Gordon Rugg's Blog, page 3
April 10, 2019
Why do people behave like idiots?
By Gordon Rugg
Other people frequently appear to behave like idiots. As is often the case, there’s a simple explanation for this, and as is also often the case, the full story is a bit more complex, but still manageably simple once you get your head round it.
First, the simple explanation. People usually behave in a way that looks idiotic for one or more of the three following reasons:
Sin
Error
Slips
This model comes from the literatures on human error and on safety-critical systems; there are variations on the wording and on some of the detail (particularly around slips) but the core concepts are usually the same.
Sin (or “violations” in the more common version of the name) involves someone deliberately setting out to do the wrong thing. I’ll return later to possible reasons for people doing this.
Error involves people having mistaken beliefs; for example, they believe that closing a particular valve will solve a particular problem.
Slips involve someone intending to do one thing, but unintentionally doing something different; for example, intending to press the button on the left, but accidentally pressing the button on the right.
These issues can and do interact with each other; for instance, someone may be planning to do the wrong thing because of an error, but may fail to do that wrong thing because of a slip. In this hypothetical example, the slip may cancel out the error, so that everything ends well, though only by accident. In other cases, the slip may lead to the error having worse effects.
So far, so good. It’s a clear, simple and powerful model that performs well in the real world. When you dig a bit deeper, though, things become more complex before becoming fairly simple again. I’ll start by flipping the question round, which exposes the core problem.
Flipping the question round: What would constitute “correct” behaviour?
Traditional logic is very good at showing how badly normal human beings perform at traditional logic. It’s also very good at working systematically through the consequences of a given set of starting assumptions.
However, it’s not very good at giving solutions for most problems in everyday life. Here’s an example. I was recently driving to work when I heard an alarmingly loud noise that appeared to be coming from my car’s engine. After a few seconds, the noise stopped as suddenly as it had appeared. What would traditional logic tell me to do in that situation?
Traditional logic wouldn’t be able to help much. The core issues in this case involved weighing up the likelihoods and the possible severities of the likely outcomes, such as the risk of the car breaking down on a country road in the middle of nowhere, and the risk of missing a significant meeting at work. They also involved weighing up the likelihood of other explanations for the noise, such as it possibly being a power tool in use on the nearby industrial estate. This in turn led into an endless regress of follow-on questions, such as how likely it was that someone would be using a power tool at 7.30 in the morning.
This is a long way from the “If this is true and that is true then this other thing is true” format of traditional logic, which doesn’t deal in likelihoods. Instead, this is much more like fuzzy logic, which wasn’t invented until well within living memory, or like Bayesian reasoning, which is still hotly debated by logicians and statisticians a couple of centuries after its invention.
So, traditional logic is unable to give guaranteed correct solutions to the majority of real world problems, and therefore people can’t follow a set of guidelines which will guarantee that they never make the wrong decision. In one way, that’s not very encouraging. In another way, it’s reassuring, since you don’t need to feel so bad next time you get something wrong. Probably…
Working through the complexity for sin, error and slips
Why do people commit sin, in the sense of deliberately not doing what they are supposed to do? (I’ll leave the theological sense of “sin” for another day…)
There are two main reasons:
Believing that what they are being expected to do is either morally wrong, or is factually mistaken
Self-interest: Believing that they personally will be better off as a result of not doing what they are expected to do
With error, there is the central question of whether we can reasonably say that a particular belief is correct. This raises a variety of issues. I’ll focus on two, which between them cover most of the key points.
One is bounded rationality. For most non-trivial questions, you could spend literally years trying to gather all the relevant information before making a decision. There isn’t enough time to do this for every question we encounter in everyday life, so we have to make a best guess from the information that we are able to gather in the time available. Sometimes, that information is misleading, so we end up making decisions based on plausible but mistaken grounds. Sometimes, we will never be able to gather all the relevant information, so we’ll never have a definitive answer.
The second issue is demonstrably mistaken beliefs about reality. These are a staple for YouTube “fail” compilations, such as “getting off a boat” fails where people have a mistaken mental model of Newton’s laws of motion. Where these mistakes involve easily visible immediate results, they’re easy to detect. However, when they are not immediately visible, they’re more likely to persist.
A classic example is the belief that subsystem optimisation necessarily leads to system optimisation; in other words, improving a part will also improve the whole. This belief is demonstrably wrong; for instance, putting a more powerful (“better”) engine in a car won’t necessarily make the car as a whole better, if the brakes aren’t able to handle the increased power. However, because the consequences of this belief aren’t immediately and obviously visible as mistakes, it’s a persistent and widespread error.
Finally, slips. A classic example of a slip is strong but wrong, where in a moment of distraction you do the thing you most often do, rather than the thing you should do. For instance, if you use your office key numerous times each day, but only use your front door key a couple of times each day, you’ll sometimes find yourself trying to open your front door with your office key, but you’ll hardly ever find yourself trying to open your office key with your front door key.
Conclusion
The sin/error/slip model makes sense of a lot of apparently idiotic behaviour. Other common issues such as miscommunications and different value systems can also arguably be handled by that model.
What can we do to improve the likelihood of people behaving less like idiots? Happily, there are various reasonably effective solutions.
One involves representations. For example, you can represent the possible outcomes of a decision as a table or as a flowchart, to check whether you’ve missed something significant.
Another involves design: For instance, designing a product so as to block likely errors by making an action physically impossible.
A third involves turning human biases to the good, by using them to make training more memorable via e.g. using vivid examples in safety lectures, making use of the human bias towards vivid examples being more memorable.
A closing thought: Sometimes, people behave in a way that looks idiotic to you, because actually you’re the one who’s wrong. Bearing that in mind before you judge others has the dual advantages of making you look wiser, and of making you less likely to be in the wrong yourself. I’ll end on that positive note…
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book: Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
March 10, 2019
What academic writing looks like
By Gordon Rugg
Students often ask what good academic writing looks like. It’s an important, simple, question. Answering it in words is tricky. However, answering it with words plus highlighter makes answering easier. The answer is that good academic writing features mainly highlighter 2, with some highlighter 1 at the beginnings or ends of paragraphs, and as little grey as possible.
What does that actually look like? I’ll use a worked example to illustrate it, on the topic of the growth of the Internet. This is a difficult topic, because the key points are well known to the general public, so there’s a real risk that your opening text will look like something that a twelve year old without Internet access has hacked together at the last minute for an overdue essay.
Here’s a set of bullet points in clear English illustrating one way of handling this:
It is widely claimed that X is true.
A counter-example is Y.
However, Z means that is not completely comparable to Z
Note that each bullet point contains information that is non-trivial (X, Y and Z). Each bullet point maps neatly onto what is known as a topic sentence, i.e. the sentence in a paragraph that contains the crucial information about the topic of the paragraph.
The image below shows how they map on to academic writing. Non-trivial insights are shown in light green highlighter. Non-trivial facts are shown in lorem ipsum (meaningless text so there’s no content to distract the reader) with yellow highlighter. Text that anyone on the street could write is shown with grey highlighter.
Note that the topic sentence is usually at the start of the paragraph, but may be elsewhere (usually at the end of the paragraph).
Note also the use of the conjunction “however” at the start of the third paragraph, in a way that implies that the topic sentence will come later in the paragraph.
What’s happening here is that the opening words “It is widely claimed” act as a flag, signalling that the writer is treating this as just a claim, not as a solid fact. This flag in the opening words tells the critical reader that what follows won’t be just general knowledge; instead, there’s going to be something more insightful.
I’ve distinguished non-trivial insights from non-trivial facts and general knowledge.
As a rough rule of thumb, general knowledge won’t get you any marks or credit in academic writing. Sometimes you have to say something that is general knowledge because it’s true and necessary; when this happens, it’s wise to treat the piece of general knowledge as a sandwich in the middle of some non-trivial content.
Non-trivial insights are intelligent, non-obvious insights. Non-trivial facts can take various forms, including statistics, historical facts, and references to the literature. Ideally, you should have both non-trivial insights and non-trivial facts facts in your academic writing; that’s how you get a distinction. If you display only non-trivial insights, or only non-trivial facts, then you may manage to get a reasonably good mark, but you’re unlikely to get a distinction.
The precise preferred ratio between the different colours of highlighter varies between disciplines, but the general principle described above is widespread.
This approach also helps make sense of the apparent contradiction between academic writing needing to be clear, but also needing to be information-rich. A common way of squaring this circle is to use short, crisp, topic sentences about insights, and to put the heavy information into the rest of the paragraph. It’s usually possible to phrase the insight in the topic sentence using surprisingly small simple words that anyone can understand; the key thing is that the insight should be something significant and non-obvious.
There are various common deep structures for bullet points. One example is the following:
X is a significant problem
Previous unsuccessful attempts to solve it failed because of Y
However, using method Z should avoid the problem of Y
I’ve written more about bullet points and writing here.
If you’re interested in the telegraph and its massive effect on the Nineteenth Century world, there’s a fascinating book on the subject; The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book: Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
February 23, 2019
Beauty, novelty and threat
By Gordon Rugg
In an earlier article in this short series, we looked at what happens when you treat two concepts such as liking and disliking as two separate scales, rather than as opposite ends on a single scale. The answer was that often this makes sense of results which would otherwise look contradictory.
In another article, we looked at what happens when you apply this approach to the well established literature on perceptions of attractiveness. The result was that this provided a clear, simple way of explaining an apparent paradox within the literature on perceptions of attractiveness in human faces.
Covering these topics raised a lot of other questions, which we’ll tackle in this article. The questions relate to three main themes:
Social context
Cognitive load
Perceptions of novelty and threat
Social context
There’s been a lot of research into attractiveness, and much of that research has involved perceptions of female attractiveness. There has been less research into male attractiveness, and even less research into perceptions of human ugliness. Also, much of the early work on averaged faces reflects common social biases of the time, such as averaging Danish faces separately from Swedish faces, but readily lumping together diverse non-European ethnic groups into e.g. an “average Mexican face” or “average Chinese face”. None of this is likely to surprise anyone with even a superficial knowledge of sociology or social anthropology or women’s studies or media studies. I won’t go further into this topic here. Instead, I’ll work through some of the issues raised in the attractiveness literature, to show how they tie in with more recent work on the uncanny valley, as well as how they can be represented using this two-concept plot approach.
Some of the underlying mechanisms proposed for perceptions of attractiveness and ugliness relate to evolutionary biology, and in particular to honest costly signals of health (e.g. Rhodes et al, 2001; Foo et al, 2017). This makes sense in terms of, for instance, skin blemishes being associated with ugliness, since they might relate to an underlying health problem. However, making sense is not necessarily the same as being true, which raises the question of whether there might be other, better, explanations for some or all aspects of attractiveness.
An example is that humans prefer symmetrical faces to asymmetric faces, which could arguably be due to bodily symmetry reflecting health. This preference also appears in insect preferences for faces of other insects from the same species (e.g. Rodriguez et al, 2004) which could be argued as further proof of an underlying cause in evolutionary biology.
However, the same findings can be explained in terms of a very different mechanism, namely cognitive load, i.e. the amount of mental processing required to handle a given set of sensory input, such as a picture of a face.
Cognitive load
Numerous researchers have pointed out that making judgments about a symmetrical, unblemished face requires less mental processing than making judgments about asymmetric and/or blemished faces (e.g. Reber et al, 2004; Winkieman et al, 2006). This is also consistent with findings about preferences for averaged images of objects other than human faces, such as automobiles, where evolutionary biology is not a very plausible mechanism (e.g. Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2003). An excellent example of this approach being applied to aesthetics in general is a classic article by Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999). This model is also consistent with findings from using machine learning to identify predictors of human facial attractiveness (e.g. Kagian et al, 2008).
An obvious apparent objection both to the evolutionary explanation and to the cognitive explanation involves changes in aesthetic preferences across cultures and across time. At first glance, both the evolutionary and the cognitive mechanisms would seem to select for a single optimal form of attractiveness, but this is clearly not what happens in human societies, where there are usually several different forms of preferred beauty.
However, a simple and powerful explanation for this apparent paradox is described in Ramachandran & Hirstein’s 1999 article. In brief, the brain needs input to stay at an optimal level of functioning; novel stimuli (e.g. an unusual face) provide this input. Similarly, at a social level, ownership of unusual items is usually a marker of higher social status (e.g. Rogers, 2003) and attractive people are more likely to be imitated than less attractive people (van Leeuwen et al, 2009). So, novelty and interestingness can add attractiveness, even if the novelty and interestingness are achieved via a departure from the classic features associated with beauty. This makes further sense of an apparent paradox covered in the previous article in this set, namely that averaged faces are attractive, but very attractive faces are not average (Alley & Cunningham, 1991).
Novelty, interestingness and threat
Novelty may bring interestingness and more attractiveness. However, novelty may also be threatening.
This is where we loop back round to sociology and social anthropology and media studies, via themes such as infantilisation of women in popular culture, plus Necker shifts and uncanny valleys. There’s been a lot of solid research into the interactions between traditional models of femininity and sending out non-threatening signals. There’s also been a lot of good popular work within the TV tropes tradition on conventions for portraying women as strong and/or threatening in popular culture.
Most of that work has used text or tables as the medium for analysing these issues. What I’ll do here is to look at what happens when you plot reassuring safe signals against threatening signals, using the format below, and applying it to three photos of women with blonde hair.
Some forms of novelty send out strong signals of safety, without any threatening signals; for instance, this image of a smiling young woman (model Melvnin) with an unusual combination of hair colour, eye colour and skin colour. The combination is unusual, but the individual features are common.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/434667801520898105/ : Used under fair use academic terms
Other forms of novelty/rarity send out strong signals of threat, such as this image of a scowling old woman with an eye patch and disheveled hair (played by Helena Bonham Carter) which taps into assorted tropes about witches and threatening mad women.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/296182112989148803/ : Used under fair use academic terms
Then, in the top right quadrant, we get strong signals both of safety and of threat, as in the picture below of Yolandi Visser. The facts that she is a young woman, with neat makeup, and a symmetrical face, should send out signals of safety and attractiveness. However, the black lipstick combined with the black contact lenses tap into well established tropes about aliens, demons and other threats. Her facial expression is neutral, leaving the viewer with an uncomfortable set of conflicting signals which can’t be resolved. I’ve written about non-resolvable facial signals here.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/7248049376981346/ : Used under fair use academic terms
With safety/risk, uncertainty is an important variable, particularly when there is strong evidence in both directions, as in the uncanny valley. We’ve blogged about this before, in relation to Necker shifts, when the viewer switches from seeing the situation from one perspective to seeing it in an utterly different perspective. It’s no accident that this is a key dynamic in horror stories and horror movies.
Returning to representing signals of safety and threat, the three images can be located in terms of safe and threatening signals as shown below.
For dealing with tropes about attractiveness and depictions of women, this is a simple but powerful representation of findings from the relevant literatures. It also raises interesting questions about what attractiveness actually is.
In terms of scales, the general assumption in the past was that attractiveness and ugliness are opposite ends of a single scale, with attractiveness at the positive end, and ugliness as a negative value opposite to attractiveness.
However, it’s also possible to argue that attractiveness and ugliness are two separate privative scales, with the features that constitute ugliness not always being the opposite of the features that constitute attractiveness.
More intriguingly, perceived attractiveness may be nothing more than a sweet spot between the values for ease of cognitive processing, novelty, and perceived threat. This raises a lot of interesting questions about the focus of research for work relating to aesthetics. Cognitive load and novelty can be quite easily modeled using well-established mathematical and computational approaches (e.g. Kagian et al, 2009, and Shannon, 1948, respectively), but perceptions of threat are not so tractable. Arguably, to understand aesthetics better, we need to understand threat better, which raises some very interesting research questions.
Some of those questions can be tackled simply and effectively by using the two-scale approach that we’ve examined in this series of articles. Risk assessment, for instance, often involves weighing apparently contradictory evidence, and the safe/threatening plot provides a quick, simple way of showing where a risk or risks should be located.
Conclusion
There can be a lot to gain from asking whether two apparent opposites would be better treated as two separate concepts, and then plotted against each other.
In some fields, this approach (or something similar) is well established. In others, though, this approach hasn’t yet been widely used, and there are rich opportunities for early adopters.
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book: Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
Related articles about uncertainty, risk and horror:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/strange-places/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/the-uncanny-valley-proust-segways-and-the-living-dead/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/in-groups-out-groups-and-the-other/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/parsing-designs-and-making-designs-interesting/
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
References
Alley, T.R. & Cunningham, M.R. (1991), Averaged Faces Are Attractive, but Very Attractive Faces Are Not Average. Psychological Science, 2(2), pp 123-125.
Foo, Y.Z., Simmons, L.W. & Rhodes, G. (2017). Predictors of facial attractiveness and health in humans. Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep39731.
Halberstadt, J.B., & Rhodes, G. (2003). It’s not just average faces that are attractive: Computer-manipulated averageness makes birds, fish, and automobiles attractive. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 149–156.
Kagian, A., Dror, G., Leyvand, T., Meilijson, I., Cohen-Or, D. & Ruppin, E. (2009). A machine learning predictor of facial attractiveness revealing human-like psychophysical biases. Vision Research, 48, pp 235-243.
Ramachandran, V.S. & Hirstein, W. (1999). The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, pp 15-51.
Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), pp. 364-382.
Rhodes, G., Zebrowitz, L.A., Clark, A., Kalick, M., Hightower, A. & McKay, R. (2001).
Do facial averageness and symmetry signal health? Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, pp. 31-46.
Rodriguez, I., Gumbert, A., de Ibarra, N.H., Kunze, J. & Giurfa, M. (2004). Symmetry is in the eye of the ‘beeholder’: innate preference for bilateral symmetry in flower-naïve bumblebees. Naturwissenschaften, 91, pp 374-377.
Rogers, E.M. (2003.) Diffusion of Innovations (5th edition). Free Press, New York.
Shannon, C.E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, pp 379-423, 623-656.
van Leeuwen, M.L., Veling, H., van Baaren, R.B. & Dijksterhuis, A. (2009). The influence of facial attractiveness on imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(6), pp 1295-1298.
Winkielman, P., Halberstadt, J., Fazendeiro, T. & Catty, S. (2006). Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Psychological Science 17(9) pp 799-806.
February 18, 2019
The apparent attraction of average faces
By Gordon Rugg
In a previous article, we looked at what happens when you take two concepts that are normally viewed as opposites, and instead treat them as two separate concepts. We used the example of what happens when you treat liking and disliking as two separate concepts, and ask people to rate items in relation to both liking and disliking.
The result is that people are willing and able to do so. The image below shows types of response that we’ve seen in real data.
Item A has been rated low both for liking and for disliking; it’s just boring, with little to be said for or against it.
Item B has been rated high both for liking and for disliking; it produces strong but ambivalent feelings. An example that we saw involved university departmental websites, where some were strongly liked because they signalled high quality, but simultaneously strongly disliked because that same signal of high quality was viewed as implying unforgivingly high expectations.
Item C has been rated high like/low dislike by some participants, and low like/high dislike by others. This is informally known in the UK as the Marmite effect, where people either love something or hate it, with few people in between.
This approach of uncoupling apparent opposites is well established in some fields, but isn’t yet widely known outside them. We’ve been using it for a while in software evaluation, where it’s invaluable for improving software mockups before committing to the final design. We’ve also blogged about ways of using it to represent expressive and instrumental behaviour; handedness; and gender roles, going back to the literature where we first encountered it, in Bem’s work on androgyny (Bem, 1974).
The advantages of using this approach are clear when you see examples. In the next section, we’ll look at the background theory on which it works. We’ll then apply it to an apparently paradoxical finding about facial attractiveness, to show how the underlying issues can be swiftly and easily teased apart via this representation.
Background theory
In terms of underlying theory, what we’re doing in these cases is asking whether a pair of concepts are not the end points of a scale running from a negative to a positive value. Instead, we’re asking whether they might be better treated as two separate concepts, with each given its own scale.
Two situations where this approach is useful are when:
We’re dealing with portmanteau terms
We’re dealing with privatives
Portmanteau terms in this context are terms which lump together several different concepts, and treat them all as part of the same “bag” (hence the name portmanteau, a type of bag). The word “good” is often used as a portmanteau which subsumes assorted different attributes. Often, those attributes point in the same direction (for example, cheap and fast and reliable are usually all desirable qualities for a product or service). Sometimes, though, one or more of the terms within a portmanteau will point in the opposite direction to the others, so a product may be perceived as being good overall, but bad with regard to some of its attributes. In this context,using a pair of scales allows us to tease out the attitudes across a batch of several attributes.
A privative term in this context is a single attribute which fits on a scale which is anchored at one end with an absence, as opposed to a negative. For example, a reservoir and a bank balance can both have a positive value for their contents (litres of water in the reservoir, or money in a bank balance). However, the concept of a reservoir having a negative amount of water in it is meaningless, since it can’t go beyond empty, whereas the concept of a bank balance having a negative value is meaningful, since you can have an overdraft.
This distinction often causes problems for people trying to learn subjects such as physics. A classic example is that in physics, hot and cold are not treated as opposites; instead, cold is a low value for heat. Absolute zero in physics is the complete absence of heat; the concept of a value below this is by definition meaningless.
We’ll draw on both the concept of portmanteau terms and the concept of privatives in the examples and discussions that follow.
Aesthetics and threat
In the next example, we’ll apply this approach to beauty/ugliness, and show how it is a simple way of explaining an apparent paradox.
First, some background. There’s been a lot of research into perceptions of attractiveness in photographically averaged faces.
Photographically averaged faces are created by superimposing multiple photos of different people to create a single composite image, as in the example below. (I’ll resist the temptation to go into detail about issues involved in using categories such as “Mexican” as group identifiers.) This approach was originally developed by Galton in the 1870s, and has been extensively used since then, partly because it lends itself well to formal experimental designs, and partly because the development of cheap computing power made it easy to use in terms of logistics (hence the number of key papers on the topic that were published in the 1990s).
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/317433473717050031/ : Used under academic fair use terms
Research within this approach has consistently found that averaged faces are viewed as attractive, and that individual faces similar to the average are perceived as attractive (e.g. Komori et al, 2009(a); Komori et al, 2009(b); Trujillo et al, 2014).
However, research using this approach has also found that the averaged faces tend to be viewed as more attractive than any of the individual faces which went into the averaged photo. (Originally reported by Galton, and replicated by e.g. Langlois et al, 1994, and Rhodes et al, 1999).
This doesn’t initially appear to make sense, because by definition averages should not be higher than all of the component scores that go into the average, regardless of whether we’re talking about mean averages, medians or modes. Enquist et al (2002) give a good overview of the literature and of this apparent paradox.
Similarly, an article title by Alley & Cunningham (1991) neatly sums up another classic apparent paradox of averaged faces: “Averaged faces are attractive, but very attractive faces are not average”.
So what’s going on here?
There has been considerable discussion of this in the literature, typically in relation to evolutionary factors and in relation to cognitive factors, as in the articles cited above. Much of this is now well understood within the facial attractiveness research field, but not widely known outside it. I’ll return to both these themes in another article.
The figure below shows how these apparent paradoxes can be neatly explained via simply representing beauty and ugliness as separate concepts. The figure shows scores for three original photos and for an averaged photo from the three originals. For clarity and simplicity, it uses fictitious data to illustrate the underlying concepts. It also uses beauty and ugliness as the concepts involved, rather than attractiveness, for reasons that will become apparent in the discussion below.
Original photos 1, 2 and 3 (in stars) all have higher scores for beauty than does the averaged photo (A, in a circle).
However, the original photos all have medium values for ugliness. These will typically be due to minor facial blemishes.
In the averaged photo, those blemishes will be lost as a result of the averaging process, so the averaged photo will have a much lower score for ugliness than the individual photos.
In the image above, the results are easy to see: The averaged photo has a lower rating for beauty than the original photos, but it also has a lower value for ugliness.
So, if these results are compressed into a single scale, where beauty and ugliness are crunched into a single value for attractiveness, then the higher scores for ugliness in the original photos will drag down the higher scores for beauty in the original photos. The final outcome will depend on the values and the way of calculating the tradeoff between beauty and ugliness, but it’s perfectly possible to end up with a situation where an averaged photo comes out on a single scale as being more attractive overall than any of the original photos.
Conclusion
So, representing beauty and ugliness as two separate factors can make sense of an apparent paradox about perceptions of attractiveness. This has numerous practical implications, in fields ranging from reconstructive plastic surgery to market research.
This particular finding is well established in the literature on perceived facial attractiveness, but isn’t so well known elsewhere.
In the bigger picture, this raises broader questions, such as which other variables need to be included if we’re looking at attractiveness, and why there’s a lot of research into attractiveness, particularly attractiveness in women, but comparatively little research into ugliness.
There’s also the even bigger question of which other fields are treating core concepts as opposites when they might better be treated as separate.
The next article in this series will look at these questions.
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book: Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
Related articles:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/gordons-art-exhibition-part-2/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/likert-scales-and-questionnaires/
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
References
Alley, T.R. & Cunningham, M.R. (1991), Averaged Faces Are Attractive, but Very Attractive Faces Are Not Average. Psychological Science, 2(2), pp 123-125.
Bem, S. L. (1974), The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 42, pp 155-162.
Enquist, M., Ghirlanda, S., Lundqvist, D. & Wachtmeister, C-A. (2002). An ethological theory of attractiveness. In Rhodes, G. & Zebrowitz, L. (eds) (2002), Advances in Visual Cognition, Vol. 1: Facial Attractiveness, Ablex, Westport, CT.
Komori, M., Kawamura, S. & Ishihara, S. (2009a). Effect of averageness and sexual dimorphism on the judgment of facial attractiveness. Vision Research, 49, pp 862-869.
Komori, M., Kawamura, S. & Ishihara, S. (2009b). Averageness or symmetry: Which is more important for facial attractiveness? Acta Psychologica, 131(2), pp 136-142.
Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., & Musselman, L. (1994). What is average and what is not average about attractive faces? Psychological Science, 5, pp 214-220.
Rhodes, G., Sumich, A. & Byatt, G. (1999). Are average facial configurations attractive only because of their symmetry? Psychological Science, 10, pp 52-58.
Trujillo, L.T., Jankowitsch, J.M., & Langlois, J.H. (2014). Beauty is in the ease of the beholding: A neurophysiological test of the averageness theory of facial attractiveness. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 3, pp 1061-1076.
February 15, 2019
When liking and disliking aren’t opposites
By Gordon Rugg
Treating liking and disliking as opposite ends of the same scale looks so obvious that few people ever think about it. They’ve been viewed as opposites since at least Classical times, when Catullus wrote about the paradox of loving and hating the same person. However, this approach doesn’t actually work very well when you try applying it systematically in contexts like surveys or evaluation or market research. There are usually pros and cons that you’re asking the respondent to compress down into a single number, and respondents usually don’t look very happy about it.
So what happens if you instead try treating liking and disliking as two separate scales? The answer is that it gives you a lot of powerful new insights, because liking and disliking are often not opposites.
Here’s one way of doing it. It’s a more detailed description of an approach that I wrote about here.
With this approach, you first ask the person to rate how much they like the thing in question. The image below shows one way of doing this, using a visual analogue scale. The person does the rating by drawing a vertical line at the point corresponding to their answer, on the line running from “not at all” to “completely”.
You can now measure how far along this line is, giving you a number for how much they like the thing in question.
Now, you repeat the question with an identical scale, only this time, you ask them to show on the scale how much they dislike the thing in question.
In a simple world, you’d expect a person’s rating for how much they like something to balance out their rating for how much they dislike it. However, what you actually see is often different. When you ask people to talk you through the reasoning behind their responses, it starts to make a new type of sense.
The image below shows some classic patterns that you see when you use this approach. I’ve used fictitious data in the image for clarity.
For product A (blue triangles) the scores are very low on liking and also on disliking; the product is perceived as boring, with nothing particularly bad or good going for it.
For product B (black squares) the scores are high both on liking and disliking. There can be various reasons for this.
Sometimes, the thing being evaluated has some very good features but also some different very bad features.
Sometimes, a feature is perceived as both very good in some ways and very bad in others; for instance, a large car may be perceived as good because it has plenty of leg room and storage space, but bad because its size makes it difficult to park in town.
For product C (green circles) the scores are split between “high like/low dislike” and “low like, high dislike”. The classic example in the UK is Marmite, which tends to evoke “love it or hate it” responses from different people.
From a practical viewpoint, the advantage of showing responses this way is that it lets you see quickly and easily what you need to do.
For product A, which is neither particularly liked nor disliked, something needs to be added.
For product B, which produces high scores for liking and for disliking, something needs to be removed; you need to find out what is producing the high scores for dislike, and remove it if possible.
For product C, which produces the “Marmite response” you need to leave the product untouched, and to focus instead on marketing it to the customers who love it.
A common pattern is that the responses to an early version of a product are medium on liking, but high on disliking.
In this case, you need to find out what is causing the dislike, and to fix it. Often, this involves basic hygiene factors; unglamorous, unexciting, but usually simple and easy to fix.
You then need to find out what would cause people to like it more. One approach is to use elicitation techniques such as think-aloud and laddering, in case people can accurately tell you what would make them like it more. Another is to use idea generation techniques such as constraint relaxation, which I’ve written about here.
Conclusion
So, sometimes concepts which look like opposites are actually not opposites, and uncoupling them from each other can give you new insights into old problems. Liking and disliking aren’t the only pair of concepts that are usually treated as opposites, but which actually make more sense treated as separate dimensions.
In this article, I’ve looked at the practical implications of applying this approach to evaluation of products, services, etc, where it offers a quick, powerful and practical way of getting new insights into what customers and clients actually think.
In the next article, I’ll look at the underlying theory for this approach, and apply it to perceptions of beauty, ugliness and threat.
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book: Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
Related articles:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/instrumental-and-expressive-behaviour/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/false-dichotomies-in-education-theory/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/gordons-art-exhibition-part-2/
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
February 11, 2019
Desire, novelty, and the attractions of safe Necker shifts
By Gordon Rugg
So what do wireframe Necker cubes have to do with enigmatic facial beauty, Rothko paintings, Sudoku, and video games? The answer is: Quite a lot.
In this article I’ll look at the deep structure of some popular passtimes, and consider some of the implications. This is the first in a short series of articles about the deep structures of desire.
The enigmatic female smile has a long history in art and film, with the Mona Lisa as a classic example. The image below shows a modern example of an enigmatic smile. So what is it that makes the smile enigmatic, rather than standard-issue?
A key feature of this image is that it’s not symmetrical. This becomes more obvious if we take the left half of the image and mirror-image it into a new version of the face. The image below shows the result: A woman staring back at the camera, with her mouth unsmiling.
When we apply the same process to the other side of the original face, we see something very different. We now see a woman starting back at the camera, with the corners of her mouth raised in a slight smile.
This mirror-imaged face is also narrower than the other mirror-imaged face. The blank space on the left in the image above makes this easier to see. The image below shows the three faces next to each other.
When we see the three together, we also see a hint of something else. The eyes in the central image and the image on the right have a faint smile, but the cheek muscles don’t appear to be flexing the way that they would in a smile. So, the image appears to be sending out two sets of mixed signals. The first set involve the asymmetry in the mouth; the second set involves the contrast between slightly smiling eyes and unsmiling cheek muscles.
The bigger picture
Asymmetry in faces is something that artists and scientists have known about for a long time. The short version is that symmetrical faces tend to be viewed as more attractive than asymmetrical faces. This isn’t just a human issue; the same preference for symmetry is widely distributed in the animal kingdom, and has been documented in e.g. bees.
However, there’s more going on in the images above than just asymmetry. The face itself appears to be symmetrical; it’s the expression that is asymmetrical, with the two sides of the face showing different expressions.
This is where Necker shifts come in. In brief, a Necker shift occurs when you suddenly realise that there’s a completely different way of making sense of the same object or situation. It’s named after the Necker cube, which is the wireframe cube shown in the left of the banner image for this article. You can see a Necker cube as either coming out of the page, or going into the page, but you can only perceive it in one of these ways at a time.
I’ve blogged previously about how this maps onto humour, where the punchline is the point at which the audience sees the Necker shift onto a completely different explanation for the build-up. In the same article, I’ve looked at how it also maps onto some aspects of horror, where the audience suddenly sees a frighteningly different way of perceiving the same situation.
In the original asymmetric image of the woman’s face, one side of the face is definitely unsmiling, and the other side is definitely smiling. This sets up the image for Necker shifts between viewing the face as unsmiling, and viewing it as smiling.
Why would a photographer want to do this, if it was done deliberately? One possibility is that it’s a deliberate use of the Necker shift as a way to add interest to the image, since the viewer’s mind will be perpetually shifting between the unsmiling and the smiling interpretation. I’ve blogged here about how this principle can be used in architecture with geometric designs, and here about how it can be applied to some forms of abstract art, where the viewer can switch between different parsings of the same scene.
So, in brief, we can use the Necker shift to define one type of enigmatic smile; the type where a face can be parsed in two different ways, because different parts of the face are sending out different signals. In the image above, each side of the mouth is sending out a signal which is clear and unambiguous on its own, but which is completely different from the signal being sent out by the other side of the mouth.
This is different from the type of enigmatic smile where the viewer doesn’t see enough information to be able to parse the expression unambiguously. Again, this is about not being able to parse something, but with the “not enough information” type, there’s a different reason for not being able to parse it.
At a deeper level, this shows us the same underlying mechanism at work in several settings that are usually treated as completely separate, namely portraiture, architecture, horror and humour.
It’s also possible to see another set of underlying mechanisms that are common to a broader range of settings. Two repeated themes implicitly present through the discussion above are interestingness and the absence of threat.
The portraiture and architecture examples above involve Necker shifts being used to add ongoing interest to an artefact, so that an image or an area of tiling or whatever will continue to be interesting to look at for more than just an initial few seconds. The presence of Necker shifts in humour and some forms of horror is usually structurally different, because it’s intended to be used for a one-off sudden punchline or shock, rather than as an ongoing effect.
So what happens when we start looking for non-threatening problems with more than one possible solution, in other fields? The answer is that they start cropping up in a lot of places. Crosswords and Sudoku are two widespread passtimes that involve a non-threatening activity where there’s an extremely large set of possible solutions, and where the player has to solve the problem of whittling this set down to the one final correct solution. As with the “conflicting but clear signals” type of enigmatic smile, both crosswords and Sudoku involve a closed set of possible answers. Crosswords involve only words; Sudoku involves only numbers. There’s a similar underlying structure in problem-solving video games, which involve closed worlds with closed sets of options.
I’ve blogged previously about ways of measuring the complexity of games. Being able to measure their complexity opens up a fascinating set of possibilities that relate to work by e.g. Ramachandran and Hirstein on “sweet spots” for desire. With this approach, it should be possible to help someone find their individual sweet spot for the complexity of a game, or design, or whatever, and then to use this knowledge to find games, designs etc that are particularly likely to appeal to them. It should also be possible to produce some objective values for preferred complexity values across a population, so that we can design public spaces to be more attractive to more people.
In the next couple of articles, I’ll go further into the issues of attractiveness, ugliness, and threat, and of ways to represent them.
Notes, references and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book:
Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful: http://www.hydeandrugg.com/
January 22, 2019
Guest article: How to conduct a successful focus group
This is a guest article by Dan O’Neil; I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful.
How to conduct a successful focus group
By Dan O’Neill
While focus group methodology is often discussed in the context of market research, it is also used in a variety of research fields. Focus groups have been used to gather data on a wide range of research topics including: attitudes towards tobacco, meat quality, farming, electronic resources, patient quality, solar technology, health and safety, property management, and many more.
If you’re thinking about conducting a focus group for your own research, below are some fundamental things you’ll need to do to prepare for this type of study.
Select the right focus group members
Finding the right people for your research study can be difficult, but getting the selections right is crucial. The members selected must be chosen on the basis of their potential contributions, so it’s important to consider what you wish to learn from the group. There are two types of focus groups: homogenous and heterogeneous. Homogenous focus groups consist of members from similar backgrounds or those who have something in common (e.g. a focus group of criminal lawyers, or toolmakers.) Heterogeneous groups consist of people from different backgrounds with an interest in common, e.g. a variety of building professionals discussing school construction.
Focus groups typically range from six to twelve members, Best practices vary on what the minimum and maximum should be. However, more than twelve is generally difficult to manage and control, and could cause the moderator difficulty.
It is also common and good practice to offer an incentive (e.g. a meal, or another token of appreciation.)
Be sure to adhere to ethical protocol
A statement describing the purpose of the research and the focus group procedure and process, needs to be signed off on by participants in order to comply with ethical protocol.. This requires careful drafting. The significant questions are: Do members wish to remain anonymous? How long will you keep records of sensitive information? Where will information be stored? Members need to be informed and they need to consent to the terms of the study.
Choose a patient but effective moderator
You’ll need a moderator who can control the group and stop individuals from “hijacking” the conversation or interrupting. The moderator must remain impartial and prevent personal bias from interfering with discussion. This is why I would not recommend the researcher to act as moderator, as they’re too close to the research.
Select a safe and secure environment
The discussion needs to happen in a safe and secure area. It’s wise to avoid interruptions as they can interfere with good data collection. A room that makes group members feel comfortable is important, with easy access to refreshments and restrooms.
Record the session
Taking written notes is not adequate, so you’ll really need to record your session. I would recommend having a note-taker and also taking observational notes during the session. I would also recommend using audio recording equipment, as some members may feel uncomfortable being recorded on video. Make sure there is a minimum of three hours recording capacity and that the machine picks up the sound from the required radius.
Prepare a script
Prior to the session, you’ll need to create a script made up of carefully-chosen questions. I would recommend using prompts after each question to get more information in case the answers are insufficient. Questions are typically broken down as follows:
Introductory questions;
Transition questions;
Main questions;
Summary questions;
Concluding questions.
Watch the time
After two hours, people can get restless. I would not recommend a period of more than two and a half hours for a session if you can avoid it. Also, be sure to allow time for breaks as needed.
Provide refreshments
Regardless of whether a token of appreciation or enticement is given, refreshments are a must. Water, tea and coffee should be available on arrival, and throughout the meeting. Depending on the situation, the meeting duration, and the value of the data, a meal may also need to be provided. This is what makes focus groups more expensive than questionnaires and single interviews. If planning a meal, make sure to consider dietary requirements.
Ask yourself this series of questions before you begin.
Focus group methodology has been criticised with regards to what it can offer in market research compared to individual interviews, etc. However, I have found it to be a useful method for gathering data. Still, it takes a lot of preparatory work to undertake successfully, so I’d recommend asking yourself the following questions before you begin: What do I need this for? What are the alternatives? How many sessions will this require? How many groups will I need to develop a learning curve? What will be required? What are the costs? How will I analyse the data?
These are the main questions that need answering prior to embarking on your focus group study. Good luck!
Recommended reading:
LIAMPUTTONG, P. 2011. Focus group methodology: principle and practice, London, SAGE.
MASSEY, O. T. 2011. A proposed model for the analysis and interpretation of focus groups in evaluation research. Evaluation and Program Planning, 34, 21-28.
November 17, 2018
Mental models, medical misunderstandings, and expressive and instrumental behaviour
By Gordon Rugg
A frequent and enduring topic of complaints about medical professionals is their bedside manner.
Three common complaints are:
My doctor won’t listen to me
My doctor is cold and impersonal
My doctor doesn’t give me the facts
These can be explained and handled via the concepts of instrumental and expressive behaviour. Instrumental behaviour is about getting the job done; expressive behaviour is about showing how you feel about something. I’ve blogged about these concepts and their implications here and here and here.
These categories are not mutually exclusive; some people are very strong both on instrumental and on expressive behaviour, for instance. However, people tend to incline more to one than the other. The “people person” with good social skills is typically good on expressive behaviour, while the archetypal “techie” is strong on instrumental behaviour.
The issue of expressive versus instrumental behaviour is a common cause of serious misunderstandings across many domains; medicine is a classic case. Fortunately, many of these misunderstandings can be fairly easily prevented. In this article, I’ll describe the underlying concepts, and how to use them to reduce the number and severity of complaints.
My doctor won’t listen to me: Being fobbed off or written off
One common complaint involves the accusation that the doctor isn’t really listening to the patient. This is often linked to the accusation that the doctor is fobbing off the patient by giving them placebos to keep them happy, or writing off the patient as just attention-seeking or hypochondriac, with no actual illness.
In terms of instrumental and expressive behaviour, the doctor in these cases is implicitly deciding whether the patient’s behaviour is primarily instrumental or expressive. The doctor probably won’t be using the concepts of instrumental and expressive behaviour by those names, since they’re not well known in medicine. Instead, the doctor will probably be using concepts that are similar but not identical, such as emotional versus practical. If the doctor decides that the patient’s behaviour is primarily expressive, then they will focus on the patient’s feelings, rather than on the patient’s facts.
A significant issue is that a doctor might treat a patient’s detailed account of their symptoms as just a particularly elaborate form of expressive behaviour (“look how many symptoms I’m telling you that I have”) rather than as an honest report that can be taken pretty much at instrumental face value.
My doctor/nurse is cold and impersonal, or my doctor/nurse won’t give me the facts
I’ve tackled these two complaints together, because they can be explained as two outcomes of the same underlying issue.
If we divide people into the categories of mainly instrumental and mainly expressive, then we can show what happens when these categories interact, as shown in the table below. For brevity, I’ve used the term “professional” to include doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare professionals.
If a healthcare professional and a patient are both in the same category, then their interaction is likely to go well. However, if they are in different categories, then their interaction is likely to go badly.
If the healthcare professional is instrumental and the patient is expressive, then the patient will view the professional as being cold and impersonal and uncaring.
Conversely, if the healthcare professional is expressive and the patient is instrumental, then the patient will think that the professional is not explaining or giving facts, and is being vague.
This model explains why a healthcare professional may be strongly liked by some patients and strongly disliked by others. It also explains why complaints about healthcare staff in a hospital or practice may appear to be mutually contradictory (e.g. too much focus on the bedside manner, or too little focus on the bedside manner).
Implications
Mismatches between professional and patient
I’ll deal with the mismatch issue first, because it can be handled fairly easily.
One simple strategy is to use the “sandwich approach”. For instance, the doctor can sandwich a chunk of instrumental information between two chunks of expressive behaviour. This would take the form of reassuring words, followed by factual information, followed by further reassuring words. This format has the advantage of containing both expressive and instrumental content, so that the doctor is giving the patient necessary factual information, as well as expressive reassurance. The ratio of reassurance to facts can be tweaked in light of the doctor’s judgment about the patient’s preferences.
Another strategy is to handle this via letting patients choose their own preferred doctor within a medical practice, if the practice uses that approach.
Fobbing off and writing off
The issue of fobbing off or writing off is more complex. When a patient shows up with a long, detailed story about medical problems, the doctor has to assess whether the patient is engaging in instrumental behaviour or expressive behaviour. In normal circumstances, it’s usually fairly easy to tell which type of behaviour a person is exhibiting. In the context of a patient with a long, detailed story, however, it’s more difficult.
If a patient has been suffering for an extended time from an undiagnosed physical problem, then they will not be at their best when seeing the doctor. Factors such as pain, exhaustion and frustration can easily turn into bursts of expressive behaviour such as anger, which will make the doctor more likely to think that the patient is being primarily expressive, and does not have a genuine underlying physical problem.
It’s not an easy call, and I don’t have any magic solution. However, I hope that this article will help to improve the overall quality of interaction between patients and medical professionals, even if it doesn’t cure all ills…
Notes and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book:
Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful:
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
November 6, 2018
Mental models, and games people play
By Gordon Rugg
There are patterns in the ways that people interact. This article is about those patterns, and their implications.
I’ll start with a pattern known as “Ain’t it awful”. In this pattern, the other person wants you to agree with them that things are awful. I’ve shown this diagrammatically below. The interaction starts with you saying something; I’ve shown this with a white circle. They then respond with something negative, represented by a grey circle. For instance, you might tell them that you’re thinking of buying an electric car. They react by saying something about problems with electric cars.
They now want you to respond with something negative; for instance, “That’s the trouble with new technology, you can’t depend on it”. The interaction is then supposed to follow the same pattern of “Ain’t it awful” in a nice, predictable way, as shown below.
This may be nice and safely predictable for them, but it’s not so nice for you if you don’t want to be told about things being awful, and it’s not so predictable for you if you’re expecting a different type of interaction.
In the rest of this article, I’ll look at ways in which interactional patterns can play out.
The pattern names in this article come from Eric Berne’s work, in books such as Games people play, and What do you say after you say hello?
A central feature of Berne’s transactional analysis (TA) approach is that it uses a very accessible style, with names for the patterns that come from everyday life. It’s also very practical and hands-on, as regards the implications of the patterns, and what to do about them. He uses the word games rather than patterns; this makes sense in the context where he was working, but it can give misleading impressions in other contexts, which is why I’m using patterns. The TA approach is in essence a subset of script theory, couched in everyday language.
Here’s an example of the Ain’t it awful pattern leading to problems. In the diagram below, you’re trying to pitch something to an Ain’t it awful player. They may be a potential customer, or a client with problems that you’re trying to solve. You start by suggesting something that could make their life better (yellow circle). They respond with something negative. You try again with something positive; they respond negatively. You try again and… and at this point you’ve probably lost them, because you’re not following the pattern that they want you to follow.
There’s a very similar pattern called Why don’t you…? Yes, but… whose name sums up the strategy pretty neatly. In this pattern, you make helpful suggestions, and they come up with objections each time.
The Why don’t you…? Yes, but… pattern can lead to a lot of problems for two main reasons which are diametrically opposite to each other.
Sometimes it causes problems because you don’t realise that the other person is following the pattern, and you waste a lot of time and effort trying to fix a problem that they won’t let you fix. Other times, it causes problems because the professional thinks that someone is following this pattern and writes them off as a time waster, when in fact the person is genuinely trying to get the problem fixed, and the obvious solutions to the problem have all failed.
Once you’re aware of this issue, you can learn ways of telling whether you’re dealing with someone following this pattern, or with someone who has a genuinely difficult problem. You won’t always get it right, but you’ll at least improve your overall success rate.
The two patterns above can be frustrating and can waste a lot of time, but they’re usually not actively harmful. The next pattern I’ll describe, however, can be dangerous. It’s known as Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch, or NIGYYSOB for short. It tends to catch people completely by surprise the first time they encounter it, and to leave people shaken and distrustful for a long time after that first encounter. Here’s how it works.
You’re dealing with someone, such as a client. They make a friendly first response, and invite you to be less formal (light green circle). You respond in kind (darker green circle). This pattern repeats, luring you further and further into informality, until suddenly they respond in a completely different and very negative way (black circle). A classic pattern is the client saying that you don’t need to bother with formal documentation for something, and that a verbal agreement will do, starting with something small and then shifting to bigger and bigger issues by gentle steps. Then, suddenly, they query your invoice for a large amount, and you don’t have the paper trail that should have protected you.
Why anyone would want to behave like this is an interesting question, and is the reason that Berne spent much of his life developing his approach to making sense of human behaviour. I won’t go into that issue, because it goes far beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I’ll cut to the lesson from this pattern, which is that once you know about NIGYYSOB, you can protect yourself from it by simply following a clear, consistent policy that stops you getting sucked into the pattern. If you meet a NIGYYSOB player, they’ll usually lose interest pretty fast when they realise that you won’t let yourself get dragged into their pattern.
I’ll end on a happier note, with another pattern that may waste your time, but that is unlikely to cause actual harm. It’s called General Motors. This pattern involves comparing different types of car (or music, or superhero, or whatever). A key point is that it’s not supposed to end with a decision about one being better than the other; it’s supposed to be an open-ended structure where people can talk in a nice, safe way about a topic of mutual interest.
This can lead to misunderstandings if you’re trying to tell someone about the advantages of your solution, and they think that you’re playing General Motors. The pattern that you want to use looks identical to the pattern that they want to use, with you talking about the advantages of your offering (yellow circle) and them comparing it to the advantages of their favoured option (blue circle). At first, you think that they’re genuinely considering the pros and cons, and that they’re open to being persuaded to buy what you’re selling; eventually, you realise that this isn’t going to happen, and you give up in frustration. On a happier note, if you realise early on that this is the pattern, you can at least have a well-informed conversation about a topic that you love with someone who enjoys discussing it with you…
There’s been a fair amount of interesting work using Berne’s approach. One promising strand was work by Maital and Maital, described in their book Economic Games People Play. This was particularly interesting because it connected Berne’s work with game theory, in an attempt to identify ways of changing workplace and societal behavioural patterns to produce better outcomes for everyone. It didn’t quite take off, but it has a lot of potential, and would bear re-examination.
If you want to find out more about this approach, Berne’s books are very accessible and practical, easy to find, and very reasonably priced. You don’t need to buy in to his underlying psychological theory; you can use the behaviour patterns on their own terms, independent of his model.
This approach interacts in interesting ways with the concepts of instrumental and expressive behaviour, but that’s a topic for another article, another time…
Notes and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book:
Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful:
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
October 26, 2018
Mental models, and making sense of crazy uncles
By Gordon Rugg
The crazy uncle is a well-established and much-dreaded part of Western culture. There’s probably a very similar figure in other cultures too, but in this article, I’ll focus on the Western one, and on what is going on in his head.
Why are crazy uncles permanently angry, and keen to inflict their opinions, prejudices and conspiracy theories on other people? Some parts of the answer are already well covered in popular media and in specialist research, but other parts are less well known.
In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of the better known elements, and then combine them with insights from knowledge modeling, and see what sort of answer emerges.
Topics well covered elsewhere
The literature on the authoritarian personality dates back over half a century, and provides a good set of insights into this worldview. The classic book on the topic can be downloaded free here. As you might suspect, there has been considerable debate about this subject in the research community; the Wikipedia article gives a good overview.
The term “authoritarian personality” can imply that there is some sort of Platonic essence of authoritarian personality. That interpretation of the phrase is not very productive; a more fruitful model involves thinking in terms of beliefs which commonly co-occur. This is similar to, but not identical to, the concept of political tribes.
For brevity, I won’t go into that topic further here; instead, I’ll focus on the classic core beliefs of the uncle. I’ll start with points from the authoritarian personality literature, and then look at what knowledge modeling can add to our understanding of this issue.
Insights from the classic literature
Binary thinking: One prominent feature of crazy uncle thinking is that it involves a lot of binary either/or categorisation. There’s good or bad, right or wrong, us or them, with nothing in between. This extends into gender roles, social roles (e.g. leaders or followers) and politics (left or right).
This type of categorisation gives a lot of power to whoever decides where the boundary is drawn between the two categories. I’ve blogged about the implications for inter-group dynamics here.
Purity: A related feature of this worldview is that one of the categories within each pair is treated as a “pure” category, which can be contaminated by even a single drop of the “impure” category, as in the mocha model. This extends beyond the obvious implications for racial prejudice into areas such as welfare policy, where it manifests as e.g. a desire to stamp out all fraud completely, even at the cost of refusing welfare to some honest claimants.
Duties and hierarchies, versus consent: The topic of welfare highlights another key feature of this worldview, which is that it’s heavily grounded in concepts of hierarchy and authority. It believes that people owe obedience to those above them, and have power over those below themselves. In this worldview, the role of being an uncle automatically entitles an individual to various forms of respect from nephews and nieces.
In principle, the role of uncle also entails various responsibilities towards the nephews and nieces, but this isn’t symmetrical with their responsibilities to him, since he perceives his higher role in the hierarchy as involving judgment; if he perceives the nephews and nieces as falling short of their duties, he sees it as his role to scold or punish them.
This is very different from the view that individuals work out among themselves what their relationships will be, on a case-by-case basis.
This can be represented neatly via graph theory, in terms of trees versus nets.
Listening to authority figure thought leaders: Another feature of the hierarchical worldview is the role of thought leaders. From a knowledge modeling viewpoint, this reduces the cognitive load on the authoritarian follower, because the thought leader does the heavy thinking for them, and produces an easy-to-grasp conclusion.
From the socio-political and theological viewpoints, one interesting issue is that authoritarian followers usually can and do shop around for thought leaders whose conclusions suit the follower. This has far-reaching implications for populist religion, where there’s more competition for followers than is the case with more institutionalised religions.
This tends to lead to a higher rate of “doctrinal churn” in populist religion and politics, where thought leaders have strong incentives to come up with concepts that will have immediate appeal to followers, such as the prosperity gospel, even if the internal logic or theological grounding of those concepts have room for improvement.
Inherently right and wrong: A common feature of authoritarian thought is the belief that various things are inherently right or wrong. This belief doesn’t stand up well to questioning. If you do question it, the authoritarian will often appeal to nature or to history (“it’s natural, look at the animal kingdom” or “it’s always been like this”). If you show that this reasoning is logically and/or factually wrong, then you’re likely to get a furious response, because you’re threatening the underpinnings of their entire worldview, including everything that they value.
Insights from knowledge modeling
The topics above have been well covered by others. In this section, I’m going to pick up on some points that have been noticed but underestimated in previous work, and others points that have gone largely un-noticed.
Expressive and instrumental behaviour: A recurrent theme in the topics above has been that the authoritarian worldview is often internally inconsistent, and/or inconsistent with reality if you think through the implications for more than one or two steps. This makes much more sense if you view what the uncle says as expressive behaviour, affirming his belief group’s values, rather than instrumental behaviour, about actually getting something done. I’ve blogged about this here and here and here.
Short span of implications: Even when you do factor in the role of expressive behaviour, one striking feature of authoritarian worldviews is that they often use a very short span of implications. This would bear more detailed investigation; it’s tempting to think that people who can’t handle long spans of implications will be drawn towards simplistic worldviews with short spans of implications, but that’s just a speculation at the moment.
Pre-emptive closure and construing and box-ticking: A related issue is that authoritarian personalities tend to stop at the first possible solution that looks okay to them, rather than going for an overview of the problem as a whole, or testing the possible solutions. This can manifest itself via cherry-picked statistics, or talking point factoids, which use single examples without a broader context. It also appears in reaction to proposed innovations, as “Oh, we already do that” where the person pattern matches onto one surface feature of the innovation, and then pigeonholes it as being the same as something that they already know.
Surface features of conformity versus deep structure: Authoritarian worldviews also tend to be keen on easily visible surface features of conformity, such as hairstyles and clothing. This interacts with the issue of binary categorisation, leading to a desire for easily visible markers of group membership (e.g. male versus female clothing and hairstyles). There’s typically less emphasis on less easily observable, deep structure, issues. A common finding when surveying self-described evangelical Christians, for instance, is that they often know very little about core Christian theological issues; typically, less than atheists do.
Conspiracy theories: Because many core features of authoritarian thought involve a fairly superficial approach to facts, they tend to clash with reality sooner or later. Authoritarian individuals aren’t usually strong on admitting that they were wrong, because they perceive that as entailing a loss of status, so they’re often very receptive to conspiracy theories as a way of reconciling their beliefs with a version of reality.
Front and back versions: Most of the issues above involve a mismatch between actual reality and simplistic views of reality. The issue of front and back versions in this context involves a different dynamic, and hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves.
The concept of front and back versions was introduced by Goffman in the 1950s. The name comes from the metaphor of the theatre, where there’s the front of stage version of the performance, versus what goes on backstage. This distinction is widespread throughout everyday life, with people systematically behaving in one way to outsiders (customers, clients, students, etc) and in another way behind the scenes with colleagues.
A key point here is that there’s usually little or no intention to deceive; for instance, nobody thinks that the actors on stage are actually killing Caesar. This is so much taken for granted that it is used as the humorous punchline in one of the Naked Gun films. The front version is often used to reassure nervous patients or clients, in the case of doctors or airline pilots, or as a polite way of avoiding social taboos (e.g. euphemisms that sidestep the need to mention toilets).
A common criticism of authoritarian individuals is that they are hypocritical about morality, claiming to be virtuous while actually behaving badly. (This is different from some religious views of humans as sinful, which lead into theological issues that go outside the scope of this article.)
Some of this apparent hypocrisy makes more sense if you view it in terms of front and back versions of morality. In this view, there’s the front version which you profess in public as expressive behaviour, and there’s an acceptable back version which one doesn’t talk about. In addition, within this worldview, there are things which are unacceptable, even as back versions, though in reality the boundary between acceptable back versions and unacceptable things is usually vague, and subject to a lot of motivated reasoning.
This also makes sense of why authoritarian personalities often view mentions of their hypocrisy as “uncivil”. By definition, back versions aren’t mentioned, and discussing them with outsiders is impolite.
Pulling it together
When you pull together the issues above, a lot of features of crazy uncle worldviews become more understandable. Not necessarily right, but understandable…
Manners: He has a different model of good manners from most of his nephews and nieces. He believes that he is owed respect because of being an uncle, but that he doesn’t owe the same amount back to the nephews and nieces, because part of his role as uncle involves assessing how well they have behaved, and what they have earned. He also believes that it’s rude to discuss some topics because they should be treated as back versions.
Angry: He perceives society as sliding into disrespect, rudeness and immorality, so he feels a range of emotions; anger is a prominent case in point.
Exasperated: Something that’s received less attention is that he’s also permanently exasperated. He believes that problems are simple, with simple solutions, and he thinks that other people either can’t see this, or are producing objections because they’re nit-pickers or obstructive. This makes him frustrated and exasperated.
Fearful: He’s fearful of loss of status, because of social changes; again, this is well covered in the literature on the authoritarian personality.
A less widely known but highly relevant finding from the work on human bias is that people in general are very loss-averse, and that this often plays out in paradoxical ways. For instance, someone who gains something and then loses a little of it will typically feel less happy than someone who finds a smaller amount, even if the first person still ends up with more overall than the second person.
So, what can you do about improving the situation?
You probably won’t get far with an evidence-based logical demonstration of why he’s factually wrong in his core beliefs and reasoning. In system theory terms, that will produce a strong feedback loop, where he will defend his beliefs even more furiously because of feeling threatened. Yelling at him will usually be equally counterproductive, and will strengthen him in his belief that the younger generation have bad manners.
However, change is possible. Some methods that often work are as follows. They’re all well established in the literature on belief change, but usually they’re described at a pragmatic level; I’ve located them within more systematised concepts, which provide a more powerful way of applying them.
Clashing scripts, schemata and facets: One common route for change occurs when two beliefs within the uncle’s worldview come into conflict with each other. I’ve blogged previously about ways of describing worldviews in terms of scripts and schemata and facet theory. A classic example is the conflict between being polite to guests, and being rude to members of out-groups, if you bring along a guest who is a member of an out-group when you visit the uncle. Often, the belief about politeness to guests takes priority. Not always, but often. From there, it’s a short step to the uncle viewing that particular individual as okay, on the basis that they’re an exception to his generalisation about that out-group. There’s still a long way to go before the uncle changes his mind about that out-group as a whole, but it’s a start.
Small cumulative changes beneath the radar: A related issue involves the span of consistency. The uncle may be unwilling to make a significant break from his previous beliefs in one step, but may change towards a new view via a series of small steps, if each of those steps is within his span of consistency, so that he can reassure himself that he’s not abandoning his core beliefs.
Tacit learning versus explicit learning: A related strand involves various forms of tacit learning, where the person gradually learns something without being aware that they are learning it, or aware of how they are learning it. Often, this occurs via nonverbal cues, such as the nephews and nieces frowning when the uncle behaves in one way, and smiling when he behaves in another. They’re often not aware that they’re doing it. This sort of nudge has the advantage of being below the uncle’s radar, and therefore less likely to trigger a feedback loop where he pushes back.
I’ll end on that positive note. I hope that this article helps someone, somewhere, to build a happier set of family relationships…
Notes and links
You’re welcome to use Hyde & Rugg copyleft images for any non-commercial purpose, including lectures, provided that you state that they’re copyleft Hyde & Rugg.
There’s more about the theory behind this article in my latest book:
Blind Spot, by Gordon Rugg with Joseph D’Agnese
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Gordon-Rugg/dp/0062097903
You might also find our website useful:
Overviews of the articles on this blog:
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/the-knowledge-modelling-book/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/200-posts-and-counting/
https://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/150-posts-and-counting/
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