Can environments be made smarter?: Building a better bin for recycling

We all have THOSE objects in our life, objects that frustrate, defy, and annoy us. My frustrating object is the cable tv box. When I want to turn it on, I never know which of two buttons to press, because depending on how the television was turned off, one or the other button won't work. Typically, I can't remember how I turned the television off. So half the time, I press the wrong button, then need to get up and walk over to the television to turn it on physically. A minor itch, but I find it infinitely annoying. I believe we all have those nagging itches that end up annoying us more than the real problems we face in life.

The problem with the remote is one known in the psychological literature as object affordances. An affordance is a physical aspect of an object that provides obvious cues as to how the object should be acted upon. Hanging strings afford pulling behavior, while fixed buttons afford pushing behavior. Some objects have obvious affordances, such as a door whose handle is designed so that it is clear whether you push or pull it. Others have not-so-obvious affordances, such as my remote, or my telephone at work (it's been three years and I still can't figure out how to forward a call), or my bank's online teller system (which is ridiculously complicated so that I can never sign into it correctly).

We interact with objects on a daily basis, but rarely reflect upon how well objects are designed to afford a desired behavior. There is a whole field of psychology about this issue which is known as ergonomics. People who study ergonomics examine aspects of the design of objects that improve their usability. A classic example I am using right now is the QWERTY keyboard. The keyboards we all use today were designed on ergonomic principles. Back in the days of the dinosaurs, when people would actually use manual typewriters, a problem would arise that commonly used combined letters like "-ed" would cause a jam of the typewriter. Note that in the alphabet, e and d are next to each other. The swinging letter e would strike the swinging letter d and would cause a jam. To avoid this, the American inventor Christopher Sholes designed a typewriter in which commonly combined letters would be spatially displaced on the keyboard, so that with the QWERTY keyboard, e and d were separated by a number of keys so they would not interfere. Unfortunately, however, the QWERTY keyboard actually serves to slow people down in their typing. Now that typewriters have gone as extinct as the dinosaurs, better designs exist, but the fact that so many people are used to the QWERTY design, it remains like a vestibular organ, useless but pervasive.

Humans design many artifacts, such as QWERT keyboards, desks, lamps, and monitors. One artifact that exists in our world are receptacles for disposing waste. Any economist would claim that humans are fundamentally consumers, yet an unintended byproduct of consumption is disposal. We drink a bottle of water, and subsequently must dispose of the bottle. In the second half of the 20th century, the idea of recycling became commonplace, and many institutions and municipalities have developed recycling programs to help reduce the amount of waste that gets buried in landfills. According to the EPA, the average american produces 3 pounds of trash per day. An unknown proportion of this trash consists of recyclable material such as bottles or cans that ended up in the general waste stream. Some of this material may be carelessly thrown out because people did not notice a recycling bin nearby.

In a study I recently submitted to a journal, my co-author Michelle Verges and I began thinking about the perceptual affordances of recycling receptacles. I had noticed that in my office building, there were two types of recycling bins. One type had a wide opening at the top and looked pretty much like a trash can except for the words "Cans and Bottles" on it. Another kind had a lid cover with a small hole cut in the center that was narrow enough to accept bottles and cans. The first type with wide openings contained about as much trash as your typical trash can. People may have mistaken the recycling bin as a trash can. The second type with a narrow hole contained only recyclables. This got Michelle and I to wonder whether it be the case that recycling bins might be designed to be smarter (by improving recycling compliance) or stupider (by reducing compliance rates).

Being an experimentaholic, I aimed to find out the answer. First, I secretly went around my building and manipulated the lids of the recycling bins. See the figure below. The bins were identical except for the presence of the lids. Half of the bins were manipulated to look like the photo on the left, with no lids, while half had the lids present as in the photograph on the right.


I went around twice a week measuring how many bottles or cans were deposited in each of the three bins for four weeks. At the end of the time, I tallied the results and found that with the condition on the left without lids, the recycling compliance rate (i.e., the proportion of recyclable cans and bottles deposited in the recycling bin) was 57%. However, with the lids present, the recycling rate shot up to 93%. The likelihood that this effect could be explained by chance is over 1 in 1,000,000.

So I have been going around taking photographs of smarter and stupider recycling bins. Here is a small gallery, of which I will increase over time.

1. SEPTA's Market East Station

This is a dumb design for a recycling bin. First, the sign is ridiculously small. Although it says RECYCLABLE, NEWSPAPER ONLY, people simply use the bin as a trash can.

While this one had some newspapers in it, there was also a plastic cup, a plastic bag, and a glass bottle. (I was rooting through it. All this education and I end up picking through trash...amazing).
Perhaps the problem is that the recycling bin looks too much like the trash can, and the heuristic that GREEN = RECYCLING is not yet very standardized or widespread (some of the trashcans at the very same station were the recycling bin above without the little sign. No wonder people mistake recycling bins for trashcans and vice versa!



2. Swarthmore Train Station

Swarthmore Township is a wealthy township where Swarthmore College is located. I recently went there to meet a colleague, and I spotted a recycling bin.


Here are individual pictures of the two recycling bins, and the contents. As you can see, the lids afford recycling paper or bottles by being a much smaller hole than the hole in the SEPTA train station.

Apart from a plate, a piece of plastic, and a piece of paper, everything in the recycling bin was appropriate for that bin.

Here is the newspaper bin:

Apart from the plastic bag, everything inside is newspaper.

The key however is not what is IN the recycling bin, but rather what WASN'T IN the adjoining trash can. There were no recyclable materials (cans, bottles, or newspapers) in the trash can.


3. Patco Station:

You don't need to buy special recycling bins in order to have high recycling rates. An ordinary trashcan lid, properly cut, makes a fine recycling bin, like this one spotted at the Camden, NJ PATCO train station:


4. Reading Terminal Market:

In order to increase recycling, why not make a bin that looks like a bottle? Although the study I completed does not speak to the effectiveness of this particular recycling bin, a look inside the trashcan next to it revealed several bottles and cans, which may indicate that people might simply be confused by what the object actually is (It could just be a plastic statue of a soda bottle to indicate that yes we sell drinks here.)


5. Japan

My favorite recycling bin was photographed by my friend Jeff Mosenkis in Japan. It is a frog. At least it is somewhat rewarding to shove a paper down a frog's throat if the news that day was bad. Unfortunately, though, my colleague Michelle is deathly afraid of frogs.

My Japanese colleague Etsuko writes, "The Japaense writing on the frog says "Kae--ru Box: For Newspapers and Magazines Only". The frog is pronounced as Kaeru in Japanese. With the same spelling in Roman letters, but with a different intonation and a Chinese character, Kaeru also means return. So, they are using a pun here for the recycling box."



Feel free to send me some pictures of your very own favorite recycling bins! I will post them here and have an expanded gallery.

Things I have had to do to do experiments

I was talking to my friend Michelle the other day about all the various things I have experienced on the way to gathering data for research. Lately, I've been watching a lot of Discovery Channel shows about various odd and dirty jobs people have, and also those shows about those crazy academics who go out in dangerous waters infested with killer jellyfish. It makes me realize, wow, I'm glad I wasn't stupid enough to choose a topic that almost kills me. But I have had my moments. Here are a few:

The peeing baby incident: That time when I was conducting research on infants' vision, a mother had to change her baby's diaper. In the midst of doing this, I turned to give the mother privacy and was working on my computer. Suddenly, I felt this weird wet sensation down my back and turned. Yup, you can fill in the rest of this story, but I was on the receiving end of a 6 month old's golden shower. I wonder if this baby (who must be about ten years old now) knows that he pissed all over some poor grad student at Chicago.

The vomiting RA: One time in Chicago, I had an experiment where I needed a confederate, someone who is pretending to be a naive subject but is actually in on the game. My RA came in the lab on a Saturday morning reeking of bar (stale cigarette smoke, cheap beer). She was still drunk. She apologized, and just as the subject showed up, vomited into her hands, which seemed to make things worse, spraying the flow and all over me and my laboratory. Just as the subject was coming in. Needless to say, she didn't last long after that.

The forgotten subject: This one didn't happen to me, but I caused this one to happen. One time, I had a friend of mine come in for an experiment in which the participant decided whether a particular fish was a member of category A or B on a self-running computer program. You see examples of fish on the screen and have to classify them as A fish or B fish, until you get 25 correct classifications in a row, at which point the experiment ends. I started this friend of mine, then somehow got distracted and forgot about him. Most people got the 25 correct in a row in about twenty minutes. Five hours later, I walk into the room for another reason, only to find my friend still at the computer, head in his hands, classifying fish. He got up and started screaming that he was going to Fing knock my Fing teeth out of my Fing mouth if I Fing make him Fing classify Fing anotherFing one of these Fing Fing fishes. I actually had to edit that - he said it with a lot more F bombs. He never let me forget that fish experiment. I think he is still scarred.

Chimp piss: When I was in Japan, I visited the National Primate Research Institute, where they have chimps. While watching one experiment, a baby chimp climbed to the top of his cage. I was about two feet away from him. He then let forth a violent spray of urine, covering me. Interestingly, that was the day I actually peed my own pants the next day, a story you can read about here.

Baby vomit. I was holding a baby for my experiment and it burped, then a little swish sound, and that familiar warmth down my back. I gotta stop working with babies!

There are probably other stories I have locked in the vaults of memory. I'll post any if I remember. Always remember - Don't due this at home. We're what you call, "professionals."

Overheard

I was talking with Matt, a friend of mine, last night. We were speaking about those people who are simply oblivious to the fact that they are completely obnoxious. In the course of the conversation, he said...

"You have a real problem when the biggest problem you will have to face in your entire life is you."

I have to say, never have truer words been spoken.

Finding the missing piece

Summer is time for love, and I offer you an analysis of the probability of meeting your soul mate. In his Symposium, Plato writes that people were originally both male and female. To prevent them from acquiring the power of the Gods, Zeus cut them in half. Life then became for humans a search for the other half that was lost, in order for them to once again attempt to ascend Mount Olympus.

It is a pretty story, and one that resonates with many a New Age follower’s conception of love. Even if it doesn’t quite jive with reality. But why not?

The reason once again has to do with probability. There is a well known problem in the statistics literature called the Birthday Paradox. Basically, the paradox questions, “How many people do you need to put into a room to get a 50% chance that two of the people have the same birthday?” The answer to this is 23. Therein lies the paradox – this seems like a very small number. Most people intuitively think that one needs to have 365/2 or 183 people in the room. But that intuition is wrong. The true formula is as follows:

N = .5 + SQRT((.25 + 2 * 365 * ln(2))

I would like to generalize this problem to the question of finding one’s soul mate. Specifically, the question I address is how many people would you have to include in a room for there to be a 50% chance that any two people in the room were once joined at the hip before Zeus took his shears and sliced them apart? Now, this assumes that the people in the room were randomly selected from the entire world population, which is approximately six billion people. The answer to this is simple, and follows the formula above:

N = .5 + SQRT((.25 + 2 * 6,000,000,000 * ln(2)) = 91,202

Wow! It would take a room of 91,202 people for there to be a 50% chance that any two people in that room were actually soul mates. One would have to have a pretty big room, perhaps as large as this room, which fits over 100,000 people.

Imagine a speed dating service in which you have five minutes to talk with every other person in this room. For those two lucky halves to actually have a chance to meet, the speed dating round would have to last for 91,202*5 minutes, which comes out to 316.67 days. All for only two of those 91,202 people to meet. This says nothing of the 91,200 people who leave Michigan Stadium brokenhearted or satisficing with someone who is not their other half.

But that doesn’t help you, dear reader, who doesn’t care about any two people encountering their soul mate, but rather about the probability that YOU will meet your soul mate. Well, the problem is that to calculate this, one would require a supercomputer that can handle a hell of a lot more decimal places than my humble Dell laptop. Needless to say, you would need a room about as big as this place to have a 50% chance of meeting your other half.

What does this tell you? Well, quite simply, you have about as much of a chance of meeting your other half as you do winning the powerball lottery. Either that, or the search for love isn’t a search for that one soul mate that Zeus cut from your side, but that any of a number of possible other halves fit approximately well enough that they can serve as soul mates. I tend to believe this is the case, because I know many a person who has claimed to have met their soul mate, and I know the probability of this actually occurring has about a snowball’s chance in hell. And whether or not I believe in soul mates matters very little. I do believe in probability!

But I tend to be hopeful. And I am a romantic who enjoys Greek mythology. I know my other half is wandering around out there. Of this I am certain beyond any statistical doubt. Whoever she is, I know she would appreciate my calculation of the infinitesimally small likelihood that we would ever meet.

Experimentaholic discovers a new force in the universe!

Leg day. There is nothing worse than leg day.

So ever since my semester ended, I have been spending more time at my gym. I generally don’t have much time for working out during the semester, but summer means time to try and avoid the ravages of time by exercise. Once you turn 25 apparently you lose a pound of muscle and gain a pound of fat per year. Lord knows I’m fat enough already to know that I don’t need another pound of fat come January, so there I go. But the other day I was really annoyed about going, since it was leg day.

Leg day is the day everyone hates, the day when you throw several hundred pounds on the barbell and do squats, or hold dumb bells and do lunges. Arm day is easy. Leg day just blows. But one thing I have noticed recently is that most men skip the leg exercises. They have skinny legs but massive chests and arms, which is obviously because they only do chest and arm exercises. But women don’t seem to skip those leg exercises – there are generally many women doing the ass and thigh machines. With one exception.

Over a month ago, when I started to go to the gym more regularly, I ran into this woman named Kelly. Kelly is stunningly beautiful. Tall, dark hair, gorgeous eyes, she could be mistaken for an actress. (She is actually a fashion model and aspiring actress…I know this only because we once got into a conversation because we were both wearing the same university tee shirt.) Kelly is one of those women who does her leg exercises quite regularly. And suddenly one day I noticed something rather perplexing about the nature of the universe. First, I noticed Kelly was doing her leg exercises. But then I noticed that there were several men, also doing leg exercises. I thought, “Wait a minute – that section is usually empty!” The next day…same thing. The following day, yet again.

Then, I had an epiphany. Maybe there is a new physical force in the universe, akin to gravity, that emanates solely from Kelly. Let’s call it the Kelly Field. It is a physical force that somehow attracts men to go to the leg section of the gym and work away those chicken-legs. I felt like Newton, but instead of an apple that struck me, it was a dumb bell.

I began to wonder how I could test whether Kelly was the source of a new force field that should be further investigated by more empirical studies, or whether this effect was merely due to chance or coincidence. So I designed a little experiment to test the hypothetical existence of the Kelly Field. Whenever I saw Kelly doing leg exercises, I counted the number of men and the number of women who would also be doing leg exercises. But after about two seconds of thinking, I realized this is not a very good experimental design: One needs a control condition. Maybe it is the case that when anyone – not just Kelly - goes into the leg section, that it attracts men to that section of the gym. So I had to have an alternative hypothesis…the existence of a Experimentaholic Field. If it were the case that anyone going to the leg section would attract men, then when I go to the leg section I would find just as many men working their legs as when Kelly was working out in that section. So I simply began to count the number of men in the leg section when Kelly was working out there, and the number of men when I was working out there. I eliminated a possible confound by never doing leg exercises when Kelly was doing leg exercises. Unlike other men, I was somehow unaffected by this force field, or at least could resist it at times.

At the end of three weeks, I had tallied the following totals over the course of 10 observations of Kelly and Experimentaholic. Below is a chart with the actual counts

Kelly: Men = 20, Women = 14

Experimentaholic: Men = 3, Women = 18

As can be seen in the contingency table above, there were far more men doing leg exercises in the presence of Kelly than in the presence of Sean. But this could be due to chance, right? How can one tell?

Well, the British statistician Karl Pearson saved the day when he came up with the formula for the Chi-Square test. Chi square allows you to determine whether there are associations among binary variables are likely to be due to chance. I ran the test, and found that the Chi Square test showed that the probability of such a large discrepancy in the number of men versus women working on their legs in the presence of Kelly versus Sean being due to chance is extremely low…like one in ten thousand. So the effect is real: there actually is a Kelly Field.

I wonder about the mechanism behind the Kelly Field. Does it work like gravity, and that its effect is a function of the squared distance between Kelly and men? Or is it something more like magnetism? Will we someday be able to throw out the theory of the Kelly Field and replace it with a Quantum Kelly Relativity Theory? Or a String Theory of Kelly? Only further investigations into the Kelly Field will provide us with these answers.

Currently I am working on my manuscript for the journal Science about this.

Actually, I’ll get to it once I get back from the gym.

What 3600 feels like

The number of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq is rapidly approaching 3600. I knew none of them, but I know that none of them deserve to be included in a number as massive as 3600. But what do such massive numbers mean? I think we are used to the physical reality of small numbers. We can think about 5 or 10 or 100 in real terms, because these are sets of objects that are common in our daily life experiences.

Sure, you may be thinking, I paid $300,000 for my house...but I am sure you didn't pay it in ones you've been stuffing in your mattress from the tip jar at the coffee shop where you may work, counting it out one by one. Money was electronically transferred between financial institutions in less than a second. Every once in a while, we find a box of 500 nails, or 1000 plastic bags, but even then, we don’t often really have an experience with all 500 or 1000 at once. Over the years you use the nails one or two at a time, or accumulate the bags in your drawer, in batches of 5 or 10 every time you go to the store. You don't really have a sudden understanding of 1000 bags until the sleepless night you take them from your drawer and put them in a pile, or 500 nails until you accidentally knock them on the floor and have to pick each and every one up.

Perhaps an understanding through analogy, temporality, spatiality?

Sit still for one hour and count, one number a second. At the end of that long and boring hour, you will hit 3600.

See the sea of periods below? That is 3600 periods.

........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................

3600 is the number of days in 9.86 years.

Want to drive from New York to Los Angeles? Drive 3600 miles west and you'll end up in the Pacific Ocean, because L.A. is only 2800 miles from New York.

Want to build a time Machine and go back and have a long chat with Socrates (I would like to give him a piece of my mind about that whole thing about physical reality not mattering)…go back 3600 years and you’ll have overshot him by about 800 years. In fact, you would have also missed Ancient Greece and have ended up in one of Homer’s stories.

One of the folks who visits my site has a project on plastic bags with a counter of the number of plastic bags used so far this year. Last I checked it was up to 231,253,112,013. Which is far more than the number of seconds I have lived this far in my life (I am 30): 480,924,000.

How do we think about such large numbers? How can we make large numbers more accessible to our reasoning so that we can think better about quantities Because I want a subjective experience of a large number that carries representational heft. I want to know what 200,000 feels like when someone tells you that over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or what 800,000 feels like when I am told that the Rwandan genocide killed up to 800,000 people, or what 6 million feels like when I am told that 6 million people died in the holocaust?

And I want to feel what 3600 feels like when I discover that 3600 Americans have sacrificed their lives in the Iraq war.

What's the meaning of your life?

Last year I was asked to give a speech at a dinner for my school's psychology honor society. I just stumbled across it today and figured I would put it out there.

Thank you for inviting me today. It truly is an honor to speak to you on this special day when you join the prestigious group of psychologists who comprise this honor society. I know I speak for the faculty in saying that we are proud of your accomplishments and enjoy having you all in our classes and laboratories.

As psychologists, we often ask ourselves questions. And at some point, as human beings, most of us have asked ourselves the biggest question out there: what is the meaning of life. If you attempt to find an answer to this question, I’m sure you will become frustrated fairly quickly, because you may find there are so many smaller questions that have yet to be answered. And without answers to the smaller questions, you can’t even begin to approach the most massive question of all.

So today I want to tell you about a question so seemingly insignificant that you probably have never thought about it before. However, trivial as it might seem, it has taken up a majority of the past 5 years of my life, and I still believe that I might understand perhaps less than 5 percent of the answer. So the question is this: how do we come to understand that objects have size. To answer this question one must first consider the history of how we have conceptualized the process of cognitive development.

A long standing belief in the history of philosophy and psychology is that infants come into the world with few cognitive abilities or skills. This is best captured by the British Empiricist philosopher John Locke’s proposal that the infant mind is a tabula raza, a blank slate. Locke claimed that experience writes all knowledge upon this slate. This perspective led William James to claim that the infant experiences the world as a blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory information. Jean Piaget, the father of developmental psychology, argued that knowledge emerges through interactive processes of assimilation and accommodation between innate reflexes and the physical world. Yet innate reflexes are relatively primitive, and many have found his theory thus far lacking. But recently, developmental psychologists have come to understand that infants are not so clueless as they might appear, and have a remarkable set of innate skills that, along with experience, gradually develop into the mature abilities that all of us Psi Chi members share – and perhaps some of their parents and loved ones as well.

The skill I have examined extensively in my attempt to answer the question of how we understand size is a curious finding that young infants seem to have a primitive ability to automatically encode the size of an object. This finding was a surprise to a lot of people, because the traditional view was that children do not understand the concept of size until about eight years of age when they are able to use rulers to measure things. But what I found was that infants do notice a change in the size of an object, but only when that object is next to another object that serves the functional role of a ruler. They encode the size of the object as a proportion of that second object. When such objects are not available (such as when you have a glowing ball in a dark room) they can not encode size. Yet when you consider the ecological world of infants, there are plenty of objects in their perceptual world that can serve the role of perceptually-available rulers. A parent, for instance, always walks through the door, and the door itself remains the same size over time, so the infant simply encodes the size of the adult relative to the size of the door. So long as these objects do not change size, infants are able to remember and recall how big or small an object happens to be. Only later, when a teacher or parent shows the child how to use a ruler, do they begin to understand the functional role of conventional standard objects such as rulers, and decontextualize the size of objects from their immediately surrounding contexts. Thus, this primitive ability becomes obsolete and replaced with a new understanding of the concept of size.

But these primitive strategies for encoding size never become obsolete enough. Have any of you ever bought a piece of furniture that looked small in the enormous warehouse where you bought it but once in your home it ended up taking up half the living room? This happened because instead of using your mature adult brain and digging out a ruler or tape measure, you used the primitive strategy from your infant brain and encoded the size of the piece of furniture relative to an available context, namely the size of he warehouse itself. The problem is that the warehouse is much larger than your living room, and thus the piece of furniture appeared a heck of a lot smaller. Only when you bring it home and find it is far too large do you begin to regret the fact that you bought it at a going-out of business sale where there is no hope of a refund! But the point is that as adults we can sometimes see this primitive ability to encode size contextually echoes through our lives and affects us as adults.

But I would like to tell you the story of how I came to this knowledge about infant sensitivity to size. Like many of you, I started working in a psychology lab as an undergraduate probably. I designed an infant study in which I presented babies with sticks of various lengths either inside glass containers or alone on a small stage in a visual habituation task. I predicted that the glass containers provided the role of a perceptually available standard. I spent weeks collecting data that consisted of the amount of time infants stared at the different sticks. Finally, in the lab one night at 2:00 AM, I opened SPSS and conducted an ANOVA on the data. I clicked analyze, and the output showed the following, which, if you took my methods and theory class, you will know exactly what this means F(1, 47) = 5.6, p < .01. For those of you who missed class those days, this means that the experiment worked – I found a real result. I sat there, alone, with my coffee, and just stared at the screen in wonder, because I realized that I was the first person on earth to know this fact about the world. I was addicted.

But not every night has been so lucky. In another study, I spent several months collecting data from infants. I was interested in whether infants could rotate an object in working memory to encode its size. It's not important. I entered the data, hit analyze, and out spat a ANOVA with a p value of .78, meaning I had nothing, nada, ziltch. Three months of waiting for parents to bring in their babies on Saturday afternoons, with many of them not showing up, and those that did often crying in the middle of the experiment and thus rendering their data useless. A lot of sweat and elbow grease for nothing.

The next day I went to my advisor, Janellen Huttenlocher, in frustration. I told her that these goddamn babies were not behaving as they were supposed to. I told her that these infants were ruining my theory. I truly believed that I just had a batch of stupid babies.

She looked at me, in consternation and bemusement, and said, “Sean, the world has spoken to you: Listen to it.” And I realized at that moment that this statement is the essence of what we as psychologists do: we listen to what the world has to say. Many times, it had nothing to say. Many times we asked the world the wrong question. Many times the world speaks a language that we can’t even begin to comprehend.

But when the world does speak to us, and we have the knowledge and wisdom to listen, it usually is says something so fascinating that it is worth all the times that you have to throw up your hands and admit that your presumptions were wrong. Psychological science allows us to understand that we often view the world through myopic lenses; that we might think we understand the way things work and have a theory to explain it, but end up, in the end, being totally wrong. And as disappointing as this may be, this fact speaks to the very complexity of both the questions that we as psychologists wrestle with and the answers we come up with. Even questions so simple as how we understand the concept of size have not so simple answers.

So far, we have waded only ankle deep in this sea of psychological knowledge, and the waters seem warm and inviting. But I also know that we will never really swim far enough out there to answer enough of the unanswered smaller questions so that we can finally answer the question of the meaning of life. But I DO believe that I have come to a better understanding of what the meaning of my life is about, and perhaps a bit of what your lives are about, as well. And it is this: To use the tools of psychological science to come to a better understanding of the world around us, the people within it, and the processes that govern our thoughts and actions. And through this understanding, change the world, inspire the people within it, and help each other maximize all the potential in all of our thoughts and actions.

So I applaud all of you for pursuing an education and career in psychology. I applaud your friends and family for putting up with late night studying sessions and for being guinea pigs in your psychological experiments. I applaud you for doing so well in your coursework and research that you are able to join this elite group of psychologists who are members of Psi Chi. And most importantly, I hope all of you continue to enjoy listening to the world throughout the rest of your lives.

Thank you.