Mind Games

Mind Games

Steven Pinker is every bit the populist. All but three of his nine books are aimed at the general public (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is available in 21 formats and editions; the CD comes out this week). Dr. Pinkers teaching is similarly accessible. Just look at the test questions here, culled from one of his Harvard courses, Psychological Science. He explains his approach: The questions that psychology tackles are the ones that obsess us in everyday life: family relations, sexuality, kindness and aggression, the reliability of knowledge. Not surprisingly, many concepts in academic psychology have crossed over into popular culture, such as conditioning, Freudian psychoanalysis and cognitive dissonance. Exams that invoke these memes test whether students understand the theories well enough to reason about them when they are presented away from a familiar textbook context and are applied to real life. APRIL 11, 2014

1 According to Leon Festingers theory of cognitive dissonance, why do the office workers in the comic strip think they have learned something?

Dilbert 1995 Scott Adams. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick

The team-building exercise forces them to cooperate, and they realize they cannot accomplish a task if they bicker and fight.

Teams of people learn more after they have set aside their differences and shown signs of solidarity (hugging) and shared emotion (crying).

People who succeed with one difficult task will be more confident in taking on new ones.

People who have been manipulated into a pointless task will rationalize their behavior and conclude that it must have been worthwhile.

2 Did you hear the joke about the statistician who drowned while wading across a river whose average depth was three feet? What did the statistician forget to take into account?

The standard deviation

The correlation coefficient

The median

Inferential statistics

3 Imagine a movie called Lamb to the Slaughter, in which the heroine bludgeons the victim with a frozen leg of lamb. She then cooks the lamb and feeds it to the police, who are searching her house for a baseball bat, which they think is the murder weapon. The fact that the police never considered the leg of lamb as a weapon is a perfect example of:

The availability bias

The effect of language on reasoning

Functional fixedness

The representativeness heuristic

4 A husband and wife are considering divorce. Under what circumstances would they be said to be in a prisoners dilemma?

The lawyers fees are so expensive that they forgo divorce and remain trapped in the unhappy marriage.

Each spouse wants to hire an inexpensive lawyer, but both hire expensive lawyers because they realize the outcome will be better for both of them.

Neither spouse wants to hire an expensive lawyer, but each ends up doing so out of fear that the other spouse will do so and leave them at a disadvantage.

When one spouse hires an expensive lawyer, less money is available to the other for a lawyer, so whoever hires the more expensive lawyer first has an advantage.

5 Pete Townshend, lead guitarist of The Who, has publicized his ailment to warn fans of the negative long-term effects of too much:

Sex

Drugs

Rock n roll

Alcohol

6 Consider this cartoon. How would the man in the chair and a contemporary psychologist, respectively, explain the dogs problem?

Leighton/The New Yorker Collection/Cartoonbank

Primary process thinking; operant conditioning

Transference; stimulus discrimination

Defense mechanisms of the ego; stimulus generalization

Oral fixation; classical conditioning

7

Higgledy-piggledy,Hamlet of ElsinoreRuffled the criticsby dropping this bomb:Phooey on FreudAnd his psychoanalysis.Oedipus, schmoedipus,I just loved Mom.

In the double dactyl above, Hamlet crucially disagrees with Freud by denying that his feelings for his mother were:

Conditioned

Sexual

Confined to the phallic stage of psychosexual development

Unresolved

8 Robert Triverss argument that evolution can select for self-deception is similar to which aphorism?

Knowledge is power.

Honesty is the best policy.

The best liar is the one who believes his own lies.

A liar must have a good memory.

9 If Jimi Hendrixs song Manic Depression had been written by a clinical psychologist, what would its title be?

Nervous Breakdown

Bipolar Disorder

Anhedonia

Borderline Personality Disorder

10 What would an evolutionary biologist say about Calvins use of the word altruist?

Calvin and Hobbes 1995. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick.

He is using it incorrectly, because he shares half his genes with his father.

He is using it correctly, because he is being asked to confer a benefit to someone else at a cost to himself.

He is using it incorrectly, because the cost to himself is small and the benefit to his father is large.

He is using it correctly, because his motives are selfish and he is withholding a favor accordingly.