What is it with Chick Sexing?

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Marcel

Come back with me for a moment to my old high school. It is 1977 and a group of us grade-10 boys is hanging around in the hallways after lunch, looking for something–anything–to take the piss out of. We pass the guidance councilor’s room, a dentist’s waiting room kind of space that mostly goes unused but whose door is always wide open. Some recently installed new technology–a job search “computer”–pulls us in. Here’s how it works: there is a catalog of job names. You choose the job you would like to know more about and enter it into the machine; and then a few weeks later you return to the office to pick up your *computer printout* of the job info. We recognize it as a gimmick right away. We patiently listen to the explanation and then flip through the catalog to find silly jobs we can use to try out this computer printout system. And there in the “C” section we find what we are looking for: CHICK SEXER. It’s a giggly treat of an item and with great delight we enter the request into the machine and laugh about it for the rest of the day. Weeks later the folded 2-sheet ringed printout arrives with only two lines of text on the first page and nothing below the perforation: A chick sexer is someone who determines the sex of baby chicks. This is done by turning the birds over and examining their bottoms to see if they are male of female. And that’s it. No info on how to become one. No info on pay. Nothing on working conditions. Nothing on certification or the difficulty of learning the skill. No mention of the thousand-birds-an-hour speed that master chick sexers attain. And absolutely nothing on the Japanese domination of the profession. The whole incident was then added to the meaningless use of technology box in my long-term memory, in addition to the juvenile prank box. And the term check sexer floated around as brain junk for the next three decades.

Then last year in the span of only a few months, I came across chick sexer again in print, in not one, but two books: Moonwalking with Einstein and Incognito. Both books use it to illustrate the effects of intense, focused practice. OK, sure, but why not unicyclists, jugglers, violinists, or short order cooks? What is it with chick sexing, I wondered? Why all the interest in this obscure profession?

As best as I can figure out, it seems that most academic interest goes back to Biederman & Shiffrar’s (1987) article on chick sexing, subtitled, A Case Study and Expert Systems Analysis of a Difficult Perceptual-Learning Task. They took two groups of subjects and gave one instruction and some training with images in determining from among the vast array of possible chick bottoms, which are male and which are female. There is apparently, outside of a few standard configurations, quite a bit of variation. A control group got no instruction or training. Both groups were then asked to sex a pile of chicks, and their performance was compared to experts. Well, the trained group got a 72% accuracy rate, not bad but pretty far short of the 95% accuracy rate of professionals. The control group, however, was also surprising. They got a 62% accuracy rate–just by using intuition. The presence of a “prominent bead” probably means a male, they reported.

After the Biederman and Schiffrar article appeared, academic interest seems to have veered in the direction of the difference between the trained and professional group and how pros are able–without always being able to articulate–how they can categorize the rarer types of chick bottoms. Cognitive researchers like Harnad (1996) and philosophers like Brandom (1998) seem to have taken taken interest in the phenomenon and chick sexers became standard go-to guys for cognitive psychologists interested in how people learn complex tasks. In 2002, Horsey published an article, The Art of Chick Sexing (linked to the Wikipedia page on chick sexing),with a clear emphasis on skills that “are hard-earned and not accessible to introspection” (pg. 107). In the case of both Mr. Eagleman in Incognito and Mr. Foer inMoonwalking, it seems to be Horsey’s article and this “unconscious” acquisition, picked up through copious amounts of intense focused practice that is of greatest interest. Horsey says that we shouldn’t necessarily be so impressed by chick sexers and expert wine tasters, etc. Every one of us is constantly making categorizations like these in our daily lives. We do it so well we aren’t even aware of the complexity of our feats. An example of one such skill is reading. Like any skill, it started with instruction and selective attention to cues. Then came practice and lots of it, until we reached the point where it became an automatic process. Reading is “not based on gestalt properties [but] on discrete cues” (pg. 114). In the case of chicken sexers, their remarkable ability can be explained through the same process, with the addition of time performance pressure, regular immediate feedback, the social pressure the instructional environment, and the rewards (financial and otherwise) of a very marketable skill in the future.

The Horsey article is short and makes for interesting reading. It suggests suggests that just about any advanced level skill is possible, given the right conditions and effort and time. For me, the Biederman and Shiffrar article also was very encouraging in the way that it showed how learning can be seen in stages. Even total amateurs were not total beginners. And with focused attention to cues and practice, anyone is capable of better performance. Expert level performance is not so easy to attain, but it is more a matter of hard work than talent or magic. That’s a message I want my learners to embrace. Julie Dirksen in her fantastic book Design for How People Learn, ends with a quotation by Kathy Sierra: “Kicking ass is more fun regardless of the task. It’s more fun to know more. It’s more fun to be able to do more. It’s more fun to be able to help others do more.” I think that if we approach learning as a continuum of increasing power and fun, all the hard work involved becomes more palatable, even if that involves looking at 1000 chicken butts an hour.

One detail that made the story of the chick sexers interesting to me was the fact that the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Nagoya, Japan produced and still produces a ridiculous number of the world’s best chick sexers. Indeed the vent method of chick sexing was invented by two researchers in Nagoya. The pictures above show the original school and one of those researchers, Professor Masui. Here are some more pictures, all of which come from a film produced by the school in the 1930s and recently re-discovered by HIRUNAGI Kanjun of the Nagoya University Museum.

The school is still in operation and you can read a fairly recent piece done on it here. Aside from being interesting for cognitive scientists, chick sexers lived lives that allowed them to cross cultures at a time when it was not easy to do so. Many Japanese chick sexers, both men and women, went to the US, Canada, and Europe to work and live in the pre-WWII era. The stories of their lives make for fascinating reading. As chick sexers, they were a type of freelance worker and they traveled widely, taking their skills from farm to farm. A great collection of first person history can be found at this site. There are some remarkable stories here of some very remarkable people. I highly recommend a visit.

Biederman, I. & M. M. Shiffrar (1987) Sexing day-old chicks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13: 640–645.

Brandom, , R.B. (1998). Insights and blindspots of reliabilism. Monist 81: 371-392.

Harnad, S. (1996). Experimental analysis of naming behavior cannot explain naming capacity. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 65: 262-64.

Horsey, R. (2002). The art of chicken sexing. London: University College London Working Papers in Linguistics.

Hirunagi, K (2006). Original film of “Chick Sexing”: On the development and practice of baby chick sexing method was found. Bullitin of the Nagoya University Museum No. 22, 65-72.

A Trolley Named Desire

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Marcel

OK, everybody knows the little trolley thought experiment, right? It even has a Wikipedia page, which I shall now quote liberally from:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher [or workers working on a track in the less dramatic version I first heard]. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

And so most people say they would indeed flip the switch and sacrifice one for the safety of the five. But then comes the second version (the description of which at Wikipedia is under the rather blunt heading “The fat man”:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

And most people recoil at the thought. Hmm, smile the ethical philosophers, you do realize that the two scenarios are identical, do you not? Killing one saves the five. But there is a difference and an important one that keeps bringing people back to this problem. Michael Sandel uses it to start his wildly-popular course on Justice (available online here, BTW). The difference between the problems makes you think. I am not alone in the reaction I had, judging from the opinions of Sandel’s students and the tabulated results of people answering the questions. I originally felt that the difference between just flipping a switch and actually running up to and grabbing, hoisting, and possibly forcing a bewildered obese person over the bridge railing was enough difference to make me take a less active role in the second scenario.

But this morning, while reading David Eagleman’s engaging Incognito on the train to work, I read about the neuroscience take on the problem (also listed on the Wikipedia page as I discovered later). Eagleman introduces Joshua Greene and Jonathon Cohen, who have done a lot of research on neuroethics, much of it in Greene’s Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard. According to them and the neuroscience perspective, the difference is that interacting with the fat man up close activates the emotional networks of the brain . The brain, Eagleman explains, is a “team of rivals” and two large groupings of rivals are the emotional and rational systems. In fMRI screenings of people considering the two trolley problems, the first scenario causes areas of the brain connected to rational thinking to be more active and the second scenario activates areas involved with motor planning and emotion.

Cognitive or emotional? Advertisers know the difference between these two systems well. And so do politicians. But in education, the cognitive is still everything. The phrase that suddenly grew larger for me on the page this morning, the one that makes all the difference, is “personal interaction.” In re-thinking the classrooms of language lessons in Japan, I wonder if this is not the key issue. I think creating a cacophony of social/personal interaction to activate the emotional parts of the brain might be a goal for these classes, though rational minds might recoil at such an approach. It seems fair to say that affect is woefully under-addressed in courses, coursebooks, and pedagogical literature (the latter probably because of the difficulty of doing research). There is this book, now 13 years old and counting, but much of the literature seems concerned primarily with reducing learner anxiety in the classroom. But in terms of neuroscience, 13 years is a lifetime ago…Jane Arnold, the editor of Affect in Language Learning, says on her website that” she is convinced that when teaching is affective it becomes more effective” but there seems to be little in the way of literature that really demonstrates that. I guess I’ll just need to keep looking.

Sept. 24, 2012 Update: This article from NPR reports on how the visual/emotional aspect of the second part of the trolley thought experiment makes it very different.

“Some dilemmas produce vivid images in our heads. And we’re wired to respond emotionally to pictures. Take away the pictures — the brain goes into rational, calculation mode.”

Investigative Journalism on Memory: Joshua Foer Goes Moonwalking With Einstein

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Marcel

As just another aging baby boomer with a dementia-distorted parent and a career in language education and a propensity to misplace items on mental shopping lists, interest, awe, and fear of memory are never far from the tip of my tongue. I have thought about it, read about it, and studied it. But Joshua Foer’s book–squarely aimed at that large group of memorywarts like me–includes a dollop of how-to to in a book that is part narrative and part meander through a palace of memory.

As a recent graduate and an aspiring science writer, young Mr. Foer covered the World Memory Championships and the American Memory Championships and, being convinced by the participants themselves that there is more learnable technique than anything else, decided to give it a go. His account of his introduction to competitive memory and his training for the US Memory Championship that he eventually wins provides the narrative structure for the book. Along the way, however, he slides in asides related to memory–the importance of knowing facts in learning, expertise training, an introduction to memory misfits, etc. Most of these will not be new to most readers I suspect. But they are interesting enough and there are enough nuggets to be found along the way that as a refresher course in introductory memory and a collection of memory-related magazine articles they are pleasant enough. His journalistic style makes the content easier to read and remember than Baddeley. He also goes into detail on how to use the method of loci and some of the techniques used by memory champs to do amazing things. Readers can decide how far they want to go in trying some of the techniques–a few can be done with the book closed on your lap for a bit, but some will require serious effort and practice–but this is a book that encourages you to try these things out for yourself.

Reading the book won’t improve your memory; it will put memory in perspective for you, though. And it will start you off with some powerful techniques that you can use to practice your way to improvement–not for everything, but for some things–and for me that was worth the price of admission.

But if you are just after the techniques for improving memory, there are print and web resources galore. The techniques everyone uses have mostly been around since the Middle Ages and it seems literally hundreds of people are making a living off re-packaging them. Do a quick web search on the method of loci to find out as much as many “experts” know in a very short time. Foer is set apart by the fact that he has a science background and is a relatively good writer, but there are dozens of similar books on the market, most of which are probably extremely similar. One interesting and comprehensive website I did find is by Fiona McPhersona, a memory expert (author/researcher) with an strong interest in practical application. It is called Mempowered. It covers both the mechanisms of memory and techniques for improvement. And there is something here for all memory hopes and worries.

Understanding the Modular You: Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Marcel

This reatively short and very entertaining book packs a message that can change the way we look at people and the minds that make us who we are. Robert Kurzban is an evolutionary psychologist. And in one long breath, here is his message: the mind is modular and it makes no sense to talk about “you” or “me” because there is no conscious, single, controlling “you” or “me” running the show inside our heads, and when”you” and “me” talk, it is basically my “press secretary” talking to your “press secretary,” one of many modules of our mind, modules that act with their own rhyme and reason and don’t necessarily talk to each other and aren’t necessarily aware of each other, but do act in a way that is in accordance to the goals for which the module was genetically selected for. Got that? Basically, it means that there are lots of parts of “you” and they do what they were designed (selected) to do, usually without regard for other parts of “you.” Behavioral inconsistencies can be explained through understanding this modular specialization structure of the brain. Deep down, I think we already know this. This is why people on diets lock their fridge doors at night, why George Reckers and Elliot Spitzer walk(ed) a different walk from their public talk, etc. But Kurzban’s theory–and he repeatedly states that it is an exploratory theory– is a way of conceptualizing how the mind can manage to be so blatantly contradictory, and as such it has great explaining power. People can hold very strong beliefs, impossibly contradictory beliefs, often for no reason. People can say one thing and do another, they can waffle between patience and impulsivity, have overinflated and unrealistic views of themselves (almost everyone, for example, believes themselves to be an above-average driver), and hold others to high moral principles that they prefer not to apply to themselves. Seen through Kurzban’s evolutionary psychology spectacles, the selfish little modules trying to gain advantage any way they can form a logical–if depressingly dispicable–portait of the organisms we are.

Aside from being an interesting and entertaining read, this hand-grenade of a book may eventually shake a lot of long-held belief fruit out of the trees that social psychologists and behavioral economists have been feeding from for years. For example, the notion that motivation and preferences are fairly constant (two that have long bothered me personally), are debunked pretty thoroughly here. Quoting LIchtenstein and Slovic (2006b): preferences “…are labile, inconsistent, subject to factors we are unaware of, and not always in our own best interests. Indeed, so pervasive is that lability that the very notion of a ‘true’ preference must, in many situations, be rejected.” What this means, is that things like motivation and preferences are more complex than we think they are now; different modules of the brain work differently “depending on context, state, and history,” and they–“we”– aren’t aware of it. So instead of constant motivations or preferences held by an individual, we should probably think of people as collections of independently-acting modules, each module “…designed to bring about certain states or affairs.” Motivation is a design to bring about a goal, but it is better conceptualized as a bunch of design goals located in a bunch of modules. The L2 Self may be not much more than a handful of sand. Actually, I don’t think the implications of Kurzban’s theory go that far, but at the least, we have to acknowledge that we are only looking at a small part of an individual whenever we look at him, no matter how closely.

Motivational Effects that Defy 3: The Placebo Effect

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Marcel

This is the 3rd post in a series on motivational effects that concern expectations. In previous posts I looked at the Hawthorne effect and the Pygmalion effect. My interest in these was raised when I learned of them while searching for the possibility that people had looked into the Placebo effect in education.This time I would like to look at the Placebo effect, the one that originally got me interested in this trilogy.

So there I was, happily making my way through Ben Goldacre’s wonderful oughtta-read Bad Science, in which he is gleefully ripping into little shreds the reputations of detox artists, brain gym evangelists, homeopathic medicine promoters, and other quacks and hacks, when right in the middle of his book I come across a chapter on the placebo effect. In that chapter he takes us on a tour of this “fascinating, misunderstood… and counter-intuitive aspect of human healing”. You can hear him sum up much of the chapter here in 5 minutes: sugar pills have effects, 4 sugar pills have more effect than 2, ‘brand’ placebo pills have more effect than generic ones, and a placebo injection or operation has more effect than a placebo pill because it is a more dramatic intervention. But there is more: what a doctor says and what a doctor believes when providing care can affect the outcome; and a placebo diagnosis of expectation of improvement can affect that improvement.

And the more people look for the placebo effect in the medical world, the more they find it; and the more they begin to look for the mechanism through brain imaging studies, etc., the more it begins to reveal itself. Here is a documentary showing some dramatic examples and some studies into the possible mechanisms at work. Fascinating stuff, but it’s time to make our segue back to the world of education.

One study that Goldacre recounts in his chapter concerns a certain group of housekeepers at a hotel. They were divided into two groups and one group was told about the benefits of exercise and had pointed out to them the fact that they were sort of super-exercisers because of the line of work they were in. Four weeks later, both groups reported that they were doing the same amount of work (or “exercise!”), but the group that had received the information about the health benefits of their work now showed a decrease in weight and body fat, and an improvement in hip-to-waist ratio (Crum & Langer, 2007). This is mind-boggling. And it got me thinking about whether such Jedi mind tricks might be able to work in education. The beauty of Crum and Langer’s experiment is also sort of a stumbling block: they didn’t do anything beyond point something out. In an educational setting this would be difficult to replicate, since the teachers would be teaching, and the students would have lots of ways to adjust performance.

The closest thing I could find (and if you know of anything else, I’d love to hear about it) was an experiment on changing performance by changing mindsets. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007) found that just informing junior high school students that the brain is like a muscle and that academic “exercise” can bring about improved academic ability got them to improve their academic performance. Even just a one-shot lecture by some university experts was enough to make a difference and make them believe in the “growth mindset”. Readers of the previous two posts in this series might now be wondering whether this experiment represents the Placebo effect, the Hawthorne effect, or the Pygmalion effect. To be honest, things are getting pretty blurry for me as well. We could argue that the researchers haven’t really done anything for the learners. That is, they haven’t made changes in the curriculum or run extra lessons with them. They have, however, pointed out an opportunity for improvement and–importantly–an expectation of success. And they’ve definitely shown an interest in their improvement. I mean, the students would of course infer that these university researchers wouldn’t be there if they didn’t think they had something that would be effective, right? I think it might not be wrong to say that the same underlying mechanism–whatever that is–is at work in all these effects. Someone is watching you, someone is interested in your performance, someone believes you can do better.

Taking this idea further, believing and higher expectations, coupled with a more rigorous curriculum can lead to significantly better performance. Anecdotal evidence suggests it can, anyway. Heath and Heath in their book Switch report on the success of a first grade language arts teacher in Atlanta who motivated her class and dramatically improved their performance on standardized tests by telling them that they would be reading like third graders by the end of the school year. That is, they were told and convinced that they would be not just successful first graders, and not even second graders, nope, they were going to advance to the level of third graders! And they did. At the end of the year, 90% of the class was reading at the 3rd grade level or higher. Perhaps we all need to push the envelope a little, while at the same time communicating our expectations of success. Certainly this is an idea worthy of more classroom research and larger-scale research.

I love the Placebo effect. I love the fact that it has been subjected to rigorous testing and found to hold true. The fact that it remains a little mysterious only adds to its charm. No doubt there are explanations for the phenomena and one day they will be widely known and appreciated, but for now it is enough to know of it and have some fun with it. It can be dangerous, too, for placebo side effects have been observed and the dangers of pigeon-holing learners must be acknowledged as well. But for teachers, deftly making use of our authority and making assertions that can lead to improvement is part of our job. Doctors don’t always understand why something gets better and teachers don’t always know how something gets learned. Understanding the Placebo effect and making it work for us is one of the things we can do. It comes with the position.

Sept. 2011 Update.

A recent Brain Science podcast interview with Fabrizio Benedetti looked at placebo effects. Dr. Ginger Campbell and Dr. Benedetti discussed what placebo effects (notice the ‘s’) are and are not, what other effects they can be confused with, and the mechanisms that are at work behind the effects. Here is a quote from episode:

I would say that the take-home message for clinicians, for physicians, for all health
professionals is that their words, behaviors, attitudes are very important, and
move a lot of molecules in the patient’s brain. So, what they say, what they do in
routine clinical practice is very, very important, because the brain of the patient
changes sometimes. As you said, of course, there is a reduction in anxiety; but we
know that there is a real change. There is a real change in the patient’s brain
which is due to—in a single sentence, we can call it the ‘ritual of the therapeutic
act.’
The ritual of the therapeutic act is very complex. In the ritual of the therapeutic
act there is a doctor; in the ritual of the therapeutic act there are drugs, there are
syringes. Sometimes there are very complex machines, like an MRI machine, for
example. All these social and sensory stimuli constitute what we call the ‘ritual of
the therapeutic act;’ and the ritual of the therapeutic act communicates and tells
the patients that a therapy is being performed. And this is very important
because it induces expectation in the patient. So, absolutely, it is very, very
important for a clinician.

Audio, transcripts, references, and notes are available at the podcast’s website. Dr. Benedetti is the author of two books on this topic, Placebo Effects, and The Patient’s Brain.

March, 2013 Update.

A recent study described here in the Research Digest shows how a type of placebo–a bogus priming method–can result in better performance on quizzes. Researchers named Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan got a group of mostly 20-yr-olds to believe they were being subliminally primed with test question answers before the questions appeared on the screen. In fact, nothing was shown, but that didn’t stop them from scoring significantly better than the control group. The researchers say this:

The placebo intervention “cannot have expanded the individual’s knowledge or storage capacities,” the researchers said. “What is more likely to have happened is a weakening of inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance on a task – for example, self-incapacitating anxieties that previously taxed cognitive resources.” The placebo might also have “primed a success orientation,” the researchers said, which may have affected the participants’ behaviour accordingly, including increasing their persistence.

The study was small and needs to be replicated, but this is indeed another strange and wonderful example of the placebo effect. The researchers plan to next investigate whether it can work without the participants being fooled.

Crum, A., Langer, E. (2007). Mind-set matters: Exercise and the placebo effect. Psych Science 18, no. 2 (Feb). Pg 165-71.

Blackwell, L. A., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Theories of intelligence and achievement across the junior high school transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78, 246-263.

Better Mood, Better Learning

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Marcel

A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests, unsurprisingly, that people in a happier mood (after listening to peppy music or watching a funny video of a baby) perform better on tests that asked them to classify stimuli from rule-described categories. Positive moods also had a beneficial effect on strategy selection. According to the journalist take on the study, creativity is enhanced by watching viral videos, which may be why workers are so prone to dash off to YouTube land so regularly while at work… The researchers actually made use of YouTube videos for the study, but I think the implications of this go much deeper. Interest (Hidi & Ainley, 2008) and mood are important for learning. They are important for motivation and they seem to have an effect on cognitive processing. The results of this research may point to one of the reasons that people rate their learning higher in entertaining classrooms.

This paper was a product of the Catagorization Lab (Mindalab) at my old alma mater the University of Western Ontario. Some of their other interesting papers can be found here.

January 4th 2011 update: Another paper mentioned in the year-end issue of the Economist, showed similar effects. Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2010) (available online via Andrew Oswald’s page) showed both the positive effects of positive affect and the negative effects of being sad or depressed. The positive affect boost to productivity was 12%.

March 2013 update: More and more I keep running across articles on positive affect and learning. Here is a nice one I saw recently that not only explains why it is important, but gives some practical advice for creating a better, more positive community in the classroom. The four essentials that Ms. Alber lists are well worth putting into practice.

Another March 2013 update: Here is a nice blog post titled Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory. It does a nice job explaining why some learners really benefit from increased use of humor and affect in lessons, and it links to lots of resources.

Nadler, R.T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J.P. (2010). Better mood and better performance: learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21 (12).

Motivational Effects that Defy: The Hawthorne Effect

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Marcel

“And you think you’re so smart.” I can still hear the words, repeated for comic effect by a teacher of mine in grad school. He was, if I remember correctly –and that is a fairly sizable “if” given the years and changes in teaching methodology beliefs that I have hopped from and to in the interim–referring to grammar and how it is often a slipperier system than the iron-clad set of facts that the authoritative reference tomes and logically-organized structural syllabuses of courses, programs, and student textbooks gave lie to.

But it is in the nature of the modern person–and by modern I mean living, thinking, now…and by now I mean, like at the moment you are reading this–to show a strong favoritism for the knowledge currently believed to be true. We sneer at the fallacious beliefs of past generations, mostly confident that we live in a time when the truth has been uncovered, and academia, science, whatever, has finally gotten it right. If there is a problem, it is not that it is not understood by someone somewhere, but rather that the correct knowledge has not disseminated properly (or perhaps because evil, ignorant agents have introduced false ideas and muddied the waters, but that’s another story). We may quote Hamlet’s rebuke to Horatio about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our blah blah blah, but the illusion of knowledge is strong and we are susceptible.

But all that modern certainty won’t always help us in the world of teaching. Teaching is one of those undertakings that seems to defy logical thinking at times. There are several motivational effects, for example, that are surrounded by a bit of mystery, that have moved in and out of fashion in the last decades, and that have proven slipperier than imagined. These are effects where “…performance or other significant objective effects come from (non-objective) causes of humans simply expecting something,” as Steve Draper writes on a web page of his. He also lists up several of them: the Hawthorne effect, the Pygmalion effect, and the Placebo effect. This latter one being the item of search that brought me to Mr. Draper’s web page. In a couple of posts I’d like to explore these ideas a little, beginning with the Hawthorne effect. I’d like to consider what they are and whether they may be exploitable by teachers, even though they are not well understood.

The first of these is the Hawthorne effect, named after the factory in Chicago where several classic studies were performed over the period from 1924 to 1932. In the studies, several changes were made in the working environment to see what effect they would have on productivity. In a nutshell, all changes that were made–somehow, and against reasonable expectations–led to increases in productivity. In poking around the web for more information, one gets the impression that the Hawthorne studies are something like one of Harry Potter’s bogarts in that each person sees something different in them. From glowing nostalgic essays to a New York Times article that goes as far as calling it an urban myth in a 1998, it seems the Hawthorne studies and the Hawthorne effect produce different cognitive and emotional effects in different people.

It is perhaps not surprising that business people look back on the seminal series of on-site experiments that saw workers as complex social beings. They were ground-breaking in that they were some of the first empirical field-based studies and introduced the idea of human relations in management, states Harvard Librarian Laura Linard on the BBC Mind Changers podcast devoted to the Hawthorne effect (try here if the audio isn’t working).

But the Hawthorne effect is probably most famous as a caution to experiment designers to be careful what effect they cause by just observing people. The simple act of running an experiment and observing people will possibly cause them to change their behavior. Framed another way, “people who are subject to intervention have their own goals and motives and respond accordingly and that is an important fact in research” (Lee Ross, in the BBC podcast). This sometimes over-simplified causal relationship is one of the reasons the effect has become academically contentious, in addition to some procedural flaws and sloppiness that is. Some people seem to have extrapolated that ANY intervention can effect improvements in performance, which is just wishful thinking, states Mecca Chiesa (again in the BBC podcast). Chiesa and Hobbs (2008) after a long overview study of the use of the term Hawthorne effect suggest that the term is applied to too many phenomena (internal cognitive functions, environmental factors, social effects, and sometimes a combination of these) to be considered useful anymore. They actually suggest retiring it.

So beyond the cautionary lesson for experiment designers, if we try to read into the Hawthorne effect more to see if there is something we can use for our classes, we get into rather unscientific territory. But maybe we can say this: intervention has power. Intervention provides a message that is at the heart of education: I care about your performance, I want to help you improve it; and I’m trying something in my power to do so. Intervention quite possibly has the power to influence the impression learners have of an educational setting. Interventions can possibly make learners aware that they are contributing to the advancement of teaching and learning; and improve the social cohesion in the group; and perhaps induce a more positive opinion of the instructor and even the slightest desire to make that instructor a little happier or at least indulge them a little. And if that is indeed true, well then I would think that improved performance is highly likely. A Hawthorne effect? No, more likely a host of other inter-playing psychological effects, but I am not one to sneer at improved performance, just like the managers of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works were not likely to sneer at the better performance and higher profits they were after.

To learn more, try this site maintained by the Harvard Business School, or the resources provided by the producers of Mind Changers, the BBC radio documentary series.

Chiesa, M. and Hobbs, S. (2008), Making sense of social research: how useful is the Hawthorne Effect?. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38: 67–74. doi: 10.1002

Man’s got to know his limitations: Chris Chabris and Dan Simon point outThe Invisible Gorilla

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Marcel

“Know thyself,” the ancient Greeks carved into stone at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. “Man’s got to know his limitations,” Dirty Harry spat as he finished off a corrupt official in Magnum Force. Art, religion, hiring, multi-tasking–ancient Greek, political activist, armchair expert, etc., etc.–the human mind has limitations. For thousands of years humans have suspected that the wonderful sense of control our brains provide us with may not exactly match what is beyond our bodies, that there are limitations, that there are things our brain does, ways it prefers to work that seriously handicap us. But this is not an easy concept to wrap your head around. As Chicolini challenges in Duck Soup: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Exactly.

You’re probably familiar with the gorilla experiments on selective visual attention that made the authors of this book famous. It got them into many introductory psychology textbooks, onto morning TV talk shows, and even got them an Ig Noble prize. You may have groaned when you learned of this book, thinking it was an attempt to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame. If you did, you need to reassess that gut reaction and give the book a little more of your attention–at least reading the subtitle (And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us), or better yet the table of contents, which you can preview at the book’s site or at Amazon.com. Because the best thing about this book is that it is about much much more than visual attention. As funny as the gorilla experiment is, the novelty of the experiment wears off pretty quickly and there is not much there for the authors to explain away when the gorilla turns to the camera and takes his mask off. The authors were wise to expand the focus of this book–and you really can’t appreciate this until after you’ve read the first hamfisted chapter dealing with selective visual attention. It is a strain. Several stories are manipulated to illustrate their point, some of them of dubious value (in particular the story of the collision of the USS Greeneville and the Ehime Maru in 2001 involved much more than just Commander Scott Waddle not seeing something he wasn’t expecting through his telescope). At the end of the first chapter, I was ready to put the book down. I’m glad I didn’t.

The next chapters deal with similar but more interesting limitations humans have with illusions of memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential, all of which help to form our intuitions, those feelings that we understand and know or can do something which we often really don’t or can’t. In these later chapters there are some wonderful stories, interesting descriptions of relevant experiments and careful explanations about what the field knows (that is, has shown in experiments and replicated enough times to suggest it is likely true), and suspects (that is, some limited experiments have indicated). The authors are very careful with what they say, debunking popular nonsense, and helping to train readers to be more careful and more skeptical themselves with what they hear and read in the media.

And that is ultimately the benefit you gain from reading this book, something that I recommend. You come away with a deeper knowledge of yourself, the illusions and limitations of our brains, the weaknesses of memory, and the horrifying tendency our brains have to jump to conclusions of cause, potential, and understanding. You gain a better appreciation for why people act the way they do and ultimately a little doubt tripwire forms, one in line with the authors’ hopes that we consider other possibilities before we “jump to harsher conclusions.”