Pick My Grad School!

Grad school application deadlines are approaching.  Some are only two months away.  I’ve got my list mostly narrowed down and I’m starting on the dirty work of the application process, writing essays, getting letters of recommendation and ordering transcripts and all that.  But I’ve still got to pick a few more schools to round out my list.  So I’m going to give you a list of schools that I’m considering and you have to tell me which one(s) I should apply to and why.  You might (maybe) convince me. :)

Here’s what you get to work with.  I split up the schools according to their psychology program’s national ranking so that I can spread my applications among schools of varying degrees of competitiveness.  I have my top ten category, from which I plan to apply to at least one school, maybe two.  Next are the programs whose rank falls between 10 and 50.  I plan to apply to 3 or 4 of these.  Next are ranks 50-100, from which I will also choose 3 or 4.  Then there are those ranked higher than 100, and I’ve already decided on two from that group.  Then I have Canadian schools.  I may apply to 1 or 2 of these programs.  This should add up to between 10-12 schools and offer me a good range of chances at acceptance.

So I will now show you the schools to which I’ve narrowed the list in each ranking category and you get to suggest which school I should pick.  This should be fun!  Remember to give me your reasons, too.  (Schools that I’m already sure of will be marked with an asterix)

Top Ten (need to pick one more):

• UC Berkeley*
• Stanford
• UCLA

10-50 (need one or two more)

• University of Arizona*
• UC Davis
• City University of New York*
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of North Carolina
• Ohio State University
• Rutgers University
• University of Washington

50-100 (need one or two more)

• UC Santa Barbara
• University of Connecticut*
• University of Kansas*
• Syracuse University
• Virginia Commonwealth University

100+

• Loyola University of Chicago*
• Kansas State University*

Canada (maybe one more)

• UBC*
• University of Waterloo
• Queen’s University
• University of Toronto
• University of Western Ontario

Happiness, Wealth and Charity – Correlation, NOT causation

You may have heard of the study that came out recently that showed a relationship between charitable giving and happiness.  The results, in a nutshell, showed a stronger correlation between happiness and charitable giving than between wealth and charitable giving.

The reason I bring this up is because I want to make sure we all have our critical thinking caps on when we’re reading about studies like this.  When the media report on such studies as this one, media consumers commonly assume that the results illustrate a causal relationship when it is really only correlational in nature.  If that is Greek to you, there’s an explanation just ahead.

I first heard about this study on the radio and later read about it online.  Here is the article (for the record, I don’t usually read the Christian Science Monitor, I just followed a link to the article).  The first correlation/causation issue arises in the title of the article, “Degree of charity depends on happiness more than wealth,” which implies that happiness causes charitable giving (ie. charity depends on happiness, ergo happiness happens then charity follows).  Then the first line of the article, “So it’s true. Money doesn’t buy happiness. Giving does.” implies the opposite, that charitable giving causes happiness.  It may seem like a trivial thing to bring up and maybe in this case it is.  It probably doesn’t matter much in which direction causation flows when it comes to giving and happiness.  But the fact is that confusing correlation and causation can cause people to arrive at incorrect and possibly harmful conclusions.

In any research methods course they will pound into you that “correlation does not equal causation!”  The example that I remember most vividly from my college days is that there is a correlation between ice cream sales and crime.  When ice cream sales increase, crime also increases.  This is true.  What is not true is that which is tempting (and sensational) to believe, that one causes the other.

It would be very interesting if people responded to crime by drowning their sorrows in more and more ice cream.  Or if the elevated blood sugar resulting from increased consumption of ice cream caused some people to go a little nuts and commit crimes.  That would make for great news.  But all we can accurately say is that when one increases, we see an increase in the other.  One possible explanation of the ice cream/crime phenomenon is that ice cream sales increase during warm weather and warm weather is also a more likely time for criminals to be engaged in illegal activity.  But that is also just a guess.  That’s the nature of correlation, we can see a relationship but we can’t draw conclusions about which causes which.

The whole point is that this study on charitable giving, like so many other studies that show up in the media, measures correlation only.  It is interesting to see that these things are related, but that’s all we can know from a correlational study.  So I exhort my readers to be good critical thinkers and be wary of drawing erroneous conclusions from correlational studies based on the assumption of causation.

APA Convention 2010

So it’s been over a week but I’m finally blogging about my experience at the APA (American Psychological Association) Convention last Friday.  It was my first time attending and I was very pleased with the whole event.  Before the convention the childish psychology nerd inside me got all excited because of the all the psych celebrities I might see.  And the mature psychology nerd in me got all excited about everything there was to learn: about grad school, about the APA, about everything psychology.

So let me break it down real quick.  There was the main exhibition hall where all the vendors and exhibitors were.  That stuff was very clinical career oriented so it wasn’t the most interesting part for me.  There were lots of people hawking therapy books and psychology journals.  But among all those exhibits there was a booth for the Society for History of Psychology (or something like that) and they had one of Albert Bandura’s Bobo dolls on display.  Apparently he used several similar dolls in his experiments on social learning.  I thought that was kind of cool.

By the way, Albert Bandura was born in Mundare, Alberta, CA which is just east of Edmonton.  And he is considered one of the most influential psychologists ever.  He is the fourth most cited psychologist of all time.  A famous Canadian you may not have known about.  Read about him here.

At either end of the exhibitors were the poster presentations.  This is where researchers, usually grad students, showcase some of their recent research in poster form for all to see.  There were some interesting studies.  I’ll tell you about some of them later if you ask.

There was the APA Bookstore.  There were way more APA books than I could ever need and a ton of therapy videos, too.  I later met the therapist who stars in those videos.  I guess you could consider him a celebrity of sorts.  I almost got myself a Stroop Test T-shirt.  That would have been nerdy.

And then, a ten minute walk from all the other stuff were the lecture halls.  There I attended lectures on getting into grad school, advances in media psychology, the psychology of choice, Phil Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project, neuropsychology and phantom limbs, and a discussion of PTSD following a screening of The Hurt Locker.

Earlier I mentioned my excitement at possibly seeing some psychology celebrities.  When I say that, I refer to psychologists who are well known among psychology students.  Their research is often part of psychology lore and they frequently show up in text books.  The ones that I saw were: Hazel Markus, known for her research on possible selves; Phil Zimbardo, who is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, was supposed to be there but was recovering from hip surgery instead; V. S. Ramachandran, known for his research on phantom limbs, plus I likely saw many others who I simply didn’t recognize.

In all, it was a great experience.  I learned a lot and I’m very glad I went.  I’m very glad it was in San Diego this year.

Are You Biased?

There is something interesting that I learned about in my psychology undergrad and that I stumbled upon again recently that can give you an interesting look at some of your unconscious prejudices: Implicit Association Tests (IATs).

In these tests you respond as quickly as you can to some simple associations and the test then looks at your response time and determines whether or not you show a preference for one category or another.  These tests are commonly used to study racial and gender prejudices.  Instead of going into detail about the test, I’ll let you look it up on your own.  Check Wikipedia if you want.

I will encourage you to try taking the tests, however.  There is one for race and one for gender.  They are available on the website UnderstandingPrejudice.org.  They give a warning on the site that I will paraphrase here: the test often reveals an implicit bias even if consciously you believe you have none.  If you’re not okay with the possibility that the test says you have a bias, don’t take the test.

My own results showed little or no automatic preference for either Whites or Blacks and a moderate association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.  As for what the results actually mean in the real world, there is some debate about whether the test actually measures bias or just familiarity.  Either way it’s interesting stuff and is well supported by research.

Share your results with me if you feel comfortable doing so.

The Blame Game

“Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge.” -Nietzsche

I’m getting a little tired of how merciless everyone is being with some of our important public figures these days.  Everyone who is working on fixing the economic crisis, for example.  As a psychology student I figured I would do my part and try to illuminate our current affairs in the light of scapegoating theory (or something like that) so that we might be able to lighten up on the people who are trying to help us.

The following is right out of my social psychology textbook, “…pain and frustration evoke hostility. When the cause of our frustration is intimidating or vague, we often redirect our hostility.”  So we end up directing our frustration towards someone or something that probably doesn’t deserve it.  And it satisfies us.  I’m pretty sure most of us can relate to that.  But I’m also pretty sure that most of us can see why that’s not a good thing.

Historically, scapegoats have included witches, blacks, jews or any other “outgroup”.  Most “modern” people cringe at the treatment that those groups have received at the hands of people who were angry but who didn’t really know what they were doing or where to direct their anger.  And yet we all do essentially the same thing on a daily basis, albeit typically in a less extreme manner.

The economic crisis is a good example of frustration that leads to scapegoating.  For most of us the ultimate causes of the crisis are beyond our comprehension.  So we quickly latch on to the names that the media provides us and begin blaming.  We blame people like Bernie Madoff, Tim Geithner, and President Obama.  Poor people get mad at rich people.  Rich people get mad at poor people.  We blame people who aren’t like us.  The truth is, many of the people we insist on blaming for our economic troubles are the ones actually trying to fix it, while the real perpetrators have escaped the public eye.

A guy like Bernie Madoff is a good candidate for a scapegoat because he’s a criminal and nobody likes him.  But blaming him for the economic crisis is like blaming all crime on one particularly proficient car thief.

And then guys like Obama are, when they accept the office of president, essentially volunteering to be a scapegoat for the American people.  As unfair as it is to blame the innocent (degree of innocence is open to debate, I suppose) it is still satisfying and perhaps calming for the people to do so.  And the president is a convenient and safe person to blame for their woes.

But generally speaking, I think it’s totally unfair and immature to cast blame indiscriminately on those who do not deserve it.  Even if it feels good.  So let’s use our common sense and common history to re-evaluate our behavior towards the people or things that we think are causing all our problems.  We need to give credit where credit is due and lighten up a little.  If we constantly look for who’s doing the wrong thing it will be harder to see when they’re doing the right thing.