Colin Johnson

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

It was Funny at the Time (8:28am) (1)

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

From time to time I wake up in the morning (or in the middle of the night) convinced that I have, either in some dream or in some hypnopompic reverie, come up with a really hilarious joke. In the cold light of 20 minutes later, they reveal themselves to be utterly un-hilarious but nonetheless having some joke-like structure.

Here is the latest example: “I hear that the Gibb brothers, Geri Halliwell and Mel B. are going on tour? What’s the name of the band? The Spice Gees.”

They have the flavour of the computer-generated jokes found in Graeme Ritchie’s work (except that the jokes generated by his system are actually funny!).

Posted in Psychology | No Comments »

Confident

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

There seem to be two meanings to the word “confident” in English. The first is the idea of confidence as a generic motivational aspect; we should learn to put aside our inhibitions and then we can tackle a problem with confidence. Call this motivational confidence.

The second is the feeling that you have been able to calibrate your actions against experience. this is the kind of confidence where you know, and know you know, when you have got something correct. Perhaps we can call this calibrational confidence.

It seems that we confuse the two fairly readily. When I say that I am not a confident singer (which is true), I am saying that I cannot calibrate my attempts at singing against the world. I don’t feel that I am singing wrongly, but I wouldn’t bet any amount that I am not awful. When I try to correct this, I am frequently told that I should be more confident; this is clearly a references to motivational confidence, as this can be summoned by willpower, whereas calibrational confidence can only be gained by skill and knowledge. However hard I might say that I am going to sing out with confidence, if I am unable to calibrate my efforts then I am not going to improve—by contrast, I’ll be like one of those godawful people at karaoke who belt out a song with great will but little skill.

I wonder why these two contrasting concepts have the same word? And, why many people conflate the two, and believe that the second will follow automatically from the exercise of the first? Clearly they are not entirely unrelated; but the link is fairly slim.

Posted in Education, Psychology | No Comments »

It Could Be You

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Lotteries are often described as “a tax on people who are innumerate”. The idea is that any rationalist would not play a lottery, because the return on investment is shoddy—negative, indeeed, stunningly so. Back to the post office savings account then.

But hang on there! Is this really why people play lotteries? Often the driving force is the remote chance of a truly life-transforming event, which is not adequately measured by the ROI.

The interesting observation is that this argument also works for events with negative consequences. Indeed, we are accustomed to this kind of reasoning about negative events. For example, people will readily argue that, whilst they know that the chances of a plane crash are minuscule, nonetheless they aren’t going anywhere a damn plane—because the consequences of being in a plane crash, however remote, are horrifying. Again, a life-transforming event, but one with bad rather than good consequences. The behaviour seems to be controlled by the same mechanism—I wonder if a carefully controlled experiment would show that the underlying structure of thought is basically the same?

Posted in Business, Mathematics, Observations, Psychology | No Comments »

Habit Templates

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

My elderly father has to take pills twice a day, and frequently forgets to take them. What he doesn’t forget are routines that he has been doing for all of his adult life. Is it worth me establishing a habit of taking no-effect sugar-pills twice a day from a marked container, so that if I get into that state the pill-taking habit will be thoroughly engrained by then, and I (or a weekly helper) can just substitute real pills for the sugar pills?

Posted in Medicine, Psychology | 1 Comment »

Granularity of Typing

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

As I have improved my typing skills over the years, I have noticed that I increasingly make errors at the whole word level rather than at the wrong-letter or transposed-letter stage. For example, when I try to type the word “universe” I frequently find that I have typed the word “university” before I realise that I have made an error. “University” is a word that I type many times a day; “universe”, perhaps once a week or less. This would seem to relate to the idea of “chunking” in memory—instead of controlling each individual letter being typed, instead I am chunking together the typing activity of whole words as “basic units”. There is an argument (from Rumelhart and McClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing) that when experienced typists type a word like vacuum, where the first three letters are all in the left hand, the right hand is moving towards the letter ‘u’ before the left hand has finished the “vac” part of the word.

Another piece of evidence for this: a colleague of mine has said in an email: “slip of the fingers: Venue for the meeting will be S122A, (*not* S110B)”. Fingers would have to slip very precisely to type the exact sequence of letters required to type the name of one room rather than another; the slip is at a much earlier stage in the cognitive process! It would be interesting to do a proper study of this kind of mistyping, perhaps this would make a good student project.

Posted in Observations, Psychology | No Comments »

Obverse/Reverse

Monday, October 5th, 2009

When I was a teenager my mother won a mint set of coins in a display case; a neat prize. Something that surprised me when I looked at it in detail was that the coins with the Queen’s head on were described as the obverse of the coin, and those with the distinctive design the reverse. This contradicted something that was part of my (mistaken) tacit knowledge about the world, i.e. that the distinctive side was the front, and the Queen’s head the back (probably being rooted in learning about coins by looking at the side on which the amount was displayed so as to learn the denomination).

Bizarrely, I’ve never been able to square this objective knowledge with my tacit feeling that the Queen’s head is on the back. I have known objectively that the Queen’s head is the front of the coin for around 25 years. However, I still basically grok that the Queen’s head is on the back. I wonder if this kind of conflict between tacit and explicit knowledge is a known and studied phenomenon?

Posted in Observations, Psychology, Tacit Knowledge | No Comments »

Colin Johnson

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