Category: Psychology

“Practice Makes Perfect, but It Doesn’t Make New”

(p. 12) Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
. . .
In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. “Those who do must make a painful transition” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”
Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves.

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “How to Raise a Creative Child.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 31, 2016): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 16, 2016, and has the title “How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.”)

Grant’s commentary is related to his book:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

“You Call It Procrastination, I Call It Thinking”

(p. 7) A few years ago, . . . , one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my expeditious habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it. She got access to a couple of companies, surveyed people on how often they procrastinated, and asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators like me.
I wasn’t convinced. So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were randomly assigned to start right away. Others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire. Everyone submitted their ideas, and independent raters rated how original they were. The procrastinators’ ideas were 28 percent more creative.
Minesweeper is awesome, but it wasn’t the driver of the effect. When people played games before being told about the task, there was no increase in creativity. It was only when they first learned about the task and then put it off that they considered more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My senior thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it’s in limbo, it stays active in our minds.
Begrudgingly, I acknowledged that procrastination might help with everyday creativity. But monumental achievements are a different story, right?
Wrong. Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has been described as a “chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, his masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind “Steve Jobs” and “The West Wing,” is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “Step 1: Procrastinate.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 17, 2016): 1 & 6-7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 16, 2016, and has the title “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate.”)

Grant’s commentary is related to his book:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

Creativity Is Correlated with “Openness to Experience”

(p. D3) “Insightful problem solving can’t be boiled down to any single way of thinking,” the authors say. Creative people have messy processes, and often messy minds, full of contradictions.
Contrary to the well-worn notion that creativity resides in the right side of the brain, research shows that creativity is a product of the whole brain, relying especially on what the authors call the “imagination network” — circuits devoted to tasks like making personal meaning, creating mental simulations and taking perspective.
While creative people run the gamut of personalities, Dr. Kaufman’s research has shown that openness to experience is more highly correlated to creative output than I.Q., divergent thinking or any other personality trait. This openness often yields a drive for exploration, which “may be the single most important personal factor predicting creative achievement,” the authors write.
These are people energized and motivated by the possibility of discovering new information: “It’s the thrill of the knowledge chase that most excites them.”
Once the idea is found, alas, the creative process begins to resemble something more like grinding execution. It’s still creative, but it requires more focus and less daydreaming — one reason highly creative people tend to exhibit mindfulness and mental wandering.
“Creativity is a process that reflects our fundamentally chaotic and multifaceted nature,” the authors write. “It is both deliberate and uncontrollable, mindful and mindless, work and play.”

For the full review, see:
CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN. “Books; The Blessed Mess of Creativity.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 9, 2016): D3.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 8, 2016, and has the title “Books; Review: ‘Wired to Create’ Shows the Science of a Messy Process.”)

The book under review, is:
Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2015.

Many Discoveries Take a Long Time Because “No One Really Looked”

Periods are a strange phenomenon. We don’t know why humans have them, or, to look at it another way, why most other animals don’t. Scientists say only 1.5 percent of mammal species have periods, and most of those are primates like us. The ranks of the menstrually afflicted grew a little bit recently, as researchers learned that female spiny mice have periods, too. They shared their findings on the bioRxiv preprint server.
. . .
Why did it take scientists so long to notice that these curious creatures were part of the period posse? “The answer, as with many discoveries in science, is that no one really looked,” said Hayley Dickinson, a reproductive physiologist and long-time spiny rat researcher at the University of Monash. “Everyone knew that rodents didn’t menstruate.”

For the full story, see:
Nowogrodzki, Anna. “First Rodent Found with a Humanlike Menstrual Cycle.” Nature (Fri., June 10, 2016).
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The preprint of the research mentioned above is:
Bellofiore, Nadia, Stacey J. Ellery, Jared Mamrot, David W. Walker, Peter Temple-Smith, and Hayley Dickinson. “First Evidence of a Menstruating Rodent: The Spiny Mouse (Acomys Cahirinus).” bioRxiv (June 3, 2016).

$10,000 Universal Income Would Reduce Work and Cost Taxpayers Trillions

(p. B4) This month [June 2016], Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute will publish an updated version of his plan to replace welfare as we know it with a dollop of $10,000 in after-tax income for every American above the age of 21.
. . .
Its first hurdle is arithmetic. As Robert Greenstein of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, a check of $10,000 to each of 300 million Americans would cost more than $3 trillion a year.
Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes. Cut it by half to $5,000?
. . .
As Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and onetime top economic adviser to President Obama, told me, paying a $5,000 universal basic income to the 250 million nonpoor Americans would cost about $1.25 trillion a year. . . .
The popularity of the universal basic income stems from a fanciful diagnosis born in Silicon Valley of the challenges faced by the working class across industrialized nations: one that sees declining employment rates and stagnant wages and concludes that robots are about to take over all the jobs in the world.
. . .
Work, as Lawrence Katz of Harvard once pointed out, is not just what people do for a living. It is a source of status. It organizes people’s lives. It offers an opportunity for progress. None of this can be replaced by a check.
A universal basic income has many undesirable features, starting with its non-negligible disincentive to work. Almost a quarter of American households make less than $25,000. It would be hardly surprising if a $10,000 check each for mom and dad sapped their desire to work.
. . .
As Mr. Summers told a gathering last week at the Brookings Institution, “a universal basic income is one of those ideas that the longer you look at it, the less enthusiastic you become.”

For the full commentary, see:
Porter, Eduardo. “ECONOMIC SCENE; Plan to End Poverty Is Wide of the Target.” The New York Times (Weds., June 1, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 31, 2016, and has the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to Fight Poverty.”)

Tesla and Google Bet on Different Paths to Driverless Cars

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — In Silicon Valley, where companies big and small are at work on self-driving cars, there have been a variety of approaches, and even some false starts.
The most divergent paths may be the ones taken by Tesla, which is already selling cars that have some rudimentary self-driving functions, and Google, which is still very much in experimental mode.
Google’s initial efforts in 2010 focused on cars that would drive themselves, but with a person behind the wheel to take over at the first sign of trouble and a second technician monitoring the navigational computer.
As a general concept, Google was trying to achieve the same goal as Tesla is claiming with the Autopilot feature it has promoted with the Model S, which has hands-free technology that has come under scrutiny after a fatal accident on a Florida highway.
But Google decided to play down the vigilant-human approach after an experiment in 2013, when the company let some of its employees sit behind the wheel of the self-driving cars on their daily commutes.
Engineers using onboard video cameras to remotely monitor the results were alarmed by what (p. B5) they observed — a range of distracted-driving behavior that included falling asleep.
“We saw stuff that made us a little nervous,” Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University roboticist who directs the car project at Google, said at the time.
The experiment convinced the engineers that it might not be possible to have a human driver quickly snap back to “situational awareness,” the reflexive response required for a person to handle a split-second crisis.
So Google engineers chose another route, taking the human driver completely out of the loop. They created a fleet of cars without brake pedals, accelerators or steering wheels, and designed to travel no faster than 25 miles an hour.
For good measure they added a heavy layer of foam to the front of their cars and a plastic windshield, should the car make a mistake. While not suitable for high-speed interstate road trips, such cars might one day be able to function as, say, robotic taxis in stop-and-go urban settings.

For the full story, see:
JOHN MARKOFF. “Tesla and Google Take Two Roads to Driverless Car.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “Tesla and Google Take Different Roads to Self-Driving Car.”)

Tech Support Causes Rage By Taking Away Sense of Control

(p. B4) Especially frustrating when talking to tech support is not being understood because you are trying to communicate with machines or people who have been trained to talk like machines, either for perceived quality control or because they don’t speak English well enough to go off-script.
“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,” said Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the podcast “Two Guys on Your Head.” “And when you say something back to me that makes no sense, now I see that all these words I spoke have had no effect whatsoever on what’s happening here.”
When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.
Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple’s customer support service, AppleCare, and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
You can also find excellent tech support in competitive markets like domain name providers, where operators such as Hover and GoDaddy receive high marks. Also a good bet are hungry upstarts trying to break into markets traditionally dominated by large national companies. Take regional internet and phone service providers like Logix and WOW, which rank near the top in customer support surveys.

For the full story, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Why Help on Tech Is Unbearable.” The New York Times (Mon., July 4, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2016, and has the title “Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable.”)

The Lucky Success of the Half-Blind “Becomes the Inevitable Coup of the Assured Visionary”

(p. B1) The most fun business book I have read this year? “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” by a former Facebook executive, Antonio García Martinez. I was sent a galley copy several months ago and picked it up with no intention of reading more than the first couple of pages. I don’t think I looked up until about three hours later.
This is a tell-all of Mr. Martinez’s experience in venture capital and later at Facebook, filled with insights about Silicon Valley — what he calls “the tech whorehouse” — mixed with score-settling anecdotes that will occasionally make you laugh out loud. Clearly there will be people who hate this book — which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read.
The dedication page includes this gem: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.” Mr. Martinez is particularly incisive when it comes to illustrating how failed ideas that happen to work are often spun into great successes: “What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary,” he writes. “The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Reading List of Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales in Finance.”)

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: Harper, 2016.

Half of Important Psychology Articles Could Not Be Replicated

(p. A1) The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.
Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday [August 27, 2015] in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.
The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

For the full story, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “Psychology’s Fears Confirmed: Rechecked Studies Don’t Hold Up.” The New York Times (Fri., AUG. 28, 2015): A1 & A13.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 27, 2015 and has the title “Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says.”)

The Science article reporting the large number of psychology articles that proved unreplicable, is:
Open Science Collaboration. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349, no. 6251 (Aug. 28, 2015): 943.

Long-Term Goals, Rather than Friends, Most Stimulate the Intelligent

(p. D1) A study published in February [2016] in the British Journal of Psychology looked at 15,000 respondents and found that people who had more social interactions with close friends reported being happier–unless they were highly intelligent. People with higher I.Q.s were less content when they spent more time with friends. Psychologists theorize that these folks keep themselves intellectually stimulated without a lot of social interaction, and often have a long-term goal they are pursuing.

For the full story, see:

ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN. “Why Making New Friends Is Harder for Grown-Ups.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 19, 2016): D1 & D4.
(Note: the bracketed year was added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 18, 2016, and has the title “The Science of Making Friends.”)

The academic psychology paper mentioned above (with title ellipsis in original), is:
Li, Norman, and Satoshi Kanazawa. “Country Roads, Take Me Home… to My Friends: How Intelligence, Population Density, and Friendship Affect Modern Happiness.” British Journal of Psychology (epublished on Feb. 1, 2016) DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12181.