Chapter 1 – Psychology, science and research

Some people say instantly ‘Oh it’s a picture of a man – so what?’. Many others (including me when I first encountered it) take a very long time to see a specific ‘thing’ in it. If you concentrate on the centre of the picture you should eventually see the top half of a man. If you imagine a beret right on top of the picture in the centre this would be correctly positioned on the man’s forehead and he would look a lot like Che Guevara. Many people have seen the picture as one of Christ with a long flowing beard. It could also be a cavalier. His face is lit as if from the right hand side and so there is a lot of shadow. If you have problems with it try looking at it with friends. Someone will spot it and help you to see the whole figure.

I don’t have precise detail on where it originated. It was published in a UK newspaper as a ‘sighting of Christ’ and was reported to be snow on a mountainside. However a student I was teaching once told me it was taken by her grandfather in Japan and was snow on a hedge. I have no independent evidence to support this. The most certain thing is that it is indeed snow.

The main point of the demonstration though is this. When the man finally pops out at you, you will never again be able to see the picture as just a load of black and white blobs. You will have constructed and maintained a ‘template’ – a best bet as to what the picture is of – and this will remain as an automatic reaction in your perceptual system. Most of the time, in science and in everyday life, when we approach visual (and other sensory) material, we have a ‘best bet’ all ready and we are not aware of the perceptual system’s operation of ‘calculating’ what sensory data represent in the world.

Disconfirming theories – a ‘lateral thinking’ problem

Chapter 1 of the book discuss the attempt to disconfirm theories as a powerful aspect of scientific reasoning. One of the best ‘awkward’ problems I have come across is shown below. Read the problem and have a think before revealing the answer below.

Three philosophy professors (A, B and C) are applying for a prestigious chair of philosophy post. There is little to choose between them so the interview panel sets a logical reasoning task. The questioner gives the following instruction: ‘I am going to draw either a blue or a white spot on each of your foreheads. I will then reveal the spots to you all simultaneously. If you see a blue spot on another person’s head put your hand up. As soon as you think you can say what colour spot you have on your own forehead please speak up with your answer’. He proceeds to draw a blue spot on each forehead. When the spots are all revealed to the candidates each one, of course, puts up a hand. After a brief moment’s hesitation professor A lowers her arm and says ‘I must have a blue spot’. How did she work this out?

Problems like this one are sometimes included in the general group of ‘lateral thinking’ problems. However, you do not have to think ‘laterally’ or particularly creatively to get the answer. You do, however, have to kind of think upside down. Before rushing on to get the answer do try to think about how the professor knew what wasn’t true rather than how she knew what was true.

Trusting intuition (the rationale for these exercises appears at the end)

1.3a

Imagine I have a piece of ordinary paper and that I fold it once, then again and then once more. You’ll agree I hope that the paper is now a little bit thicker. After this it will become difficult to fold but just imagine, if it were physically possible, that I folded it 50 times more. About how thick do you think it would become? Would it be as thick as a shoe-box? Would the paper reach as high as the wall you’re in now? Would it reach to the top of a house? Have a very rough guess as to how far upwards the paper would reach.

1.3b

Imagine that the surface of the Earth is perfectly smooth (no mountains or valleys etc.) and that I have put a rope around it at the equator. Now imagine I want to raise the rope so that it is just 1 metre above the surface all round. About how much more rope do you think I’d need?

Rationale for exercise 1.3

I’m hoping that for 1.3a you very much underestimated the height of the paper and for 1.3b you grossly overestimated how much rope would be needed. If you didn’t then good on you! The point of the exercise is to emphasise that fact that we can never rely solely on ‘intuition’. Often when people say they got an answer ‘through intuition’ what they actually mean is that they got it without any conscious deliberation. Nevertheless usually they got their answer through the usual logic but the process was so quick and immediate that they weren’t aware of any significant mental processing. If they mean that the answer just came to them through no process at all then they were just guessing. When we just guess we are influenced by many factors and certainly cannot claim to have ‘the truth’ form nowhere. If this were possible than scientists, mathematicians and engineers could just pack up, go home and leave intuitionists to solve all problems. The world just isn’t like that. The point of the exercise was to make you wary of intuition and to recognise that such unfamiliar problems need always to be approached using well worn first principles, not mystical guesswork.

This is the British Psychological Society’s code of ethics and conduct.

https://explore.bps.org.uk/content/report-guideline/bpsrep.2021.inf94

British Psychological Society main site.

https://www.bps.org.uk

American Psychological Association main site.

https://www.apa.org/ An easy to read online resource for all research methods and some statistics. https://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/contents.php

Precognition studies and the curse of the failed replications

The following is an article from The Guardian in which Chris French discusses the system of peer review that allowed a prestigious journal to refuse to publish a failed replication of some otherwise astonishing pre-cognition (predicting the future) studies. 
www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/15/precognition-studies-curse-failed-replications

Chris French is a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. He edits The Skeptic magazine.

Some notes on peer review

Chapter 1 mentions the fact that , in the interests of scientific integrity, psychological research articles (as with all other sciences) are usually submitted to a peer review process.

Over recent years several problems with this process have been raised, including:

• a prolonged time between completion of research and eventual publication. In today’s academic research world there is mounting pressure on academics to achieve publication of their research articles in prestigious journals in order to increase their ‘impact factor’. As Stephen Curry writes in The Guardian (7th September, 2015) the central point of scientific publication in journals is “the rapid dissemination of new results so they can be read, critiqued and built upon. We have lost sight of that because scientific publication through journals has become more about earning prestige points to advance your career than communicating new findings. This has perverted both the motivations of authors and the job of reviewers.” Curry suggests that an encouraging recent development has been the increased use of ‘preprints’ which are research reports yet to receive peer review but which researchers publish on sites such as PsyArXiv. Preprints can be commented on by site users and this can help authors prepare articles for formal submission.
• conflict of interest if the findings and conclusions of the submitted research article run counter to the theoretical position of one or more of the reviewers – see Info Box 1.4 in Chapter 1. A partial answer to this has been to use anonymous author names so that, at least, reviewers cannot simply talk down the potential publications of their known rivals but this still does not stop strong critical comment if the findings conflict with the reviewer’s position. Even with anonymity, where the research area is highly specific and only a few researchers are working in it, there will be a good chance that reviewers will recognise the origin of the research article. 
• claims of ‘sloppy science’ if authors of article will not share their data with reviewers. The APA does not require that data be shared with peer reviewers or online.  For some detail on this controversy see: www.nature.com/news/peer-review-activists-push-psychology-journals-towards-open-data-1.21549 Obviously, without shared data reviewers cannot authenticate the statistical processes used and the accuracy of consequent results and the appropriateness of conclusions.
• a wide variety of forms of peer review. There is no one agreed method. See www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ Approaches range from almost just saying ‘The paper is fine’ to highly detailed, intensive and critical commentary. Reviews take time and are usually competed for no fee. Hence an author might be at the mercy of an overstressed reviewer who only glosses over the paper.
• because academic career success very much depends on developing a CV littered with ‘high impact’ publications in top level journals, some have been driven to the use of fake reviews. This is not always the direct fault of the authors concerned. In some cases fake reviews were organised by agencies offering editing and submission services to highly productive academics. In 2017 the publishing company Springer had to retract (withdraw from publication) 64 papers because of faked reviews.