How can I be a more creative social scientist?

Answer: Read the anticreativity letters by eminent social psychologist, Richard Nisbett:

The Anticreativity Letters: Advice from a Senior Tempter to a Junior Tempter

Reference: Nisbett, R. E. (1990). The anti-creativity letters: Advice from a senior tempter to a junior tempter. American Psychologist, 45, 1078-1082.

The Anticreativity Letters is eminent psychologist Richard Nesbitt’s clever take on  C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters for psychologists.

Written in the form of letters, The Anticreativity Letters is a letter correspondence between senior devil, Snidely, and junior devil, Slump. All of the letters are from Snidely to Slump, and the subject of the correspondence is a budding academic research psychologist, whom Snidely calls “the patient.” Snidely is advising Slump in the wily skills of how to lead the patient away from a career of creative productivity towards a career of drab mediocrity or out of the academic profession altogether.

Here’s a quick summary of the key points:

1. Stay away from sneery, critical colleagues who dismiss your ideas who are always too eager to as “old hat”, trivial and unworkable:

“. . .you want to steer him away from the people who are absorbed in interesting work, and toward the sneerers. When it comes to associates, there is nothing so useful as sneerers, especially if they are intelligent and witty. They are sure to dismiss your patient’s ideas, should he be so foolish as to discuss them, as trivial, old hat, obvious, or patently ridiculous. Old hat is really the most useful accusation because it need never be proved. The clever sneerer knows that he or she need merely assert that an idea is an old one. Such an assertion will not be called into question one time in a hundred. . . My colleague Fallow very nearly succeeded in throwing Leon Festinger off the trail of dissonance theory by encouraging him to associate with people who could be counted on to tell him that dissonance was nothing more than rationalization recycled into new bottles. Festinger’s unfortunate self-confidence blocked that move, but with a more humble patient you would have won every time. . .

. . .Each member of the faculty could find six flaws in every design, 12 artifactual explanations for every finding, and 24 predecessors for every alleged original idea. Every student adopted that same stance toward his or her fellows. And, most important, that critical stance became part of the scientific conscience of every student. As a result, hardly one of those talented students has lived up to the early promise shown. Each of them can be counted on to shoot on sight any glimmer of an idea the moment it makes an appearance on the horizon of the mind.”

2. Read widely and cultivate an interesting group of friends. You never know where your next good idea will come from:

“I note you have steered him away from philosophy and literature by intimations of “hot air,” “speculation,” “fantasy,” “waste of time,” and so forth. This is much to be commended because great philosophy and great literature are an unparalleled source of ideas in psychology. . .

. . .Few things are more calculated to destroy creativity. Whatever original ideas he might have will slowly become assimilated to what he is reading, so that his work will be at best derivative. Unless he is very energetic, in fact, he can be counted on to give up research altogether on the grounds that he never has any ideas that someone else didn’t already have. . .

It is particularly important to prevent him from talking with his colleagues. A cup of coffee with a stimulating colleague can be a disaster. It can easily result in a new idea, a new perspective, a new career! And yet it is so easily avoided. Busy, busy. Not today. Nose to the grindstone.”

3. Don’t isolate yourself. Work closely with your supervisor and colleagues. Talk about your ideas with others:

“Nearly all young graduate students in the social sciences think that learning how to do research is like learning how to write a novel. That is, they think they have to come up with an idea, which they then work on more or less in solitude, with occasional criticism and advice from a professional. That, after all, is the way they functioned with their senior honors theses. (It never occurs to them that custodial care is all that most faculty are willing to give to undergraduates engaged in research.) So they don’t realize that a continuation of that apparently grown-up way of functioning will keep them largely ignorant of how to pursue an idea across a series of investigations, in the face of failure, criticism, and a host of unanticipated difficulties.

We know, of course, that learning how to do research is really like learning how to make movies. There are many things to be learned that are quite invisible to the novice, some highly technical, some grand strategic, and some mundane-seeming but crucial. The only way to do this is by working shoulder to shoulder, trustingly, with someone who already knows how to do it.”

4. Don’t agonize over your perceived lack of intelligence or creativity or social standing of your research field:

“All but the very most brilliant patients are therefore candidates for constant worry about whether they are smart enough to succeed. . .

Remember that such people literally have more to lose than to gain by producing something. They know this, and live in constant fear of doing work that is unworthy of them. No idea, of course, however important, seems obviously valuable or even very sensible in its formative stages. The minute a famously smart young person has an idea, you want to encourage speculation about whether it is really earth shaking if true or really true if earth shaking. . . Give me a patient with an IQ of 170 and I’ll produce mental paralysis by the age of 30 more often than not.

But worries about creativity are the best. Regardless of your patient’s real or ascribed intelligence, he is bound to have doubts about his creativity. It is hard to believe, but humans actually think there is a property of creativity that one can either “have” or “not have,” as opposed to a talent for some field–a love of its content that keeps them thinking about it all the time–organization, and a willingness to work. . .

It is important to remember how social scientists view the Great Chain of Being. They think that sociologists are on the bottom and mathematicians are on the top. A consequence is that the psychologists are always trying to impress the biologists, the biologists the chemists, and the chemists the physicists. This makes most psychologists into rabid reductionists. They think this is good scientific strategy, but it is really just biologist envy.”

5. Don’t jump on to whatever is trendy. Think up your own research ideas:

“What is troubling about your patient is that the research is something that he is genuinely interested in, something that proceeds from long-time concerns and that builds both on the thinking and the research skills that he developed in his research with his major adviser. What you want is to have him working on some trendy topic he has picked up by reading the journals. You want him to see some piece of moderately interesting work, get him to thinking that it is ridden with alternative explanations, and have him redo the experiments with the major purpose of showing that he is cleverer than the original investigators. Research is least dangerous when it is most reactive.”

6. Focus on quality rather than quantity of output:

There is a direct analogy here for the relation between creativity and sheer production for the modern professional, especially scientific professionals. They know that what counts is creativity and that all creative people are productive in some sense. They also know that it can be hard to tell just what work is genuinely creative. From there it is only a step to get them to focus exclusively on the productivity and to slide into a tacit equation of productivity and creativity. Here you have the academic reward structure massively on your side. Academic decision makers count notably better than they read. We have recently encouraged the rapid promotion and advancement of many psychologists whose work, whatever its value in terms of quality, is wretchedly excessive in terms of numbers of publications.”

7. Don’t get caught up in time-wasting chores:

“. . .even if he is obsessed with work, he can’t do research continually. What you want to do is make any other work he does as barren for him as possible. Get him to take the same driven stance toward preparing his courses that he does toward his research. Put him into an endless round of overpreparing his lectures and tracking down minutiae that won’t interest his students in the least. When this is done right, little research is accomplished, the teaching gets steadily worse, and the patient is a bitter, burnt-out case by the time he is denied tenure. . .

. . .It is important to remember that teaching in moderation is actually valuable for research. The necessity of explaining one’s concerns to others, and of putting them into a broader context, together with the effort to demonstrate why certain topics are interesting, all have the most direct benefits for thinking about research. We have had great success with scientists at the modern research institutes who are relieved of all need for teaching. Most of them are turning out to cease all productive activity within a matter of a few years after arrival.”

8. Live a balanced life. Invest time into forming close, satisfying relationships with others:

“I think you are quite mistaken to cackle over the fact that your patient has fallen in love. It is true that love affords innumerable distractions and that he will be quite incapable of work during the inevitable troughs in the relationship. But on balance we have more to lose than we have to gain. Freud pointed out that the primary concerns     . . .are love and work. When a human’s love life is going well, work is likely to be carried out with special joy and contentment. These emotions are our deadly enemy.

You may claim that it is mere coincidence, but it is certainly the case that your patient is doing suspiciously interesting work lately.”


How can I write well?

Answer: Write like Elliot Aronson, eminent social psychologist and author of the best seller The Social Animal.

Elliot Aronson is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to win all three of its major awards for distinguished research, distinguished teaching, and distinguished writing.

In the last 10 minutes of the 30-minute video below, Elliot Aronson talks about how he wrote his journal articles and books on social psychology. Move the time cursor to 19′ 30″:

How to understand statistics the painless way

Watch these 85+ brilliant videos on various topics in introductory statistics by Salman Khan from the Khan Academy.

If you don’t know about the Khan Academy, the free online website with over 3300 instructional videos that have been downloaded over 175 million times, then watch this TED video and be impressed:

from the Khan Academy website:

Statistics

Introduction to statistics. Will eventually cover all of the major topics in a first-year statistics course (not there yet!)
Videos
  1. Mean Median and Mode
  2. Range and Mid-range
  3. Reading Pictographs
  4. Reading Bar Graphs
  5. u08_l1_t2_we2 Reading Line Graphs
  6. Reading Pie Graphs (Circle Graphs)
  7. Misleading Line Graphs
  8. u08_l1_t2_we3 Stem-and-leaf Plots
  9. Box-and-Whisker Plots
  10. Reading Box-and-Whisker Plots
  11. Statistics: The Average
  12. Statistics: Sample vs. Population Mean
  13. Statistics: Variance of a Population
  14. Statistics: Sample Variance
  15. Statistics: Standard Deviation
  16. Statistics: Alternate Variance Formulas
  17. Introduction to Random Variables
  18. Probability Density Functions
  19. Binomial Distribution 1
  20. Binomial Distribution 2
  21. Binomial Distribution 3
  22. Binomial Distribution 4
  23. Expected Value: E(X)
  24. Expected Value of Binomial Distribution
  25. Poisson Process 1
  26. Poisson Process 2
  27. Law of Large Numbers
  28. Normal Distribution Excel Exercise
  29. Introduction to the Normal Distribution
  30. ck12.org Normal Distribution Problems: Qualitative sense of normal distributions
  31. ck12.org Normal Distribution Problems: z-score
  32. ck12.org Normal Distribution Problems: Empirical Rule
  33. ck12.org Exercise: Standard Normal Distribution and the Empirical Rule
  34. ck12.org: More Empirical Rule and Z-score practice
  35. Central Limit Theorem
  36. Sampling Distribution of the Sample Mean
  37. Sampling Distribution of the Sample Mean 2
  38. Standard Error of the Mean
  39. Sampling Distribution Example Problem
  40. Confidence Interval 1
  41. Mean and Variance of Bernoulli Distribution Example
  42. Bernoulli Distribution Mean and Variance Formulas
  43. Margin of Error 1
  44. Margin of Error 2
  45. Confidence Interval Example
  46. Small Sample Size Confidence Intervals
  47. Hypothesis Testing and P-values
  48. One-Tailed and Two-Tailed Tests
  49. Z-statistics vs. T-statistics
  50. Type 1 Errors
  51. Small Sample Hypothesis Test
  52. T-Statistic Confidence Interval
  53. Large Sample Proportion Hypothesis Testing
  54. Variance of Differences of Random Variables
  55. Difference of Sample Means Distribution
  56. Confidence Interval of Difference of Means
  57. Clarification of Confidence Interval of Difference of Means
  58. Hypothesis Test for Difference of Means
  59. Comparing Population Proportions 1
  60. Comparing Population Proportions 2
  61. Hypothesis Test Comparing Population Proportions
  62. Squared Error of Regression Line
  63. Proof (Part 1) Minimizing Squared Error to Regression Line
  64. Proof (Part 3) Minimizing Squared Error to Regression Line
  65. Proof (Part 4) Minimizing Squared Error to Regression Line
  66. Regression Line Example
  67. Proof Part 2 Minimizing Squared Error to Line
  68. R-Squared or Coefficient of Determination
  69. Second Regression Example
  70. Calculating R-Squared
  71. Covariance and the Regression Line
  72. Chi-Square Distribution Introduction
  73. Pearson’s Chi Square Test (Goodness of Fit)
  74. Contingency Table Chi-Square Test
  75. ANOVA 1 – Calculating SST (Total Sum of Squares)
  76. ANOVA 2 – Calculating SSW and SSB (Total Sum of Squares Within and Between).avi
  77. ANOVA 3 -Hypothesis Test with F-Statistic
  78. Correlation and Causality
  79. Deductive Reasoning 1
  80. Deductive Reasoning 2
  81. Deductive Reasoning 3
  82. U12_L1_T3_we1 Inductive Reasoning 1
  83. Inductive Reasoning 2
  84. Inductive Reasoning 3
  85. U03_L1_T1_we2 Inductive

How to handle scientific disagreements the mature way

from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, p 234-5:

Professional controversies bring out the worst in academics. Scientific journals occasionally publish exchanges, often beginning with someone’s critique of another’s research, followed by a reply and a rejoinder. I have always thought that these exchanges are a waste of time. Especially when the original critique is sharply worded, the reply and the rejoinder are often exercises in what I have called sarcasm for beginners and advanced sarcasm. The replies rarely concede anything to a biting critique, and it is almost unheard of for a rejoinder to admit that the original critique was misguided or erroneous in any way. On a few occasions I have responded to criticisms that I thought were grossly misleading, because a failure to respond can be interpreted as conceding error, but I have never found the hostile exchanges instructive. In search of another way to deal with disagreements, I have engaged in a few “adversarial collaborations,” in which scholars who disagree on the science agree to write a jointly authored paper on their differences and sometimes  conduct research together. In especially tense situations, the research is moderated by an arbiter.

My most satisfying and predictive adversarial collaboration was with Gary Klein, the intellectual leader of an association of scholars and practitioners who do not like the kind of work I do. They call themselves students of Naturalistic Decision Making, or NDM, and mostly work in organizations where they often study how experts work. The NDMers adamantly reject the focus on biases in the heuristics and biases approach. They criticize this model as overly concerned with failures and driven by artificial experiments rather than by the study of real people doing things that matter. They are deeply skeptical of the value of using rigid algorithms to replace human judgment, and Paul Meehl is not among their heroes. Gary Klein had eloquently articulated this position over many years.

This is hardly the basis for a beautiful friendship, but there is more to the story. I had never believed that intuition is always misguided. I had also been a fan of Klein’s studies of expertise in firefighters since I first saw a draft of a paper he wrote in the 1970s, and was impressed by his book Sources of Power, much of which analyzes how experienced professionals develop intuitive skills. I invited him to join in an effort to map the boundary that separates the marvels of intuition from its flaws. He was intrigued by the idea and we went ahead with the project—with no certainty that it would succeed. We set out to answer a specific question:  When can you trust an experienced professional who claims to have an intuition? It was obvious that Klein would be more disposed to be trusting, and I would be more skeptical. But could we agree on principles for answering the general question? Over seven or eight years we had many discussions, resolved many disagreements, almost blew up more than once, wrote many drafts, became friends, and eventually published a joint article with a title that tells the story: “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.” Indeed, we did not encounter real issues on which we disagreed—but we did not really agree.


from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, p 31-2; 40-3:

Oxford University is an intimidating place to give a lecture. It’s not so much the spires and gargoyles, or even the knowledge that for over seven hundred years this place has led the intellectual world. It’s Oxford’s dons. They had turned out in force that day in April 1975 to hear the upstart American psychologist who was on sabbatical at Maudsley Hospital’s Institute of Psychiatry in London and who had traveled to Oxford to talk about his research As I arranged my speech on the rostrum and looked nervously out into the hall, I could see the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, a 1973 Nobel laureate. I could see Jerome Bruner, a celebrated academic who had recently come to Oxford from Harvard to take the Regius professorship in child development. There too was Donald Broadbent, the founder of modern cognitive psychology and the foremost “applied” social scientist in the world, and Michael Gelder, the dean of British psychiatry. And there was Jeffrey Gray, the renowned expert on anxiety and the brain. These were the greats of my profession. I felt like an actor who has been pushed out onto a stage to do a soliloquy before Guinness, Gielgud, and Olivier.

I launched into my speech about learned helplessness, and I was relieved to find the dons reasonably responsive, some of them nodding at my conclusions, most of them chuckling at my jokes. But in the middle of the front row was an intimidating stranger. He was not laughing at my jokes, and at several crucial points he conspicuously shook his head no. He seemed to be keeping a running total of mistakes I had unknowingly made.

At last the speech was finished. The applause was appreciative, and I was relieved, for the occasion was now over except for the polite platitudes traditionally offered by the professor assigned to be the “discussant.” The discussant, however, turned out to be the naysayer from the front row. His name was given as John Teasdale. I had heard the name before but knew almost nothing about him. Teasdale, it proved, was a new lecturer in the psychiatry department, fresh up from the psychology department at Maudsley Hospital in London.

“You really shouldn’t be carried away by this enchanting story,” he told the audience. “The theory is wholly inadequate. Seligman has glossed over the fact that one-third of his human subjects never become helpless. Why not? And of the ones who did, some bounced back right away; others never recovered. Some were helpless only in the very situation they learned to be helpless about; they no longer tried to escape from noise. Yet others gave up in brand-new situations. Let us ask ourselves why. Some lost self-esteem and blamed themselves for failing to escape the noise, while others blamed the experimenter for giving them unsolvable problems. Why?”

Baffled looks appeared on many of the dons’ faces. Teasdale’s piercing critique had thrown everything into doubt. Ten years of research, which had looked definitive to me when I began the talk, now seemed full of loose ends.

I was almost dumbstruck. I thought Teasdale was right, and I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of these objections myself. I mumbled something about this being the way science progresses and by way of rejoinder asked if Teasdale himself could solve the paradox he had set before me.

“Yes, I think I can,” he said. “But this is neither the time nor the place.”

. . .

Explanatory Style

When John Teasdale raised his objections after my speech at Oxford, I felt for a moment as if years of work might have been for nothing. I had no way of knowing at the time that the Teasdale challenge would result in the thing I wanted most of all–using our findings to help needful and suffering human beings.

Yes, Teasdale had granted in his rebuttal, two out of three people became helpless. But, he’d stressed, one out of three resisted: No matter what happened to them to make them helpless, they would not give up. It was a paradox, and until it was resolved, my theory could not be taken seriously.

Leaving the hall with Teasdale after the address, I asked him if he’d be willing to work with me to see if we could construct an adequate theory. He agreed, and we began meeting regularly. I’d come down from London and we’d take long walks through the manicured Oxford grounds and the tree-lined meadows called The Backs, talking out his objections. I asked for his solution to the problem he had posed, about who is vulnerable to helplessness and who is not. I learned that for Teasdale the solution came down to this: how people explain to themselves the bad things that happen to them. People who made certain kinds of explanations, he believed, are prey to helplessness. Teaching them to change these explanations might prove an effective way to treat their depression.

Every two months or so during this period in England, I made week-long trips back to the United States. On my first trip I returned to the University of Pennsylvania to find that my theory was being assaulted by challenges almost identical to Teasdale’s. The challengers were two fearless students in my own research group, Lyn Abramson and Judy Garber.

Lyn and Judy had both been caught up in a vogue-enthusiasm for the work of a man named Bernard Weiner. In the late 1960s Weiner, a young social psychologist at the University of California’s Los Angeles campus, had started to wonder why some people are high achievers and other people are not. He concluded that the way people think about the causes of successes and failures was what really mattered. His approach was called attribution theory. (That is, it asked to what factors people attributed their successes and failures.)

This view ran against the existing belief about achievement, the classic demonstration of which was called PREE-the partial reinforcement extinction effect. PREE is an old chestnut of learning theory. If you give a rat a food pellet every time he presses a bar, this is called “continuous reinforcement”; the ratio of reward to effort is one-to-one, one pellet for one bar-press. If you then stop giving him food for pressing the bar (“extinction”), he’ll press the bar three or four times and then quit completely, because he can see he’s never getting fed anymore, since the contrast is so great. If, on the other hand, instead of one-for-one reinforcement, you give the rat “partial” reinforcement-say, an average of only one pellet for every five or ten times he presses-and then start extinction, he’ll press the bar a hundred times before he gives up.

PREE had been demonstrated in the 1930s. It was the kind of experiment that made the reputation of B. F. Skinner and established him as the panjandrum of the behaviorists. The PREE principle, however, though it worked with rats and pigeons, didn’t work very well with people. Some would give up as soon as extinction began; others would keep going.

Weiner had an idea why it didn’t work with people: Those people who thought the cause of extinction was permanent (who concluded, for example, “The experimenter has decided not to reward me anymore”) would give up right away, while those who thought the cause was temporary (“There’s a short circuit in this damned equipment”) would keep on going, because they thought the situation might change and the reward would resume. When Weiner performed this experiment, he found just the results he predicted. It was the explanations people made, and not the schedule of reinforcement they’d been on, which determined their susceptibility to PREE. Attribution theory went on to postulate that human behavior is controlled not just by the “schedule of reinforcement” in the environment but by an internal mental state, the explanations people make for why the environment has scheduled their reinforcements in this way.

This work had great impact in the field, especially upon younger scholars like Lyn Abramson and Judy Garber. It had shaped their whole outlook, and it was the lens through which they examined the theory of learned helplessness. When, during my first trip home from England, I told my colleagues what John Teasdale had said, Lyn and Judy replied that he was right and I was wrong, and the theory would have to be reformulated.

. . .Throughout my career, I’ve never had much use for the tendency among psychologists to shun criticism. It’s a longstanding tradition acquired from the field of psychiatry, with its medical authoritarianism and its reluctance to admit error. Going back at least to Freud, the world of the research psychiatrists has been dominated by a handful of despots who treat dissenters like invading barbarians usurping their domain. One critical word from a young disciple and he was banished.

I’ve preferred the humanistic tradition. To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they’re wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, it is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

I had always stressed to my students the importance of welcoming criticism. “I want to be told,” I had always said. “In this lab, the payoff is for originality, not toadyism.” Now Abramson and Garber, not to mention Teasdale, had told me, and I was not about to bristle with hostility. I promptly enlisted the three of them as allies in making the theory better. I argued with my two brilliant students, sometimes for twelve hours without a break, working to make my theory incorporate their objections.

I launched into two sets of conversations. The first, in Oxford, was with Teasdale. John’s commitment was to therapy, and so, as we discussed how to change the theory, we explored the possibility of treating depression by changing the ways depressive people explained to themselves the causes of bad events. The second, with Abramson and Garber back in Philadelphia, took its character from Lyn’s strong interest in the etiology—the causes—of mental illness.

Teasdale and I started writing a manuscript together, on how therapy for helplessness and depression should be based on changing people’s explanations. Concurrently, Abramson and I  started one on how people’s explanatory style could cause helplessness and depression.

At that moment, as it happened, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology contacted me.  The learned helplessness  controversy, he said, had  generated  a great many submissions to the journal, many of them attacks of just the sort John and Lyn and Judy had made. The editor was planning to devote a whole issue of the journal to the battle, and he asked if I would write one of the articles. I agreed and then persuaded Lyn and John to let me merge the  two articles  we had been working on separately. I felt it important that when the new theory got  this very prominent airing, it would already contain our responses to the attacks. . .

The special issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology was published in February 1978. It contained the article by Lyn, John and me, answering in advance the main objections to the original learned-helplessness theory. It was well received and itself generated more research than the original helplessness theory had.