PS124 Psychology in the Real World Flashcards
Meta-research
Research of how people do research
Science of how people do science
Understand the social and cognitive processes that lead to scientific discoveries and innovation
How this pertains to the size and composition of research teams
Re-focus on observation - the origin point of most psychological knowledge and breakthroughs
Typically students are exposed to theories and corresponding supporting data and mechanisms but this theory itself is not a neutral approach to how research is done
Discoveries are becoming more predictable
Discoveries becoming more predictable e.g the next phone camera will have higher resolution and zooming
Pennicilin - left petri dishes they developed mould - no bacteria grew between the mould - Fleming
Higgs boson - last particle in the standard model of quantum physics
All types of discoveries are important
We need a healthy mix and proportion of unexpected/expected discoveries
But if unexpected findings cannot be predicted, should we simply focus on theoretical-derivations?
Sleeping Beauties in Science
Sleeping Beauties in Science - The impact and value of a discovery is not necessarily readily/immediately appreciated
Research is “ahead-of-its-time”
If the importance of a paper can remain latent for many years, this hampers prediction
For many past studies, the prince may never arrive as in no one will find the paper
A study will remain ‘lost under the stack of new research’
Is the type of work that teams produce more predictable?
Large teams develop…small teams disrupt science and technology
Small teams are likely to be sleeping beauties
Small teams cite earlier and less popular studies/referces
Citation delay to small and disrupting teams (longer citation lag)
Proportion of small teams has been decreasing over recent decades
It takes decades-long for large teams to start citing small teams’ work
Constant disruption level with> team size, but beyond a team size 10 disruption < sharply
4 member teams are already too big
Small, disrupting teams are awarded but underfunded
Probablity of small-team producing Noble-Prize winning papers is nearly three times as high as a control group
Team composition affects performance
Team diversity promotes abstraction and cognitive flexibility in collective problem solving:
Sex/age group
Ethnic/religious/cultural background
Socio-economic level
Personality
More angles over a subject/problem/puzzle
Search compatibility and alignment of interests but avoid recruiting/teaming up with clones or team inbreeding
Dividends to those who take the high ‘moral’ road
Slowed progress in large fields of science
Number of papers published per year has increased over time
Policy measures (by funding agencies and universities) aim to increase paper output
Paper output determines how career trajectories, departments’, unis’, nations’ evaluations
Too many papers published each year in a field leads to stagnation rather than advance
The flood of new papers deprive reviewers and readers from fully recognising and understand novel ideas
When a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers the list of most cited papers fossilizes anchor effect among a sea of incoming new waves of papers. New papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited
The sixe of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas
Research quantity is not a substitute for research quality
Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas
Further away collaborators are the less disruptive their discoveries are if collaborators are under the same roof they are likely to make more disruptive discoveries. Everyone has equal chance of carrying out, analysing, writing and conceiving the experiment but remote teams delegate task.
Academic freedom and innovation
Freedom to critique, open disclosure, free cooperation and free competition
“The right to choose one’s own problem for investigation, to conduct research free from any outside control, and to teach one’s subject in the light of one’s own opinions” Improving academic freedom by one standard deviation increases patent applications by 41% and forward citations by 29%
Global academic freedom has declined over the past decade for the first time in the last century and our estimates suggest that this decline poses a substantial threat to the innovation output of countries in terms of both quantity and quality (2024).
Scientific/knowledge process is slowing down
We seem to be gradually losing our capacity to work freely, locally, in small teams, and thus, becoming less capable of producing disruptive/unexpected research
To foster disruptive discoveries, you will want to:
Build/be part of a small team, “rogue teams”
Build/be part of a diverse ream “no-clone teams”
Build/be part of a free team, “opiniated-and-open-to-critique team”
Build/be part of personal team, “under-the-same-roof teams”
But more determinately, across these forms we want to improve our observation skills, we want to observe the natural and human world better.
Inattentional Blindness
Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged in another task event or object
Possible explanations?
Perception is a limited process (i.e cognitive resources are limited)
The unnoticed stimuli in a visual scene are attended to and consciously perceived, but are rapidly forgotten rendering them impossible to report
Lack of expectation for the stimuli
Expectation-based self-fufilling prophecy
Our thinking goes together with our senses. They are extensions on one another. Perception illusions can trick us about reality. But how we think about reality can affect how we perceive reality.
To make sense of reality, as reality is and not as we expect it to be
Clean observation
Unbiased by-standing
Detective’s eye
Knowledge of context
Black swans
Semiotics
Black Swan Theory
Developed by Nasim Taleb (also see Fooled by Randomness)
Universal truths are difficult to prove due to extremely rare events
Rare events, by virtue of being unexpected, carry unproportionable consequences
The power of N=1 vs Large samples (i.e what the majority does is by average is predictable, but the average is NOT disruptive)
For statistical analyses, we learn to exclude outliers, data that falls beyond the theoretical predictions of where data should be. This helps to run statistical tests/models, but it comes at a price, because we are discarding our “mis-fit” data they are rare and disruptive!!!
Averages often bend reality (the average of two socks)
How we “sample” the world determines our conclusions
Beware of grand-sweeping statements/theories
Semiotics
Study of signs
Sign: any activity, conduct or process that communicates something
Intentional (word uttered with a specific meaning) or not (a symptom of a particular medical condition)
Linguistic or not; anything can be meaningful IF the observer can extract information (a piece of clothing can be informative)
An observer needs to ‘diagnose’ a situation or ecent (Reading signs was the first a sub-discipline of Medicine)
To find “give-aways”
In the present tech-age of big data, observation power and black swans and are undervalued “thick data”
