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.

More Data on the Election

This morning, Harry Enten from FiveThirtyEight reported that registered voters who stayed home were more likely to be Democrat. This is based on a SurveyMonkey poll of 100,000 registered voters, including 3,600 who were registered but did not vote:

Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful. It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset.

Registered voters who identified as Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to stay home.

It seems reasonable that many of these voters stayed home because they didn't know who to vote for or didn't want to vote for the person their party selected. And in fact, favorability ratings of either candidate were lower among people who didn't vote. However, Enten argues that because of the high correlation between party affiliation and voting, and because other polls show people who didn't identify with either candidate tended to vote for Clinton over Trump, these registered voters who stayed home would probably have voted for Clinton if they had actually voted on Election Day.

On Guns and Background Checks

This morning, I encountered two studies examining guns and background checks. The first examined school shootings, finding that 154 shootings occurred between 2013 and 2015. Using newspaper articles from that time period, as well as publicly available data, they found that school shootings were less likely to occur in states with background check laws, higher expenditures on mental health care, and higher expenditures on K-12 education.

Based on these data, we might be able to conclude that if guns are more difficult to get (i.e., background check), they're less likely to be used for school shootings. This would suggest background checks are a good thing - as is mental health treatment and education, of course. Unfortunately, the second study I read was based on a national survey of how many people were able to purchase guns without a background check. And they found that 22% of people surveyed were able to purchase a gun without such a check. When you look at private sales between individuals (which includes gun shows), that number jumps to 50%. Even in states that regulate private gun sales, 26% said they were able to purchase a gun without a background check.

As the article points out, the previous figure from 1994 data suggested that 40% were able to purchase a gun without a background check. So these new data suggest improvement. But considering the lives that could be saved from background checks, that's still a lot of guns that could be in the hands of people who really shouldn't have guns in the first place.

When They Go Low, We Get High

If you, like myself (and many people I know), are incredibly worried about the upcoming inauguration of President-Elect Trump (god, it still hurts to type that), take heart - or rather, take solace in the free joints the DC Cannabis Coalition will be giving away in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day:

It all starts at 8:00 a.m. January 20th on the west side of Dupont Circle. Then, marchers will walk to the National Mall where the real protest will begin.

“The main message is it’s time to legalize cannabis at the federal level," said Adam Eidinger, the founder of DCMJ, a group of D.C. residents who introduced and helped get initiative 71 passed in the District. Initiative 71 made it legal to possess two ounces or less or marijuana, to grow it, and to give it away, but it is not legal to sell it.

The great marijuana giveaway is legal, as long as it's done on D.C. land.

"We don't want any money exchanged whatsoever, this is really a gift for people who come to Washington, D.C.," he said.

There will 4,200 gifts, to be exact. Then, at 4 minutes and 20 seconds into Trump's speech (420 is the internationally known code for weed), they'll light up. That part, is most definitely illegal.

"We are going to tell them that if they smoke on federal property, they are risking arrest. But, that's a form of civil disobedience," said Eidinger. "I think it's a good protest. If someone wants to do it, they are risking arrest, but it's a protest and you know what, the National Mall is a place for protest."

Open Data in Action

It's Tuesday, which means I've received my weekly email from the Association for Psychological Science, in which they provide links to new articles published in one of their journals, Psychological Science. I clicked on the first link, a fascinating article examining performance gap between upper-class and working class children, with the intention of blogging about it, when I noticed something interesting. Under the title information were three icons:

There was a link next to these icons where I could click for more information. Turns out these are "Open Practice" badges, which indicate whether the study authors have shared data and/or study materials. The authors of this study have shared both, and sure enough, links to data and materials are provided at the end of the article. I think we can expect more and more researchers to be willing to share their data and materials in this way.

The last badge, which the authors of this study did not receive, is a rather high bar, but also a really good thing:

Preregistered Badge*

URL, doi, or other permanent path to the registration in a public, open-access repository
An analysis plan registered prior to examination of the data or observing the outcomes
Any additional registrations for the study other than the one reported
Any changes to the preregistered analysis plan for the primary confirmatory analysis
All of the analyses described in the registered plan reported in the article

*Authors who have additional unreported registrations or unreported analyses without strong justification (as determined by the editor in chief) will not qualify for a badge.

If the analysis plan was registered prior to observation of outcomes, the Open Practices note will include the notation DE (Data Exist).

If there were strongly justified changes to an analysis plan, the Open Practices note will include the notation TC (Transparent Changes).

Basically, to qualify for this badge, researchers need to register their planned analyses in advance, and if they end up conducting additional analyses, make a strong justification for why. This is a great way to counteract p-hacking (see previous posts on p-hacking here and here). As I said, this is a high bar, and very few studies will likely qualify, but this is a great first step and a push to make better data practices the norm.

On New Year's Resolutions

Probably because I was on the road most of yesterday, no one has asked me yet about my New Year's resolutions (which is fine, because I was still trying to figure out what they would be exactly). But Glamour thinks you shouldn't even bother:

For thousands of years (truly—going all the way back to the Roman era, when people made promises to the god Janus), we’ve endured your vicious circle, listing our perceived shortcomings, trying to improve for a few weeks, then giving up and feeling bad all over again. Consider this our breakup notice. Turns out you don’t really help anyway: “The rah-rah excitement about a resolution works for only a week or two,” says John Norcross, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania and author of Changeology. (He studies the stickability of New Year’s resolutions for a living, so trust.) And as much as we might want to eat more greens or go to the gym more often, most of all we want to be happy in 2017: free of guilt and shame. So we’re pledging not to make any of these clichéd, old, tired resolutions again. Who’s with us?

It's true, New Year's resolutions are difficult to keep - here's a blog post from last year in which I cited research by Dr. Norcross quoted above. But that doesn't mean you should stop trying; you just need to be SMART about it. That is, make sure your goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-Bound

So, what are my New Year's resolutions?

1. Visit at least 1 new state - I'll be turning 35 in less than a week, and I've currently visited 34 states. So why not make it 35 states at 35 years old?
2. Finish my book - and hopefully get it submitted somewhere for publication. I know there are options like self-publishing, which I would probably more strongly consider if writing were my profession, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of promotion, etc., myself. Since this is just a hobby, I can be a little more particular about these things.
3. Average 1 blog post per day for the year - I know there will be days I write two posts and days I don't write one at all, but as long as I end up with 365+ blog posts for the year, I'll be happy
4. Make it a mission to reach 10,000 steps per day - I was doing really well until I started my new job, but this year, I'm going to try to reach 10,000 steps each day (knowing there will be days where it's just impossible, e.g., I get a migraine, I spend the whole day driving, etc.)
5. Read 24 books - I've already set my Goodreads challenge; last year, my goal was 25, and I wanted to increase it for this year, but since I want to write more, I think 2 books a month is a good goal

Welcome to 2017!

Happy New Year, DT readers! I hope everyone had a lovely New Year's celebration. We just returned from the Detroit suburbs where we hung out with friends; the celebration involved lots of funny YouTube videos, 4 adults splitting 5 bottles of wine, a game of Cards Against Humanity, and a soak in the hot tub. Now I'm back home to recuperate and finally put away some of the Christmas gifts we still have sitting out - between having plans every night last week and being out of town two weekends in a row, I haven't spent much time in my apartment.

Now we can look back at 2016, happy to have it behind us. And if we want to revisit it, we should at least recognize it for what it was - a horror movie. In fact, someone was even kind enough to make a trailer, featuring exploding phones, rooms of people doing the mannequin challenge, Brexit, and an orange bad guy (among other things):