bits of Psychology go next. Nevertheless, it’s quite important for my interdisciplinary thinking to have gone through some of these steps, to have worked out what I make of scientific conclusions, what the deal-breakers are, and now I need to spend more time thinking about whether I am doing it right.

Update, some hours later: As I have been thinking about this, I have asked myself the question, does it make a difference to me if a result has been successfully replicated, or not? And the answer seems to be yes, which isn’t surprising, but cuts back a little against the grain of the post.

It’s anniversary time again. Five years of the blog!

I wrote a review of the year for 2016-17 here, for 2015-16 here, for 2014-15 here and for 2013-14 here, and here’s another. This one announces a few changes ahead, though.

* I wrote four posts about the early 16th-century poet John Skelton, a maverick talent who seems to me to be revealed interestingly by a cognitively-tuned approach. The trail goes from here to here to here to here.
* I wrote a couple in which I reflected on my experience in trying to design experiments that answered my questions about literature at the same time as answering those of my psychology collaborators: this one and this one.
* The year was bookended by posts about the ways that generalised approaches, and individualised approaches, offered problems and opportunities to psychological research: the former, then the latter.
* I offered a few thoughts about predictive processing and the free energy principle, which offer interesting links with literary questions. Once, twice, thrice. Vera Tobin’s book on surprise, noted here, connects to that general theme.
* And finally, sneaking in under the radar at the time perhaps, was a post about memory, prompted by Jon Simons’s lecture at the Royal Institution. The post is here, and the lecture can be viewed on Youtube: see below. Jon gives a little namecheck to me and to Charles Fernyhough (website here), because we are plotting interdisciplinary work in which literary as well as psychological perspectives on the subjective experience of remembering will be brought together.

And it’s this last topic which is going to become the main focus of the blog for a while. I would like to do something focused that develops and grows over time. It may take a little while for this to get going, but it should be a nice change, for me at least, to have the blog aligning more clearly with my day-to-day priorities.

Iva K. Brunec, Morris Moscovitch, and Morgan D. Barense, ‘Boundaries Shape Cognitive Representations of Spaces and Events’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22 (2018), 637-50.

For a while here I was thinking ‘I don’t get it! What’s even real and what’s even metaphorical any more?’ and then I thought ‘Hmmmmmm… this might actually be very interesting’. The set-up is that different parts of human cognition seem to rely on ‘boundaries’. Navigation, for example, ‘uses spatial boundaries to segment routes’: splitting things up helps us do them. Memory, also, relies on ‘shifts in spatiotemporal contexts to segment the ongoing stream of experience’ — this goes all the way back to the niches and plinths of memory palaces, an organised form in which we can contain more.
      So, they wonder, could this be a sign of common neural underpinnings, and a clue to the way that cognition tends to work when it faces — perhaps — an even wider variety of challenges? They make a big proposal, that ‘a fundamental event boundary detection mechanism enables navigation in both the spatial and episodic domains’, and this helps our brains create ‘cohesive representations’. They present evidence that this might be the result of ‘interplay between hippocampal and cortical dynamics’.
      This is all at a pretty early stage, but it made me think — you won’t be surprised to hear — about all the ways that literary form can provide us with spatial or quasi-spatial boundaries or quasi-boundaries that manage the unfolding of narrative or description (analogies for navigation and memory, perhaps): stanzas and rhyme-schemes and paragraphs and chapters and speech-prefixes and line-breaks and sentences and so on and so on to a point where it begins to be a bit everything. But the contribution of segmentation to thought, and the contribution of segmentation to literature, could speak to one another, I think.
      The curtailed nature of that last paragraph, and the feeling that things get a bit everything in these posts sometimes, both point towards future developments, which I’ll discuss in my next post, the five-year round-up (!). I just don’t have time at present to offer an example of how, say, different stanza forms create different patterns of metaphorical navigation. I don’t plan to punish myself about that, so I have a cunning plan for the blog.

* Vincent P. Brouwers, Christopher L. Heavey, Leiszle Lapping-Carr, Stefanie A. Moynihan, Jason M. Kelsey and Russell T. Hurlburt, ‘Pristine Inner Experience While Silent Reading: It’s Not Silent Speaking of the Text’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (2018), 29–54.
* B. Alderson-Day, M. Bernini, and C. Fernyhough, ‘Uncharted Features and Dynamics of Reading: Voices, Characters, and Crossing of Experiences’, Consciousness and Cognition, 49 (2017), 98–109.
* M. Caracciolo and R.T. Hurlburt, A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (Ohio State University Press, 2016).

The first of these papers aims to be clear and categorical about what we do when we read. They say that we do quite a bit of inward ‘seeing imagery’ related to what we are reading; and there are ‘inner words’ as part of the reading experience; but there was hardly any ‘silent speaking of the text… where the text was directly experienced as spoken or heard while reading’. This is very different from some other results of this sort; it’s supposed to be counter-intuitive; is it? I honestly don’t know whether I think there is any ‘silent speaking of the text’ (poetry any different?), because once I start performing what-it’s-like-to-read, I wonder if I am actually a good witness on myself.
      I like the bit where they wonder whether there was something strange about their experiment. Did they have an anomalous set of participants? Did they used texts that stifled that inner voice? (It was Fitzgerald and Hemingway; nothing obvious to worry about there?) Maybe their experimental protocols ‘discouraged’ reports of inner speech? They think not, because the participants themselves expressed surprise that they weren’t reporting inner speech. Is it there but somehow ‘compressed’ out of range of conscious sampling, memory, and/or self-report? They don’t think that’s it.
      ‘Clearly there is much work to be done’, they conclude, and who can blame them? I’ve cited two of the sources they engage with, both important studies, one linked to the ‘Hearing Voices’ project that considers inner speech in a variety of rich contexts, and the other a collaboration between narratology and psychology that pushes the field in interesting directions. Sampling inner experience is very hard, but empirical studies of reading are currently pushing at new and very interesting ways of solving the problems.