Via.

Baumeister has a book coming out on willpower. There’s a NYTimes article about his work, summarized and discussed on LessWrong.

You spend the most willpower when you have to make AND implement your decisions:

which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

 

Willpower depletion makes you reluctant to make trade-offs:

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

 

Willpower depletion makes you more likely to take the path of least resistance:

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time).

 

Testing willpower depletion in rural Indian villages:

Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly.

 

Decision fatigue can be a factor in trapping people in poverty:

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class.

 

Glucose restores willpower in humans and dogs:

To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

 

Ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others:

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him.Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

 

Good decision makers structure their lives so as to conserve willpower:

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out.

Although they are generally perceived as arrogant and overly dominant, narcissistic individuals are particularly skilled at radiating an image of a prototypically effective leader. As a result, they tend to emerge as leaders in group settings. Despite people’s positive perceptions of narcissists as leaders, it was thus far unknown if and how leaders’ narcissism is related to the actual performance of those they lead. In the current paper we used a hidden profile paradigm to provide evidence for a discord between the positive image of narcissists as leaders and the reality in terms of group performance. We proposed and found that although narcissistic leaders are perceived as effective due to their displays of authority, leaders’ narcissism actually inhibits information exchange between group members and thereby negatively affects group performance. Our findings thus indicate that perceptions and reality can be at odds, which has important practical and theoretical implications.

The study is based on the

Hidden Profile paradigm. Researchers recruited 150 people and put them into groups of three. One person was randomly chosen as the group’s leader, and each group was assigned a task: choosing a job candidate. Everyone was told they could contribute advice, but the leader was ultimately responsible for making the decision. Of 45 items of information about the candidate, some were given to all three, and some to only one of the participants.

From the 

Psychological Science press release:

The experiment was designed so that using only the information all three were privy to, the group would opt for a lesser candidate. Sharing all the information, including what each possessed exclusively, would lead to the best choice. Afterwards, the participants completed questionnaires. The leaders’ questions measured narcissism; the others assessed the leaders’ authority and effectiveness. All checked off the items among the 45 that they knew—indicating how much the group had shared—and rated how well they’d exchanged information. Experimenters tallied the number of shared items, noted the objective quality of the decision, and analyzed these data in relation to the leader’s narcissism.
As expected, the group members rated the most narcissistic leaders as most effective. But they were wrong. In fact, the groups led by the greatest egotists chose the worse candidate for the job. Says [lead researcher Barbara] Nevicka, “The narcissistic leaders had a very negative effect on their performance. They inhibited the communication because of self-centeredness and authoritarianism.”

This is in a way similar to a study we reported on a few years ago, finding that we prefer confidence over expertise.

Recently watched:

Overrated (mostly too boring):

Millenium Actress (nonsensical)
The New World (2005) (too long for a music video)
Munich (overacted, too long)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (didn’t finish - boring)
Des Hommes Et Des Dieux (Of Gods and Men) (didn’t finish - boring)
Macross ‘84: Do You Remember Love? (ridiculous)
Haibane Renmei (too slow paced for a few beautiful moments)
Paycheck
Blood Pledge
Green Street Hooligans (interesting, but laughably bad second half)
Black Death (boring)
Illegal (okay, predictable)

Favorably reviewed and actually good:

Audition (1999) (Japanese, but surpasses Korean horror)
Mao’s Last Dancer (good)
Whisper of the Heart (unbelievably idealistic, but good)
3 idiots (good)
Metropolis (decent)
Only Yesterday (great)
Grave of the Fireflies (good)
American - The Bill Hicks Story (ok)
Voices of a Distant Star (good, short film)
The Way Back (good)
Lives of Others (great)
Jeux d’enfants (Love me if you dare) (good)
Battle in Heaven (good)
5 Centimeters Per Second (good)

Both horrifying and delightful (read the whole thing):

Left: biological children; Right: adopted

I can’t say whether the genetic or prenatal quality of the adopted children is better or worse, but their combination seems similar to U.S. middle-class.

You can also consider adopted child trying hard enough to get Bs or As in school (harder than a biological child), or sibling competition effects.

(HT)

Excess amino acids are oxidized for energy. This may be why many people feel a slight surge of energy after a high-protein meal. (A related effect is associated with alcohol consumption, which is often masked by the relaxing effect also associated with alcohol consumption.) Amino acid oxidation is not associated with cancer. Neither is fat oxidation. But glucose oxidation is; this is known as the Warburg effect.

A high-protein LC approach will not work very well for athletes who deplete major amounts of muscle glycogen as part of their daily training regimens. These folks will invariably need more carbohydrates to keep their performance levels up. Ultimately this is a numbers game. The protein-to-glucose conversion rate is about 2-to-1. If an athlete depletes 300 g of muscle glycogen per day, he or she will need about 600 g of protein to replenish that based only on protein. This is too high an intake of protein by any standard.

A recreational exerciser who depletes 60 g of glycogen 3 times per week can easily replenish that muscle glycogen with dietary protein. Someone who exercises with weights for 40 minutes 3 times per week will deplete about that much glycogen each time. Contrary to popular belief, muscle glycogen is only minimally replenished postprandially (i.e., after meals) based on dietary sources. Liver glycogen replenishment is prioritized postprandially. Muscle glycogen is replenished over several days, primarily based on liver glycogen. It is one fast-filling tank replenishing another slow-filling one.

Recreational exercisers who are normoglycemic and who do LC intermittently tend to increase the size of their liver glycogen tank over time, viacompensatory adaptation, and also use more fat (and ketones, which are byproducts of fat metabolism) as sources of energy. Somewhat paradoxically, these folks benefit from regular high carbohydrate intake days (e.g., once a week, or on exercise days), since their liver glycogen tanks will typically store more glycogen. If they keep their liver and muscle glycogen tanks half empty all the time, compensatory adaptation suggests that both their liver and muscle glycogen tanks will over time become smaller, and that their muscles will store more fat.

Clinton’s achievements were a problem. In strategy meetings, he often complained that he had created seven million jobs and cut the deficit but no one seemed to notice. In speeches, he referred to the achievements awkwardly. Our polls showed audiences already knew about them or didn’t believe they were true.

The solution, apparently, was a re-jiggering of language. Morris relates that communications strategist Bob Squier had the following bright idea:

The key…was to cite the achievement while talking about something he was going to do. For example: “The hundred thousand extra police we put on the street can’t solve the crime problem by themselves; we need to keep anti-drug funding in the budget and stop Republicans from cutting it.” Or: “The seven million jobs we’ve created won’t be much use if we can’t find education people to fill them. That’s why I want a tax deduction for college tuition to help kids go on to college to take those jobs.”

Linguists of course will recognize that this language is infested with presuppositions—those fascinating linguistic organisms, which because of theirpresumption

of truth, head deniability off at the pass. There are no fewer than six distinct, politically-relevant presuppositions in the above brief excerpt.

Once you know about the linguistic properties of presuppositions, it seems intuitively natural that they should act as performance-enhancing aids for claims, particularly when it comes to believability. After all, their entire reason for living is to allow the speaker to signal that certain information is already taken for granted as shared knowledge—and if it’s not, then the hearer should accommodate it post-haste into his set of background assumptions.

In fact, psychological studies as far back as the seventies have shown that people can be so eager to accommodate presupposed information that they might even tweak their own memories accordingly. In a study led by memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus, people who’d witnessed simulated car crashes were more likely to mistakenly remember a stop sign when asked ”Do you remember seeing the stop sign?” 

as opposed to “Do you remember seeing a stop sign?”

The researchers asked a group of college seniors — three weeks before graduation — to read a passage that described college graduation either as an event that would prompt a major change in their identities or as an event that would prompt only a relatively trivial change. Compared to students who read the passage describing graduation as a small change, those who read a description of the event as a major change were much more likely to make more impatient choices, choosing to receive a gift certificate worth $120 in the next week rather than wait a year for up to $240.

Their work suggests that people can be motivated to hold onto their money, or make more prudent decisions by increasing their sense of connectedness to their future selves, the researchers said.

Project Bright Idea: http://today.duke.edu/2011/03/darity.html

Darity’s research showing black and Latino students to be underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes …

Its primary author calculates “on the safe side” that 15-20 percent of students taught with techniques usually reserved for gifted classrooms are identified within three years by their districts as being academically and intellectually gifted. Only 10 percent of a control group of similar students taught in regular classrooms met their district’s “gifted” criteria during the same period.

energizing their profession and their classrooms by weaving together teaching strategies based on the work of national education experts, including Art Costa and Bena Kallick’s work on “habits of mind,” Mary Frasier’s on “traits, attributes and behaviors” and Howard Gardner’s on “multiple intelligences.”

“We are literally changing the knowledge, skills and dispositions of teachers so they believe children can learn. It is a lot about teacher expectation and belief,”

teachers’ fault, as the usual hopeful story goes.

“We are teaching students how to think, not what to think,” Gayle said.

why did no one try this before? it’s brilliant!

“In college we learned about the multiple intelligences theory; it’s nothing new. But Bright Idea had the research that provided a model to incorporate all the things we know that are right for kids,” Miller said.

By using some components of Bright Idea, McFarland watched the achievement gap at Fuquay Varina decrease by 4-6 percent from 2006 to 2010.

4-6% relative? so the gap went from e.g. 20% to 19%? or absolute? (from 20% to 15%)?

“But with high expectations, there is a change in teacher practices and more willingness and interest on their part. Teachers are saying they want more.”

all we need are high expectations.

When I asked her to close her eyes, she said “Okay,” and closed one eye, as in a permanent wink.
“Are your eyes closed?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Both eyes?”
“Yes.”
I held up three fingers. “how many fingers am I holding up, Mrs. G.?”
“Three,” she said.
“And your eyes are closed?”
“Yes.”
“Then how did you know how many fingers I was holding up?”
An interesting silence followed

…
I wheeled Mrs. G in front [of a mirror] and asked if she could see her own face. She said yes. I then asked her to close both her eyes. Again she closed one eye and not the other.
“Are both your eyes closed?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Does it seem possible to see yourself in the mirror if both your eyes are closed?”
Pause. No conclusion.
“Does it look to you like one eye is closed or that both are closed?”
Pause. No conclusion.

Lyte lists these neurochemicals produced by various microbial species:

Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium	GABA
Escherichia, Bacillus, Saccharomyces	Norepinephrine
Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, Enterococcus	Serotonin
Bacillus, Serratia	Dopamine
Lactobacillus	Acetylcholine

Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The 

CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.

Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe. Instead, the moral character of an action’s consequences also seems to influence how non-moral aspects of the action – in this case, whether someone did something intentionally or not – are judged.^[8]

For what fraction of your beliefs could you rediscover the belief if it (only) was deleted, leaving all your other memories except those of learning or attesting to the belief? If the fraction is near 1, this is more than just robustness to damage from physical damage - e.g. stroke/alzheimer’s/poisoning - (like bilingualism or other sources of cognitive reserve) due to having meaningfully connected beliefs (to each other and to your experience) rather than rote-learned mantras.  It’s confidence that your beliefs are effectively complete - that you have access to the derivable consequences of your experience (even if you’re not genius-fast at (re)discovering them as needed).

Little Albert was an eight month old child who briefly starred in an experiment by behaviorist John Watson. Watson showed him a fuzzy white rat. Albert seemed to like the rat well enough. After Albert liking the rat had been confirmed, Watson showed him the rat again, but this time also played a very loud and scary noise; he repeated this intervention until, as expected, Albert was terrified of the white rat.

But it wasn’t just fuzzy white rats Albert didn’t like. Further investigation determined that Albert was also afraid of brown rabbits (fuzzy animal) and Santa Claus (fuzzy white beard).

I’m sure the kid turned out fine.

He put pigeons in a box that gave them rewards randomly. The pigeons ended up developing what he called “superstitions”; if a reward arrived by coincidence when a pigeon was tilting its head in a certain direction, the pigeon would continue tilting its head in that direction in the hope of gaining more rewards; when the reward randomly arrived, the pigeon took this as “justification” of its head-tilting and head-tilted even more.

People also don’t look for negative confirmation when they’re told to learn a pattern. They usually do this poorly even when forming explicit plans (not only with automatic learning), e.g.

There are four cards which have a letter on one side and a number on the other side. I lay them out and the cards appear as 2 5 F E. The rule is that a card with an odd number on one side must have a vowel on the other. What is the minimum number of cards you should turn over to prove the rule is true (and which cards would they be)?

The “positive test strategy” is sometimes a useful heuristic, but it’s embarrassing how bad people are at escaping it (see Wason’s “confirmation bias” experiment and its Bayesian refinement).

[There is a strong] correlation between educational TV shows and so-called “relational aggression” - things like bullying, name-calling, and deliberate ostracism. The shows most strongly correlated with bad behavior were heart-warming educational programs intended to teach morality. Why?

The researchers theorize that the structure of these shows often involved a child committing an immoral action, the child looking cool and strong, and then at the end of the show the child eventually gets a comeuppance (think Harry Potter, where evil character Draco Malfoy is the coolest and most popular kid in Hogwarts and usually gets away with it, whereas supposedly sympathetic character Ron Weasley is at best a lovable loser who spends most of his time as the butt of Draco’s jokes). The theory is that children are just not good enough at the whole feedback of conseqeunces thing to realize that the bully’s comeuppance in the end is supposed to be the inevitable result of their evil ways. All they see is someone being a bully and then being treated as obviously popular and high-status.

So funny.