Science is Dead, Long Live Science

Francesca Gino

John Sexton at Hat Hair, Published papers on honesty appear to have been based on fake data

This is certainly ironic. A popular researcher at Harvard Business School who has published numerous behavioral studies on the topic of honesty has been accused of faking her data. Here’s a bit of her bio from Harvard’s website:

Francesca Gino is an award-winning researcher who focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work, and how leaders and employees have more productive, creative and fulfilling lives…

Gino has been honored as one of the world’s Top 40 Business Professors under 40 and one of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers 50. Professor Gino has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the HBS Faculty Award by Harvard Business School’s MBA Class of 2015, and for her research, including the 2013 Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award, from the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division. Her studies have also been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and her work has been discussed on National Public Radio and CBS Radio.

So Professor Gino isn’t just a popular academic, she’s an academic whose work has crossed over into newspapers quite often. I was only able to find one example at the NY Times but there are about a dozen stories mentioning her at the Washington Post over the past decade. But over the past two years, several examples of Gino’s work have been called into question.

Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of Dr. Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School — told The Chronicle that the university had informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results.

The 2012 paper reported that asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document rather than at the bottom significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided. The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.

Much of the scrutiny of Dr. Gino’s work is coming from three behavioral scientists who run a blog called DataColada. They started looking into her work back in 2021 and found evidence of fraud in multiple papers.

In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).

In the Fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS). Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.

If you continue reading that blog post it’s a pretty convincing argument that data has been manipulated by changing a small amount of information in an Excel spreadsheet. The same bloggers have published three posts so far alleging data manipulation is various papers and they say they have one more installment to go.

Dr. Gino has been placed on administrative leave. The website doesn’t explain exactly when or why but the leave apparently happened in the past month just as her work was being publicly questioned. She wouldn’t comment for the story.

The motive to cheat is strong; articles that "confirm" a popular idea are far more likely to get published, while studies that support the 'null hypothesis' (most studies) are not likely to get published. And getting published is how you advance in science. It might only take a minor change in a few data points to change a study from not significant to significant. And the the likelihood of somebody bothering to check (even if they could) is small. Most scientists are too busy writing their own proposals and doing their own work to check too hard on yours. Given that, a certain level of fraud is inevitable. Only strict sanctions (firing and being unable to work in the field again) will keep it down to a bare minimum.

But He Seemed Like Such a Nice Young Man

Althouse: "Evan Rachel Wood Accuses Marilyn Manson of Abuse ... Hours later Mr. Manson’s label dropped him."

The NYT reports.

“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” Ms. Wood wrote in an Instagram post. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander, or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”

Wood was 19 — a teenager — when the relationship began. Manson was twice her age. His Instagrammed response is:

“Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how — and why — others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth.”

From the NYT:

As often is the case most of the fun is in the comments. 

Ms. Wood, who supported a California law that extended the statute of limitations on domestic abuse, testified before the State Senate in 2019 that a man whom she did not identify by name had groomed her when she was 18. “He cut me off from my close friends and family one by one, by exhibiting rage in some form or another when I was in contact with them,” she said in her testimony. “He had bouts of extreme jealousy, which would often result in him wrecking our home, cornering me in a room and threatening me.”

She said that she felt terrified for her life, and that he broke her down through starvation and sleep deprivation, and by threatening to kill her. In one instance, he forced her to kneel in their bedroom, tied up her hands and feet, beat her and shocked sensitive parts of her body....

Mr. Manson told Spin magazine in 2009 that he had called Ms. Wood 158 times one day after a breakup. “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer,” he said. 

Marylin Manson was a monster? Who could have guessed. I suppose girls like bad boys, until they don't. 

Some NSFW just to spice things up.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Hedley Lamarr Presents The Teutonic Titwillow, Lili von Shtupp! ready and willing.

Eyes Don't Work

In fact, they may encourage the Magpie to attack:

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Dogs More Complicated Than Scientists Thought

Canine Minds Far More Complex Than Originally Thought

Researchers at Yale are using cognitive interactive studies to learn more about how dogs’ minds work. Laurie Santos, director of the Yale Canine Cognition Center, explains that hundreds of volunteer dogs are used as subjects of puppet shows and a series of other cognitive tests.

“Dogs are just fascinating,” Santos said. “We love them, they live in our homes. Anyone who hangs out with a dog is kind of wondering, ‘what are they thinking, do they love me’.”

In the puppet show exam, the dogs are shown one scene, where a rat puppet assists a hedgehog puppet up a hill. In a different scene, the rat puppet knocks the hedgehog puppet down.

“Similar studies have been done with human infants, and what we find is that infants don’t like the guy who was mean,” Santos said. “So, we’re doing the same thing with dogs to try and see if dogs morally evaluate, the way humans do.”

By the end of the puppet show test, the dogs did indeed appear to be weary of the rat puppet.

The interesting thing is that dogs make any sense out of the puppet show at all. However, once they make that bridge, the idea that they would prefer the "friendly" rat only makes sense, As a pack animal, they are sensitive to relations between pack members.

Jerks While Driving

Experts Solve 70-Year-Old Driving Mystery

Think before you jerk.” “Jerking isn’t a joke." Such slogans, as reported in the Washington Post and elsewhere, garnered national attention when used to remind drivers in South Dakota not to over-correct their steering on slick roads. Indeed, the standard theory behind the way we steer our cars dates back to the 1940s but has left us with a longstanding mystery: data shows that we have a habit of jerking the wheel from time to time, puzzling researchers. Now, experts in Sweden are explaining the phenomenon, and their findings could lead to better safety systems in cars, according to a release at Eureka Alert. The jerkiness is tied to the way humans reach for things: When something is close by, we move our arms more slowly to grab it than we do when it's further away. The result is that both movements take the same amount of time.

"We immediately recognized this pattern" as similar to steering behaviors, a researcher says. "It was a bit of a eureka moment. Was it possible that this basic human behavior also controlled how we steer a car?" A study of more than 1,000 hours of drivers' movements suggests that it certainly was. The team developed a mathematical model addressing the behavior; now, "it is possible to predict how far the driver is going to turn the wheel, right when the person starts a wheel-turning movement. It's like looking into the future," the researcher says. . .

Just not very far into the future.

Feminists, Teach Women Not to Hit Men!

Found at Wombat-socho's "Live at Five: 11.19.14" Model charged with beating up designer boyfriend

Though, to be fair, he looks like he deserves it, just on general purposes. What a dorky looking set of tats!

A stick-thin model was arrested for beating up her clothing- and shoe-designer boyfriend in the couple’s luxurious Manhattan apartment over the weekend, law enforcement sources said Monday.

Natalie Suarez, who has done photo shoots for magazines such as Glamour and Vogue, punched and kicked Jordan Adoni, 31, in their pad at a West 42nd Street high-rise Friday, according to court records.

The 5-foot-10, 125-pound Suarez, 24, also pulled Adoni’s hair and dug her nails into his face, leaving him with scratch marks and bruises, court papers say.

Eat a hamburger or two!

5' 10" and 125 lbs? How does she stay on the ground? Stretch some paper across that frame, and she'd make a pretty kite.

“I’m f–king getting you arrested!” she yelled at Adoni, who waited until Saturday to report the domestic spat, sources said.

Police showed up to the Silver Towers apartment complex Sunday and cuffed Suarez, who was charged with misdemeanor assault and aggravated harassment.

She was released without bail at Manhattan Criminal Court, where she appeared wearing black skinny jeans and a long top coat.

I'm glad we got the fashion report to go along with arrest report.

She is a skinny little thing, but you know, a lucky punch can kill anyone, and fingernail in the eyeballs isn't that good either.

There is a basic asymmetry between the capability of the two sexes regarding violence. Men are generally larger, more muscular and frankly, ready for violence hormonally. However,
Female on male crime is surprisingly common, rarely reported, and even more rarely seriously punished. The usual attitude by women is that the men had it coming, and men tend to take the attitude that it's not serious, and any man who gets hurt wasn't worthy anyway.

But even a slap on her wrist might break it.

Wombat-socho has the grand "Rule 5 Sunday: Wax Ecstatic" up and running at The Other McCain.

Did You Inherit or Learn Your Mother's Fear of Spiders?

Phobias may be memories passed down in genes from ancestors

Memories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop.

Scientists have long assumed that memories and learned experiences built up during a lifetime must be passed on by teaching later generations or through personal experience.

However, new research has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.

Researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, found that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.

The results may help to explain why people suffer from seemingly irrational phobias – it may be based on the inherited experiences of their ancestors.

So a fear of spiders may in fact be an inherited defence mechanism laid down in a families genes by an ancestors' frightening encounter with an arachnid.

This seems to me like pure Lamarkism. If a mental acquired condition can be inherited, why not a physical one, say longer necks on giraffes?

Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known asheritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance). It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories as a supplement to his concept of an inherent progressive tendency driving organisms continuously towards greater complexity, in parallel but separate lineages with no extinction. Lamarck did not originate the idea of soft inheritance, which proposes that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the main mechanism driving species to adaptation, as they supposedly would acquire adaptive changes and pass them on to offspring.

In the absence of knowledge about Mendelian genetics, Darwin himself allowed the possibility of the the inheritance of acquired characteristics. His theory did not specify how organisms changed, just that they did, and it was inheritable.

In real science, a theory once held to be true but proven incomplete can be modified.

Wombat-socho has the weekly "Rule 5 Sunday: Shadows Of The Night" up at The Other McCain.

Did "Girly" Cave Men Lead to Civilization?

Another Anthropology article via Dieneke's Blog: Craniofacial feminization and the origin of behavioral modernity

Abstract:

The past 200,000 years of human cultural evolution have witnessed the persistent establishment of behaviors involving innovation, planning depth, and abstract and symbolic thought, or what has been called “behavioral modernity.” Demographic models based on increased human population density from the late Pleistocene onward have been increasingly invoked to understand the emergence of behavioral modernity. However, high levels of social tolerance, as seen among living humans, are a necessary prerequisite to life at higher population densities and to the kinds of cooperative cultural behaviors essential to these demographic models. Here we provide data on craniofacial feminization (reduction in average brow ridge projection and shortening of the upper facial skeleton) in Homo sapiens from the Middle Pleistocene to recent times. We argue that temporal changes in human craniofacial morphology reflect reductions in average androgen reactivity (lower levels of adult circulating testosterone or reduced androgen receptor densities), which in turn reflect the evolution of enhanced social tolerance since the Middle Pleistocene.

The authors note that as "behavioral modernity", essentially increasing social behaviors and the rise of fixed residences and cooperation coincide with apparent feminization for the human face, leading them to suspect that a decrease in male hormones which lead to decreased aggressive behavior and the rise of culture.  While I didn't really hear in the abstract was a "causal" connection - are male hormones decreasing due to some other evolutionary pressure, and humans becoming more social and civilized as a result, or is it culture and civilization that is providing the evolutionary pressure that is feminizing humans? As people become more social, does the relative value of aggression driven by the male hormones less useful?

Worse, are the metrosexuals possibly the real wave of the future?

For some chat on the progress and future of human evolution, here is an interesting, if extremely long video of Charles Murray, author of "The Bell Curve" on how the recent spate of DNA data vindicates many of the long derided points he made in the controversial 1996 book.  Courtesy of Powerline:



It's all interesting, but the talk itself is only about 45 minutes before the question period.

Wombat-socho has the grand round up of Rule 5s "Rule 5 Sunday: Mind The Gap" up at The Other McCain.

We Have Met The Enemy, and She is Us

A feminist makes the realization that not all misogynists are men, and blames men...

Too many women ignore their own misogyny

. . . It is heartbreaking, and intolerable, and a whole host of other adjectives that, taken together, still couldn’t account for the daily reality of women treating themselves and other women with an unbearable amount of disrespect and contempt.

How do women hate each other? They’re too numerous to catalog here but we can include ubiquitous women’s magazines and websites that ingrain false notions of physical perfection, hypersexuality and material wealth while peddling alcohol, cigarettes and elixirs of youth.

And, therefore, of course, men who make and profit from such magazines.  It just couldn't be something innate to women.

Then there are the ever-present culture wars pitting women who believe in the “right to life” against those who believe in “a woman’s right to choose,” or those who want to pursue a career versus those who want to stay home with kids, or breast-feeding against bottle feeding, yada, yada, yada. Each portrays the other as incapable of making good choices. 

Or it could just simply be that other women are their own natural competition for resources; to men, to jobs, for other resources necessary for existence and the feeding of their children.  Until Samuel Colt made all men and women equal, most women had no choice but to abide by the choices that men made, while seeking in their own way to "guide" their choices.  The physical differences are just too great, as well as the testosterone driven ability of men to excel at violence, which persists into the modern era of firearms.

If women became safe and respected by all men becoming feminists, then women accepting their own misogyny — whether defined as bias, hatred, cattiness or extreme snark — would seem to hasten a similar state.

Women may never be able to walk down a dark alley and feel completely comfortable, but it shouldn’t take so long to feel their self-esteem is likely to be safe within a diverse population of other women. For now, plenty of women wage war on other women.

In 2013, a Gallup poll found that women are likelier than men to express a preference to not be supervised on the job by a woman. Clearly, even as we struggle to gain the respect of men, there’s plenty of work to be done setting the sisterhood right.

I believe that a whole lot of social behavior in humans is as evolutionarily driven as it is in our primate relatives.  The hunter/gatherer animal that modern humans were for thousands of generations before we became civilized has indelibly marked our behavior; both cooperation and competition within and beyond the "local group" are essential parts of our behavior, and sex differences have also been evolved and selected for.  That doesn't mean we necessarily should tolerate bad behavior, but it helps to understand how it arises.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

Obama To Hold Summit on Clinton Concussion

Or, why are we supposed to worry more about concussions in sports than we worry about them in people who want to run the country?

Obama to hold summit on sports concussions

At the forum, the president will argue for a "team approach" to preventing and treating concussions, the White House said, with hopes of raising awareness of how to identify, treat and prevent concussions among young athletes. Obama will also call for additional research into the field of sports-related concussions, with the hopes of developing ways to better avoid such injuries.

The concussion forum was first reported by The Washington Post.

The president told The New Yorker earlier this year that he'd be reticent to allow his son, if he had one, play professional football because of the risk of concussions. More than 4,500 former NFL players have sued the league over its handling of concussions, which doctors say can be associated with permanent memory loss and behavioral changes.

Concussions have also been linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative brain disease.

Bill Clinton says GOP trying to cast Hillary in 'The Walking Dead'

Bill Clinton said he was “dumbfounded” by Karl Rove’s suggestion that his wife might have suffered from a traumatic brain injury, but shrugged off the incident and suggested that it was just the beginning of a GOP effort to raise questions about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s stamina.

“I’ve got to give him credit -- that embodies that old saying that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the former president said Wednesday when asked at a fiscal summit in Washington about Rove's comments. “First they said she faked her concussion and now they say she’s auditioning for a part on 'The Walking Dead.'”

Hillary was seen wearing glasses with fresnel lenses, essentially prisms to recombine double vision caused by brain trauma for several months after her accident.  Even Bill admitted it took Hillary 6 months to "get over" the injury.  If a football player had suffered a concussion that serious it's likely he would not be allowed to play again, and he might well be subjected to serious questions about his ongoing mental faculties. We do know that concussions can cause long term learning, behavioral and emotional problems, not ideal in a Commander in Chief.

But then, she is democrat, so it's more of a feature than a bug.

I doubt If I'd Have Figured This Out

But, then, I would probably just bust it open, or get my chainsaw.

I wonder if some form of the "Clever Hans" phenomenon is a work? That would still make the crow pretty damn smart, but not a mechanical genius.

Found at Theo's.

I Was Going to Post This Last Night. . .

. . . But then we started catching up on TV programs we'd missed.

Why we can't stop procrastinating, according to science

Calgary professor Piers Steel showed that the percentage of chronic procrastinators has grown from about 5 percent in 1978 to 26 percent in 2007. (Other researchers have put more recent numbers at around 20 percent, but it’s clear the problem is on the rise.)
So what's going on?

Part of the reason may have to do with technology, Steel hypothesized. There’s so much to do online, and so many different media at our fingertips, that putting off until tomorrow (and the day after) what we could do today is almost natural. He estimated that new technologies like email and mobile phones cost the U.S. about $70 billion in lost productivity a year.

Indeed, The Telegraph reported that a survey by Webtrate showed that 60 percent of respondents who looked at email or a social media ping in the middle of work forgot what they were thinking about. Email and social media took away an hour of productivity for about 36 percent of survey takers, and 16 percent lost more than an hour.

But there may be more to it than that. A new study on twins published in Psychological Science has found there may be a genetic link; the siblings in the study tended to have similar self-reported levels of procrastination. Meanwhile, another study in Current Psychology argues that those who are more likely to leave things up to chance have a propensity to wait until the last minute (or even later).

The Goose Whisperer

Actually, he's more of a shouter; it takes a loud voice to reach over a few thousand baby geese:

Shockingly, Middle School Kids are Little Beasts

And they're not especially worried about it either.  A typically concern trolling article about the frequency of "sexual harassment" in Middle School students, from CBS Chicago:

Middle School Sex Harassment Widespread, Goes Unnoticed At School

An alarming number of instances of inappropriate sexual behavior among middle school students appear to be going unnoticed by teachers and other adults, a new study concludes.

The study, written by three University of Illinois researchers, found that 21 percent of the students in the survey experienced some form of physical sexual harassment.

The students reported instances like being slapped on the buttocks, being rubbed against their bodies sexually or being forced to kiss another student. Much of the behavior happened in open areas, most commonly in the hallways, classrooms or gymnasiums.

The middle school years are the period when humans beings are becoming aware of sex and sexuality, and really starting to feel it.  It's also a time before the brain and personality become mature, so naturally, there's going to be a lot of stupid, juvenile behavior.  Because they're juvenile

Additionally, about 19 percent of students said they were victims of rumour spreading, verbal sexual commentary or homophobic name-calling. For example, one student said “someone wrote on the bathroom stall that I was a skank.”

The study by Sarah Rinehart, Namrata Doshi and Dorothy Espelage, examined survey responses of 1,391 students from four Midwest middle schools (grades 5-8). The survey sample was evenly split between boys and girls.

The researchers also noted that many of the students dismissed the behavior as joking or not that serious. Others said “that you get used to it” or “it doesn’t really bother me any more.”

That dismissive behavior is cause for concern, the researchers say.

I notice that they didn't make a big deal out of male on female behavior.  I suspect it's because, at that age, girls are generally more mature physically and psychologically than the boys, and a majority of the misbehavior they found was girl on girl aggression.  And that just doesn't fit the "rape culture" meme.

Russian Ginger Gets the Stuffing Beat Out of Her...

...pillow:



Wombat-Socho got the master Rule 5 Sunday post up on "Rule 5 Monday" this week. 

Global Warming Makes People Angry

A new study, published in Science, purports to show that Global Warming Climate Change, makes people more angry:

Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict

Abstract

A rapidly growing body of research examines whether human conflict can be affected by climatic changes. Drawing from archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, and psychology, we assemble and analyze the 60 most rigorous quantitative studies and document, for the first time, a remarkable convergence of results. We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world. The magnitude of climate's influence is substantial: for each 1 standard deviation (1σ) change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises 14%. Because locations throughout the inhabited world are expected to warm 2 to 4σ by 2050, amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Certainly, there has been a relationship between "climate change" and conflict throughout history.  The Roman civilization and their rather brutal conquest of the know world was aided by the "Roman Warm Period" from 250 BC to 450 AD, which allowed them to grow enough food to send the legions out seeking territory to conquer.

The Viking conquests  in much of Europe were triggered by the medieval climate optimum, which allowed the Vikings to grow so much food they actually became numerous enough sally forth from their "viks" (fjords) where their culture originated and try to steal the goodies from other cultures basking in it's warmth.

Similarly wet and warm conditions may well have permitted the Mongol hordes to flourish to the detriment of the Chinese, and nearly everyone else within pony range.

Mongol horsemen relied on domesticated animals; Amy Hessl, one of the scientists involved in the research, explained to LiveScience in July that a single Mongol fighter required 10 horses, plus livestock that could keep up with the horde and provide food. Wetter conditions in the steppe would have encouraged grass and other plants to grow, providing plentiful grazing opportunities for all sorts of animals. When the climate became colder and dryer in the middle of the 13th century, the Mongol Empire splintered, and its rulers moved their capital away from the steppe to modern-day Beijing.

It is, in fact, because scientists deduced that plantlife flourished and then failed in Mongolia during this period that they can make these connections. Both the Mongol and the Roman hypotheses rely on the information researchers such as Hessl gathered from tree rings. Wider rings indicate more favorable growing conditions. Thinner ones indicate leaner times. Matching up tree rings with historical dates produces fascinating correlations.

So it would be safe to say that historically, warm climates have been associated with violence and conquest, however the linkage is a bit different than what the authors might wish you to think;  good climates lead to population growth, and resulting conflicts over, well, just about anything.

As for the interpersonal anger, we do know that Global Warming makes Al Gore angry, whether or not it's actually occurring.  A mole from WUWT recently infiltrated a training session for Al Gore's "Climate Reality Leadership Training Corps" and reported:

We skeptics ain’t liked much with them folks. The “d” word (denier) was used liberally, and I queried several participants, some of who were very cool folks, about it. Al Gore and his speakers used “Denier,” “Denial Industry” and other terms I found objectionable. Lousy salesmen, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

 He also reported:

This was a super-liberal “kum-bay-ya” crowd as I predicted. I kept many of my opinions to myself. The event truly did have a “religious cult programming” feel to it, similar to an Amway meeting I attended years ago – carefully timed applause, audience call & response etc. Very bizarre.

Well, Al does hail from Tennessee after all; no doubt he learned the effectiveness of  evangelical preaching.

This is Comforting

 Radiologists fall for Invisible Gorilla Gag

...radiologists still sometimes fail to see important things, and Drew wanted to understand more. Because of his line of work, he was naturally familiar with one of the most famous studies in the field of attention research, the Invisible Gorilla study.

In that groundbreaking study, research subjects are shown a video of two teams of kids — one team wears white; the other wears black — passing two basketballs back and forth between players as they dodge and weave around each other. Before it begins, viewers are told their responsibility is to do one thing and one thing only: count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball to each other:

The "cuties" version of the Invisible Gorilla Gag. I didn't see the Gorilla even though I expected it...

"Sounds ridiculous, right?" says Drew. "There's a gorilla on the screen — of course you're going to see it! But 50 percent of people miss the gorilla."

This is because when you ask someone to perform a challenging task, without realizing it, their attention narrows and blocks out other things. So, often, they literally can't see even a huge, hairy gorilla that appears directly in front of them.

That effect is called "inattentional blindness" — which brings us back to the expert lookers, the radiologists.

Drew wondered if somehow being so well-trained in searching would make them immune to missing large, hairy gorillas. "You might expect that because they're experts, they would notice if something unusual was there," he says.

83 percent of radiologists didn't notice the gorilla in the top right portion of this image.

He took a picture of a man in a gorilla suit shaking his fist, and he superimposed that image on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they're searching for cancer. He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide.

But they didn't: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says.

This wasn't because the eyes of the radiologists didn't happen to fall on the large, angry gorilla. Instead, the problem was in the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas, so "they look right at it, but because they're not looking for a gorilla, they don't see that it's a gorilla."

I'm often concerned that I might miss big shark's teeth because I'm so focused on seeing the small ones. 

I Could Have Saved Them the Trouble

What Fish Think About

Scientists have just observed a thought swimming through the brain of a live fish, and that thought concerned getting something good to eat.

Fish and other wild animals appear to think a lot about food: how to obtain it and what to consume.

To be fair to fish, they also think about sex and fighting when they're not thinking about eating. So think of them as kind of like wet teenagers.

Computers Pass Test for Humans

People pay back favors to computers

"Every culture has a rule of reciprocity, which roughly means, if I do something nice for you, you will do something nice for me," Nass says. "We wanted to see whether people would apply that to technology: Would they help a computer that helped them more than a computer that didn't help them?"

So they placed a series of people in a room with two computers. The people were told that the computer they were sitting at could answer any question they asked. In half of the experiments, the computer was incredibly helpful. Half the time, the computer did a terrible job.

After about 20 minutes of questioning, a screen appeared explaining that the computer was trying to improve its performance. The humans were then asked to do a very tedious task that involved matching colors for the computer. Now, sometimes the screen requesting help would appear on the computer the human had been using; sometimes the help request appeared on the screen of the computer across the aisle.

"Now, if these were people [and not computers]," Nass says, "we would expect that if I just helped you and then I asked you for help, you would feel obligated to help me a great deal. But if I just helped you and someone else asked you to help, you would feel less obligated to help them."

What the study demonstrated was that people do in fact obey the rule of reciprocity when it comes to computers. When the first computer was helpful to people, they helped it way more on the boring task than the other computer in the room. They reciprocated.

"But when the computer didn't help them, they actually did more color matching for the computer across the room than the computer they worked with, teaching the computer [they worked with] a lesson for not being helpful," says Nass.

But just because people were "nicer" to computers that were more helpful doesn't mean they really meant it.

Very likely, the humans involved had no idea they were treating these computers so differently. Their own behavior was invisible to them. Nass says that all day long, our interactions with the machines around us — our iPhones, our laptops — are subtly shaped by social rules we aren't necessarily aware we're applying to nonhumans.

"The relationship is profoundly social," he says. "The human brain is built so that when given the slightest hint that something is even vaguely social, or vaguely human — in this case, it was just answering questions; it didn't have a face on the screen, it didn't have a voice — but given the slightest hint of humanness, people will respond with an enormous array of social responses including, in this case, reciprocating and retaliating."

 Humans even have trouble turning off a robot that begs them not to.