Fluency, Lie Detection, and Why Jargon is (Kind of) Like a Sports Car

A recent study from researchers at Stanford (Markowitz & Hancock) suggests that scientists who use large amounts of jargon in their manuscripts might be compensating for something. Or rather, covering for exaggerated or even fictional results. To study this, they examined papers published in the life sciences over a 40 year period, and compared the writing of retracted papers to unretracted papers (you can read a press release here or the abstract of the paper published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology here).

I've blogged about lie detection before, and that (spoiler alert) people are really bad at it. Markowitz and Hancock used a computer to do their research, which allowed them to perform powerful analyses on their data, looking for linguistic patterns that separated retracted papers from unretracted papers. For instance, retracted papers contained, on average, 60 more "jargon-like" words than unretracted papers.

Full disclosure: I have not read the original paper, so I do not know what terms they specifically defined as jargon. While a computer can overcome the shortcomings of a person in terms of lie detection (though see blog post above for a little bit about that), jargon must be defined by a person. You see, jargon is in the eye of the beholder.

For instance - and forgive me, readers, I'm about to get purposefully jargon-y - my area of expertise is a field called psychometrics, which deals with measuring concepts in people. Those measures can be done in a variety of ways: self-administered, interview, observational, etc. We create the measure, go through multiple iterations to test and improve it, then pilot it in a group of people, and analyze the results, then fit it to a model to see if it's functioning the way a good measure should. (I'm oversimplifying here. Watch out, because I'm about to get more complicated.)

My preferred psychometric measurement model is Rasch, which is a logarithmic model that transforms ordinal scales into interval scales of measurement. Some of the assumptions of Rasch are that items are unidimensional and step difficulty thresholds progress monotonically, with thresholds of at least 1.4 logits and no more than 5.0 logits. Item point-measure correlations should be non-zero and positive and item and person OUTFIT mean-squares should be less than 2.0. A non-significant log-likelihood chi-square shows good fit between the data and the Rasch model.

Depending on your background or training, that above paragraph could be: ridiculously complicated, mildly annoying, a good review, etc. My point is that in some cases jargon is unavoidable. Sure, there is another way of saying unidimensional - it means that a measure only assesses (measures) one concept (like math ability, not say, math and reading ability) - but, at the same time, we have these terms for a reason.

Several years ago, I met my favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk at a Barnes and Noble at Old Orchard - which coincidentally was the reading that got him banned from Barnes and Nobles (I should blog about that some time). He took questions from the audience, and I asked him why he used so much medical jargon in his books. He told me he did so because it lends credibility to his writing, which seems to tell the opposite story of Markowitz and Hancock's findings above.

That being said, while jargon may not necessarily mean a person is being untruthful, it can still be used as a shield in a way. It can separate a person from unknowledgeable others he or she may deem unworthy of such information (or at least, unworthy of the time it would take to explain it). Jargon can also make something seem untrustworthy and untruthful, if it makes it more difficult to understand. We call these fluency effects, something else I've blogged about before.

So where is the happy medium here? We have technical terms for a reason, and we should use them as appropriate. But sometimes, they might not be appropriate. As I tried to demonstrate above, it depends on audience. And on that note, I leave you with this graphic from XKCD, which describes the Saturn V rocket using common language (thanks to David over at The Daily Parker for sharing!).

Simplistically yours,

~Sara

None of Us is Dumb As All of Us Or Two Heads Are Better Than One?: Co-Authors

A recent blog post detailed the rise in frequency of co-authors, including that awkward moment when the list of co-authors is 3 times longer than the paper itself:

Physicists set a new record this year for number of co-authors: a 9-page report needed an extra 24 pages to list its 5,154 authors. That’s a mighty long way from science’s lone wolf origins! 

Cast your eye down the contents of the first issue of the German journal, Der Naturforscher, in 1774, for example: nothing but sole authors. How did we get from there to first collaborating and sharing credit, and then the leap to hyperauthorship in the 2000s? And what does it mean for getting credit and taking responsibility?

Read more here.

Having worked with co-authors, and also written papers on my own, there are certainly benefits and drawbacks either way. Anyone who has ever worked on group projects in school knows that some group members are helpful and some do little to nothing. The same is true in just about any group undertaking.

There are a variety of social psychological phenomena at play here, such as social loafing, which occurs when people exert less effort in a group than they would on their own. A related concept is diffusion of responsibility - we share responsibility with others, so that if there are more people around, we have less personal responsibility for something than we do on our own.

Groupthink can also occur, where groups actually consider less information, suppress controversial and dissenting views, and frequently make worse decisions than an individual on his/her own.

So why do we even bother working in teams at all?

In addition to co-authors becoming more and more common, and perhaps an expectation, research is becoming more complicated. With complication comes the need for multidisciplinary teams and skill-sets. Its becoming less and less likely that one person will have the necessary skills and knowledge to complete the pieces of a study, let alone for a single manuscript. As a result, collaboration is key.

In fact, groupthink is more likely to occur in a homogenous group. Diversity, not only in terms of personal characteristics like race and gender, but also knowledge and background, is incredibly important. Obviously, participants in a group also need to feel comfortable expressing dissenting opinions and critically evaluating information, something that is (usually) strongly encouraged in scientific undertaking.

Though co-authors are certainly becoming the norm, I think we can all agree that 5,154 authors is excessive. The thought of coordinating author forms for that many people gives me a headache!

Trivially yours,
~Sara

How to Make a Statistician Laugh Out Loud

This...

Source: Mind Hacks

Facial Composites and the Power of Averages

I've previously blogged about facial asymmetry and attractiveness. Research in this area often works with facial composites - photos that combine facial elements of multiple faces - and found that composites are often viewed as more attractive. This is because composites average across various (often asymmetrical) features.

I saw this post on Facebook today and thought it made a nice follow-up to my post: composite faces using celebrities. Enjoy!


Still asymmetrically yours,
~Sara

The Importance of Scientific Literacy

The next presidential election is a little less than a year away, but we're already hearing from many presidential hopefuls, including a few we wish would go away. One who springs to mind is Ben Carson.

I've been accused of disliking Ben Carson because of his desire to do away with the Department of Veterans Affairs. (Check out a response from some of the major Veteran Service Organization here.)

But my bigger issue is that he has demonstrated a poor understanding of science multiple times. Such as when he said vaccines are important (and thankfully shooting down the autism and vaccines claim) but should be administered in smaller doses, and the ones that don't prevent death or disability should be discontinued (as Forbes asks, which ones are those? Because preventing death or disability is kind of what they're meant to do).

Or when he said the theory of evolution was "encouraged" by Satan.

Or that the pyramids are grain silos.

These are all issues that countless scientists, with years of formal education, have spent their careers studying. I'm certainly not saying we should trust them simply because they have years of formal education. That would be a little like believing anything Ben Carson says because he has an MD.

But, even though I'm not a virologist, or biologist, or archaeologist, I can examine what these experts have to say and come to my own conclusions about whether I think they're accurate based on the methods used in the research.

That's because of an important concept called scientific literacy:

Scientific literacy is the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity. It also includes specific types of abilities...   

Scientific literacy means that a person can ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived from curiosity about everyday experiences. It means that a person has the ability to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena. Scientific literacy entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press and to engage in social conversation about the validity of the conclusions. Scientific literacy implies that a person can identify scientific issues underlying national and local decisions and express positions that are scientifically and technologically informed. A literate citizen should be able to evaluate the quality of scientific information on the basis of its source and the methods used to generate it. Scientific literacy also implies the capacity to pose and evaluate arguments based on evidence and to apply conclusions from such arguments appropriately. (from the National Science Education Standards)

As the quote above says, you're constantly bombarded with claims in the popular media. Such as the recent story about how eating bacon increases your risk of colon cancer by 18%. But an examination of this research shows two things: 1) they found this increased risk among people who eat about 2 strips of bacon every day, and 2) the absolute risk of colon cancer without eating bacon at that level is about 5%, and with that level of consumption is about 6% (more here). In fact, this story had a great outcome. People heard the claim, were skeptical, and looked into it.

Or how about this figure shown during a Congressional hearing about funding for Planned Parenthood, which highlights a related concept of numerical literacy (or numeracy)?

A figure that, based on the numbers associated with the two trend lines, should look more like this:

More here

Or even a recent analysis of Southwestern Airlines's claim of having the lowest fares - read more at my friend David's blog here.

The big thing we can do is encourage a healthy level of skepticism. Obviously, continuing to provide strong science and math education is incredibly important when preparing children to become voting citizens. But simply getting people to think twice about any "scientific" claim they hear would be a step in the right direction.

~Scientifically yours,
Sara

The Importance of Context, Confirmation Biases, and the Fundamental Attribution Error

Recently, a photo of a group of young women taking selfies at a ball game went viral. Not only did this become an online joke, it was used by some as more evidence of the younger generation as self-absorbed and vain.

However, a recent post on medium.com provided some important context for this picture. I won't repeat everything from the post here - you should definitely check it out at the link above - but in short, the girls, and everyone else in the audience, were asked to take selfies. They were just participating. After the public shaming of these young women, they were offered free tickets as an apology, which they instead asked to be donated to an organization that supports victims of domestic violence.

So that picture above? That's what classy ladies who also know how to have fun look like.

Why were people so quick to believe that these young women were acting out of vanity, not participation? One potential reason is because it confirms a stereotype we have about young people. This phenomenon is aptly called "confirmation bias" - we look for, and remember, evidence that confirms our expectations, and ignore or forget information that disconfirms our expectations. This is one reason that anecdotes are not useful evidence if you're trying to get at the truth of a phenomenon. You might be able to remember, for example, 20 times you observed women drive poorly, but fail to remember the 20 times you observed men drive poorly. (And as I've blogged before, memory can be very biased.)

Another reason, which could occur in concert with confirmation bias, is the fundamental attribution error (or FAE, because damn, is that a really long name). FAE is based on in-group-out-group theories; our in-group is made up of people like ourselves and our out-group is made up of everyone else. How we define that group at a given moment depends on context - it could be gender, race, age group, education level - and research suggests that we begin grouping people as "like us" and "unlike us" based on some pretty arbitrary information: what team you were randomly assigned to, whether someone picked the same painting from two options, etc.

For those who love learning psychological terms to impress your friends expand your knowledge, we call this latter concept the "minimal group paradigm."

FAE basically states that we look for evidence to confirm that people in our in-group are good, and unlike people in our out-group. If we observe someone in our in-group doing something positive, we attribute that to their personality - they're just good people. If we observe someone in our in-group doing something negative, we attribute that to the situation - something made them do that.

And we do the opposite with people in our out-group. When they do something positive, we attribute it to the situation, and when we observe them do something negative, we attribute it to their personality.

When we saw these young women taking selfies at the ball game, many of us attributed it to their personalities - they're vain. No one stopped to consider that maybe there was a situational explanation. Then medium.com came along and demonstrated that there was a situational explanation. And we all felt like assholes said, "if I'd known that information when I saw the picture, I wouldn't have been so quick to judge." Because we're good people. It was the situation. (See how pervasive the FAE is? Hey, I have a PhD in social psychology and I did the same thing.)

Contextually yours,
~Sara

Totally Superfluous Movie Review: The Craft

Because it’s October, and because I was talking about this movie with friends recently, I decided to watch The Craft again tonight.

I’ve seen this movie many times – it spawned a generation of young women fascinated with the occult, and has a great soundtrack, including a great cover of “Dangerous Type” by one of my favorite bands, Letters to Cleo.

The thing that struck me about this movie upon watching it again tonight is the underlying theme of belonging. On its surface, the theme seems to be about control – fascination with magic and other supernatural forces stems, at least in part, from a desire to feel in control of the world around us. With magic, we can punish the people who hurt us, make our crush love us, and change our situation, all things that happen in the movie.

But the deeper issue is the need to belong, something we all experience, but is often the focus of our lives as children and teenagers. Sarah (Robin Tunney) first befriends Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell), and Rochelle (Rachel True) because she is a new student and has no friends in a new town. She also meets Chris and falls for him, but is devastated when he rejects her and spreads nasty rumors about her. Her focus then becomes getting Chris to accept (love) her.

Bonnie wants to get rid of her scars, so she can feel normal. Rochelle is stifled socially and on her swim team because of a hateful bully (played by the ever-awesome Christine Taylor, who can pull off everything from plucky love interest to racist bully), and wants to make the bullying stop. Finally, Nancy wishes to escape poverty and an abusive stepfather, because even though she claims she doesn’t care what others think of her, she does (including Chris).

Of course, in trying to belong and feel accepted, they become the monsters they fought so hard against. This is a common theme in horror movies (look for a blog post on that later!). Sarah realizes first that they’ve taken things way too far, unfortunately a little too late to help Chris. When she tries to stop Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle from hurting people, they lash out at her. Only through being accepted by (and accepting) Lirio is Sarah able to make things right - or perhaps more symbolically, only through Sarah accepting herself is she able to find the strength to make things right.

If you’re looking for education on Pagan religions, obviously this is not the place to look. Probably one of the most common misconceptions of these religions is that the purpose is to do magic. But the Pagans were farmers, and their religion and ceremonies were built around the harvest and nature. Magic was considered one of many natural forces they sought to understand and, when possible, control.

But if you’re looking for an allegory of adolescence, and the price of belonging (at least in certain ways), check out The Craft!

Craftily yours,
~Sara