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“The Steroids of Scientific Competition”
A week or so ago, I wrote up some new research showing how easy it is for psychological scientists to falsify experimental results. The point of the report, published on-line in the journal Psychological Science, was not that researchers are deliberately, or mischievously, reporting bogus findings. The point was instead that commonly accepted practices for reporting and analyzing data can lead inadvertently to invalid conclusions. According to the authors of the paper, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Berkeley, the commonly accepted “false positive” rate of 5 percent could in reality run as high as 60 percent if all these practices come into play.
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Scientific “freedom” and the Fountain of Youth
“Chronological rejuvenation” is psychological jargon for the Fountain of Youth, that elusive tonic that, when we find it, will reverse the aging process. Though many of us would welcome such a discovery, most of us also know it’s a fantasy, a scientific impossibility. So imagine my surprise when I came across this passage while browsing the journal Psychological Science.
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Youth vs Age: Who Makes the Better Decisions?
It’s 2031, and you are among the first humans to set foot on Mars. You and the other pioneering astronauts have discovered that there is actually a small amount of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, but you need to figure out how to extract it. The future colonization of the Red Planet depends on your success in this task. Imagine you’re the leader of this mission, and you have two oxygen extraction systems that might work. You need to pick someone to test the two competing systems, and you have two equally qualified candidates. One is an up-and-comer, just turned 20 and eager to make his mark. The other is 67, a veteran. Which do you put in charge of this crucial job?
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The Nuts and Bolts of Emotional Sobriety
One of the cornerstones of alcoholism recovery is what’s called “emotional sobriety.” The idea is that alcoholics and other addicts, if they hope to stay sober over the long haul, must learn to regulate the negative feelings that can lead to discomfort, craving and—ultimately—relapse. It’s a lifelong project, a whole new way of thinking about life’s travails. But the recovery literature also says “first things first”—which simply means “don’t drink.” Especially in the early days of recovery, alcoholics are counseled not to analyze why they are addicted, or how they might have avoided alcoholism: “Don’t think and don’t drink” is the maxim.
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How Not To Cope With a Personal Insult
Humans have always had to cope with threats, both big and small. The physical and life-threatening threats that our ancestors faced have largely been replaced by social threats, but they are nonetheless an emotional menace: Insults, rejections and criticism can undermine our integrity and self-esteem, even our sense that the world is a meaningful place. Sometimes we cope with these threats smoothly, and other times awkwardly—sometimes disastrously. Is there a single, most effective strategy for dealing with life’s constant battering?
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The Cluelessness of the Psychopath
Hannibal Lecter is arguably the world’s most famous psychopath. I know—he’s not real. Still, the anti-hero of The Silence of the Lambs embodies the chilling constellation of traits generally associated with this rare mental disorder. A highly intelligent physician and psychiatrist, Lecter is superficially charming, even urbane—at least when he’s not cannibalizing his innocent victims. He is rarely emotional, and despite the brutality of his crimes, he shows absolutely no evidence of empathy or a guilty conscience. That’s what makes psychopaths so mysterious and incomprehensible—the lack of normal human feeling. How could somebody’s child develop into that kind of merciless automaton?
