"In Magic and the Mind, Eugene Subbotsky provides an overview of the mechanisms and development of magical thinking and beliefs throughout the life span while arguing that the role of this type of thought in human development should be reconsidered. Rather than an impediment to scientific reasoning or a byproduct of cognitive development, in children magical thinking is an important and necessary complement to these processes, enhancing creativity at problem-solving and reinforcing coping strategies, among other benefits. In adults, magical thinking and beliefs perform important functions both for individuals (coping with unsolvable problems and stressful situations) and for society (enabling mass influence and promoting social harmony). Operating in realms not bound by physical causality, such as emotion, relationships, and suggestion, magical thinking is an ongoing, developing psychological mechanism that, Subbotsky argues, is integral in the contexts of politics, commercial advertising, and psychotherapy, and undergirds our construction and understanding of meaning in both mental and physical worlds. Magic and the Mind represents a unique contribution to our understanding of the importance of magical thinking, offering experimental evidence and conclusions never before collected in one source. It will be of interest to students and scholars of developmental psychology, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and educators."

"Researchers have looked at comparisons between medical epidemiological research and psychological research using effect size r in an effort to compare relative effects. Often the outcomes of such efforts have demonstrated comparatively low effects for medical epidemiology research in comparison with effect sizes seen in psychology. The conclusion has often been that relatively small effects seen in psychology research are as strong as those found in important epidemiological medical research. The author suggests that many of the calculated effect sizes from medical epidemiological research on which this conclusion has been based are flawed. Specifically, rather than calculating effect sizes for treatment, many results have been for a Treatment Effect × Disease Effect interaction that was irrelevant to the main study hypothesis. A technique for developing a “hypothesis-relevant” effect size r is proposed."

Balancing selection?

"My experiment connects to these ideas because it asked people to make a simple judgement (the colour of the ink), like the experiments supporting an optimal information integration perspective on decision making, but the judgement requested was just marginally more complex because we manipulate both Stroop condition (whether the word and ink matched) and colour strength. If you are a straight-down-the-line optimal information decision theorists then you must believe that evidence about the decision based on the word is combined with evidence about the decision based on the colour to make a single 'amount of evidence' variable which drives the decision. In the paper I call this the 'common metric' hypothesis. The logic is a bit involved (see the paper), but a consequence of this hypothesis is that the size of the effect of the word condition should vary across the colour strength condition, and vice versa. In other words, you should see an interaction. Visually, the lines on the graph of results would be non-parallel." --- You can see where this is heading.

The fact that these are "new statistics" for many psychologists, in this day and age, tells us much about the state of the discipline.

More from Turkheimer.

"argues that human nature is not some "thing" awaiting discovery but is active in understanding itself. According to Smith, "being human" is a self-creation made possible through a reflective circle of thought and action, with a past and a future, and studying this "history" from a range of perspectives is fundamental to human self-understanding." --- Given the phrasing, and the author's affiliations, if this isn't full of Vygotsky I'll buy a Lenin cap and eat it.

I love how he immediately thinks "if this worked, it could be a model experimental system for studying the neuroscience of free will"!

Miller's classic paper, transcribed (rather ugly).

"Confronting Theory presents a critique of what has come to be known as theory in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than dismissing theory writing as pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that although many of these analyses sound like revolutionary psychological theory, few, if any, have empirical implications that students can evaluate. By considering the educational implications of cultural theory, Confronting Theory will empower students with arguments, not just opinions, about the increasingly idealist and irrelevant anti-realist curricula they confront in their humanities education in today’s universities."

Everything useful in this paper is contained in their Figure 1 and its caption, and even then I think they're incomplete. (In the top left of Figure 1, the "strong support" quadrant, draw another narrow band along the opposite diagonal to the first theory, also going through the small cross of observations: this would be a distinct and incompatible theory which also makes a narrow range of predictions that also match the precisely-measured data.)

Warning: it turns out that his case study for his approach is the development of the incest taboo, and he's pretty free in quoting the clinical literature about how exactly the taboo gets broken. This actually has considerable redeeming intellectual value, but is still not for the squeamish and/or victimized.

BBS target article attacking the use of western (esp. American) college students as proxies for "human nature".

... the unfortunate Strogatz column is made worse by the fact that there are actual dynamical models of marriage, with at least some connection to empirical data, rather than being derived _ex ano_.

This is really not good. Strogatz knows much better --- why is he doing this?

Noooooooooo!

"Stop Anthropomorphizing Me"

William Tucker on Raymond Cattell. (There's good chapter on him in Murphy Paul's book on mental testing.)

Note: those who think intelligence is innate learn less.

Journal version

Toulmin lecture which I bounced off of some years ago. Should try re-reading it now.

Carol Tavris on psychology vs. psychotherapy