Reviews Blues

So, I seriously got a case of the reviews blues, and I got a tell you, it hurts so bad. I could sing a song about it, to a blues rift. I received a set of reviews from a journal asking me to basically go back to conceptual square one and redesign this entire piece of work. And run more Experiments. Normally, running experiments makes me warm and fuzzy inside, but it is summer, and there are no students around to serve as subjects. So the paper will have to lay dormant until the start of subject pool time.

I recently presented some data at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Washington, D.C. I like the conference because it is filled mainly with people of an experimental sort – not those clinical folks. Not that I have a problem with clinical psych – some of my best friends are clinicians! (I love that excuse) But if another person says, “Are you analyzing me?” when they find out I’m a psychologist…there will be hell to pay. But the highlight for me was meeting my doppelganger – a professor from the Midwest who falls asleep reading statistics books, and not just to read something so boring that she falls asleep, but because she loves statistics. Mmmm. My kind of person! She actually did something really cool – she taught a statistics course that had a service learning component in which the students created this large project to eliminate plastic bag waste. You can read about it here. I’m sold on the idea because I am sick of all the plastic bags crammed in my closet.

So in the meantime, I sit and peruse the internet, when I stumbled upon this great website called edge.com that is a community of people who are much smarter than I am. Every year the host of the website posts a question for people smarter than I to answer, questions of a metaphysical nature. In 2005 the question was the following:

“What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

The answers to this question are intriguing – and worth reading. (You can find the answers at the Edge Foundation website above). But this got me into thinking how I would answer the question.

My first response is that basically everything I believe to be true I can not prove. I don't even know if there really is anything I can prove to be true, but rather, I can only tell you how likely something I found to be true will replicate if you try to figure it out for yourself. But I believe I am composed of 70 percent water, I believe water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms, I believe that atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and that protons are composed of quarks, and so on. But I can prove none of it. I accept it as truth because I have no real reason to doubt these beliefs, and I don’t see how anyone has anything to gain by foolishly making me believe these falsehoods (perhaps the corporate entity that makes the VitaminWater I drink religiously?) But this is a somewhat unsatisfying answer – a cop out, if you will. The following is a list of some of the things I truly believe but can not prove, but wish I could.

1. Destiny is for the most part a series of random accidents one can not predict

Who are you? I am a cognitive-developmental-cultural psychologist who studies memory, spatial reasoning, and culture’s effects on the mind. I am also a pianist, a painter, a photographer, and on some rare days a writer. But how did it come to pass that these things came to identify me?

That I am now a professor of psychology is a total accident. Once, while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was walking through a building. I could have taken a shortcut through a quad, but I decided to take the longer route for no real reason. In walking down the hallway, I noticed a help wanted sign for a lab technician in a psychology laboratory. Needing a bit of cash, I took the number down, called, and was interviewed and hired. The job was boring - transcribing hundreds of hours of videos of children interacting with parents – but the professor noticed that I worked hard and encouraged me with posing that I work on an idea that eventually became my M.A. thesis.

I often wonder about the person I didn’t become – that moment the universe divided and in this alternative world that person who once was me took the shorter route. I wonder what his destiny would have been. Maybe I would be here (here is a coffee shop in the Bella Vista neighborhood in Philadelphia) or maybe I would be somewhere completely different. Either way, my feeling tends to be that we would like to believe in destiny because it makes the universe seem purposeful. I’d rather simply accept the world I happened to stumble into.

2. People do not differ in intelligence, they only differ in their intrinsic motivation to come up with correct answers

People do not differ in intelligence. This is the great error with our national fetish for testing and ranking, quantifying without truly understanding what the numbers mean. One’s I.Q. score may say something about a person, but it is not any intrinsic and innate level of cognitive abilities. It is rather a habitual and chronic level of motivation for trying hard enough to answer questions correctly.

Now, this claim is in a way is a notational variant of intelligence – you could say that if they both have the same predictive power, why chose motivation over intelligence? However, it is very different from an ontological perspective, and the implications for pedagogy is enormous. You can not change one’s innate level of cognitive ability, but you certainly can change their level of motivation.

3. Babies are far stupider than many developmental psychologists claim, but they have enormous potential

I recently attended a conference in which one fellow was claiming that babies have an innate sense of helping and hurting behaviors, another was claiming that they could solve complex statistical and mathematical problems, and another was saying that infants can judge the intentions of others. Some of these guys I consider my friends. However, I can’t help but wonder why it is the case that a 6 month old infant can solve probability problems, but my 20 year old undergraduates struggle like it is solving Fermat’s Theorem. And as I see it: either the developmental folks are simply wrong, or we get stupider as we get older.

I truly believe that babies start out just like John Locke stated – a blank slate. But not any old blank slate…a slate with lines already carved onto it. These lines are the hardwiring of what will eventually be a rich and complicated system of interacting systems and mechanisms. But there is nothing there are the beginning. There is nothing there in the genes that we can consider to be representational knowledge. And what gets written onto those lines of this blank slate are some kind of universal language that has to do with the universal experience of being a baby – learning to see and perceive the world, act upon and within it, and ultimately, come to understand that the probability of getting heads or tails with the flip of a fair coin are 50-50. We come prepared to learn a great deal about the world, but I can not buy the claim that we come hardwired with a rich set of conceptual schemes.

4. White Capri pants are an evolutionary mistake

White Capri pants universally make anyone wearing them look terrible. I don’t know why this is, but I have never seen someone wearing white Capri pants and said, “Wow, that person looks great!” Perhaps it is something local, having to do with my own fashion preferences, but I think there is more to it than that because I’ve had many a discussion with many a man and have not yet once met someone who hasn’t held the same opinion.

5. You are almost there

This is a fortune from a fortune cookie that I keep in my wallet. I opened this one in Chicago, in China Town, shortly before I left the chains and shackles of graduate school. I believed then that I was almost there. I believe now that I am almost there. And I believe you, too, are almost there. I don’t where there is for me, nor do I know where there is for you, but it is comforting for both of us to know that it is approaching. I hope it is beautiful for me. I hope it is beautiful for you.