Will money make you happy? Beware the focusing effect!

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.…

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Just say “no” to TV. Do it for your country.

A couple weeks ago, I asked a friend how close he thought we were to a time when Americans would get so frustrated with their corrupt and dysfunctional government that they take to the streets with torches.  He replied:  that won’t happen as long as they’ve got TV.  I think my friend has a good point.  TV appears to be electronic Soma.

As long as ordinary Americans are glued to the tube, there is little hope that they will be able to focus the requisite attention and energy necessary to fix their government.  It’s not that all heavy TV viewers would become active participants in their government if we took away their TVs. As long as they are glued to their hypnotic televisions, though, they won’t be active participants in their own government.  As long as American citizens suckle off their television sets, government will be run unabashedly by big corporations.

American citizens don’t seem to be inclined to give up their TV viewing, despite the fact that giving up most of their viewing would free them up to monitor their government and to advocate for needed changes.  According to the Nielsen Media Research Study released in September 2006, the average American household watched television more than 8 hours per day during the 2005-2006 television year. Individuals watched an average amount 4 hours and 35 minutes per day  To watch TV for 4 ½ hours per day, every day, is virtually the same amount of time many people dedicate …

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Psychology’s top blunders, part one.

I don’t like the magazine Psychology Today. Instead of presenting the latest psychological findings in a layman-friendly format, the monthly instead peddles relationship advice and thinly-veiled book advertisements. So while I wouldn’t recommend a subscription to anyone (you’d better serve yourself by subscribing to a division of the APA), the magazine did feature one article in February 2005 that piqued my interest: Psychology’s Top Ten Misguided Ideas.

Composed by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Director Dr. Robert Epstein, the ten-part list includes many psychological buzzwords and memes that the pop psych crowd (like most Psychology Today readers) still consider legitimate. I’d like to discuss a portion of Epstein’s list below:

1. Projective Tests

The popular images of psychology and psychiatry have a few iconic mainstays. You know the therapist cliché: a patient laid on a long couch, rambling about childhood trauma to a near-silent facilitator scribbling away. In nearly equal footing, many people associate projective tests, such as word association and Rorschach ink blots, with legitimate psychology.

The logic behind projective tests says that a therapist can quickly dig into a client’s preoccupations and mindset based on their knee-jerk responses to ambiguous things. This assumes that a patient would always see the same thing in the same ink blot; a sex addict would always recall lewd scenes; a veteran with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder would always recognize carnage.

But projective tests neglect the effect of priming entirely. A wide variety of psychological studies have demonstrated that earlier access …

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Jesus Camp – How to train young children to be “soldiers in God’s army.”

I haven't seen "Jesus Camp" yet, but I plan to.  This is an ABC documentary on Jesus Camp.  Personally, I'd flunk out of camp because I'd have a hard time praying in the company of a facade of George W. Bush, as though he were a leader sent specially by…

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The Onion and the transubstantiation

Rather than describe The Onion's most recent sacrilege, you can take a look here.  Remember, if you so much as smirk, you will have paved your own ultimate path to hell.  I've written very little on the doctrine of the transubstantiation, the topic of this Onion article.  This surprises me, because the…

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