Category: Research

Does a Growth Mindset Matter?

by hkatz, posted in Research, Self-Development

Years ago, I read about how a “growth mindset” can boost your chances for academic success. According to this popular theory, students are more likely to succeed if they believe that they can change their personal traits and abilities.

For example, instead of assuming that they have a fixed amount of talent for a particular ability – like solving algebraic equations or drawing portraits – they recognize that they can learn and grow. They don’t have a fixed level of skill, and the mistakes they make aren’t a sign of some hopeless lack of talent.

This theory makes sense. When learning something, I’d rather go into it with an attitude of perseverance and skill building, instead of a defeatist mindset that prompts me to give up at every mistake or struggle.

But what happens if you try to teach growth mindset in a classroom? Do interventions that aim to cultivate growth mindset among students actually work?

A systematic review and meta analysis of the existing research didn’t find significant positive effects for these kinds of interventions. What it found was poor study design and researchers influenced by financial incentives to produce stronger positive results.

One of the authors of this review and meta analysis also posted a Twitter thread (called an X thread now?) that’s worth reading, partly because it responds to a different meta analysis that seems to regard growth mindset interventions more favorably.

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be good solid evidence that these interventions work for students. Maybe you can personally find a way to make growth mindset work well for you and help you achieve your goals (academic or otherwise). But the current interventions introduced to groups may not do much at all on average. They appear to be overhyped.

And yes, it’s also depressing to read about low-quality research in psych and how often it gets cited and reported without criticism.

Unethical Behavior in Medical and Psych Research Is Depressing

by hkatz, posted in Research

Fraud, negligence, misguided good intentions combined with poor study design, intellectual conformity… these are among the problems plaguing research.

A couple of links as examples:

  • Possible fabricated evidence in Alzheimer’s research.
  • A chemical imbalance theory of depression, pushed for years by many psych professionals and the media, doesn’t have much evidence to back it up. (By the way, if you’re currently on antidepressants, please discuss any concerns with your doctor and don’t just abruptly stop taking them. That itself could be harmful.)
Continue reading “Unethical Behavior in Medical and Psych Research Is Depressing” →

A link between depression and inflammation?

by hkatz, posted in Research

A recent Science Alert article announced the results of a large study involving close to 86,000 people in the UK: There’s an association between a higher risk of depression and a higher level of bodily inflammation.

What does this mean?

We don’t know. I love how, like most of science journalism, a bold and promising headline gives way to paragraphs of doubt and descriptions of methodological limitations.

An association between depression and inflammation in the body may mean that one increases the risk of the other, or that there’s another factor (or factors) contributing to both.

You can think of some plausible scenarios that tie the two together. For example, someone with depression may eat more poorly, and maybe their poor diet elevates their levels of bodily inflammation. But we don’t yet understand the mechanisms at play, and jumping to conclusions may put people in harm’s way (for instance, if they try to treat their depression with anti-inflammatory meds).

That said, eating a more nutritious diet is a good decision to make regardless of the relationship between depression and inflammation. And it’s interesting to follow research that explores the interaction of mental and physical health. Many people impose a barrier between brain/mind and body, but our brain is a part of our body, and our systems are complex.

Concerns About AI Bias Aren’t Just “PC-Ness”

by hkatz, posted in Research

People often need to frame things as a battle between two forces (“libs” vs. “conservatives,” or “SJWs” vs. “anti-SJWs”). Any concerns or opinions mentioned predominantly by one side will get automatically shot down by the other.

I’m seeing these kind of knee-jerk responses in conversations about algorithms trained to make predictions about individuals. Depending on where the algorithm is used, these predictions can affect anything from the health care you receive to whether you’re hired for a job.

One example is a medical algorithm that was significantly more likely to recommend special health care programs for white patients than black patients who were equally sick. The factor that shaped the decision-making in this case wasn’t even race, at least not directly. From a recent MIT Technology Review article on this issue:

howbiascreptin

One of the remarks I regularly hear (and read) about this topic is that these algorithms are upsetting people because they reflect “facts not feelings” and that “facts don’t lie.” Ok, maybe facts don’t lie, but what do they actually reflect? What datasets are you training these algorithms on, and what do the data really tell you about people? (Not just groups of people, but individuals who are on the receiving end of these predictions.) The fact that members of one group may have historically been more likely to receive worse health care, on average, than members of another group doesn’t mean we need to perpetuate the problem.

The biases produced by these algorithms – biases which may be based on class, income, race, sex, or other dimensions – don’t necessarily reflect unchanging truths about human nature or social problems we can never address. So it’s disheartening to see people crow about how decisions based on algorithms are reflecting the “real truth” underneath the layers of PC-ness we’re festooned with as a society.

The medical algorithm mentioned in this post was examined, and the problem got addressed. In many other cases, we don’t know why algorithms are making predictions or decisions in certain ways. We don’t know what data they’ve been trained on, and companies are keeping quiet about it. There may be little accountability or option to appeal a decision. This is a critical issue to discuss, while hopefully minimizing the knee-jerk responses and the thought-terminating clichés (chants of “facts not feelings” from people who are also acting emotionally about this issue, though they don’t recognize their satisfaction or delight as feelings).

Researching the Long-Term Damage of Romanian Orphanages

by hkatz, posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Research

Read this excellent article that looks into the ethics of researching cognitive and neural development in Romanian children who live in orphanages. Even when adequate food, shelter, and medical care are provided, the children suffer from neglect; from a young age, they don’t interact much with caretakers, which stunts their development.

What practical benefit will this research have for the kids? Will the research itself be enough to change state policies? What is the research telling us that’s new? We already understand that growing up in these orphanages increase the chances of hurting cognition, emotional development, and other aspects of psychological health. What benefit will it bring to science, and to the kids, to investigate the effects on their brain, which includes decreased white matter?

Synaptic Sunday #14: Military and Neuroscience

by hkatz, posted in Neuroscience, Research, Synaptic Sunday

For Memorial Day weekend, three pieces of neuroscience research relevant to the military (and with applications beyond it):

1) Navy seeks to map the mind

On brain-computer interface technology –

The true goal is to make a vehicle or a robot arm just another extension of the human body and brain.

2) PTSD Combat Veterans’ ‘Fear Circuitry’ In Brains Always On High Alert

Even when an individual with PTSD isn’t confronted by a threat or a relatively taxing mental activity, there’s still PTSD-related activity in certain areas of the brain. What does this mean?

3) Professor finds neuroscience provides insights into brains of complex and adaptive leaders

What do the brains of great leaders look like? Is there really a way to increase leadership strength via neuro-feedback?

Attitudes that enhance vs. limit broad creative thinking

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Research

What motivates you as you go about your life? Is your attitude more of approach or avoidance, the willingness to go for a reward or the desire to avoid harm?

I know it isn’t strictly either/or for anyone, but it’s helpful to think of your motivations in different situations and how they affect your thought processes, including your creativity and memory.

I came across an interesting study from 2001, The Effects of Promotion and Prevention Cues on Creativity. It centers on an experimental set-up where you have to get a cartoon mouse out of a maze by finding a route through the maze to the exit.

In one condition, there was a piece of cheese drawn outside of the maze, suggesting that if you successfully found the correct route out, the mouse would get the cheese. This condition was meant to evoke a style of thinking focused more on promotion: you complete a task in order to attain something new and nurturing.

In another condition, there wasn’t any cheese; instead, an owl hovered above the maze, making you think that if the mouse didn’t get out, the owl would eat it. The style of thinking evoked here was based on prevention: more about risk aversion and vigilance, avoiding bad outcomes.

So what happened in the experiment? The participants did well on solving the mazes (one would hope, given they were college students), but the interesting difference between participants who were in the promotion vs. prevention condition emerged later, when they were all given another task to complete. In one version of the experiment, they got a task that required them to detect images of simple objects embedded in a noisy visual. In another version, they had to come up with a list of ways that they could use a brick. In yet another, they had to complete word fragments by coming up with whole words that matched.

Independently of how much they enjoyed any given task, it seemed that overall, the participants in the promotion group were able to think more broadly and more creatively during the follow-up tasks. In contrast, an attitude of avoidance/prevention tended to make their thinking narrower. (And this wasn’t even tied to anything personal – the participants themselves weren’t going to enjoy the cheese or avoid a monster owl about to attack them, though they may have identified with the mouse; basically they were just cued into thinking within a certain framework, promotion vs. prevention).

You always have to be cautious when applying the results of one study to day-to-day life, but this does get me thinking about the implications. I’m more in the habit of avoidance than approach, which I don’t think always serves me well; while I don’t want to change this orientation completely, I don’t want to skew too much towards it either. Having risk-avoidance as a dominant approach may not be good in the long-run, in terms of thinking big and developing ideas creatively over time; it might limit you more to narrower, tried-and-tested paths.

Psychology’s checkered past

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Research

The experiments mentioned in 10 Psychological Experiments that Went Horribly Wrong are more complex (and darker) than how they’re portrayed in the article, which also doesn’t give a full account of the rationale behind some of them and what conclusions we can draw from them.

But the article is still worth a look, to get a sense of the kinds of unethical cruel decisions made by experimenters and doctors, the poor experimental designs of their studies, and the way that human nature can often turn ugly really fast.

In their bid to capture, quantify or control some of our most fundamental qualities – love, cruelty, craving for approval, sexual identity, fear, power and submission – these experimenters usually didn’t account for how messy people can be (and how easy it is to let power over others go to your head).

Synaptic Sunday #13 – Neuroscience of Gratitude

by hkatz, posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Research, Synaptic Sunday

What is gratitude, and what is its impact on mental and physical health? What systems in the brain are associated with it? How can one cultivate gratitude? Why does it seem to be felt and expressed so much more easily in some people than in others?

Here are some of the ongoing efforts of neuroscientists and psychologists to better understand gratitude:

1) Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude

Recently scientists have begun to chart a course of research aimed at understanding gratitude and the circumstances in which it flourishes or diminishes. They’re finding that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits…

2) The Grateful Brain

3) From the Bottom of My Heart

Put yourself in the position of a Jew during World War II who escapes to France penniless and is forced to beg on the streets. A passerby gives you roasted peanuts — your first morsel of food in several days.

You are allergic to peanuts.

Do you feel grateful? Or bitter, anxious, awkward, sad — perhaps even happy?

If you don’t know about this person, read about her now: Rita Levi-Montalcini

by hkatz, posted in General Learning, Research

She is a Nobel Prize winning neurologist who passed away two days ago at age 103. Where was her earliest work done?

“Amazingly, Levi-Montalcini did her early research into nerve growth by studying chicken embryos in a makeshift laboratory in her bedroom.”

This was while she was living in Fascist Italy. And she was Jewish.

Here’s another good article on her in the New York Times:

“Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome.”

Photo of Rita Levi-Montalcini