Know Your Primates

On February 17th a woman in Stamford Connecticut was seriously injured when the pet chimpanzee of a friend suddenly attacked her.

The incident was another unfortunate one for all involved, including the chimp, Travis, who was killed by police, as are so many innocent animals who are acquired by humans and just behaving as they should.

Forget about the fact that people who own exotic animals such as chimps and tigers are not only stupid, but selfish; that's not what this post is about.

No, this post is about what we call these great apes.

More often than not, people call chimpanzees monkeys. But they are not monkeys, they are chimpanzees, just as we are not chimpanzees, we are homo sapiens.

So why do some people confuse chimps for monkeys? Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, there are a few families of primates that include monkeys who resemble the great apes. For example, the family of monkeys called Cebidae, which includes species such as black howler (see middle photo) and squirrel monkeys (see bottom photo) bear a slight resemblance to chimps (see top photo) and gorillas. (Of course, most species of monkeys bear very little resemblance to chimpanzees.)

The other answer to the question as to why people call chimps monkeys is because they are stupid and really don't know the difference, although their stupidity is not their fault.

To clarify, monkeys, chimps, gorillas, orang-utans, bonobos, and homo sapiens (us) are all part of the order called primates (All of the above except for monkeys make up the family of primates called Pongidae).

So, know your primates and don't call chimpanzees monkeys!

Pet Peeves: Part I: Restaurants

I have a lot of pet peeves.

This one is about restaurants.

I've been to restaurants in many countries in addition to the United States, but my favorites are in France and Italy, not only for the quality of the food but for the service or, depending on your perspective, the lack of service. But not many Americans probably agree with me.

Here's what I hate about most restaurants in this country.

The waiters and waitresses are always trying to sell you food and beverages. For example, when waiters (sorry I'm going to use male nouns and pronouns) ask you what you want to drink and you say "I'll only have water," they immediately ask, "Are you sure? We also have wine and beer." I know you have wine and beer. What do you think I'm a moron and forgot or couldn't read the menu? Or do you think I'm so stupid that I don't know what I want?

Of course, this happens with the entire meal. If I only order an entree, say the salmon, waiters are not satisfied with that so they have to ask "Don't you want an appetizer? We have some great fried calamari!"

I say, "No thanks," but what I'm saying to myself is, "Idiot, if I wanted to order the fried calamari I would have ordered it. What am I, a child, who needs to be prompted to order?"

Well, of course, many Americans are like children such that they allow waiters to talk them into ordering everything on the menu.

Then, and this never happens in France, the waiter has to interrupt my mediocre meal to ask "Is everything all right"? I say, "Yes, thanks," but what I say to myself is "It was all right until you came up for the fifth time to ask me if everything was all right."

Christ, they just won't leave you alone in American restaurants.

And then when you finally finish your meal and ask for the check, their last stand is to ask whether you want coffee and to see the desert menu. "No," I say to myself, "I just want to get out of here and go home where I can do what I thought I could do here -- relax."

I want a waiter who both waits on me and waits for me. If I need something, I'll call you and ask for it. Just take my order and bring me the damn food, and leave me alone.

Of course, waiters (and restaurants) push food and beverages because they want you to run up a bigger bill. And, frankly, many customers fall for these sales ploys, so why wouldn't they keep selling. Also, the waiter gets a bigger tip. Well here's a tip: leave me alone and be ready at my beck and call and I'll give you a big tip!

In France, you have to send up flares to get the waiter's attention, but I prefer that to an over eager waiter that, like a fly, keeps buzzing around me throughout the whole meal.

Just one of my pet peeves.

Economists Are Experts on Human Behavior?

I've noticed a trend recently: economists are claiming to be experts on human behavior, a realm once restricted mainly to psychologists.

A recent article in the L.A. Times, titled, "UCLA researchers study social forces shaping human behavior during war" finally pushed me to write this.

When I saw this title, I naturally thought the "researchers" would be psychologists or even sociologists. But economists?

What do economists know about human behavior (He asked rhetorically)? Is there really an economist out there anywhere whose predictions about the economy or the economic behavior of human beings are better than chance? And what kind of"research" do these economists do? I can tell you that it's not experimental. In fact, it's based on complex statistical analyses from a variety of different sources that are used to predict the behavior of individuals during war. I'm not suggesting that their "research" doesn't have value, but if we want to understand the behavior of individuals, I submit that we have to study the behavior of individuals in controlled settings.

Christ, economists even get a Nobel prize! For what? Has any economic theory ever accurately predicted or explained human behavior? That is why economists, like social workers, have to go shopping for a discipline with a real research base that they can use to buttress their own theories.

And that discipline is usually psychology. Until recently, that is.

Economists, not having a substantial discipline of their own, have become polygamists, extending their marriage with psychology to include, you guessed it, neuroscience.

The union of these three disciplines is a new discipline called neuroeconomics. According to the website of The Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics at George Mason University, neuroeconomics is "dedicated to the experimental study of how emergent mental computations in the brain interact with the emergent computations of institutions to produce legal, political, and economic order."

What the hell does that mean? How does one study mental computations experimentally? (Are there really computations going on in the brain?) And, is there really a "legal, political and economic order"?

But the issue is much larger than whether economists know anything about human behavior.

The issue is who is in the best position to explain human behavior and by what methods? Nowadays, everyone, it seems, is an expert on human behavior, especially those who aren't experts (e.g., economists, people with MBAs, people with literature degrees, social workers, therapists, and journalists). If you have a Ph.D. in experimental or behavioral psychology beware; everyone knows as much as you do about your subject matter. While no one would ever question a physicist's explanation of, well, physical things, there are many out there who will debate with you your knowledge of and expertise on human behavior.

So, be prepared for more psychologizing from economists and others from business schools at universities, especially when they collaborate with brain imaging researchers.

Let me wrap up by saying emphatically that no amount of knowledge or understanding of the brain mechanisms involved when we are said to make decisions or choices will ultimately explain the decision-making or choice behaviors. That will come only from an understanding of the environmental contingencies that impact directly on the behaviors of interest and that will only come from experimental behavioral psychologists.

Monkeys Are As Smart As College Students Because They Have Better Teachers

You can always tell when scientific meetings such as the AAAS meeting are going on because there are a lot of news stories about, well science.

One of the most recent, again from the National Geographic News, bore the title, "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds."

This story, just as others like it, begs for skeptical thinking.

In the story, we are told that "Rhesus macaques placed in front of touch screens in a Duke University laboratory were able to subtract dots—not by counting them individually but by using a more instantaneous ability researchers call number sense."

The lead researcher, Duke University graduate student Jessica Cantlon, was quoted as saying that the results "suggest that these abilities are part of a primitive system for reasoning about numbers that has been passed down for millions of years of evolutionary time."

An "instantaneous ability" to subtract? A "number sense"? Like the sense of smell, taste, vision? A primitive system for reasoning?

Malarkey!

These ways of talking about the monkeys' behavior are completely circular: What is the evidence for the "number sense," or the "primitive system"? Only the monkeys' behavior. There is no independent evidence for any of these claims.

Not to take anything away from the monkeys, but what is left out of the sloppy and designed-for-PR ways of describing what the monkeys did was a throw-away line in the story about what happened after the monkey made a correct response: "Each correct answer was worth a serving of Kool-Aid." No mention was made of what happened if the monkeys made an incorrect response which they surely did at the beginning of training.

Some will recognize this as operant learning: correct responses produce consequences called "reinforcers," and incorrect responses likely produce either a brief time-out, when the monkey loses the opportunity to respond, or some other withholding of reinforcement (i.e., the Kool-Aid).

Why is it important to describe the training? Simple. Because without the training, the monkeys do not subtract. Why is this point important? Because only if monkeys engage in the kinds of behaviors WITHOUT training can they be said the have a "number sense," or a "primitive system for reasoning."

It is not the monkeys who have done anything worth writing about; it is the training! Thus, monkeys do not have a number sense or ability to "add" or "subtract." What they have, which is what we have, is the ability to learn.

But in the absence of a good learning environment, neither monkeys nor people, will learn. So, the fact that the college students used as controls in the study performed as well as the monkeys' means only that the monkeys had better teachers than the supposedly smarter college students.

This Post (It) Should Be Read, And Other Grammatical Musings

From time to time, I will comment on grammatical errors that bug me. This post is about a couple of errors that have become so common that I find myself making at least one of them.

One problem is that almost everyone nowadays uses both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same function in a sentence, namely that of the subject, for example, saying "My sister she called me today" instead of the more correct, "My sister called me today." I hear this every day by people who should know better, such as news anchors (okay, so maybe they really don't know better), and actors in movies and on television who are reading scripts written by educated writers (okay, so maybe they aren't that educated).

The rule, which can be found as 30c n the book Rules for Writers (6th ed.) by Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, Marcy Carbajal Van Horn, is "Do not use both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same grammatical function in a sentence" (p. 255).

Now that you're aware of it, try to listen for this mistake.

Another grammatical error that I notice is when people (again, news anchors are common grammatical criminals) screw up the subject verb agreement with singular and plural, for example, saying "There's a lot of cars" instead of "There are a lot of cars." Maybe people wouldn't make this mistake as much if they didn't make a contraction of "there" and "is," but then again, maybe they would. Or, maybe it's just easier to say "There's" than to say "There are."

Either way, we are slowly becoming a country of illiterates.

More Stupid Psychology

Unfortunately, the science magazines (e.g., Scientific American, National Geographic), like the rest of the culture, have been bamboozled by psychology into taking psychological research seriously.

Take the most recent ridiculousness, an article in the National Geographic News titled, "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," which reported on a study by psychologists at prestigious Princeton University and presented at the equally prestigious annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the study the researchers performed brain scans of men while they saw pictures of scantily clad women. Apparently the region of the brain associated with tool use lit up confirming for the researchers the stereotype that we men view women as objects. And a really "shocking" finding was the activation of brain regions associated with inferring another person's intentions, suggesting to the lead researcher, Susan Fiske, that "This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said."

Is she kidding? Okay men, be honest, which of you looks at skimpily clad women and thinks, "I wonder what college she went to"?

Did these "researchers" look at other parts of the brain, such as the part of the hypothalamus that mediates sexual arousal, or perhaps measure sympathetic nervous system activation? Oh, and did I mention that, at least according to the article, the photographs of the scantily clad women were headless? Assuming any validity to the findings (a big assumption), aren't we more likely to view a headless person more as an object?

And the ridiculousness doesn't end there, because apparently some of Dr. Fiske's male colleagues at prestigious Princeton suggested performing a similar study with women because according to a reverse stereotype, women look for men who have wealth and power. Aha, so women see us men as objects too!

Of course, this analysis smacks of evolutionary psychology, which, if you need to be reminded, is just a rehash of sociobiology in a slightly more appealing package. But if they want to play the evolutionary psychology game, then, yeah, I look at sexy women as objects with whom I want to have sex. What healthy male doesn't? If we didn't, and were only interested in their minds, then perhaps we wouldn't have succeeded much as a species.

So, let women look for men to mate with who have power, and let us men look for sexually attractive females, and maybe we'll all be happy and successful.

By the way, this study is just one example of why psychology has contributed very little to either our understanding of human behavior or to our ability to change it.

Doctors Aren't the Only Doctors, And Other Ruminations on Using Names

I have a Ph.D., but when I go to my physician's office, everyone, from the receptionist to the nurse to the physician himself calls me by my first name. Okay, so they don't know that I'm also called "doctor." But what really riles me is that when I introduce myself as "Doctor . . . ," or when I call and identify myself as "Doctor . . . ," they still call me by my first name.

Another thing that gets my goat is how every one in the physican's office calls all patients by their first name, even patients who are in the 70s or 80s. Now, I'm probably old fashioned in this regard, but I believe that everyone older than about 20 or so should be called "Mr.," "Mrs.," "Ms.," or "Dr." (if that person has any kind of doctorate degree).

And the same goes for my bank, credit card company, local newspaper, etc., or anyone who calls me and isnt' a friend of mind. Show some respect.

The only exceptions are when someone tells you that you can call them by their first name.

But back to you medical doctors out there. My degree says the same thing yours does: Doctor. Just because we generically call physicians "doctor," doesn't mean you are the only doctors. So, get over your ego trip. I went to school for as many years as you did and as a university professor, I think I do as much good, maybe even saving some lives (metaphorically), as you do.

So, unless you want me to call you by your first name, call me "Doctor" okay?