Ed Wilson's Naturalist - a great biography of a fascinating environmentalist & scientist

I finished reading E.O. Wilson's biography 'Naturalist' yesterday. It took me a few pages to get into it, but it provided a fascinating glimpse into the life and philosophy of one of the most outstanding biologists and scientists still alive. He created some of the greatest controversies in science in modern times (the sociobiology debate), popularized the term 'evolutionary biology' and has made a huge impact on the environmental movement the world over (with helping to coin the term biodiversity and advancing the biophilia hypothesis - well, in the book he makes it clear that he did not invent the term biodiversity and initially even objected to it).

It is the self-portray of a highly introvert, but extremely ambitious individual, obsessed with understanding biological diversity (especially of ants), often plagued by insecurity and self-doubt, but also extreme boldness, political naivety and self-assurance that have landed him in a few hot spots.
I really appreciated his explanations of how he got to the intellectual positions that he was arguing for, his willingness to listen and change perspective if proven wrong and his very honest style of writing. The book provides quite a few back stories about the politics and history of a particular era of modern science and interesting perspectives on a number of major scientists. I was certainly not aware of the importance that Watson and the molecular revolution had on biology and the major debates (Wilson called them the molecular wars) that it created. But looking across the buildings to my biology colleagues, it explains a few of the ongoing debates and peculiarities.
I came across a reference to this autobiography in Sense and Nonsense, Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown's great summary of evolutionary approaches to human behaviour. Ed Wilson is a central and controversial figure in this whole approach and since I am going to teach a session on evolutionary approaches to culture, I thought I might as well have a look what Wilson had to say about his own life and work. It was a rewarding read and provided many insights to an important era of biology. Nearly every second page had quotes worth noting down, a true gem with good explanations and interesting advice to young and experienced scientists. I may not always agree with him, but he certainly has achieved a lot with his style, approach and determination. Since I may use some of them for my own writing and teaching, I am going to share some of these quotes as well as some longer summaries of key ideas here.

Over to Wilson himself....

His three big truths (all page numbers refer to the 1994 Island Press edition):

First, humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosophy and religion make little sense without taking into account these first two conceptions (p.363)

On his ambitions as a young scientist and the social nature of science (p.210):

... I was still obsessed by an elemental self-image: hunter in the magical forest, searching not just for animals now but also for ideas to bring home as trophies. A naturalist, real and then more metaphorical, a civilized hunter. I was destined to be more of an opportunist than a problem solver. The boy inside me still made my career decisions: I just wanted to be the first to find something, anything, the more important the better, but something as often as possible, to own it a little while before relinquishing it to others. I confess that to the degree I was insecure, I was also ambitious. I hungered for the recognition and support that discovery in science brings. To make this admission does not embarrass me now as it would have when I was young. All the scientists I know share a desire for fair recognition of their work. Acknowledgements is their silver and gold, and why they are usually very careful to grant deserved authority priority to others while so jealously guarding their own. New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given [note: I really like this phrase]. 

On the ideal conditions for developing as a scientist - or as a political revolutionary (I love the analogy) (p. 108):

Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Given them an exciting new idea tha can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by a few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary test, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon.... Bring on a local role model, an older man or woman who promotes The Idea and embodies in his character and working habits the ideals of the youthful discipline. 

Another quote that shows his ambition (p. 232):

By this time I had been radicalized in my views about the future of biology [here he refers to what was called the molecular wars, the discovery of the double helix by Watson - one of his colleagues and how this led to a major split in biology]. I wanted more than a sanctuary across the street, complete with green eyeshades, Cornell drawers of pinned specimens, and round-trip air tickets for field work in Panama. I wanted a revolution in the ranks of the young evolutionary biologists. I felt driven to go beyond the old guard of Modern Synthesizers and help start something new. That might be accomplished, I thought, by the best effort of men my age (men, I say, because women were still rare in the discipline) who were as capable and ambitious as the best molecular biologists. I did not know how such an enterprise might be started, but clearly the first requirement was a fresh vision from the young and ambitious. I began to pay close attention to those in other universities who seemed like-minded. 

On different types of scientists (p.210):

 Scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success a life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science. It is the latter who stay active in research for a lifetime. 

On paradigm shifts in science (p. 220):

When one culture sets out to erase another, the first thing its rulers banish is the official use of the native tongue (referring to the bad meaning that 'ecology' had taken on after the molecular revolution). 

On the importance of enemies (p. 218):

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. The made me suffer (after all, they were enemies), but I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions. We need such people in our creative lives. As John Stuart Mill once put it, both teachers and learners fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field.  

An observation of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a science guru who inspired large number of young scientists and how he managed to do this (p. 237):

He did nothing, except welcome into his office every graduate student who wished to see him, praise everything they did, and with insight and marginal scholarly disgressions, find at least some merit in the most inchoate of research proposals. He soared above us sometimes, and at others he wandered alone in a distant terrain, lover of the surprising metaphor and the esoteric example. He resisted successfully the indignity of being completely understood. He encouraged his acolytes to launch their own voyages. 

Wilson's advise for young scientists to develop their own field of research (p.123, after having discussed his failings to become a champion runner):

I have evolved a rule that has proved useful for myself and might be for others not born with championship potential: for every level of mathematical ability there exists a field of science poorly enough developed to support original theory. The advice I give to students in science is to move laterally and up and down and peer all around. If you have the will, there is a discipline in which you can succeed. Look for the ones still thinly populated, where fine differences in raw ability matter less. Be a hunter and explorer, not a problem solver. Perhaps the strategy can never work for track (running), with one distance and one clock. But it serves wonderfully well at the shifting frontiers of science. 

Scientific summaries and comments on sociobiology

On genetic determinism (p.332-333):

Genetic determinism, the central objection raised against book two (the chapter on humans), is the bugbear of the social sciences. So what I said that can be indeed called genetic determinism needs saying again here. My argument ran essentially as follows. Human being inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structure, a propensity that is shaped by enough people to be called human nature. The defining traits include division of labor between the sexes, bonding between parents and children, heightened altruism toward closest kin, incest avoidance, other forms of ethical behavior, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, dominance orders within groups, male dominance overall, and territorial aggression over limiting resources. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless - however much we might wish otherwise - cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than in others. So while cultures vary greatly, the inevitably converge toward these traits. The Manhattanite and the New Guinea highlander have been separated by 50,000 years of history but still understand each other, for the elementary reason that their common humanity is preserved in the genes they share from their common ancestry. 

... the important point is that heredity interacts with environment to create a gravitational pull toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies into the narrow statistical circle that we define as human nature.

Page 335-336:

What made Sociobiology notorious then was its hybrid nature. Had the two parts of the book been published separately, the biological core would have been well received by specialists in animal behavior and ecology, while the writings on human behavior might easily have been dismissed or ignored. Placed between the same two covers, however, the whole was greater than the sum of its part. The human chapters were rendered creditable by the massive animal documentation, while the biology gained added significance from the human implications. The conjunction created a  syllogism that proved unpalatable to many: Sociobiology is part of biology, biology is reliable; therefore human sociobiology is reliable.

In fact, I would love to quote large sections of chapters 16 and 17, because they contain so much rich material on the history and dynamics of the debate and how Wilson saw himself in the middle of this political mix.

Here is another important development, one that is often ignored. Having being challenged extensively for his application of sociobiology to humans, in particular the challenge of ignoring culture, he developed the concept of gene-culture-coevolution together with Charles Lumsden. Here is a longer quote with a summary of the basic premises (p.350-352).

We reasoned as follows. Everyone knows that human social behavior is transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. The brain in turn is a highly structure organ and a product of genetic evolution. It possesses a host of biases programmed through sensory reception and the propensity to learn certain things and not others. These biases guide culture to a still unknown degree. In the reverse direction, the genetic evolution of the most distinctive properties of the brain occurred in an environment dominated by culture. Changes in culture therefore must have affected those properties. So the problem can be more clearly cast in these terms: how have genetic evolution and cultural evolution interacted to created the development of the human mind? ... We were looking for the basic process that directed the evolution of the human mind. We concluded that it is a particular form of interaction of genes and culture. This "gene-culture coevolution", as we called it, is an eternal cycle of change in heredity and culture. Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgement, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from those available. We called these competing behaviours and mental abstractions "culturgens". They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as "memes". ... Each time an individual modifies his memories or makes decisions, he entrains intricate sequences of physiological events that run frist from the perception of visual images, sounds, and other stimuli, then to the storage and recall of information from long-term memory, and finally to the emotional assessment of perceived objects and ideas. Not all culturgenes are treated equally; cognition has not evolved as a wholly neutral filter. The mind incorporates and uses some far more readily than others. ... All are diagnostic of the human species, all part of what must reasonably be called human nature. Such physiologically based preferences, called "epigenetic rules", channel cultural transmission in one direction instead of another. By this means they influence the outcome of cultural evolution. It is here, through the physical events of cognition, that the genes act to shape mental development and culture. The full cycle of gene-culture coevolution as we conceived it is the following. Some choices confer greater survival and reproductive rate. As a consequence, certain epigenetic rules, those that predispose the mmind toward the selection of successful culturgens, are favored during the course of genetic evolution. Over many generations, the human population as a whole has moved toward one particular "human nature" out of a vast number of natures possible. It has fashioned certain patterns of cultural diversity from an even greater number of patterns possible.  

 This book has helped me appreciate and re-evaluate his work on a different level. I hope this is reflected in my teaching ;)

How to do a pancultural factor analysis - a simple option

I am going to demonstrate a simple way of doing what is often called a pan-cultural or culture-free factor analysis in the cross-cultural literature (even though I do not like those terms) in SPSS. In the methods literature, this is also sometimes called a pooled-within analysis.

The basic problem is: How can you analyze the data from a large number of samples in an efficient way without giving priority to any data set? This is particularly interesting when you deal with data from lots of different cultures and you would like to find a solution that is averaged across all samples or 'culture-free' - capturing the average human being.

Such a solution could be interesting in its own right. It can also be useful as a reference structure for further Procrustean analyses (see my earlier blog post here).

Let's work with an example. I took the 1995 World Value Survey scores for Morally Debatable Behaviour (see a published analysis of the data here).

You will need to create the average correlation matrix first. The simplest way in SPSS is via Discriminant Function Analysis. Go to Classify (under 'Analyze') and select 'Discriminant'. Transfer the variables that you want to analyze into the Variables box. Then transfer your cluster or independent variable (your samples from different countries or cultures) into the 'Grouping Variable' box. You need to tell SPSS what the range of your country/sample codes is. In this case, the first sample is 1 (France) and the last sample in the data base is 101 (Bosnian Serb sample).

To request the average correlation, click on statistics. There you need to click on 'Pooled-Within Correlation'. Not much else that we need right now, so click 'Continue' and 'Ok'. In the output, you will see the table with the pooled-within correlation matrix right after the lengthy group statistics.

There are two options now. Either way, you need to get the correlation matrix.
One option is to open a syntax file in SPSS and to type this command and include the proper correlation matrix from your output as well as the overall N:

MATRIX DATA VARIABLES=benefits publictransport  tax stolengoods bribe homosexual prostitution abortion divorce euthanasia suicide
/contents=corr
/N=84887.
BEGIN DATA.
1.000
.434 1.000
.422 .516 1.000
.329 .429 .427 1.000
.338 .410 .428 .482 1.000
.232 .232 .244 .239 .267 1.000
.216 .249 .247 .274 .282 .544 1.000
.218 .238 .248 .266 .256 .334 .424 1.000
.204 .259 .252 .268 .273 .286 .355 .492 1.000
.220 .216 .235 .220 .233 .308 .295 .315 .327 1.000
.180 .210 .213 .239 .231 .275 .323 .315 .314 .430 1.000
END DATA.
EXECUTE.

Once you have it all typed out (or copied from SPSS), highlight it all and press the Play button (or 'Ctrl' + 'R').
A new SPSS window will open (probably best to safe this new data file with a proper name). As you can see in this picture, this looks a bit different from your average SPSS data spreadsheet.

 The first two columns are system variables (Rowtype_ and Varname_). The first line contains the sample size. If you don't want to use the syntax, this is the other option. You need to create this SPSS data file directly. The first variable in the SPSS matrix file is called ROWTYPE_ (specify it as string variable) and identifies the content in each row of the file (CORR, for correlations, in this example). The second variable is called VARNAME_ (again, specify as a string variable) and contains the variable name corresponding to each row of the matrix. The FACTOR procedure also includes a row of sample size (N) values to precede the correlation matrix rows. Then type or copy the full correlation matrix.


We are nearly ready for the analysis. Unfortunately, SPSS does not support factor analysis of matrices directly via the graphical interface. In order to run the analysis, you need to use syntax (again). 

Type the following command into the same syntax window (it will run a standard PCA, with Varimax rotation, print the scree test, sort the factor loadings and suppress loadings smaller than .3):

FACTOR MATRIX=IN(COR=*)
  /PRINT INITIAL EXTRACTION ROTATION
  /FORMAT SORT BLANK(.3)
  /PLOT EIGEN
  /CRITERIA MINEIGEN(1) ITERATE(25)
  /EXTRACTION PC
  /ROTATION VARIMAX
  /METHOD=CORRELATION.


Again, highlight the whole Factor command bit and hit play (or 'ctrl' + 'R'). You should see the output of the factor analysis based on the average correlation matrix. As you can see in the output, there are two factors that correspond to the 'socio-sexual' and the 'dishonest-illegal' factors. The scree test and Bartlett's EV > 1  also both support that there are only 2 factors. 

Now you can either interpet this factor structure in your report or use as reference for further comparisons against each of the samples.

Voila!

Stereotypes, policy making and the lack of value research in the Pacific

I have been working on some policy related research work. The first stage of the project is a literature review of available research on values in the Pacific. The review generated is supposed to inform policy making in the Pacific. It is a fascinating project and topic. Yet, I am struck by two very peculiar observations as I am trying to locate relevant material.

Little research and lots of recommendations

The first thing that is really noteworthy is the absence of much high quality empirical work, but the abundance of policy recommendations, guidelines and advise based on a complete lack of information. For example, government departments in NZ provide information to employers about  how to deal with Pacific Island staff, but I was unable to locate any first hand research that supports these recommendations. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but seems to be part of a larger picture of wild guessing, stereotyping and random observations being turned into potentially ill-informed and inappropriate guidelines, policies and interventions. This is outright problematic in my opinion.

Old School Anthropology and lack of insider voices

The second striking fact is that there are quite a few books by American/European/Western anthropologists describing the exotic features of island life and isolated topics of interest to these foreign outsiders, but relatively few ethnographic or anthropological accounts (beyond artists responding to journalists questions) by local people. In some cases, the diverging view points by outsiders (as in the famous Mead vs Freeman exchange) are heavily debated by other anthropologists from overseas, but there is little voice in that debate that came from Samoans (as far as I can tell based on my initial search). Outsiders determine how one of the most diverse regions in the world is portrayed and described.

Island themed performance and stereotypical accounts from age-old ethnographic studies shape our vision of the Pacific

Basically it seems that our understanding of issues in the Pacific are shaped by Western anthropologists doing research with more traditional communities from the 1920s-1970s mainly and there is a relatively lack of research on how modern day general populations in the Pacific feel, think and believe about all sorts of issues of societal relevance. Advise to business, clinicians, and even governmental policies are built on the absence of reliable data.

Pain increases happiness... or why watching other people suffer can be more painful than suffering yourself

Why do people voluntarily engage in pain? We conducted a study a few years ago and the articles and a media release by our university are just out this.

We were interested in individuals who participate in objectively painful religious rituals. Western theories and observers would argue that people engaging in these activities risk infection, experience negative emotions and should feel less happy after the ritual, compared to others who do not engage in these behaviours. There is quite a bit of research in medical areas that talk about the negative effects of large scale religious events, especially if they involve painful activities (just think of jumping into ice cold water, walking over burning hot coals, piercing yourself with unsterilised metal rods, etc.).

We studied a festival on the small island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, just off the coast of Africa. The festival involves 10 days of fasting and prayers, and culminates in a long procession and fire-walking ritual. What was particularly interesting for us was to study the effects that active participation in the firewalk as the focal element of the ritual had on people, compared to others who participated, but did not do the firewalk or merely watched from the sidelines.

We invited fire-walkers (‘high-ordeal’ participants); people participating in the ritual without engaging in the high-intensity activities (‘low-ordeal’ participants); and spectators to be part of our study. The fire-walkers and ‘low-ordeal’ participants were members of the same families. The support from the local temple and community was actually phenomenal. We had to turn people away, because we did not have enough resources to study everyone. Here, the hard work by Dimitris Xygalatas in setting up the field site and establishing the connections with the local community really paid off!

Participants walked barefoot in the midday sun without eating or drinking while carrying pots of sacrificial offerings. The fire-walkers were pierced with needles or skewers and finished the procession by walking over knives and burning coals.

Our design was super-ambitious though. We asked individuals a few questions before the whole festival started, measuring their initial states of happiness and fatigue and we also strapped them up with mobile heart rate monitors. This allowed us to track their physiological arousal during the festival. We then asked people again after the end of the ceremony.

To examine the effects of participation, we compared the levels of happiness, fatigue and heart rate of low- and high-ordeal participants, and found that fire-walkers had experienced the highest increase in heart rate and reported greater happiness and less fatigue post-ritual.

Even more interesting was the experience of ‘low-ordeal’ participants because of their relationship to the fire-walkers. Fire-walkers experienced the emotional ‘high’ upon finishing the ritual, whereas ‘low-ordeal’ participants did not, while simultaneously worrying about the well-being of their friends and family. These people, even though they did not physically experience the pain, felt more exhausted than the fire-walkers. Sometimes, perceiving other people suffer can be more exhausting than actually experiencing the pain yourself.

The Team of Investigators - after the ritual ordeal is over

In the paper, we provide some speculations about potential biological mechanisms, especially opioid systems and pain-offset mechanisms to guide future research. The study of voluntary pain is highly fascinating and there is so much that we don't yet understand (see also my earlier posts about extreme rituals in this blog).

For those interested, the paper can be found here (it is open access, so no fees) and the media release is here.

Indigenous or not indigenous.... that is the question

Today I listened to a really interesting talk by Peter Smith from Sussex Uni. He was presenting his work on social influence, including some of the new stuff on different indigenous social influence strategies such as the Chinese guanxi, Brazilian jeitinho, Middle Eastern wasta and Russian svasy. These are all local behaviours that individuals may adopt to solve problems in their environment, typically by relying on social relationships or their power (e.g., for a great example from the news this morning - the son of the Iraqi transportation minister forcing a plane to return to Beirut). Peter and his colleagues asked students and managers to come up with good examples of each local cultural strategy in their local culture. They then took the most representative scenarios from each culture, removed any identifying content and gave it to managers in other cultures. What they found was that the supposedly indigenous influence strategies were generally seen as typical even in other cultures. In other words, British 'pulling strings' was often as likely to be seen as applicable and typical in China and Saudi Arabia as in the original British context.
This clearly challenges notions that indigenous influence strategies are unique and distinct to a specific local context. Of course, he immediately got challenged by some people in the audience defending the indigenous approach, claiming that these wimpy scenarios miss the rich context and the social relationships that go with each style.
I think that there are subtle differences in how these influence strategies work and are employed (see for example our qualitative ethnographic work on Brazilian jeitinho here and a set of empirical studies where we also make some theoretical claims about jeitinho vs guanxi here). Yet, there are three major issues that I think the indigenous people are missing.

First, there are limited behavioural options for humans. We are live in social settings with a core family, extended family and a relatively stable set of limited contacts in an extended social network. All these networks are more or less hierarchically structured. We all need to negotiate these networks and there is only a limited set of behavioural strategies for any of us (e.g., ingratiation, calling in favors, returning favors, making compliments, breaking some rules, paying a bribe, giving some gifts... you name it). See work by David Ralston. We can not just come up with something completely different. It is all there. We are humans. Therefore, people in most contexts will be able to recognize and distinguish particular types of behaviours. Hence, people can call a spade a spade... even if it looks a bit funny shaped.

Second, the functions of all these behaviours are to solve problems. It is the functionality of these behaviors, even if not socially approved and even considered illegal (think of corruption or nepotism), it still gets things done. This is why they are so widespread and so similar in form. We made this argument and showed some data supporting this claim here.  Peter Smith and his colleagues also found similar results in their cross-national study. Think behaviours - think functions. And think power corrupts... probably as universal a function of human behaviour as there can be.

Third, many of these behaviours are locally embellished, discussed, criticized, analyzed, debated. By doing this, these behavioural strategies take a life on their own in the minds of concerned members of a community. Go to Brazil and talk to them about jeitinho - you will be listening to complaints for hours - hopefully while having some good cool caipirinhas. Go to Lebanon and ask somebody about wasta - and better have a good shisha or coffee next to you, because you are not going to move for a while. These behaviours are often recognized as problematic, but they are so damn useful and this is why they continue. At the same time, discussing and gossiping about them becomes a reinforcer of the social norm and therefore serves as an identity marker. The behaviour is not just a behaviour anymore, but has taken a cultural life of its own. Therefore, it has to be unique - you can't say that another place has also something that really seems to be jeitinho... or wasta... or guanxi. It is what makes us who we are as people... So dare you say that somebody else may have come up with something similar.

So how does my claim that there are subtle differences fit in with that? I think the first and second point are the answer to that. There are a number of limited behaviours and strategies that people can use to solve problems. The nature and type of problems will differ slightly by context. Therefore, some behaviours will be more common or be expressed with greater force or variety than others. Hence, there is a matrix of behaviours which is latently present in all contexts, but then is expressed to slightly different degrees. Some patterns of the behavioural matrix may be missing or be expressed very weakly in some places. Others may take a particular form due to the different social relations- compare the loose social relations in Brazil which allows more flexibility in social norm bending with the still relatively strong family networks in China that may be less flexible. So what differentiates the various styles is how the matrix is filled with specific behaviours in a specific context. Jeitinho may be a bit more norm breaking, wasta a bit more relying on social hierarchy, guanxi a bit more social relationship harmony focused. But the matrix is there. It is recognizable. It has blends of the same ingredients. It is this matrix that makes us human and helps us to interact with anyone in the world. It is what makes us humans.

A Brazilian will recognize Chinese guanxi and know what it is all about. A Russian will painfully remember some personal experiences when hearing an example of wasta in Lebanon. We all can understand what happened in Beirut this morning - even though we may not want to do or can not do it ourselves (even though I have to admit it would be bloody awesome sometimes to force that damn train or bus to come back when I just missed it... Just saying... :).

Academia, theories and the real world

Yesterday was the first day of my workshop on culture, evolution and collective rituals organized by the Kurt Lewin Institute, hosted by Groningen University. I gave a talk on cultural change and how evolutionary processes can help to understand how, when and why cultures might be changing. It was more of a big picture kind of talk, with an overview of what I would consider exciting theories in the social and biological sciences about cultural dynamics. In the afternoon, me and Nina Hansen then gave the students a task: Breaking them into small groups, they had to imagine that they are asked to provide advise to UN Women about addressing gender inequality in developing countries. Their task was to use their respective theories of research to come up with interventions to tackle the task.
The interventions were really fascinating, typically addressing issues of arranged marriages and/or education of women. I loved how the students focused on concrete examples and target populations and considered trade-offs between costs and benefits that keep practices that disempower women in place. This was fantastic stuff. Some of the proposed interventions were also really innovative and creative - big ups for that.
It was also great to see that people were really aware of cultural sensitivity, issues of trust and ethics. They showed amazing sensitivity to potential problems.
At the same time, what was really striking was the lack of psychological theory. These students are PhD students in leading Dutch universities. Their research is in social psychology, on issues around status and intergroup relations. I would have thought this makes their theories and research immediately applicable to this specific intergroup context of gender relations. Yet, beyond simple nods towards social influence and contact theories (without actually using these theories to develop or guide their intervention), there was a void of theory. Lots of common sense reasoning, but nothing that an educated individual may not come up with... I was struck by this.
Are our psychological theories irrelevant to addressing pressing global issues?

What could account for this observation?
One option might be that psychologists are really good in terms of addressing the problem, using a problem focused mindset. So the students turned to the problem and addressed/ identified key issues about the problem. This is great critical thinking - but then... what is the use of studying psychology if critical thinking is the key?
Even when pressed by me, the students came back to classic theories of intergroup relations. Even though they work on cutting edge stuff at world leading universities, nobody really stepped up with an example of recent psychological theorizing. What is the practical relevance of these theories?
Another option might be that our instructions led them astray. We asked them to address the problem. Yet again, involving Kurt Lewin's old mantra: There is nothing as practical as a good theory. Good theories should lend themselves to address problems.
Another option is that the students were aware of all the pitfalls and problems and exceptions and boundary conditions of their theories and therefore were reluctant to apply it here. Great - but then, what is the relevance of the theory if it can not explain key mechanisms of human behaviour? What is the usefulness of a theory if by virtue of its boundary conditions and equivocal findings it becomes inapplicable to real world contexts?
Or are psychologists just too shy or unwilling to convert their theoretical stuff into useful real-world applications? So the problem would be one of translating science and research into interventions.

I am not blaming the students, I think it reflects a deeper problem in our field. Our work is increasingly specialized and focused on minute details (which can and should be important), but miss the link to real world applicability. This is reflected in a similar way in this great opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof.

One great quote from this opinion piece:

A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.

Side note on that blog: The one thing that I do not agree with there is that I believe we need more (but useful) quantitative thinking and research to tackle social problems. The issue for me is translating it into language that is understandable by the general public (see Statistics as Principled Arguments).

Back to my main points: I can already hear some colleagues complaining about the importance of basic research. I love basic research. I think we need a better understanding of human behaviour and all the intricacies of it. But we are not doing physics, most of what we are studying is based on real world observations. So our insights should also provide some better understanding of how things could be changed (see also my earlier post on practical psychology).

We had a great discussion yesterday. I think this is the starting point. We need to reflect on our practices. Maybe (and I actually believe this) our theories in psychology are relevant. But psychologists are too reluctant to take their own research serious, tweak it to make it relevant and most importantly communicate it in a useful way to help address social issues.

Philosophy of measurement, functional equivalence, DSM V... or how did I get here?

Here is a very raw and unfinished "trying to wrap my head around some rather confusing issues" post. I have been thinking about levels of equivalence or invariance in cross-cultural measurement. I have been a wee bit unhappy with a couple of conceptual problems in the framework, but particularly the most general or abstract level of 'functional equivalence' has intrigued me for a while. Traditionally, it is more of a philosophical or theoretical statement of the similarity of functions of a psychological construct in different cultural groups. In other words, a particular behaviour serves the same functions in two or more cultural contexts.

I have been following some of the discussions on IOnet and the posts by Paul Barrett as well as the more biologically oriented personality literature. Following a few of these leads, I recently started reading some more conceptual and philosophical papers on the philosophy of measurement in psychology. More specifically, I just finished reading Joel Michell's Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology and Michael D. Maraun's Measurement as a Normative Practice. These papers are superbly well written (as far as you can say that about these kinds of papers) and express quite a few of my growing concerns about psychological research in very clear terms. I started off wondering about functional equivalence, but got much bigger issues to chew on now.

Michell's main logical argument is as follows (from his very concise reply to a number of commentaries, p. 401):

Premise 1. All measurement is of quantitative attributes.
Premise 2. Quantitative attributes are distinguished from non-quantitative attributes by the possession
of additive structure.
Premise 3. The issue of whether or not any attribute possesses additive structure is an empirical one.
Conclusion 1. The issue of whether or not any attribute is measurable is an empirical one.
Premise 4. With respect to any empirical hypothesis, the scientific task is to test it relative to the evidence.
Premise 5. Quantitative psychologists have hypothesized that some psychological attributes are
measurable.
Final thesis. The scientific task for quantitative psychologists is to test the hypothesis that their
hypothesized attributes are measurable (i.e. that they possess additive structure).

The  major task for psychology is to actually prove that anything that we do has a quantitative structure. Much of his review is taking to task the legacy of Fechner and especially Stevens (for those of you who ever suffered through some advanced methods classes... these names should be painfully familiar). It was an eye opener to see the larger context and the re-interpretation of stuff that I just took for granted as a student and never really questioned later on in my professional life. Fechner's legacy leading to a so-called quantitative imperative (e.g., Spearman, Cattell, Thorndike) was challenged in the early to mid-parts of the last century (the so-called Ferguson Committee), but Stevens became the most successful defender of this empiricist tradition. He argued in a representational theory of measurement that measurement is the numerical representation of empirical relations. There is a

'kind of isomorphism between (1) empirical relations among objects and events and (2) the properties of...' numerical systems (Stevens, 1951, p. 1). From this starting point he developed his theory of the four possible types of measurement scales (nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio)' (Michell, page 370). This is the foundation of any scale development in psychology. In a second argument beautifully laid out by Michell, it then becomes clear that these numerical representations due to their assumed isomorphic relations then both define the relations represented and represent them. Given this operationism, 'any rule for assigning numerals to objects or events could be taken as providing a numerical representation of at least the equivalence relation operationally defined by the rule itself.' (Michell, p. 371). 

And this loop is where we are stuck. We take a few items or questions, administer them to a bunch of people, factor analyze them to get a simple structure and voila... we have measured depression, anxiety, dominance, identity... you name it. Or take implicit measures...  you present a number of stimuli with no inherent coherent meaning and present them to individuals to measure their accuracy or reaction speed or whatever you want. Take the score and you have some measure of implicit bias, cognitive interference, etc. There is no relation between the empirical reality and the numerical representation as scores anymore. The question of whether the phenomenon of interest can be quantified has disappeared.

How does the DSM V fit in here? Well, it could be seen as just the latest installment of the same confusion. We don't know what exactly we are measuring (see for example this article on grief as a case in point).

The issue is that we need to test whether psychological constructs can actually be quantified. As simple or complex as that. As much as I agree, I can't stop scratching my head and wondering how the heck we are going to do that. How would you be able to examine whether any psychological construct (which is basically just an idea in our beautiful minds that we try to use and build some kind of professional convention around it) is actually quantifiable or not? The responses by a number of eminent psychometricians to this challenges suggested that nobody was able to come with an example to show that this has worked in a wider context within mainstream psychology.

Enter the second paper. Approaching the problem using Wittgenstein's philosophy of measurement as normative practice (comparing it to the logical structure of language), Maraun argues that measurement needs to be rule-based or normative. You need to start with a definition that then leads to a specific set of rules or norms of how to measure this particular phenomenon just defined. The definition and the set of rules are the most basic form of expression. There is nothing simpler or more basic than this. Once these norms are established, any other person should be able to arrive at a similar result, that even if based on a different metric should still be convertible (e.g., from meters to feet). In psychology in contrast, we have no rules. We have a test or an experiment that is being conducted and the results are examined against another set of empirical observations to claim that the results are valid. According the practice of measurement in physics, empirically based arguments are not relevant for claiming that something has been measured. Measuring a number of items that factor together and then correlating it with some other instrument similarly derived does not mean that anything meaningful has been measured. Observing some kind of empirical pattern in an experiment does not constitute measurement if it is then validated or compared to a different set of  empirical observations. The issue is that the concept is not sufficiently precise defined to lead to a set of rules that govern its measurement.

There a number of other points in that paper around validity, nomological networks, covariance structure and the like. Again, I keep scratching my head. These guys got a point... but how to get out of it. Maraun is very pessimistic. He argues:

Simply put, measurement requires a formalization which does not seem well suited to what Wittgenstein calls the 'messy' grammars of psychological concepts, grammars that evolved in an organic fashion through the 'grafting of language onto natural ("animal") behaviour' (Baker & Hacker, 1982). One aspect of this mismatch arises from the flexibility in the grounds of instantiation of many psychological concepts, the property that Baker and Hacker (1982) call an open-circumstance relativity (see also Gergen, Hepburn, & Comer Fisher, 1986, for a similar point). Take, for example, the concept dominance. Given the appropriate background conditions, practically any 'raw' behaviour could instantiate the concept. Hence, Joe's standing with his back to Sue could, in certain instances, be correctly conceptualized as a dominant action. On the other hand, Bob's ordering of someone to get off the phone is not a dominant action if closer scrutiny reveals the motivation for his behaviour to be a medical emergency which necessitated an immediate call for an ambulance. The possibility for the broadening of background conditions to defeat the application of a psychological concept is known as the defeasibility of criteria (Baker & Hacker, 1982). Together, open-circumstance relativity and the defeasibility of criteria suggest that psychological concepts are simply not organized around finite sets of behaviours which jointly provide necessary and sufficient conditions for their instantiation (Baker & Hacker, 1982). Yet, this is precisely the kind of formalization required if a concept is to play a role in measurement. (p. 457-458).

Maybe what we are studying is just the social construction of meanings of psychological concepts as expressed in the heads of individuals? Is this a feasible reconciliation? From a researcher perspective it might be a worthwhile endeavor (think of discourse analysts embracing factor analysis... the thought is actually quite amusing). However, this approach leaves our search for a) latent variables and b) measurement invariance completely meaningless.

The reading continues. Some random thoughts at 1am while I am writing these notes:
a) The search for quantitative latent constructs in psychology probably should (?) or could (?) start from basic biological principles. In essence, we assume that there is something 'latent' out there if we use EFA or CFA or any of the typical covariance structure tests. If there are biological mechanisms that lead to certain psychological phenomena, we can study the biological principles and their interaction with the social environment that lead to psychological realities. Then we could get around the quantification problem. Problem... what biological principles and at what level of specificity?
b) The use of covariance analyses provide simple structures of language concerning folk concepts. This may be useful and meaningful for understanding how people in a specific context interpret items or questions. It is probably more of a sociological analysis of meaning conventions than a psychological analysis. This could be useful or interesting for research purposes, but it is not quite how we commonly understand or interpret the results when we are using these kinds of techniques.

Or am I missing something? How can this measurement paradox be tackled?