Book Review: Mistakes were Made (but not by Me)

Review of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. ISBN 978-0151010981 (Hardback), 978-1905177219 (Paperback)

For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our decisions, memories and judgement. This book focuses in particular on self-directed biases: the distortions of memory and explanation that make sure that each of us is the hero, not the villain, or our own life story.

When corrupt police frame innocent people, how do they justify to themselves what they are doing? When a couple divorce, how can two former lovers come to hate each other with such passion? When political or military mistakes lead to thousands of deaths, how do the decision-makers live with themselves? The authors take academic research (on cognitive dissonance, stereotypes, obedience and more) and apply it to a wide spectrum of issues from the White House to Mel Gibson’s racism.

It is eye-opening to read how malleable and unreliable memory is, and how easy it is to create feedback loops of increasing certainty from just a glimmer of evidence. An appalling example is the recovered memory craze of the 80s and 90s, which is discussed at length. The book isn’t entirely downbeat, even though it explains how prosecutions, marriages or therapy sessions can go terribly wrong. It shows how easy it is for good people to hurt others, but that we can avoid these traps with humility and self-questioning. They call science “a form of arrogance control”.

A theme running through the work of these two psychologists is how science can address real problems of human conflict. That warm, humane spirit pervades this book and I think anybody curious about the science or the solutions would benefit from reading it.

Attribute substitution- a quick guide

Noticing that there wasn’t an article about this concept on Wikipedia, I’ve written the following and donated it to start off an article. The GNU Free Documentation license applies. (Updated 2 June. 20 hours after its creation, the article is the number four hit for its title on Google UK!)

Attribute Substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system. This explains why biases are unconscious and persist even when the subject is made aware of them. It also explains why human judgments often fail to show regression toward the mean. Hence, when someone answers a difficult question, they may be answering a related but different question, without realising that a substitution has taken place.

Behavioural Economics Videos

Behavioural economists have been quick on the uptake in using video lectures to convey their message. Here is a short round-up focusing on quality rather than comprehensiveness.

Book Review: Free Market Madness

Review of Peter A. Ubel (2009) Free Market Madness: Why human nature is at odds with economics  – and why it matters. Harvard Business Press, ISBN:9781422126097

Despite the title, this book sings the praises of the free market. However, it soundly debunks a libertarian free-market fundamentalism that draws its legitimacy from the rational-choice assumptions of economics.

The author is a medical doctor and decision scientist, not to mention an accessible writer. The book is based on many important scientific studies, including the author’s own research, so there’s a high fact-to-opinion ratio. In his medical work, Ubel sees first-hand the obesity crisis, the stressful conditions in which we make medical decisions and the inefficiency of a market medical system. This in turn shows the danger of believing that people always make decisions in their own best interest.

Helping Simon Singh

I wasn’t at the London meeting last night, but here is the New Scientist write-up about Simon Singh’s libel case with the British Chiropractic Association (previously featured). It seems that this case is capturing the mood of the nation’s skeptics to an unexpected extent, just as the Atheist Bus campaign and Godless People events succeeded beyond their wildest expectations (though I’m not saying that skeptic is the same as atheist).

ASKE colleagues have asked how to support Singh at a time when he might be about to launch a very expensive appeal.

One thing you can do to help Singh is to buy his book “Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial” (co-authored with Prof. Edzard Ernst), or if you have it already, give it some publicity. I’ve had it for a while and honestly only dipped into it so far, but it seems definitive and a large chunk of it deals with chiropractic. The end section is a set of very short assessments of the evidence relating to each of a long list of alternative practices: extremely helpful material for any skeptic.

It doesn’t help Singh’s legal case as directly as a cash donation, but it gets him some cash, raises the profile of the central arguments this case is about and adds a useful resource to your bookshelf. Reviewing or recommending the book on Amazon is a good idea as well: as expected, there are some alt-med supporters giving it one star reviews to bring its rating down, without really addressing the book’s content.

British Chiropractic Association promote bogus treatments

Along with a lot of other bloggers, I want to repost this quote from an article by Simon Singh:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

Singh, along with Prof. Edzard Ernst, is the author of “Trick or Treatment? : The undeniable facts about alternative medicine”, an excellent and definitive guide to the topic. I trust him on the issue of the status of chiropractic far more than I’d trust a lot of other people, including the British Chiropractic Association, who are suing Singh for libel. This weekend the court made a misguided preliminary ruling that favoured the BCA, causing a chilling effect for those who want to call them out for promoting quack remedies.

Let’s get the word out, help Singh out (he’s a entertaining, informative and bold writer and his books explain fascinating science in an accessible way) and make this a foot-bullet for the BCA.

* by “bogus” I here mean “inauthentic; not genuine; lacking in credible evidence”, your honour.

Update: David Allen Green, AKA Jack of Kent, writes about chilling effect of the case in the current New Scientist.

Update: A great round-up of reaction to the case from the God Knows What blog. Singh will announce his next steps at a meeting tomorrow (Monday 18th).

Book Review: Never Saw It Coming

Review of Karen A. Cerulo (2006) Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. ISBN 9780226100333

This starts out so well, but wanders into such dubious and frankly mad territory that I can’t recommend it. The theme of the book is how we find it difficult to define or imagine the worst: in particular, worst outcomes such as business failure or loss of a child. Cerulo, a sociologist, argues that this asymmetry is part of our (Western, and USA in particular) culture.

This blindness to the worst has profound costs. In organisations, we have disasters like the Bay of Pigs, Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks. The banking crisis which occurred since the book was published may be the best illustration of all. At an individual level, people prepare inadequately for severe illness, death or other misfortune. Culturally, she claims, we resist anything that makes us think about the worst.

Daily Mail campaigning both for and against vaccination

Via The Lay Scientist: Nauseating tabloid The Daily Mail publishes editions in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Like a lot of the UK press, it’s taking part in an irresponsible and anti-scientific campaign to deny people life-saving vaccines (the cervical cancer vaccine in this case), but the Irish edition is campaigning for the vaccine to be reintroduced. Unbelievable!

Humour site News Arse asks which women the Daily Mail wants to die, British or Irish?

Book Review: The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect: How managers let themselves be deceived by Phil Rosenzweig. ISBN: 978-1-84739-336-4

Business academic Rosenzweig has written a definitive book about critical thinking in the context of business success. A lot of people claim to understand why businesses succeed or fail, whether in journalism such as Fortune magazine, in bestselling books such as In Search of Excellence or in academia. With admirable clarity, Rosenzweig sets out the scientific failings of these, boiling down the errors to a list of nine “delusions” which infect even some of the most prestigious business research.

New Scientist: Religious books masquerading as science

Hooray for the mighty Wikileaks, preserving for us the New Scientist article “How to spot a hidden religious agenda” that the magazine itself has taken off its web site for legal reasons.

The piece is important and deserves a wider discussion. The “science” shelves of a high street bookshop put outright pseudo-science right alongside popularisations of genuine science.