Letters Remain

  • Statistical Literacy Guides

    I am suitably impressed by the clarity and breadth of the House of Commons Library’s statistical literacy guide on How to spot spin and inappropriate use of statistics (pdf, via @TimHarford).

    A quick dig around the archives revealed a full series of statistical literacy guides (all pdf), all of which are fantastically readable, accessible and comprehensive. These are must-read guides to what some people feel are complex, seemingly-monolithical subjects:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Evidence on Breastfeeding

    In an article the Royal Statistical Society announced as the runner-up in their annual Awards for Statistical Excellence in Journalism, Helen Rumbelow thoroughly investigates the well-debated subject of breastfeeding.

    The conclusion of the piece is that much of the evidence in support of breastfeeding is massively misrepresented or inherently flawed.

    “The evidence to date suggests it probably doesn’t make much difference if you breastfeed.” […]

    “The conclusion is that the evidence we have now is not compelling. It certainly does not justify the rhetoric,” [American academic Joan Wolf] says. The problem with the studies is that it is very hard to separate the benefits of the mother’s milk from the benefits of the kind of mother who chooses to breastfeed. In the UK, for example, the highest class of women are 60 per cent more likely to breastfeed than the lowest, so it is not surprising that research shows that breastfed infants display all the health and educational benefits they were born into. But even if education, class and wealth is taken into account, there is known to be a big difference between the type of mother who follows the advice of her doctor and breastfeeds, and the one that ignores it to give the bottle. In other words, breastfeeding studies could simply be showing what it’s like to grow up in a family that makes an effort to be healthy and responsible, as opposed to anything positive in breast milk.

    This is not to say that breastfeeding is not good:

    • Wolf acknowledges that it helps prevent gastrointestinal infections (life-saving in the developing world, generally a mild complaint in the West).
    • Michael Kramer (one of the world’s most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research; advisor to the WHO, Unicef and the Cochrane Library) believes:
      • The evidence is “encouraging” in preventing respiratory problems.
      • The data on helping prevent breast cancer is “solid”.

    However:

    • The data on obesity, allergies, asthma, leukaemia, lymphoma, bowel disease, type 1 diabetes, heart disease and blood pressure are “weak” at best.
    • The “highly respected” American Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warns that, “because the breastfeeding mothers were self-selecting, ‘one should not infer causality’”.
    • The World Health Organisation’s own research review concluded that gains were “modest” and also warned that “because none of the studies it looked at dealt with the problem of confounding, the results could be explained by the ‘self-selection of breastfeeding mothers’”.

    via @TimHarford

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Immigration Makes Cities Safer

    Cities with large immigrant populations are some of the safest places to live, suggest the data and studies, especially those where the police “know how to work with [immigrants], not against them“.

    The studies in question–including one extensive study by the FBI–go on to suggest reasons why immigrants reduce a city’s crime:

    This is not just a matter of random correlation being mistaken for causation. A new study by sociologist Tim Wadsworth […] carefully evaluates the various factors behind the statistics that show a massive drop in crime during the 1990s at a time when immigration rose dramatically. In a peer-reviewed paper appearing in the June 2010 issue of Social Science Quarterly, Wadsworth argues not only that “cities with the largest increases in immigration between 1990 and 2000 experienced the largest decreases in homicide and robbery,” which we knew, but that after considering all the other explanations, rising immigration “was partially responsible.” […]

    So, yes, there are pretty compelling data to support the argument that immigrants as such—even presumably “illegal” immigrants—do not make cities more dangerous to live in. But what mechanism about such immigration makes cities safer? Robert J. Sampson, head of the sociology department at Harvard, has suggested that, among other things, immigrants move into neighborhoods abandoned by locals and help prevent them from turning into urban wastelands. They often have tighter family structures and mutual support networks, all of which actually serve to stabilize urban environments. As Sampson told me back in 2007, “If you want to be safe, move to an immigrant city.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Presence of Books and Children’s Intelligence

    The number of books in your household has more of an effect on your child’s academic achievements than your education or income, a recently published study (pdf) has found.

    Suggesting that the effects seem to be far from trivial, the conclusion indicates that simply the presence of books in their house can make children more intelligent.

    Just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study […] found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

    [Another study] found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide” — the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year.

    Upon reading this I had the same thought as Jonah Lehrer: “But what to do in a world of Kindles and iPads?”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Innovation and the ‘Creation’ of Time

    I make no secret of being a huge fan of Matt Ridley’s body of work, and his latest addition to this, The Rational Optimist, seems like a welcome addition.

    A wonderful summary of the book’s main theme–that innovation and the spreading of theories and ideas is the key to a prosperous future and we should be optimistic for what lies ahead because of this–has been written by John Tierney, with a nice look at one reason why innovation and its companions are important for progress:

    “Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”

    You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Anchoring Our Beliefs

    The psychological principle of anchoring is most commonly discussed in terms of our irrational decision making when purchasing items. However, Jonah Lehrer stresses that anchoring is more wide-ranging than this and is in fact “a fundamental flaw of human decision making”.

    As such, Lehrer believes that anchoring also effects our beliefs, such that our first reaction to an event ‘anchors’ our subsequent thoughts and decisions, even in light of more accurate evidence.

    Consider the ash cloud: After the cloud began drifting south, into the crowded airspace of Western Europe, officials did the prudent thing and canceled all flights. They wanted to avoid a repeat of the near crash of a Boeing 747 in 1989. […]

    Given the limited amount of information, anchoring to this previous event (and trying to avoid a worst case scenario) was the only reasonable reaction. The problems began, however, when these initial beliefs about the risk of the ash cloud proved resistant to subsequent updates. […]

    My point is absolutely not that the ash cloud wasn’t dangerous, or that the aviation agencies were wrong to cancel thousands of flights, at least initially. […] Instead, I think we simply need to be more aware that our initial beliefs about a crisis – those opinions that are most shrouded in ignorance and uncertainty – will exert an irrational influence on our subsequent actions, even after we have more (and more reliable) information. The end result is a kind of epistemic stubbornness, in which we’re irrationally anchored to an outmoded assumption.

    The same thing happened with the BP oil spill.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Predicting Our Behaviour

    Other people are far superior than us at predicting our behaviour as their predictions are based primarily on observation and are not tainted by our psychological narrative.

    After reading Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves, Nick Southgate–faculty member at London’s The School of Life–discusses this idea that our friends and acquaintances are better than us at predicting our future behaviour .

    We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However […] our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.

    In contrast, other people can only base their predictions on behaviour they have observed. This gives them a factual edge. They know you are always late, don’t stick to diets, drive too fast and tend to forget birthdays. Their judgement is not clouded by resolutions to reform oneself and the self-preserving instinct to not dwell on past misdemeanours.

    Consequently, if we want to know what you will do next, it is often better to ask others than it is to ask yourself. Friends and family can know you better than you know yourself. Even strangers, who can see a situation more clearly than you, can make better predictions.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Conformity and Its Influences

    There are ten “timeless influencers” of conformity, suggests the literature on the topic, and by understanding what these influences are–and how to use and counteract them–we are provided with some insight into our and others’ behaviour in many situations.

    To that end, PsyBlog helpfully provides a summary of the ten core factors that influence conformity.

    • Group size: Maximum conformity is seen in groups of between three and five people. More than five makes little difference, less than three and conformity is “substantially reduced”.
    • Dissent: A ‘competent dissenter’ in the group can reduced conformity from 97% to 36%, even on obvious visual judgement tasks. “Dissenters must be consistent, though, otherwise they’ll fail to convince the majority”.
    • Ingroup bias: We like to conform with those we perceive to be in our ‘group’, especially if they are attractive. This is very strong, negating even the dissenter and group size influences. We will also go to lengths to avoid conforming with a perceived ‘outgroup’.
      Professor Richard Wiseman, in 59 Seconds, notes that “Regardless of whether the similarity is dress, speech, background, age, religion, politics, drinking and smoking habits, food preference, opinions, personality or body language, we like people who are like us, and find them far more persuasive than others.”
    • Mood: Good moods make us more likely to conform than bad moods. The ‘fear-then-relief’ tactic (“make someone afraid of something, then relieve that fear”) is particularly effective.
    • Need for structure: Those with a ‘need for structure’ in their lives are more likely to conform than others.
    • Social approval: “Non-conformity and self-confidence go hand-in-hand”. Those with a desire for social approval will confirm more often than not.
    • Culture: Those from individualist cultures are less likely to conform than those from collectivist cultures (typically Western and East Asian cultures respectively). Conformity rates range from 25-58% in collectivist cultures and 14-39% in individualistic cultures.
    • Authority: Conformity can be transformed into obedience in the presence of a perceived authority figure (think: Milgram experiment). Obedience levels range from 12-92%, “depending on the social context”.
    • Social norms: Our level of conformity is “strongly influenced by thinking about how others would behave in the same situation we are in, especially when we are unsure how to act. The higher we perceive the level of consensus, the more we are swayed. We are also more easily swayed if we know little about the issue ourselves or can’t be bothered to examine it carefully”.
    • Reciprocation: The desire to reciprocate is “incredibly strong and influential across all human cultures”.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • User Experience Design Tips

    Inspired by Matthew Frederick’s enlightening book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Shane Morris and Matt Morphett started 101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School.

    After a promising start the site halted prematurely with a measly nineteen entries to it’s name. Those that do exist are not all fantastic, but there are some gems that are worth a browse, including:

    I wait in hope of a revival.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Effectiveness of Social Support on Exercise Goals

    Informing our friends and family of our resolutions in hope that the social support will encourage us is an effective tactic–as long as these people ‘check-in’ on our progress at semi-regular intervals.

    That’s the conclusion from a study where three groups of people had their exercise goals tracked under one of three conditions: a regular phone call from an exercise instructor, a regular automated call from a machine, and a control group receiving no calls.

    The results showed that having to report your progress toward a goal drastically increases the amount of effort undertaken–especially when it’s a human checking-in on your progress.

    The caller, whether human or computer, asked the participants to recite the amount of exercise they performed during the past week. Participants were then congratulated on any exercise performed, and asked how the level might be increased in the week ahead. When lapses occurred […] the goal was to impress upon participants the importance of resuming the workout as soon as possible. All questions were designed to encourage rather than to scold.

    After 12 months, participants receiving calls from a live person were exercising, as a mean, about 178 minutes a week, above government recommendations for 150 minutes a week. That represented a 78% jump from about 100 minutes a week at the start of the study. Exercise levels for the group receiving computerized calls doubled to 157 minutes a week. A control group of participants, who received no phone calls, exercised 118 minutes a week, up 28% from the study’s start. […]

    Some studies by other researchers have suggested that after eight weeks of regular exercising many people can settle into a long-term habit of working out.

    The article also cites a study on how meeting in groups to discuss exercising goals (group-counseling) showed a quadrupling of exercise levels after three months and an even greater jump at nine months (long after the group-counseling sessions ended in month three). By contrast, “the exercise level of a control group rose during the study period but at nine months had returned to near-baseline levels”.

    via Nudge

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    Lloyd Morgan