Statistical Sins: Olympic Figure Skating and Biased Judges

The 2018 Winter Olympics are almost here! And, of course, everyone is already talking about the events that have me as mesmerized as the gymnasts in the Summer Olympics - figure skating.

Full confession: I love figure skating. (BTW, if you haven't yet seen I, Tonya, you really should. If for no other reason than Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.)

In fact, it seems everyone loves figure skating, so much that the sport is full of drama and scandals. And with the Winter Olympics almost here, people are already talking about the potential for biased judges.

We've long known that ratings from people are prone to biases. Some people are more lenient while others are more strict. We recognize that even with clear instructions on ratings, there is going to be bias. This is why in research we measure things like interrater reliability, and work to improve it when there are discrepancies between raters.

And if you've peeked at the current International Skating Union (ISU) Judging System, you'll note that the instructions are quite complex. They say the complexity is designed to prevent bias, but when one has to put so much cognitive effort into understanding something so complex, they have less cognitive energy to suppress things like bias. (That's right, this is a self-regulation and thought suppression issue - you only have so many cognitive resources to go around, and anything that monopolizes them will leave an opening for bias.)

Now, bias in terms of leniency and severity is not the real issue, though. If one judge tends to be more harsh and another tends to be more lenient, those tendencies should wash out thanks to averages. (In fact, total score is a trimmed mean, meaning they throw out the highest and lowest scores. A single very lenient judge and a single very harsh judge will then have no impact on a person's score.) The problem is when the bias emerges with certain people versus others.

At the 2014 Winter Olympics, the favorite to win was Yuna Kim of South Korea, who won the gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She skated beautifully; you can watch here. But she didn't win the gold, she won the silver. The gold went to Adelina Sotnikova of Russia (watch her routine here). The controversy is that, after her routine, she was greeted and hugged by the Russian judge. This was viewed by others as a clear sign of bias, and South Korea complained to the ISU. (The complaints were rejected, and the medals stood as awarded. After all, a single biased judge wouldn't have gotten Sotnikova such a high score; she had to have high scores across most, if not all, judges.) A researcher interviewed for NBC news conducted some statistical analysis of judge data and found an effect of judge country-of-origin:

As a psychometrician, judge ratings are a type of measurement, and I personally would approach this issue as a measurement problem. Rasch, the measurement model I use most regularly these days, posits that an individual's response to an item (or, in the figure skating world, a part of a routine) is a product of the difficulty of the item and the ability of the individual. If you read up on the ISU judging system (and I'll be honest - I don't completely understand it but I'm working on: perhaps for a Statistics Sunday post!), they do address this issue of difficulty in terms of the elements of the program: the jumps, spins, steps, and sequences skaters execute in their routine.

There are guidelines as to which/how many of the elements must be present in the routine and they are ranked in terms of difficulty, meaning that successfully executing a difficult element results in more points awarded than successfully executing an easy element (and failing to execute an easy element results in more points deducted than failing to execute a difficult element).

But a particular approach to Rasch allows the inclusion of other factors that might influence scores, such as judge. This model, which considers judge to be a "facet," can model judge bias, and thus allow it to be corrected when computing an individual's ability level. The bias at issue here is not just overall; it's related to the concordance between judge home country and skater home country. This effect can be easily modeled with a Rasch Facets model.

Of course, part of me feels the controversy at the beginning of the NBC article and video above is a bit overblown. The video fixates on an element Sotnikova blew - a difficult combination element (triple flip-double toe-double loop) she didn't quite execute perfectly. (She did land it though; she didn't fall.)

But the video does not show the easier element, a triple Lutz, that Kim didn't perfectly execute. (Once again, she landed it.) Admittedly, I only watched the medal-winning performances, and didn't see any of the earlier performances that might have shown Kim's superior skill and/or Sotnikova's supposed immaturity, but I could see, based on the concept of element difficulty, why one might have awarded Sotnikova more points than Kim, or at least, have deducted fewer points for Sotnikova's mistake than Kim's mistake.

In a future post, I plan to demonstrate how to conduct a Rasch model, and hopefully at some point a Facets model, maybe even using some figure skating judging data. The holdup is that I'd like to demonstrate it using R, since R is open source and accessible by any of my readers, as opposed to the proprietary software I use at my job (Winsteps for Rasch and Facets for Rasch Facets). I'd also like to do some QC between Winsteps/Facets and R packages, to check for potential inaccuracies in computing results, so that the package(s) I present have been validated first.

Statistical Sins: Hello from the 'Other' Side

I'm currently analyzing data from our job analysis survey (in fact, look for a post in the near future about why it's important for psychometricians to remember how to solve systems of equations), and saved the analysis of demographics for last. Why? Because I'm fighting a battle with responses in the 'Other' category for some of these questions. I think I'm winning. Maybe.

I've blogged about survey design before. But I've never really discussed this concept of having an 'Other' category in your items. You assume when you write a survey that people will find a selection that matches their situation and for those few cases where no options match, you have 'Other' to capture those responses. You then ask people to specify why they are 'Other' so you can create additional categories to capture them in tables.

Or, you know, you could have what people actually do and end up with a bunch of people whose situation perfectly fits one of the existing categories and instead selects 'Other,' then writes an almost word-for-word version of an existing category in the specify box. For instance, in one item on our survey, we had 36 people select 'Other'. After I had looked at their responses and placed the ones that fit an existing category into that box, I had 7 'Other's left.

Actually, that's the second best outcome to hope for when allowing for 'Other.' More often, you get vaguely worded responses that could fit in any number of existing categories, if you only had the proper details. For example, in another item on our survey, I have 17 'Others.' I have no idea where to put two-thirds of them because they lack enough detail for me to choose between 2-3 existing options.

Fortunately, those two items are the standouts, and for remaining questions with 'Other' options, only 4-5 people selected them. Even for those few other responses that are gibberish, I'm not losing a lot of cases by calling them unclassifiable. But still, going through other responses is time consuming and requires a lot of judgement calls.

Obviously, what you want to do is minimize the number of 'Other' responses from the beginning. I know this is far easier said than done. But there are some tricks.

Get experts involved in the development of your survey. And I don't just mean experts in survey design (yes, those too, but...); I mean people with expertise in the topic being surveyed. Ask them what terms they use to describe these categories. And ask them what terms their coworkers and subordinates use to describe these categories. Find potential responses that are widely used and as unambiguous as possible. You'll still have a few stragglers who don't know the terms you're using, but you'll hopefully minimize your stragglers.

If possible, pilot test your survey with people who work in the field. And if your survey is very complex, consider doing cognitive interviews (look for a future blog post on that).

Find a balance in the number of options. What this really comes down to is balancing cognitive effort. You want to have enough to cover relevant situations, because that requires less cognitive effort from you when analyzing your data. You just run your descriptives and away we go.

But you also need to minimize response options to a number people can hold in memory at one time. The question above with the 17 other responses was also the question with the most response options. More isn't always better. Sometimes it's worse. I think for this item, we just got greedy about how much information and delineation we wanted in our responses. But if your response options become TL;DR, you'll get people skipping right to 'Other' because that requires less cognitive effort from them.

Balancing cognitive effort won't be 50/50. Someone is always going to pay with more cognitive effort than they'd like to exert and that someone should almost always be you. If you instead make your respondents pay with more effort than they'd like to exert, you end up with junk data or no data (because people stop completing the survey).

And of course, decide whether you care about other at all. If there are only a fixed number of situations and you think you have all of them addressed, you could try just dropping the other category altogether. Know that you'll probably have people skip the question as a result, if their situation isn't addressed. But if you only care to know if X, Y, or Z situations apply to respondents, that might be okay. This comes down to knowing your goal for every question you ask. If you're not really sure what the goal is of a question, maybe you don't need that question at all. As with number of response options, you also want to minimize the number of questions, by dropping any items that aren't essential. It's better to have 100 complete responses on fewer questions than 25 complete and 75 partial responses on more questions.

Social Learning and Amazon Reviews

In my inbox this morning was a new article from Psychological Science exploring how people use statistical and social information. And a great way to examine that is through Amazon reviews.

Social learning - also called vicarious learning - is when we learn by watching others. One of the famous social learning studies, Bandura's "bobo doll" study found that kids could learn vicariously by watching a recording, showing us that it isn't necessary for the learner to be in the same room as the model. The internet has exponentially increased our access to social information. But Amazon reviews not only provide social information, but numerical information:

One can learn in detail about the outcomes of others’ decisions by reading their reviews and can also learn more generally from average scores. However, making use of this information demands additional skills: notably, the ability to make intuitive statistical inferences from summary data, such as average review scores, and to integrate summary data with prior knowledge about the distribution of review scores across products.

To generate material for their studies, they examined data from 15 million Amazon reviews (15,655,439 reviews of 356,619 products, each with at least 5 reviews, to be exact). They don't provide a lot of detail in the article, instead referring to other sources, one of which is available here, to describe how these data were collected and analyzed. (tl;dr is that they used data mining and machine learning.)

For experiment 1, people had to make 33 forced choices between two products, which were presented along with an average rating and number of reviews. Overall, the most reviewed product had 150 reviews and the least reviewed product had 25, with options fall between those two extremes. An example was shown in the article:

They found that people tended to prefer the product with more reviews more frequently than their statistical model (which factored in both number of reviews and rating) predicted. In short, they were drawn more to the large numbers than to the information the ratings were communicating.

Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment, except this time, they had participants make 25 forced choices, and decreased the spread of number of reviews: the minimum was 6 and the maximum was 26. Once again, people were drawn more to the number of reviews than the ratings. When they pooled results from the two experiments and examined them using meta-analysis techniques, they found that people unaffected by the drastic differences in number of reviews between experiment 1 and experiment 2. As the authors state in their discussion:

In many conditions, participants actually expressed a reliable preference for more-reviewed products even when the larger sample of reviews served to statistically confirm that a poorly rated product was indeed poor.

Obviously, crowd-sourcing information is a good thing, because, as we understand from the law of large numbers, data from a larger sample is expected to more closely reflect the true population value.

The problem is that people fixate on the amount of information and use that heuristic to guide their decision, rather than using what the information is telling them about quality. And there's a point of diminishing returns on sample size and amount of information. A statistic derived from 50 people is likely closer to the true population than a statistic derived from 5 people. But doubling your sample from 50 to 100 doesn't double the accuracy. There comes a point where more is not necessarily better, just, well, more. This is a more complex side of statistical inference, one the average layperson doesn't really get into.

And while we're on the subject of Amazon reviews, there's this hilarious trend where people write joke reviews on Amazon. You can read some of them here.

The Oatmeal and the Backfire Effect

Stop what you're doing and check out this great cartoon from the Oatmeal, dealing the backfire effect, a psychological phenomenon where information that is contrary to your beliefs actually strengthens your beliefs.

This concept is also sometimes called attitude polarization or belief polarization. Think of your attitude or belief as falling on a continuum, in terms of things like strength or importance - after all, most social psychologists do. Let's say you have an attitude that falls at the far right, close to the maximum. Information from the left might actually push you even farther right, up to the maximum (the poles).

If your attitude is a bit more wishy-washy (somewhere in the middle), it might not take much to move you to one side or the other. So backfire effects are strongest among people with strongly held attitudes or beliefs - generally the people who are more likely to act on those beliefs. We know that attitudes and behavior have a tenuous connection, but that connection is strongest when the attitude is specific and strong (a core belief).

On a side note: I wonder what it says about me that none of the "mind-blowing" facts presented in the cartoon ruffled my feathers. Either I'm really chill about hearing new information that might conflict with my beliefs or I'm feeling apathetic these days. (Yes.)

Mental Illness and Art

By now, you've probably at least heard of, if not watched, 13 Reasons Why, a series on Netflix that chronicles a set of tapes created by Hannah Baker to explain why she committed suicide. These tapes make it to our protagonist, Clay Jensen, a friend of Hannah's, and we learn about the events taking place prior to and after her suicide. It was a difficult series for me to watch - I had a cousin who committed suicide after his 30th birthday party, which coincidentally was also the day I graduated college. I awoke the next day to the news. A friend of mine who also experienced a family suicide mentioned that she was meaning to watch the show, and I passed on some trigger warnings for her. It's a difficult show to watch for anyone, but for people who have experienced firsthand the grief displayed by the characters of the show, especially Hannah's parents, it can bring back many conflicting emotions.

I do mean to sit down and write a review of the show. I think I need a little more distance, because I know I'm still feeling through many of emotions the show triggered. One thing the show has done is, it has started to get people talking about mental illness. In fact, that's what good art does - gets people thinking and talking about the human condition. In fact, two articles have crossed my path today, dealing with negative emotions more broadly and mental illness specifically.

The first is an interview with psychologist Susan David, whose book Emotional Agility deals with the importance of negative emotions, including in workplace settings. She argues that negative emotions should not be suppressed, because they can provide important information for the feeler and his/her coworkers:

A core part of emotional agility is the idea that our emotions are critical; they help us and our organizations. For example, if a person is upset that their idea was stolen at work, that’s a sign that they value fairness. Instead of being good or bad emotions, we should see emotions as containing useful data.

Our moods can provide us with important information - in fact, we refer to this in psychology as the "mood as information effect." If we realize we're in a negative mood, we analyze the situation to see what the cause could be. This mood is an indicator that something isn't right. Of course, Dr. David is going beyond mood as information and discussing how those emotions could inform others about what the person values. Further - and I'm sure she goes into this in her book - suppressing emotions can lead to thought suppression effects, where the suppressed emotions become stronger and more salient. The cognitive stress of suppressing would also make it more difficult for a person to do their job, especially jobs that require more critical thinking.

The other article deals with mental illness among artists, and asks whether pain is necessary to create great art:

Artists are masochists. We revel in the beauty of pain more than any other profession in the world. It's an experience we create for our viewers that is almost palpable. And it is in this experience that we connect to each other, creating everlasting bonds with our audience.

Some of the world's greatest artists have documented their own struggles with mental health. From depression and anxiety to a wide range of psychological disorders, these are all real themes that will always remain in art.

The article, written by artist Melody Nieves, who has struggled with depression herself, includes many great works of art, some familiar and some likely not, that deal with different aspects of mental illness and emotional pain:

The Verdict on Racism and Sexism

I'm currently in an online discussion about whether we should continue singing music that is outdated at best and misogynist at worst. The verdict is still out on that one, but it's generating some interesting perspectives.

So it's interesting timing that these two things came across my inbox today:

• The Supreme Court ruled that a Colorado man may get a new trial, due to racist comments by a juror during deliberations - it was a close to decision (5-3).
• New research published in Psychological Science finds evidence of prejudice transfer; finding out a person is sexist leads to the perception that the person may also be racist (and vice versa). This "transfer" was mostly driven by the degree of social dominance (showing a strong preference for their in-group and comfort with social inequalities) demonstrated by the perpetrator.

Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and the ABCD of Personality

I've blogged many times about the human brain, taking time to discuss the various brain regions and what behaviors and processes they control. Your brain is an amazing demonstration of evolution in action, even in terms of its structure.

The lowest parts of the brain (the hindbrain - the cerebellum, pons, and medulla oblongata) control the basics of life: breathing, heartbeat, sleep, swallowing, bladder control, movement, etc. The midbrain/forebrain* controls processes that rank a little higher on the continuum, but still not what we'd consider high-level processing: emotion, sleep-wake cycle and arousal, temperature regulation, and the transfer of short-term to long-term memory (the very basics of learning), among other things.

Finally, the cerebral cortex, the outer-most part of the brain that developed last evolutionarily speaking; it is responsible for what we call consciousness, and this part of the brain in particular is responsible for many of the traits that differentiate humans from other animals - memory, attention, language, and perception. Other animals have a cerebral cortex as well but not nearly as developed as our own.

These various brain structures work together, and sometimes a lower part of the brain will take over for the higher parts of the brain, especially when there is some kind of disorder of higher brain function. Sandeep Gautam over at The Mouse Trap discusses the work of Paul McClean, and refers to activity coming from the lower brain areas as "bottom-up" and activity from the higher brain areas as "top-down." In his post, he discusses the ABCDs - affect (emotion), behavior, cognition (thought), and desire - and links these bottom-up/top-down processes to different personality traits, offering an eight-part structure of personality: a bottom-up and top-down trait for each of the ABCDs:

• Affective
• Bottom-Up: How we respond to stimuli, specifically Introversion/Extroversion
• Top-Down: Analyzing the situation for things that require increased vigilance and potentially anxiety, a trait called Neuroticism (aka: Emotionality)
• Behavioral
• Bottom-Up: Basic response to stimuli, Impulsivity or Impulsive Sensation Seeking
• Top-Down: A more thoughtful response to stimuli, including considering how that response might impact oneself and others, which could lead to inhibition. This trait is known as Conscientiousness
• Cognition
• Bottom-Up: Degree of distractibility or focus when encountering new things, which manifests as the trait Openness to Experience
• Top-Down: Making connections between concepts, a trait known as Imagination
• Desire/Drives
• Bottom-Up: Degree of aggression in one's reactions, a trait known as Agreeableness
• Top-Down: A process driven by expectation, which impacts one's desire to help or hurt others. He refers to this trait as the Honesty-Humility dimension

This structure is a departure from the Big Five personality traits. Obviously, it includes those 5 (Extroversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness), but adds 3 more (Impulsivity, Imagination, and Honesty-Humility). As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the Big Five (more on that here), so I find this new structure interesting but a little strange. Probably what is strangest to me is that 3 of the Big Five are considered bottom-up processes, rather than the more thoughtful, controlled top-down. I would have thought Agreeableness and Openness to Experience were the result of higher-level processing.

It's a somewhat artificial divide of course. Except in the case of injury to a higher-level part of the brain, even bottom-up processes are going to be shaped by higher-level thinking. Your degree of Introversion/Extroversion, for instance, may influence your most basic response to social stimuli, but it's going to take higher-level processing to understand how best to handle that reaction and also determine what you need in that situation (that is, I'm feeling X, so do I need alone time or time with others?).

What do you think about this new taxonomy?



*These two areas tend to be differentiated from each other, but I was always taught about them in combination, under the title "midbrain." The forebrain includes structures like the amygdala, hippocampus, and so on. They rank higher up than the hindbrain, but are still considered "subcortical."

WTF Is Up with Swearing

For a few years, a good friend of mine has given up swearing for Lent. It apparently takes a lot of conscious effort and there are certainly slip-ups, where profanities come out before he has the chance to suppress them. An article in Time explores the scientific research around swearing. Not only can it help us to deal with experiences like pain, it also appears to be somewhat involuntary:

When researchers observed how people dealt with the pain of submerging their hands in icy water, they found that people could withstand more discomfort if they repeated a swear word, rather than a non-swear word. Scientists have also found that unlike most sounds we utter, cussing can happen in both voluntary and involuntary ways. The latter—like when we drop our keys in the snow and yell “F-ck” without consciously deciding to—offer evidence that language isn’t just produced one way in the brain. That has clinical and research implications, says Bergen, and it may tell us something about why we came to communicate as we do.

It also suggests that these emotionally charged words can become so deeply ingrained in us that uttering them toes the line of being a physical act rather than a symbolic one, more like a sneeze than a sentence. “When you say them,” [psychologist Timothy] Jay says, “you feel something.”

We've all probably had the experience of uttering a swear word involuntarily, often in situations where we really shouldn't swear. And many of my friends with kids have discussed times their young children have sworn after dropping something. In fact, we probably all remember this scene from A Christmas Story:

In his research, Jay has recorded and analyzed clips of people swearing, to try to understand why we do it. Swearing offers us a release of our emotions, and elicits a physical response, not unlike fight or flight. Benjamin Bergen, another researcher interviewed for the article, has even written a book on swearing: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves.

I've recently become more conscious of swearing in my writing. Before, I would try to avoid it as much as possible - my mom was a children's writer and very strongly dislikes bad language - but I felt that it left my characters too wooden. If they spoke more like I did, and the way many of my friends do, they would be a bit more crass. Now I just let fly in my writing. None of my readers have commented on it, positively or negatively, which is probably the best reaction.

It's All Millennials' Fault

Millennials get a pretty bad rap. And now they're being blamed for more - this time, a slump in fabric softener sales. Procter and Gamble thinks it's because they just don't know how to use it or don't recognize its benefits.

In fact, they've suspected this for a little while and have been posting videos on their YouTube page showing those poor helpless millennials how to use fabric softener (as in the video above). How kind of them...

I'm guilty of cracking many jokes about millennials, though many of my friends strongly identify as such. (I'm on the cusp, and really think of myself more as an X-er, but whatever.) Still, the whole "oh you don't do this? maybe you don't know how" bit has been true in many different contexts. Everything from pushing for better hand hygiene to giving a better job interview has been responded to with education. And it's possible that lack of knowledge is part of the reason millennials are turning their nose up at fabric softener, just like a lack of knowledge may explain why people don't wash their hands as well or as often as they should. But dissemination theory provides many reasons innovations aren't taken up. In fact, one of my favorite theories about diffusion of innovations comes from the work of Everett Rogers, who offers a set of variables that determine whether an innovation is taken up into practice:

So millennials may not use fabric softener because they don't see the benefit (which could be responded to with education), but the issue may also lie in the softener itself - they may not like using additional chemicals with their clothes, and therefore see it as incompatible with their values. Or maybe they have used it and didn't notice a difference, making results unobservable.

For me personally - I have really sensitive skin and I find fabric softener very irritating. (I also have to be careful what kind of detergent I use, as well as what fabrics I wear.) And the smell of fabric softener is way too strong for me. I can smell it on my clothes all day and it makes me gag. Considering the increase in allergies, which has been attributed to increased use of antibiotics - allergic reactions are an immune response, and paradigmatic changes in immune function could definitely explain why we're seeing more food and environmental allergies - it could be that many millennials have more sensitivities as well.

Girls, Math, and Grade School Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat, especially with regard to women and math ability, has been one of my interests for a long time (see past posts here and here). To recap, stereotype threat occurs when a stereotype about a group (e.g., "women are bad at math") affects a group members' performance (e.g., a woman encountering math test). Though some studies have tested this by specifically stating stereotype prior to the test phase, other research suggests that this isn't necessary. Simply being aware of the stereotype is enough to impact performance.

Recent research suggests this stereotype is still alive and well, and begins rearing its ugly head around 1st grade:

A new study shows that first-grade teachers consistently rate girls’ math ability below boys’ — even when they have the same achievement level and learning style. The study out today in the journal AERA Open from researchers at New York University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign seems to represent a setback for gender equity in math. A widely reported 2008 study found that girls score as well as boys do on standardized state math tests. But the latest study suggests that early in their math education, many girls run into a teacher who perceives them as being worse at the subject than they are — which could discourage some of them from heading down a path that could lead to a career in math, science or engineering.

For me, I think I became consciously aware of the gender math stereotype in middle school. And they were especially obvious to me in junior high and high school, when I took algebra courses for the first time. Believe it or not, I struggled big-time with algebra. But I excelled at geometry. Still, I started to buy into the stereotype, if not about all women, but definitely about myself. I used to be involved with science and math clubs, but around 7th or 8th grade, I stopped going because I believed I couldn't do math.

My Algebra 2 teacher definitely bought into gender stereotypes. I approached him early in the course to tell him I was having trouble. He invited me to stop by during study hall. I showed up, he gave me some problems to work on, and walked away. A couple of boys from my class showed up and he spent the whole time showing them how to do the problems on the board, correcting them when they gave a wrong answer, and just being really hands-on with them. Meanwhile, I was working through problems I had no idea how to do with no attention from him. I did this one more time before I got the hint and stopped showing up. That was my one and only C in high school. That was also the last math class I took in high school.

Now that I've been working with higher-level statistics for so long, algebra makes perfect sense to me. I wonder how different things would have been in my career choices if I'd had more help.

Trying to Be Less Dumb

Previously, I blogged about a book called You Are Not So Smart. Last night, I started the sequel, You Are Now Less Dumb:

As the previous book, it deals with cognitive biases, which I've blogged about before. But while the purpose of the previous book was to make you aware of these various biases, the goal of this book is to help you "learn from failings" and "feel more connected with the community of humanity." Less succinctly:

You think seeing is believing, that your thoughts are always based on reasonable intuitions and rational analysis, and that though you may falter and err from time to time, for the most part you stand as a focused, intelligent operator of the most complicated nervous system on earth. You believe that your abilities are sound, your memories are perfect, your thoughts are rational and wholly conscious, the story of your life true and accurate, and your personality stable and stellar. The truth is that your brain lies to you. Inside your skull is a vast and far-reaching personal conspiracy to keep you from uncovering the facts about who you actually are, how capable you tend to be, and how confident you deserve to feel.

You may wonder why, as a psychologist who is familiar with much of this research, I would read this book. Wouldn't it make sense for someone without that knowledge and education? But the thing I love about reading these types of books, especially when they accurately discuss the research, is that I come away with new insights and connections. I also enjoy some of the different anecdotes and findings they bring in from other fields, that help give me a wider view and understanding. For instance, in the first chapter, McRaney talks about the importance of narrative in understanding ourselves and others. Part of his evidence for the importance of these narratives? Centrifuges.

Applying g-forces to the human body can have many interesting effects - not just pushing the body around, but also (when one "pulls too many g's") keeping blood from getting to your brain. As a result, you pass out. The Air Force and places like NASA use centrifuges as they teach pilots techniques they can use to keep blood in their brain, and keep themselves from passing out. During practice, many of the pilots pass out, and interestingly, they may report visions and hallucinations - which sound strikingly similar to visions reported by people with "near-death experiences":

The tunnel, the white light, friends and family coming to greet you, memories zooming around--the pilots experienced all of this. In addition, the centrifuge was pretty good at creating out-of-body experiences.

As Whinnery and other researchers have speculated, the near-death and out-of-body phenomena are both actually the subjective experience of a brain owner watching as his brain tries desperately to figure out what is happening and to orient itself amid its systems going haywire due to oxygen deprivation. Without the ability to map out its borders, the brain often places consciousness outside the head, in a field, swimming in a lake, fighting a dragon--whatever it can connect together as the walls crumble. What the deoxygenated pilots don't experience is a smeared mess of random images and thoughts.

Narrative is so important to survival that it is literally the last thing you give up before becoming a sack of meat.

How a Picture of Margaret Thatcher Demonstrates the Way We Process Faces

You may remember seeing this picture of Margaret Thatcher in your introductory psychology textbook:

Notice anything odd about either of these pictures (other than being upside-down, of course)? I'll give you a hint that there is something wrong, and it's much more obvious if you look at it right-side up:

Obvious, and also slightly terrifying. Thatcher's mouth and eyes have been inverted in the picture on the left. It's completely obvious when the face is viewed right-side up, but often unnoticeable when viewed upside down. This demonstration, known as the Thatcher Illusion, was first demonstrated in 1980 by Professor Peter Thompson from the University of York. But this demonstration was about more than just making the then Prime Minister look funny. It helped show the way we process faces.

Previously, people speculated that we processed faces piecemeal - taking in each feature. But Thompson argued that we take a holistic view of the face, taking in the overall look and configuration, as well as noting the individual features. When the faces are presented in a way we rarely see (upside-down), we look at the individual features, but since we're used to seeing them right-side up, they appear correctly placed. When the images are flipped right-side up again, we are able to immediately see the issues with the configuration.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

Worth Psychology recently tweeted this link to a New York Magazine story, "5 of Humanity's Best Ideas of What Dreams Actually Are." Believe it or not, I learned a thing or two in the article:

The earliest recorded dream is from the Sumerian king Dumuzi of Uruk, who ruled just before Gilgamesh, sometime around 2500 BC. “An eagle seizes a lamb from the sheepfold,” a translation reads. “A falcon catches a sparrow on the reed fence … The cup lies on its side; Dumuzi lives no more. The sheepfold is given to the winds.” The king was freaked out about his dream, and occasioned the first recorded dream interpretation, care of his sister, who was evidently a professional at these things. Sister’s advice: Some bad shit is about to go down, so you’d do well to hide.

The article then goes through the 5 theories, offering some background and explanation for each. Unfortunately, they give a lot of attention to the Freudian/psychoanalytic perspective, that dreams are your brain trying to tell you something.

• Dreams are pragmatic prophecies - This is not to say dreams are actual prophecies, but rather, that because we know our situation well and because human survival comes from our ability to think about and prepare for the future, we could have dreams about things that we expect to happen. Dreams in this theory are about preparation, so that we are ready to deal with situations in our wakeful life.
• Dreams tell you what to do - Unfortunately, for this item on the list, they really just followed along with the previous item, even delving into actual prophetic elements (such as mentioning that Lincoln dreamed of a White House funeral days before his assassination). However, one story they share, about Descartes, gets at a different aspect of dreams - that of consolidating and synthesizing information, and using that to solve problems:

"In the 17th century, René Descartes, the great doubter, had his life course shifted by a series of dreams he had one November evening. In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, historian-psychiatrist George Makari reports that Descartes had a series of sleeping visions that prompted him to realize that 'spatial problems could become algebraic, which crystallized a vision of a natural world underwritten by mathematical laws,' thereby changing his life and eventually the popular, scientific conception of reality."

This realization was likely not a sudden insight, but an issue Descartes had spent a great deal of time thinking about. Because of the memory consolidation aspect of sleep, combined with dreaming about something that had been on his mind, Descartes was able to solve his mental puzzle.

• Dreams are communications from the unconscious mind - The good old "Your dreams are trying to tell you something" hypothesis. I've blogged before about my thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and why social psychological findings are a much better explanation for some of the things Freud and his ilk observed. And of course, I would argue that this "theory" differs very little from the first and second items on this list. (I would also argue that none of these first three items meet the definition of theory, hence the quote marks.)
• Dreams are data - This one is not actually a theory at all, but rather a thinly veiled reason to share the Sleep and Dream Database, a crowdsourcing site that has catalogued 20,000 dreams (which, to be fair, is a cool idea, and a site I'll be visiting myself). Using these data, researchers have been able to examine psychological themes, and the results suggest that, because we are rarely alone in dreams and we tend to dream about people we are close to, we use dreams to explore the quality of our relationships with others. Honestly, that would have been a better bullet point for this list.
• Dreams are your memories in action - And finally, the author mentions the memory consolidation and learning aspects of dreams. Of all these "theories," this is the only one for which they offer research support over anecdotes. The author hints at the neural network aspect of memory, and also shares findings from a study on learning that allowed some participants to nap afterward, resulting in enhanced learning. (In fact, many such studies have been performed.) But they also discuss a study on male zebra finches that also provides support for this theory. Birds aren't born knowing how to sing certain patterns, but instead learn them. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that male zebra finches showed the same patterns of neuron firing while sleeping as they were when they were singing, suggesting they may be practicing the songs in their dreams.

Personally, I ascribe to the last (and really only) theory on the list. But that's not to say that aspects of the other items on the list can't be true. In fact, as is the case with the Descartes anecdote, they can be easily combined with this theory. The human brain is an incredibly complex machine. Even with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have not even begun to truly imitate the human brain's incredible pattern recognition ability or attention to context. This is arguably an evolved trait, because the best way to learn (something humans excel at compared to most other species) is to connect it to something already learned. This strengthens neural connections, and not only enhances our ability to learn the new thing, it changes our understanding of what we've learned previously. This can, of course, have some pesky effects when it comes to memory of events. But all in all, this ability is a good thing.

While we're awake, we think through things and examine patterns, but we also have to devote a lot of energy to being awake and interacting with the world, making decisions that takes up space in our limited working memory. Sleep is a time of rejuvenation, when our body replenishes, heals, and repairs. Our cognitive resources are free to work through problems, and our brain is consolidating memories, getting us closer to a synthesized solution. And because our problems range from intellectual (like Descartes's) to social and psychological, the content of our dreams can also range from thought problems to interpersonal issues.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

What Would I Do If I Could Feel?

In one of my favorite childhood stories, The (Wonderful) Wizard of Oz, the tin man was unable to feel emotions because he did not have a heart. He, Dorothy (with her dog, Toto) the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion make their way to see the Wizard of Oz in the Emerald City so that each can get their heart's desire (pun fully intended). Though in the book, the Wizard fools each character into thinking he has actually given them what they want, in the MGM movie version as well as one of the best adaptations of the source material (The Wiz), the realization is that each character had what s/he wanted all along. They just didn't see it, and their thinking had blinded them to the strengths they already possessed.

Though these are just stories, research suggests that how we think about ourselves and our abilities impacts our reality. It can actually change us, for better or for worse. Today in "This Week in Psychological Science," I learned about a new study that finds how we think about emotions actually impacts how they are represented (and experienced) in our brains. Specifically, the researchers set out to examine thinking about emotions as categories, or thinking about them on a continuum:

An important aspect of emotion perception that has been overlooked concerns the difference between the continuous nature of the sensory inputs that people receive and the categorical nature of their thinking about emotion. In facial expressions, the contractions of various facial muscles can vary continuously to create gradations of movements (Jack & Schyns, 2015). But people typically talk about these expressions in categorical terms, calling them expressions of “fear” or “calm,” for instance (Barrett, 2006).

Whether we think about emotions continuously or categorically does have some important ramifications. A nuanced view of emotion can make us better at detecting how others are feeling, while thinking about them in categories means that a facial expression or behavior has to reach some threshold before we decide the other person is feeling a certain emotion. This would in turn impact our behavior and interactions with others. It might also impact how we manage our emotions. Viewing emotions continuously also allows us to understand more complex emotions, made up of combinations of the basic emotions. According to Ekman, there are 7 basic emotions:

They conducted two studies, in which participants examined pictures portraying emotions while undergoing MRI. In the first study, participants saw faces displaying fear or calm to varying degrees, and either categorized them or marked where they fell on a continuum for "fear" and "calm." In the second study, participants judged their own responses to graphic images, either as categorically "bad" or "neutral" or along a continuum. They found different levels of activation in parts of the brain responsible for emotion, specifically the amygdala and the insular cortex (the part of the cerebral cortex closest to the amygdala and other structures in what is known as the midbrain):

Activation was greater when the perceived intensity of the negative emotion was greater. When people were only given categories to work with, they had to force pictures into those holes, even when the displayed emotion wasn't very extreme. So a picture showing very mild fear that a participant categorized as fearful produced greater activation in those parts of the brain. Activation was lower when the perceived intensity of the positive or neutral emotion was greater. Allowing a "gray area," through use of a continuum, would allow for more accurate perception, while being forced to use categories may change perception, leading people to perceive the target as being more similar to the category selected. Obviously, this goes beyond emotions, and could have some important implications for other work involving categories, such as stereotypes.

Personality Traits and Choking

As a social psychologist, I believe the situation has a strong influence on behavior, over and above a person's traits. Of course, I do recognize the existence of personality - I'm a big fan of the Big Five theory, which states that our personality can be summed up by where we fall on five continua: openness to change, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. When I've measured personality in past studies, I used a measure developed to assess the Big Five (take one such test here).

A recent study also used the Big Five traits, to try to understand why people choke under pressure. According to their work, one of the Big Five explains who choked under pressure: people high in neuroticism:

Previous research, conducted by Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr, has shown that although individuals may be highly competent in low-pressure contexts, their performance may significantly decrease once the pressure is on. One explanation for why this happens is that anxiety acts as a distractor, sapping cognitive resources such as working memory away from the task at hand and ultimately harming performance.

On the basis of this previous work, Kaileigh Byrne, Crina Silasi-Mansat, and Darrell Worthy hypothesized that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism would experience greater performance anxiety, leading to worse decision-making strategies under pressure.

“This theory offers a potential mechanism by which neurotic individuals may fail when they most need to succeed,” Byrne and colleagues explain.

They conducted two studies, one that created pressure by telling individuals their decisions would impact a (fictional) team member, and another creating pressure with deadlines. In both studies, they found people high in neuroticism performed less well than people low in neuroticism when the pressure was on. In the low pressure conditions, there was no difference.

Fat Shaming and Bullying: Why It's All About (Mis)Attribution

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an article on fat shaming, and the bullying people experience for being overweight or obese. Though - as with many articles recently - they tied it to comments from a certain presidential candidate, fat shaming and bullying have been issues for much longer. In fact, I've blogged about weight management and similar topics before, since this was one of my research interests.

The problem with fat shaming is that it is widespread, and the bullying and negative comments about weight begin early and continue even among adults:

Rebecca Puhl, the deputy director of the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and her colleagues find that weight is the most common reason children are bullied in school. In one study, nearly 85 percent of adolescents reported seeing overweight classmates teased in gym class.

Dr. Puhl and her colleagues asked fat kids who was doing the bullying. It turned out that it was not just friends and classmates but also teachers and — for more than a third of the bullied — parents.

“If these kids are not safe at school or at home, where are they going to be supported?” Dr. Puhl asked.

How can parents - who (hopefully) would reprimand their children for being bullies - also participate in this behavior? The issue, I suspect, comes down to attribution: is the person "to blame" for the condition? Though children may tease others simply for being different, as we grow older, we are taught that difference is not always bad. Further, we learn (again, hopefully) not to judge others who are different for reasons beyond their own control. That is, we shouldn't make fun of someone who has a disease that is not their fault.

The issue with overweight and obesity is that many people do not consider it to be a disease, even if the medical community for the most part does. Instead, they view it as a lifestyle choice, and see no issue with judging others they perceive have made bad choices. It's all about attribution. If I believe a person is overweight or obese because they lack the willpower to eat healthy portions and/or engage in physical activity (that is, I attribute the cause of their condition to their own behavior), what's the issue with denigrating them? Attribution theorists would argue that we engage in this kind of thinking regularly - determining whether someone is at fault for their situation - and that our conclusions impact a variety of behaviors.

Errors in attribution lead a variety of negative behaviors, like blaming the victim. There's an additional level here, though, in that people perceive the shaming and bullying as potentially helpful to the individual being shamed. That is, they think it will help motivate the individual to change:

“There tends to be this public perception that maybe fat shaming is O.K. because it will provide motivation to lose weight,” Dr. Puhl said. Instead, she adds, “it is very harmful to health.”

Research suggests that even people who overweight or obese (which amounts to about two-thirds of the general population) share many of these same beliefs. And of course, when we judge our own behavior, we all think of things we should be doing differently to be more healthy. I know I should exercise more, eat healthier, and drink less beer. Would making these changes help me lose weight? Probably, but then there's more to it that. In fact, anyone who has made these lifestyle changes knows (myself included) it is still very difficult to lose weight and even more difficult to maintain weight loss. For many years, I was 20-25 pounds overweight, and despite trying everything I could, was not able to lose much. What finally worked was a complete accident - I was prescribed a medication for a different purpose that had a side effect of weight loss. But as with other treatments for overweight and obesity, like bypass surgery, it's perceived by many to be "cheating." I didn't work to lose that weight.

What we need to do is to change perceptions about overweight and obesity. If the key is attribution, that's where we need to focus our efforts.

On the Importance of Emotion

During April's A-Z Blog Challenge, I talked about a variety of social psychological concepts. I talked about emotion (also known as affect) and how it influences the decision-making process. The thing many people outside of psychology do not always understand is that there really isn't a hard line between decisions made through cognition ("rationally") and those made through affect ("emotionally"). The two forces work together. Without emotion, we would find it very difficult to make some of the most basic decisions. Why? Because rational thought can only get us so far, and when two options are equally matched on a logical level, it takes that extra push of emotion to make a decision.

In Descartes' Error by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, we learn about a patient named Elliot (not his real name), who was a successful businessman with a family, until he had a brain tumor removed from his frontal lobe. After, Elliot remained an intelligent, pleasant person, but his life was in shambles:

Any projects he did on the job were either left incomplete or had to be corrected, eventually leading to the loss of his job. He got involved in a moneymaking scheme with a “shady character” that ended up in bankruptcy. He got divorced, then married again to someone his family strongly disapproved of, and divorced again. By the time his referring doctors sent him to Damasio, he was living with a sibling, and, as a final blow, was denied disability assistance. The docs wanted to know if Elliot had a “real disease,” Damasio recounts, since “[f]or all the world to see, Elliot was an intelligent, skilled, and able-bodied man who ought to come to this senses and return to work. Several professional had declared that his mental faculties were intact — meaning that at the very best Elliot was lazy, and at the worst a malingerer.”

[Damasio] learned that when Elliot was at work, he might spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to categorize his documents: Should it be by date, pertinence to the case he’s working on, the size of the document, or some other metric? Yet his cognitive faculties were ace: He tested well when given an IQ test and other measures of intelligence; Elliot’s long-term memory, short-term memory, language skills, perception, and handiness with math were all still present. He was not stupid. He was not ignorant. But he acted like he was both. He couldn’t make plans for a few hours in advance, let alone months or years. And it had led his life to ruin.

What was even more confounding is that Elliot could think up lots of options for a decision. When given assignments of assessing ethics (like whether or not to steal something for his family, Les Miserables–style), business (like whether to buy or sell a stock), or social goals (like making friends in a new neighborhood), he did great. But, even with all the idea generation, he could not choose effectively, or choose at all.

Without emotions, it becomes more difficult to know which tasks are more pressing, which organizational method is most preferable, or even when to buy or sell a stock. Those little emotional cues push us along. Whether we mean to or not, emotions come into play regularly. If they didn't, we would be like poor Elliot, forever analyzing organizational methods while blowing work deadlines or falling for scams that might sound legit if not for the little nagging doubt or fear in the back of our minds.

In fact, emotional reactions occur more quickly than cognitive reactions. We feel fear and begin to run before we consciously realize we've just seen a bear during our hike. One reason for this might be how our brain uses short-term memory (also known as working memory) versus long-term memory. Working memory is filled with information we want to have readily accessible, while long-term memory refers to the information and episodes (memories of our lives) in storage.

A recent study in Psychological Science delved into this very topic. Across four studies, they examined how emotional information stored in working memory impacted processing speed. On a computer, they showed participants faces, either neutral or negative (fearful or angry). They manipulated whether participants held this face in their working memory by telling them to remember the face for a task later on. They then flashed faces, which increased in contrast to become more clear across 5 seconds. Participants had to indicate whether they saw the face, and then indicate whether it was the same as the face they were shown initially. They found that people identified faces more quickly when presented with a fearful or angry face:

In sum, the present study extends previous findings by demonstrating that the content of WM can affect emotional processing in the absence of conscious awareness, and such WM modulation effects on nonconscious processing seem to be tuned to threat-related signals (e.g., fear and anger).

Essentially, the faces put people on edge and made them react more quickly. In a computer-driven study, this might not seem very important but what if (for instance) you're out in a public place and you look around and see fear on people's faces? You now know there's something to be afraid of and you will hopefully react more quickly when you encounter whatever you should fear. If you didn't have emotions, faces would just be faces, and whatever emotion they're displaying would be as meaningless as organizing files by document size.

You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured

When people find out I'm a psychologist, there are a few very predictable reactions, as predictable as the response I get when I tell people I'm originally from Kansas:

I'm of course asked if I'm analyzing them right now. I have many go-to responses for that one:

"I'm a social psychologist. I don't help people."

"I do research, so actually I'm analyzing your behavior."

"You think any self-respecting psychoanalyst would do that for free?"

But the next most common question is about dreams. I've had many people ask me if I can help them figure out the meaning of a strange dream they had. Even people who have known me for years sometimes ask me about dreams.

Dreams are pretty fascinating. It's like your own TV channel, except the shows all involve you walking around with no pants. (Or in my case, shoes - I definitely have the naked dream but probably more common is realizing I went all the way to work/school/somewhere random with no shoes.) There are certain dreams we all have. The naked dream is one example. But another common one was a recent subject of an article for the Washington Post:

We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments.

The author, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, did some digging to find out what psychologists had to say about the dream. I give her credit that the first place she looked was at the peer-reviewed literature. She was dismayed when she found nothing and expressed surprise that no psychologists had studied such a common dream. I'll be honest, I sat down and tried to figure out how I would study such a dream, and unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of objective ways to study any dream. You'd need to find people right after (or right before) they had the dream and try to measure various aspects of their lives to find any connections or explanations. But the problem with recruiting people right before is that 1) you don't know when or even if they'll have the dream and 2) you risk influencing their dreams by the simple act of studying them, perhaps causing people to have the school dream. In fact, just writing down your dreams have been shown to influence how you dream - I'm told that's the best way to get into lucid dreaming, where you are able to control the direction of a dream during the actual dream.

So with no peer reviewed literature to guide her, she asked various psychologists to offer their thoughts on the dream. Though many of the explanations crossed into the realm of psychoanalysis (see this blog post to find out what I really think about Freud and his ilk, a post that was also about dreams in which I briefly referenced the "going back to school" dream), there did seem to be a thread linking these explanations together that probably gets at the truth:

"I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students," says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. "These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve."

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, "is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer's task in 'awake life' is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure."

But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?

"Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked," Willis wrote in an email. "Since each new stress in the current day is 'new,' there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar 'achievement' stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the 'go-to' memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the 'now.'"

So the dream is really about fear of not measuring up, or of being measured and found wanting. We're concerned about failure. Though in the article, the psychoanalyst goes on to talk about manifest/latent content and how your brain is trying to shield yourself from the real truth, the neurologist's explanation is probably more accurate and certainly more supported. It's kind of the "neural-connectedness" theory of dreams. Information stored in your brain is connected through a neural network. Some connections - such the connection between dog and leash - are stronger than others - such as the connection between dog and duck-billed platypus.

The internet, however, laughs in the face of your strong-weak connection dichotomy and says, "You want to see a dog dressed as a duck-billed platypus? Boom!"

When you sleep, your brain is consolidating memories, and building up the neural network. So if a stressful time in your current life reminds you of a stressful time in school, your resting brain will forge or strengthen that connection. I think, and I think Dr. Willis would agree, that dreams are just your brain making and testing connections, causing you to see elements of these memories and bits of information while you sleep. We see common themes and threads not because your subconscious brain is sending you coded messages, but because that's how neural connectedness works.

If you have had this dream, unfortunately you're probably going to continue having this dream, especially in times of stress. Dreams can be disconcerting but they're really just your brain testing out the wiring - and that's a good thing.

Hillary Clinton, Complexity, and Likability

A college professor shared this great article that I want to pass on: To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings. The author begins by talking about many of the great characters in pop culture and literature, characters who weren't always likable and sometimes were complete villains. But we were interested in them, because they were complex. And by the way, they are predominantly white men. The author says we've been "trained to emphasize with white men," whether we realize it or not.

It reminded me of a recent complex, and not always likable character, Jessica Jones (title character of the Netflix series). Jessica is a private investigator with super powers. But she's also a sexual assault victim, someone who was continuously victimized by her ex-boyfriend, who was able to make her stay and do horrible things with his own super powers (mind control). We meet her after she has gotten away from him, when she has become an alcoholic, violent, and tactless. I loved the show, and Jessica, right away. Finally, I thought, a victim who doesn't care about being likeable. Who doesn't have to be so sweet and wonderful that of course we all sympathize with her, that we all ask how something so terrible could happen to her.

No, Jessica would say, f*** that. I don't care if you like me. I don't care if you think I deserved or didn't deserve what happened to me. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what I'm like as a human being, I didn't deserve to have my free will taken from me.

But I spoke to many people who couldn't get into Jessica Jones, or found themselves preferring other characters, because Jessica was so unlikable. And it's true, sometimes I would watch Jessica react to a situation and think she should have reacted differently - if she wanted things to go a certain way, that is. But I loved the character, perhaps because she wasn't always likable, and contradicted the stereotypical victim I have seen far too often. She was not a stereotype. She was a real person, with flaws. She was complex.

So I already knew a little of what to expect in the article about Hillary Clinton. Complex female characters are unusual, and hard to accept, so of course, that would extend to our relations with others, especially people we only view through media. But I think this paragraph really sums up the insanity of this election:

I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

We lack archetypes for people like Clinton, and often demand perfection - even contradictory traits - from women in general. Even Clinton recognizes this; the article quotes an interview with Clinton, in which she says:

It’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens.

Alexander Hamilton, Sleep, and Memory Consolidation

I'm currently reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow - the book on which the Broadway musical, Hamilton, is based.

I'm currently about 250 pages in, so it doesn't look like I'll finish before the end of my vacation, but I've made a good dent. In the current section, which is about Hamilton's writing habits, particularly with regard to the Federalist Papers, I found this description of Hamilton's approach to writing from William Sullivan's Public Men of the Revolution:

One who knew his habits of study said of him that when he had a serious object to accomplish, his practice was to reflect on it previously. And when he had gone through this labor, he retired to sleep, without regard to the hour of the night, and having slept six or seven hours, he rose and having taken strong coffee, seated himself at his table, where he would remain six, seven, or eight hours. And the product of his rapid pen required little correction for the press.

What Hamilton was doing - and I'm certainly not downplaying his genius, or his Mozart-like ability to write without the need for revision - was taking advantage of the memory consolidation function of sleep. That is, during sleep, your brain builds neural connections and essentially transfers events and what you learned that day into long term memory. This is why one of the effects of sleep deprivation is memory issues. So Hamilton did the thinking (and some research) needed to gather his thoughts, then slept to allow them to coalesce and organize. Then he would wake up and write it all down. In fact, I just received a link to yet another study demonstrating the memory consolidation effects of sleep.

Of course, what Hamilton did was even more extraordinary when you consider that it was not yet known that sleep could do this - at least, not from scientific study. Psychology wasn't even considered a field yet; that would happen in 1870s Germany. That Hamilton fellow was pretty smart.