Thoughts on psychology. Empirical psychology, not Freud's psychology.
I have a thesis.
Okay. Not literally. But I have a yellow legal pad page covered with scribbling, arrows, and stars.
I know what my thesis is going to be on. Which is considerably further than I was this morning. This morning I had five or six different projects, and no idea what direction to go in.
Now I have a thesis.
And it is mad hot science.
I am super excited.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s pop-psyc book Blink. It is non-fiction, but written for a general audience, no APA citations or mention of statistics. It is aimed at such a lay audience that they finally use the word “correlation”, accompanied by a definition, on page 180.
For a pop-psyc book, it was great. In a narrative voice Gladwell described his research and created a concise and straight forward summary of the thin-slicing and first impression literature.
Usually when reading a book I keep a yellow legal pad on the floor near the couch or bed, where I can scrawl notes. I only had half a page of notes for the entire book, but I figured I would share:
There was a reference for a book titled Sources of Power by Gary Klein. A book about how people make important decisions. It might not relate the the first impression line of research, but it might relate to some of the ways our memories work after crimes, in jury settings, etc. I am going to order a copy and read through it this summer.
You know why many police departments are outlawing high speed chases? It isn’t the fear of accidents. It is the result of amped up cops. Imagine driving through a high speed police chase, getting out, and then having to detain your prey suspect. Gladwell writes that this hyper-arousal may be responsible for at least three of the police-brutality-esque arrests that resulted in three of the biggest race riots in American history. (LA Riots, and two doses in Miami.) Interestingly, more departments are sending cops out on single lone shifts. Know why? Because they are less likely to do something stupid/aggressive. They are more likely to follow the rules when they are alone, instead of getting caught up in the bravado.
The last bit of interest…
When Paul Ekman was fresh out of graduate school and working with Silvan Tomkins he did an exercise. He took hours of videotape that a colleage named Carleton Gajdusek had filmed of two tribes from Paupa New Guinea. He edited the film down, so that all that was left were close face shots. He then showed the films to Tomkins. Tomkins labeled the first tribe, the South Fore tribe, as “sweet and gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful”. This was very true, and fit the culture and history of the tribe. Tomkins had a very different impression of the second tribe, known as the Kukukukus. He labeled them as “violent, and there is a lot of evidence of homosexuality”.
I am sure you see why I literally sat straight up from my cat-in-the-sun position on the couch when I read this. This is seriously pimp.
The Kukukukus did not participate in adult homosexuality. They did, however, participate in a practice where prepubescent boys were assigned as sexual courtesans/servants to the adult males in the tribe.
Anyways… overall I would totally recommend the book. Very interesting, and a great introduction and compilation of the larger literature.
You should buy me a reader copy while you are at it. The library wants theirs back.
(They sent me a copy through interlibrary loan on Tuesday, and emailed me Wednesday to let me know that the home library needed it back immediately. *sadface*.)
Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown and Company: New York.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Specifically, what role the IRB should play when I am designing a study.
The IRB was created by the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) in 1974. It was founded to protect human participants, and every research institution now has an IRB. It consists of at least five members, both scientists and non-scientists, and usually has a “community member” serving as well. Before you run a study using human participants you propose the project to the board, and hope they give you permission.
I have a fear that it is easy to begin to see the IRB as the stone tablets of ethical behavior, easy to see their signatures as a confirmation that your research is moral. But we have to remember that this isn’t always the case.
We cannot hold a static list of rules as our only matrix for morality. Imagine if the Ten Commandments were our only guiding force. Milgram’s experiments would be the least of our worries. Or if we saw the initial Constitution as a static document to measure our behavior. Citizens of today would still be three fifths of a voter, or even less.
Our morals should not be dictated by stone tablets, or any one source of knowledge. Our moral compass cannot be a few other equally misguided humans, either. Our decisions must be based in both rationality and compassion. Otherwise we risk abusing the power our participants give us.
The guidelines set by the IRB on our campus are not the optimal level of acceptable behavior. They are the bare minimum, designed to protect the participants. We should treat them as such.
Yet it is hard, when designing a study, to find that balance. There is an intense desire to find the answer to your questions, especially when they deal with very emotional issues like childhood sexual abuse or eyewitness identification. The answers to the questions could literally help save lives. But the well being of our participants is just as valuable.
We, as researchers, need to be the final line of defense for the participants. We need to be the ones drawing the line before behavior is coercive or dangerous. We need to be the ones that hold ourselves to that standard, instead of waiting for the man on the mountain to bring us our stone tablets down.
-Amber.
