Tyranny of the Mean

I was reading the textbook for statistics class when I came across the side box titled, "The Psychology of Statistics and the Tyranny of the Mean". Tyranny of the Mean, it's a phrase that brings back memories from way back when. I remember my father saying something to that effect. He's also known to say things like, "Conventional wisdom is just that -- conventional."

Growing up in the US, I had to take standardized tests every year, and the raw scores (how many answers I actually got right) mattered less than the percentile. These days, I can't help cringing a little when I hear mothers talk about their babies' height and weight in percentile terms.

When it comes to performance and certain quantifiable attributes such as wealth, we like being on the far right end of the curve. But being on the far right end of the curve (2 standard deviations from the mean) is not without disadvantages; it means it takes more work to connect with the other 97.8%. One mother, speaking of her long baby daughter, already worries that her daughter will grow up to be too tall: "It will make it harder for her to find a husband." I suppose judging human development and the way we live our lives by a normal distribution curve is human nature. We enjoy the comfort and sense of affiliation that we get from being "normal". Normal, of course, is relative to the population being sampled, and we like to it most when it's a sample of our "peers". Yet, we like being special (we especially like the privileges that being special confers) and dislike feeling boxed-in by convention.

It's easy to forget that where we are on a curve says little about who we are, the choices we've made and how happy or fulfilled we are.

With ... , anything is possible.

What was the first word that popped into your head to complete the above sentence? Hard work? Determination? Faith? Or was it money?

I was chatting with a group of university students who are mentors to a group of Form 3 students selected to participate in The Women's Foundation's pilot TEEN program. As part of the introductions, I had asked them to complete a few sentences. Here were the some of the answers that have stuck in my mind:

If I could be anything or anyone, I would be...
"... the richest person, because anything is possible with money, and nothing is without it."
"... I would not be a Hong Kong person." When asked why, she explained that life in Hong Kong is too high pressure.

I like being a woman, because ... "I can be weak".

The same guy said:
- One of the things I like about being a man is ..."a lot of things in the system are in our favor".
- One of the things I don't like about being a man is ... "a lot of programs are available to help women, but men's needs are neglected".

Students & The Trolley Problem

I first came across the Trolley Problem a couple years ago in "The Moral Instinct", a NYTimes Magazine article by Steven Pinker. The two scenarios, as posed by philosopher Philippa Foot, goes something like this:

Situation A: A train is travelling down a track, and will certainly kill the 5 people on the track unless you flip a switch that changes the train onto another track that only has one person on it. If you do nothing, 5 people will die. If you flip the switch, one person dies. What do you do?

Situation B: This time you are on a bridge when you see the train travelling down the track with 5 people on it. This time, there is no flip to switch. However, there is a very large man on the bridge. If you push this man onto the track in front of the train, you will save the 5 people but kill the fat man. Do you push the large man onto the track to his death?

Most people will flip the switch killing one person to save 5 people in Situation A, but will not push the man over in Situation B, allowing five people to die. In Situation A, most people have no problem justifying their decision to flip the switch by saying that one should try to save as many lives as possible. But they would not apply the same justification to Situation B. In fact, most people justify not pushing the large man to save five people, because it's not right to kill. In other words, they do not feel that they are the agent of death in Situation A. This was true of my students as well when I posed the question to them in class today (I was trying to make the point that consumers/people don't always behave rationally).

When I broke down the class' responses according to sex (granted, my sample size for male students was much smaller than for female students), I found that:
1.  A higher % of female students (31%) vs. male students (21%) would kill one person to save five in both situations (i.e. make the logically reasoned, unemotional choice)
2.  A higher % of male students (36%) vs. female students (17%) would do nothing in both situations (i.e. the most passive, least caring and least rational option).

I found this interesting because, at the suggestion of SF, I've been reading Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice, which critiques Lawrence Kohlberg's theory about children's stages of moral development for excluding girls' experiences, which Gilligan found to be more concerned with care and relationships rather than reasoning. Gilligan's book was first published in 1982. More recently (i.e. within this century), Joshua Greene has scanned people's brains using fMRI while they answer these two questions in an effort to see which parts of our brain are at work to produce the very different responses to the two situations whose outcome is the same (one person must die to save five lives).  Greene gives a brief explanation his findings on his homepage. Irregardless of sex and maturity of moral development, people make moral decisions based on reason and emotion. I wonder though, whether decisions made are based primarily on one's emotional need to be accepted by others. And whether the "response conflict" part of the brain triggered by Situation B, as described by Greene, is really a response to the uncertainty of whether one's decision will be accepted by others.

As one student justified, killing in Situation B is illegal, but flipping a switch in Situation A is not. When I suggested that in Situation B, instead of being convicted as a murderer, he could also be construed as a hero for taking the difficult action of killing one person to save five, he was no longer so sure of his choice.

Conversations in my head between Plato & Freud

Plato

Sigmund Freud

It's great to be a student in 2010. When I was a freshman in 1989, I could sit and doodle during a lecture. At business school in 1998, I got to sit in the only amphi at the time with in-seat LAN outlets. This allowed me to play online chess with a fellow bored classmate across the amphi. Today, I was Skyping with MH in New York. I had her on mute on my end, but on her end, she could hear the lecture. At one point, I scanned the lecture hall with my laptop camera.

"Next time, sit in the first row so I get to see the faces of your classmates," she told me.

Today's Personality lecture was on Sigmund Freud -- repression, suppression, transference, free association, dreams, unconscious, Freudian slips etc.  When Dr Blowers was talking about hypnosis, MH and I chatted about NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming). She recounted how an NLP practitioner at a yoga retreat had made her hold a flower, arm out-stretched, for an hour. Then I mentioned how my new Mommy friends had raved about self-hypnosis during the birthing process, and wondered if I could apply that skill to help me run an upcoming half marathon, for which I have not trained. The most interesting little factoid from the day's lecture had little to do with psychology -- apparently, eels are hermaphrodites.

But the thought of the day was sparked by this line in one of the concluding lecture slides: "fantasy (psyche's reality) is important in shaping adult personality". This made me think about yesterday's class on Plato and skepticism.

Plato asked: What do we really know about our reality that is truly real? How do we know it's real?
Freud asked: What do we know about our reality that we don't really want to know? How can we know it?

It occurred to me that Plato and Freud could have an interesting conversation. After all, the Parable of the Cave can be used to describe our relationship with our unconscious. Imagine our conscious being shadows projected by our unconscious forms.

We spend a lot of time talking about and shoring up what we know or think we know. And then we tend to ignore the rest. As the student from yesterday's class pointed out, if we have no way of knowing the truth, why not just accept what we know as all there is to know?

Why poke and prod and look for an unconscious/higher reality/truth that is not/cannot be comprehended by our conscious?

All this makes me think that the most interesting question is: What don't we know? And do we really not know it? Or does our conscious mind suppress our knowledge?

• We don't know what happens to us when we die.
• We don't know if there is a God that made this universe. Although Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow think they know: A Grand Design
• We don't know what we're really capable or, let alone other people.
• We don't know the end consequences of most of our actions.
• We don't know how long we will live.

 Ultimately, we don't know what we don't know...until we know it...

From Obedience to Immortal Cells to Why Bother Questioning Reality

We're still in the introductory weeks of school. So there were still no numerical concepts presented in Research Methods. Instead, we were given a lecture on Research Ethics. All the standards mentioned seem fairly obvious and straightforward as best practices go. But I couldn't help thinking about a study such as Stanley Milgram's landmark obedience study that showed how susceptible people in general are to unquestioning obedience in relation to figures of authority, real and perceived. Milgram's study probably would not pass muster with today's ethics boards. For a recreation of this experiment by mentalist Darren Brown, click here.

Listening to Dr Li offer up examples of research experiments dating back to the first half of the 20th century, it became obvious that much of psychology's body of knowledge is built upon the exploitation of weak and vulnerable populations (prisoners, the poor or mentally ill etc.). I began to feel like an heir to an ill-begotten fortune built generations before me, but has since been whitewashed. Yet it's undeniable that knowledge gained from these studies have increased understanding of human nature. This reminds me of a quote AW once posted as a status update: "Behind every fortune is a crime." Of course, I'm not advocating that we discard any unethically gained knowledge. I just wonder whether we would be where we are now had the researchers of psychology's past adhered to today's ethical standards. Would a utilitarian dare argue that those breaches in ethics were/are justified given the findings' contribution to the greater good.

Immortality in a cell: stained Hela cells via wikiCommons

Think about the case of Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were harvest, unbeknownst to her or her family, to create the first human cell line which were then used (and continue to be used) in many research studies such as testing the first polio vaccine. HeLa cells, as all cells descended from Lacks' tumor cells are called, are "immortal". Rebecca Skloot tells this fascinating story which raises some thought-provoking ethical, as well as philosophical, questions in her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

But such arguments seem moot. The knowledge gained is here to stay. Similarly, the ethics standards established are here for good reason. Yet, I think it's important not to forget our debts and the price we have had to pay to get to where we are. Most importantly, we should be mindful of the fact that much bad has been done in the name of good science.

Speaking of moot points, I sat in on the Philosophy through Film course. Today's lecture on skepticism was to prep us for a discussion of The Matrix next week (way better than the recent hit Inception). One of the lecture slides asked us to consider:

"Is the world real?
What can we know?
Are we dreaming?
Are we brains in a vat?
Are we part of a computer program?"

Dr Inglis went on to recount Plato's Parable of the Cave. "It's difficult and painful to doubt this world," Dr Inglis explained Plato's view. "The ones that do are not respected by the others." She went on to explain that Plato believed there was a higher reality -- forms -- to the one we perceive, which he likened to shadows cast by forms. Forms are perfect and true. The reality that we grasp is an imperfect, shadowy representation of form.


Unlike other classes I've been in, the students seemed to enjoy asking questions. One student asked, "Are we (i.e. humans) form or shadow?"

Another two students started a discussion on whether forms themselves had a higher form (Plato assumes that forms is a final reality.). "If we keep extending logic, there could be infinite higher realities. So why not just accept this level (what we are capable of perceiving) as reality?"

I loved this question, because it sums up my ambivalence towards philosophy. As a few many speakers at Edge's conference on The New Science of Morality echoed, psychology and neuroscience endeavours to unravel what "is" while philosophy has seemed more pre-occupied with how things "ought to be" without much acceptance for the limitations posed by human nature.

But between what is and what ought to be, there is also what could be? Ultimately, it will take something more than knowledge of who we are and who we ought to be to become who we can be. That something, I believe, is empathy and compassion. Our challenge is to find and maintain a balance cool-headed reason and warm-hearted compassion. The question is whether that balance can only be found in a moment as the pendulum of human history swings from one side to the other.

One of my dreams is to...

Today was my first day of teaching "Hospitality Distribution Channel Management" (I really don't understand why they can't come up with sexier sounding course titles) at PolyU. Each time I teach a course, I open with introductions and ask the students to write down why they're studying tourism, what hobbies they have, where they'd like to  and to complete the sentence, "One of my dreams is to..."

Here's the category breakdown for this year's class of nearly 70, Year 3 students:
1.  Travel around the world --36%
2.  Be rich -- 11%
3.  Have a career in hospitality or tourism -- 10%
4.  Be an entrepreneur (most want to open a shop with a couple wanting to own a football club) --10%
5.  Be a writer --5%
6.  Have a happy family --5%
7.  Own a car or home --5%
8.  Other (ranging from being an actress to graduating to learning 10 languages) --16%
9.  Blank -- 2%

One of my dreams is to wake up. And now, off to bed I go...

Personality: Why Do We Behave the Way We Do?

Still feeling my way around campus. Came across this nice little piazza while looking for T6.

Went to Wendy's 7:30am yoga class before sitting down to breakfast with BL at Cafe O. After he shared his frustrations negotiating a business deal with a certain Macanese conglomerate, I shared with him what I found interesting from yesterday's Love course. In particular, I mentioned two points from Dr Hui's lecture on "The Science of What We Call 'Love'":
1. That "we like attractive people because we derive social gains from being seen with them", we assume attractive people have a "better personality and moral characteristics" and that "very competent people are not liked" but "competent people are liked...to a certain extent"
2. In our most intimate relationships, we have a "psychological need for consensual validation" and "any attempt to persuade strains the relationship"

BL and I ended up talking about whether we were more or less likely to attribute credibility to men or women (i.e. who are we more or less likely to question or be critical of?). We both agreed that we had a tendency to challenge women directly, but to let disagreements with men slide. So we concluded that we're more concerned with straining our relationships with men versus women. I wonder if this has anything to do with sexuality rather than gender stereotyping, which is the most often cited reason. Are straight men and lesbian women more likely to challenge the views of attractive men than attractive women? What about bisexuals? Would they be the most agreeable? There must be a study on this somewhere. Conversely, who's dissenting views or criticisms are we more likely to listen to and consider? People we do not seek or rely on for consensual validation? Or rather, people with whom we feel secure and validated. Dr Hui recounted two father-son examples. In the first, the father complained to him that he drives his son to school every day, but not once has his son shown any appreciation or expressed gratitude. In the second, the father also drives his son to school every day, but told Dr Hui, "I'm so happy that my son lets me drive him to school every day." It's worth reflecting on who we think doesn't listen to us and why we believe that to be the case. Does the other party somehow feel unvalidated in the relationship. Why?

It was with these questions in mind that I walked into Prof Blower's Psychology of Personality. The objective of this course, he explained, was not to help us answer the question: Who Am I? Rather, it was to help us understand the evolution of ideas by people trying to answer another question: Why Do We Behave the Way We Do?

"All the people I'm going to lecture on are white, male and dead. It's all history, cuz they're all dead," Prof Blowers was up front with his disclaimer. He explained that his aim was to bring the ideas of Freud, Adler, Jung, Erikson, Bandura, Kelly and Rogers into the 21st century. Since it is on their ideas that modern psychotherapy was founded.

Prof Blowers likes to pepper his lectures with Cantonese, for which he always gets the lecture hall laughing (even though he's said nothing more funny than the translation for mask (面具). Much of his lecture was about two words: personality and character, their etymology, our use and understanding of the words as lay people and the evolution of the concepts (i.e. personality comes from the latin word personalitas, which was used to mark a distinction between living and non-living things. From there, we got the concept of "persona" (the mask we wear), the "personal" (that which we conceal, experiences which are hidden and not revealed) as well as that of "personalities" as in celebrities or VIPs. Likewise, character can be revealed or concealed.

"Cometh the hour, cometh the man," Dr Blowers quoted. Psychologists continue to ask: From where does personality and character spring? What are the developmental processes and experiences that shape or inform personality and character? "It's not just a developmental process that only happens to children, it happens through life. We need to look at our life histories to understand who we are."

"For many of you, starting out, you do not yet know who you might become," he added, addressing a lecture hall full of students in their early 20s. But do they really grasp what he's telling us?

Do I, at 37, know who I might become? The difference between me as a 16-year-old freshman and me as a 37-year-old studying among freshman is that back then I would have answered with youthful certainty that of course I knew who I would become. At 16, I knew because I expected to be whatever or whomever I wanted to be. At 37, I would like to think that I now know better.


 

Psyched to Be Back-to-School: A Day of Ethics, Stats, Love and Morality

Starbucks Philosophy: I drink therefore I am...happy? 30% off of HKU students!

1 September, back-to-school! It's been over a decade since I last completed a masters. The first thing I noticed was the horrible traffic. I got a bit lost looking for CBC lecture hall. One student I asked was just as clueless as me. The next one replied: "It's hard to explain." Finally, a sweet student who overheard walked me to the building and pointed me in the right direction.

"Are you are Year 1 student," he asked.

"Kind of," I replied, not wanting to let on that I'm old enough to be the mother of a Year 1 student. It was good to know that I could blend in with the frosh.

While I'm registered in the Postgrad Certificate in Psychology, I'm taking the opportunity to audit a range of classes. Afterall, the next two weeks is what's called "shopping period". First class of the morning, a first year Philosophy course on Ethics and Society. The main question posed in this class is: How are we to live? Will be interesting to participate in the discussions. Dr O'Leary was explaining his distinction between ethics (internally-derived) and morality (externally determined), and a student expressed his befuddlement that there should be a difference/distinction. It seems his assumption is that personal ethics should obviously be aligned with social morality. To be 19 again and experience and know the world to be so simple!

Next class was the required statistics course for all Psych students. Was amazed to see the classroom standing room only. It was interesting to hear the lecturer slag off the more intuition-driven psychology disciplines such as psychoanalysis. In my experience though, statistics are just as open to varying, opposing and even groundless interpretations as a dream.

Third class was a two-hour lecture on "Love, Marriage, Sex and Family (LMSF)". I noted that I found the order of the course title a bit odd (i.e. It was not Love, Sex, Marriage and Family or Sex, Love, Family and Marriage or any other combination). The aim of the course is to "enable students to rethink (or start to think) about intimate relationships, using a multi-disciplinary approach. After taking this course, students will be better informed of the legal, medical and psychosocial implications of decisions they will be making with regard to their own intimate relationships, and to be better equipped to advise others on the subject." Reading through the syllabus, it should have stated "heterosexuality" as a requirement since gay marriage is not yet legal in Hong Kong. And there is no discussion of human sexuality in general. Somehow, through the weeks, we make the leap from falling in love to cohabitation and how to decide who the "right person" is for marriage to unplanned pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases. Hmmm...according to this course, the consequences of sex are pregnancy or disease. What happened to condoms and birth control? What happened to sexual desire, need and pleasure? I feel compelled to drop Dr Hui an email.

His lecture on the science behind love was fun though, especially with the amusing commentary of a particularly vocal male student. We learned that when guys say they are looking for inner beauty in a woman, they are really talking about physical beauty. Research tells us (shaky statistics aside, this is where I actually trust my intuition), we assume that beautiful people are kind and moral.

Speaking of morality, Theories of Morality was the last class of the day. Unlike Ethics and Society, this course focuses on 20th century moral theory. The class poses the questions: Is morality relative or absolute? Is morality basically a form of personal or social opinion, or can it be made objective or even scientific? If morality is not science, then is there a rational way of resolving moral disputes?

My question of the day (after having been provoked by RSA's 21st Century Enlightenment animation): What is the role of intuition and affect in shaping, even determining, our beliefs and choices relating to individual and social ethics, morality and happiness? Academia places supreme emphasis on rationality. And Dr Martin admitted as much that he believes rationality to be the superior means for thinking about and resolving moral dilemmas. But then, he quoted Obama's justification for America's wars in the Middle East, which he said gave him food for thought: "When the powers of rationality fail..." He had never thought of rationality failing, just people failing to be rational.

Could it be that rationality fails simply because we expect too much of it; because it does not allow for or accept inconvenient truths about our nature and the human condition? Let's see how the semester unfolds...

Next Wednesday, I'm looking forward to sitting in on Morality, Metaphysics and the Meaning of Life: Philosophy Through Film instead of LMSF and Thories of Morality. According to the syllabus, there'll be a discussion of The Matrix and skepticism. That should be interesting especially after the recent brouhaha over Inception.