Why do some people vote against their self-interest?

The BBC reports:

[It's] striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform [in the U. S.] – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies..?

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side…

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious…”

Brain science and education: In search of a new synthesis

The NY Times reports:

The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.

And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.

(Cross-posted with my Education Blog.)

Propanda can influence us more than we believe

Last week, the U. S. Supreme Court issues a decision related to political campaign spending by corporations and labor unions. Dan Vergano reports in this USA Today article that political advertising is hardly the only kind of propaganda that can shape our perceptions of the world.

• Just giving medical students pens with a drug’s name on them made the students significantly more favorably disposed toward the medication than otherwise, despite their immersion in classes aimed at letting them rationally evaluate drug benefits, found a 2009 Archives of Internal Medicinereport.
• Remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland? Roughly a third of people presented with a fake ad depicting a visit to Disneyland that featured a handshake with Bugs later remembered or knew the meet up with the ‘wascally wabbit’ had happened to them, according to a 2001 University of Washington study. Even though Bugs is owned by Warner Brothers and verboten at a Disney facility, so it couldn’t have happened.
• In a famous 1951 experiment led by Swarthmore’s Solomon Asch, 76% of people conformed at least once to what they heard other people arguing was the correct length of a line on a scale right in front of their face, even though it was plainly wrong. The people arguing for the incorrect measurement were all plants, but overall, 33% of participants went along with the group, even though they were spouting nonsense. A follow-up study in a 1955 Journal of Abnormal Psychology report found even under anonymous conditions, about 23% of people preferred to believe what people were saying about the line rather than the evidence in front of their own eyes.

“If you are inclined to believe that people do all their thinking rationally, then you might accept that more information is better, and that eventually the good information will drive out the bad,” says journalist Shankar Vedantam, author of the just-released The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. “Unfortunately, there is a small warehouse full of research showing it is an error to believe we live according to reason. Rather we make decisions with our unconscious.”

The impact of the Internet on cognition: Experts speak out

NEWSWEEK reports:

The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” That is the “annual question” at the online salon edge.org, where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers…

“The Internet hasn’t changed the way we think,” argues neuroscientist Joshua Greene of Harvard. It “has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn’t changed what [our brains] do with it.” Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard is also skeptical. “Electronic media aren’t going to revamp the brain’s mechanisms of information processing,” he writes. “Texters, surfers, and twitterers” have not trained their brains “to process multiple streams of novel information in parallel,” as is commonly asserted but refuted by research, and claims to the contrary “are propelled by … the pressure on pundits to announce that this or that ‘changes everything.’ “

The rest of the experts’ responses to Edge.org’s question can be viewed here.

Among dyslexics, IQ and reading are unrelated, study finds

Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss reports:

[A new] study by [Yale researcher Sally] Shaywitz and several other researchers and published this month in the journal Psychological Science, provides empirical evidence for the first time showing that the relationship between IQ and reading over time is not the same for dyslexic readers as it is for non-dyslexics.

In people without dyslexia, intelligence and reading do in fact connect and can influence each other over time. But in dyslexics, IQ and reading are not linked over time and do not have an affect on each other, the researchers showed.

Classic article: “Preschool program improves cognitive control”

I’m introducing a new feature here at the CogSciBlog – classic article posts. As regular readers know, my posts typically highlight new research, but there are of course older articles and reports that remain relevant to contemporary cognitive science. So, I will occasionally post a summary of an interesting ‘classic’ article or report (‘classic’ broadly defined).

If you would like to submit an idea for a classic article, please contact me at mgs {at} mgsaldivar.com

This week’s classic article is:

Diamond, A, Barnett, W. S., Thomas, J. & Munro, S. (2007, Nov. 30). Preschool program improves cognitive control. Science, 318(5855), 1387 – 1388.

Executive functions (EFs), also called cognitive control, are critical for success in school and life. Although EF skills are rarely taught, they can be. The Tools of the Mind (Tools) curriculum improves EFs in preschoolers in regular classrooms with regular teachers at minimal expense. Core EF skills are (i) inhibitory control (resisting habits, temptations, or distractions), (ii) working memory (mentally holding and using information), and (iii) cognitive flexibility (adjusting to change)… EFs are more strongly associated with school readiness than are intelligence quotient (IQ) or entry-level reading or math skills. Kindergarten teachers rank skills like self-discipline and attentional control as more critical for school readiness than content knowledge. EFs are important for academic achievement throughout the school years.

The article is available here [PDF].

Political views influence belief in experts and expertise

NEWSWEEK reports:

As with mammograms, climate change is also a matter of trust and belief (or not) in experts: physicists, or Glenn Beck? In addition, denying environmental reality reflects, in part, a tendency to justify the existing order, argues [Dr. John] Jost [of New York University]. Conservatives, part of whose ideology is to respect and protect the status quo, tend to engage in this “systems justification” more than liberals, tending to view corporations, markets, government, and other institutions as legitimate and benign. Acknowledging climate change means recognizing “shortcomings of the current system” and “admitting that the status quo must change,” Jost and colleagues write in a paper to be published early next year. They find that a desire to justify the status quo (gauged by agreement with such statements as “Most policies serve the greater good” and “Society is set up so people usually get what they deserve”) accounts for much of the variability in people’s likelihood of denying climate change.

Researchers find that remediation rewires learners’ brains

A press release from Carnegie Mellon University announces:

Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating new white matter that improves communication within the brain.

As the researchers report today in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white matter — the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed — improved substantially after the children received 100 hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased, and testing showed the children could read better.

“Showing that it’s possible to rewire a brain’s white matter has important implications for treating reading disabilities and other developmental disorders, including autism,” said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI).

The article is available online here (free preview, subscription required for full access).

Genes and behavior

NEWSWEEK reports:

Over the past decade, [genetics company] deCODE has discovered genes linked to type 2 diabetes, atrial fibrillation, heart attack, prostate cancer, glaucoma, breast cancer … seemingly every ill ever visited upon humanity short of boils. But that wasn’t good enough. The gene variants, it turns out, account for only a small fraction of the risk of developing these diseases. Plus, many genes affect that risk. As a result, tests for disease-risk genes, and even drugs that target the pathways the genes affect, aren’t all that informative or useful, limiting the market for both diagnostics and treatments based on disease genes…

A more pointed rebuke to DNA centrism comes from research on how children’s behavior affects how adults treat them. That kids (through their behavior) create their own environment, so to speak, has been known to science since the 1960s (and to parents forever). But scientists have hardly studied it, notes psychologist Claire Vallotton of Michigan State University, in part because they have been loath to look too hard into something that implies a baby is to blame for how she is treated.

The relationship between sleep and memory

TIME Magazine reports:

For nearly two centuries, researchers have suspected that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. But it’s only in the last decade that neuroscientists have discovered the most convincing evidence that memory is indeed dependent on sleep. The prevailing theory is that during deep sleep, the brain replays certain experiences from the day, which, in turn, strengthens the memory of what happened. It is thought that when it comes to factual memories, like names, faces, numbers or locations, memory consolidation happens only during deep sleep — a phase of non–rapid eye movement sleep. (The other broad type of sleep, called rapid eye movement or REM sleep, which is when dreaming occurs, is believed to play a role in consolidating memories involving emotions and motor skills, such as dancing or playing an instrument.)