Class 1

Welcome!

Welcome!

I am “the UNPREPARED”

Welcome!

I am “the UNPREPARED”,

“the UNMOTIVATED”

Welcome!


“the UNMOTIVATED”,

“the UNPROFESSIONAL”

Welcome!


“the UNMOTIVATED”,

“the UNPROFESSIONAL”,

Professor of decision-making!

Prof. Alexandre Linhares, Ph.D.

And I bring a theory for you tonight!

Day #1

God, I have one minute left to live!

HMS GLOUCESTER

WHERE ARE WE?

HMS Gloucester(British Type 42 Destroyer)

1991 Gulf War

What’s on the sky?

American A-6 Intruder BomberSilkworm missile (wings are folded in image)

They surely look different in a radar, right?

Timeline, 5secs

5 secs later: “I have 1 minute left to live”

radar event around 5:00AM

Timeline, 45secs


40secs information gathering

Firing of counter-missiles

radar event around 5:00AM

Timeline, 1:30secs


radar event around 5AM



Counter-missiles destroy object

“Whose Bird was that?”“it was ours, sir”

Timeline, 4:01:30secs

5 secs recognition: “I have 1 minute left to live”

radar event





4 Hours of analysis, trying to find out whether a friend was shot down

Timeline, 4:01:30secs

5 secs recognition: “I have 1 minute left to live”

radar event





4 Hours of analysis, trying to find out whether a friend was shot down

45 secondsThis is what interests us: the button-pressing; the decision-making, the intuition behind it, the thoughts, and the thoughts we never saw.

Mystery #1 How did the officer know in 5 seconds that it was

a hostile missile?

Be the mind!

Was the location different?

The location was from one of Iraq’s missile sites; BUT American pilots had been flying through that track,

… so no distinction could be made on the basis of location.

Experts always cut corners

Could Friend or Foe system tell them apart?

NO. Why not? Because American pilots were usually late on turning the system back on.

Experts always cut corners

Was the altitude different?

YES! …But the Gloucester’s 992 & 1022 radars do

not give altitude information (360o vertical sweep). In fact the radars were only able to detect feet-wet objects (those already above the seas).It took Michael Riley over 40secs to find out that the track was flying at 1000 ft, instead of an A-6’s usual 3000ft altitude. This is when he commands the counter-response.…so how did he know in 5 seconds????

Mystery #1 How did the officer know in 5 seconds that it was

a hostile missile?

Be the mind!

Was it ESP?

ESP (Noum): Extrasensory perception encompassing paranormal abilities such as telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance.

So Riley thought.

Was he a Jedi Master?

Was Allah interfering for the side of the infidel?

Infidel !!!

Are these hypothesis scientific?

What makes a theory scientific?– Because authors have Ph.D.s?– Because they have mathematics and statistics?– Because they are hard to understand?– Because the authors are professors?– Because they are professors and boring people?– Because it makes you want to sleep?

Are these hypothesis scientific?

As argued by philosopher Popper, a theory is only scientific if it makes testable, refutable, predictions.

Powers of human intuition

In infirmaries, nurses are able to immediately spot infected microbabies (less than 1kg), so that doctors can start treatment right away. If they waited for test results, the babies would not survive the infection.

How can they do that?

Klein, Sources of power

Powers of human intuitionIn simultaneous chess, masters play up to 25 games

with different opponents at the same time. It generally ends with the masters beating all competitors.

Powers of human intuition

José Raul Capablanca once mentioned: “I see only one move. The best one.” Atkinson, Chess & Machine Intuition

The Iceberg (consciousness versus unconsciousness)

What this course is about: psychology, decision-making, information processing, & other life and death issues.

PART I

Impulsivity and unconscious learning

animal impulsivity

Jörg-Peter Ewert showed that the frog Bofu bofu responds to moving strips in an uncommon form:

Prey Predator

animal impulsivity

Chicken and Ducks

Tinbergen, N., The study of instinct. Oxford University press, Oxford, United Kingdom 1951.

GooseHawk

animal impulsivity and inability to learn

When the time comes for egg-laying, the wasp Sphex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket which she stings in such a way as to paralyze but not kill it. She drags the cricket into the burrow, lays her eggs alongside, closes the burrow, then flies away, never to return. In due course, the eggs hatch and the wasp grubs feed off the paralyzed cricket, which has not decayed, having been kept in the wasp equivalent of a deepfreeze. To the human mind, such an elaborately organized and seemingly purposeful routine conveys a convincing flavor of logic and thoughtfulness – until more details are examined. For example, the wasp’s routine is to bring the paralyzed cricket to the burrow, leave it on the threshold, go inside to see that all is well, emerge, and then drag the cricket in. If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making the preliminary inspection, the wasp, on emerging from the burrow, will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will then repeat the preparatory procedure of entering the burrow to see that everything is all right. If again the cricket is removed a few inches while the wasp is inside, once again she will move the cricket up to the threshold and reenter the burrow for a final check. The wasp never thinks of pulling the cricket straight in. On one occasion, this procedure was repeated forty times, with the same result.

Human impulsivityInvoluntary, unconscious, human responses.

Unconscious learning: • word sequence stimulation• red shirts• teacher control • Red cards• Hefferline experiment

Damásio’s Red Cards game2 sets of red cards2 sets of blue cardsPlayers get $2.000 and instructions to get rich, but none

of the following information.

Game: get $100 with each red card get $50 with each blue card

Penalties for red cards go up to $1250Penalties for blue cards are less than $100

NOW, WHAT HAPPENS?

Results

• After 50 cards, most people have a feeling about the good and the bad cards

• After 80 cards, something has clicked, and people can explain what’s going on. They have created a hypothesis, “tested it”, and it seems good. They have figured out the game.

• After 10 (!) cards, people start to develop a stress response to the bad cards, 40 steps before these are recognized as bad.

The Hefferline experiment

Experimental setting:– the desired response was a tiny thumb-twitch so small as to

be subliminal, that is, the subjects could control it but only unconsciously (it was referred to as an ‘invisible thumb-twitch’ since the subjects had no knowledge of their controlling of it).

– The response was recorded by electrodes placed on the palmar base of the left thumb and on the medial edge of the left hand.

– Subjects heard music through headphones, and there was an aversive noise that would be mute for 15 seconds whenever the response was obtained, or, in case of it already being mute at the time of response, being then postponed for more 15 seconds.


• Group 4. Recording electrodes and a meter that informed them of response. Knew their behavior would stop the sound. Straightforwardly developed the response.

• Group 3. Recording electrodes, no meter. Knew their behavior would stop the sound. Some subjects attempted to produce the response voluntarily, which never occurred.


• Group 2. Recording electrodes PLUS some dummy electrodes, so they could not know where to attempt to respond to the noise. All subjects developed the response.

• Group 1. Recording and dummy electrodes. They were not informed that had any control on the disturbing sound. Instead, they were told that the study was about “body tension of noise superimposed on music”. Thus, they were simply told to “listen through earphones, and, otherwise, do nothing”.


Impulsivity: – Involuntary automatic unconscious processing

connecting perception and (unconscious micro) action

HEFFERLINE, R.F. — KEENAN, B.—HARFORD, R.A.: Escape and avoidance conditioning in human subjects without their observation of the response. Science, vol. 130, 1959, pp. 1338-1339.


One might be led to believe that group 1 was a control group, since subjects lacked any knowledge whatsoever of the required task, but this is far from the truth. Group 1 gradually developed the desired response, as their brains were constantly scanning the senses for associations, and, in less than an hour, they were fully conditioned to stop the noise. The immense subtlety involved in perceiving a causal connection between an ‘invisible’ thumb-twitch and the annoying sound cannot be overstated, especially when we consider the massive sensorial information constantly bombarding the subjects. After the experiments were finished, subjects in group 1 were shocked to know they had been in control of the noise all along, as they still believed to have had been passive listeners throughout the whole experiment.

Jedi Conclusion

Most of our learning is unconscious,

impulsive, and automatic.

You must trust the force!

Part II: Priming

Priming, #1Two Dutch researchers asked subjects to either (A)

think and write down what it would be like to be a Ph.D. professor; or (B) think and write down what it would be like to be a soccer hooligan.

Afterwards, subjects had to respond to hard questions from “Trivial Pursuit”, and:(A) PhDs got 55.6% right, while(B) Hooligans had only 42.6% right

This just may be the difference between success and failure.

Gladwell, Blink, p.56

•Stereotypes:–Professors (Study 2)

–Soccer Hooligans (Study 3)

•Priming procedure: write about the behavior, lifestyle, appearance, and attributes of the typical X–No prime, 2 min prime, 9 min prime

•Trivia Quiz: 60 questions–e.g., “Who painted La Guernica?” a) Dali, b) Miro, c) Picasso, d) Velasquez

Automatic effects on:Behavior

(Dijksterhuis & Van Knippenberg, 1998)







perc

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corr

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•Priming manipulation: word-find task with words related to–achievement--e.g., win, achieve, compete, attain

–neutral--e.g., ranch, shampoo, river, carpet

•Scrabble task: create as many words as possible out of 8 tiles

•Measure persistence at task in face of obstacle to goal (i.e., after 2 min. told to stop via intercom)

Automatic effects on:Goals

(Bargh et al., 2001)


(Bargh et al., 2001)A+A+

•Proportion who continued to work after the experimenter said, “stop” over the intercom–57% in achievement condition–22% in neutral condition


(Bargh et al., 2001)


(Bargh et al., 2001)A+A+

Priming, #2In the US, questionnaires taken from GRE

tests were applied to Black students.

One group received just the questions.

Another grouped received the same questions, alongside a prior “Please state your race” question.

This latter group got only half the questions right! They were primed to perceive themselves as failing.

White vs Black p.77

White or Bad vs Black or GoodHurtEvil

Glorious

Wonderfulwww.implicit.harvard.edu

White or Good vs Black or BadHurtEvil

Glorious

Wonderfulwww.implicit.harvard.edu

Activation spreading

Hofstadter (1979, p.677-678) especulates that a computer program to model human calculation processes in a psichologically plausible way would be as slow as humans:

“[The program] will represent the number 2 not just by the two bits “10”, but as the full-fledged concept the way we do, replete with associations such as homonyms “too” and “to”, the words “couple” and “deuce”, a host of mental images such as dots on dominos, the shape of the numeral “2”, the notions of alternation, evenness, oddness, and on and on…”

2

twotoo

couple

pair

even

prime

“, also”very

Jedi Conclusion

A concept will prime related concepts, and these primed, active, concepts,

will guide subsequent behavior

PART III: on the truth

Lying is universal--we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.

Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then--But am I but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot instruct this club.

Lies (even in their nice generous noble form of etiquette) affect decision making at all levels

Plane crash stemming from etiquette and prestige

Split brain experiment, (i)

Language centre in left

Patient could see but not identify spoon

Patient could pick out the spoon with their left hand when asked

Roger Sperry (who won the Nobel prize in 1981) and Michael Gazzaniga

Split brain experiment, (ii)

The LEFT hemisphere has language capabilities.In subjects with lesions separating the hemispheres, it is possible to present them requests to the RIGHT hemisphere, which the left hemisphere has no way of obtaining the information.

After the subjects executed the requests, they were asked why they were doing what they were doing.

What was their response?

Mystery #2 What do split-brain

patients respond, since they have no way of

knowing the answers?

Be the mind!

Jedi conclusion

Humans will easily, automatically, unconsciously discard inconsistencies, lack of information, and contradictions, so as not to feel bad about themselves

Part IV: The failure of intuition

– Group therapy #1 (image of crazy hippies, zen images)

– Excel solving– Analogy making (REWRITE)

The Game Show ProblemYou are on a game show, given the choice of 3

doors. Behind one is a car, behind the 2 others, goats. You get to keep whatever is behind the door you choose.

You pick a door at random (say, No. 1) and the host, who knows what is behind the doors, opens another door (say, No. 2), which has a goat behind it.

Now, should you stay with your choice or should you switch?

Working Group Task #1

Simulating the problem

Chosen door Opened door Car Stay Switch=RANDBETWEEN(1,3)'=IF(A3<>C3,6- (A3+C3),IF(A3=2,1,4- A3))'=RANDBETWEEN(1,3)' 0 0

#NAME? #NAME? #NAME? #NAME? #NAME?

Mystery #3 Why can’t we feel that we

should switch doors?

Be the mind!

The Game Show ProblemYou arrive early on a game show with three

doors, and one is open with a goat inside. Suddenly the janitor rushes and closes that open door. In the remaining doors, there is one car behind one, and a goat on the other. You get to keep whatever is behind the door you choose.

Is this any different from the game show problem?

Bloody IgorYou arrive on your new job, taking care of dogs. You

were advised to “beware of bloody Igor, which is very dangerous, and never submits to anyone”. Though many dogs won’t submit at many times, Igor never does.

As you arrive into the building, you find yourself immersed in an enormous fight between dogs. There is blood everywhere, and something like 20 dogs are fighting. You have a single muzzle, and you put it in the first dog you can. After a display of power, all the remaining dogs submit to you -- except one, which continues growling. It could be Igor, or Igor could be the one with the muzzle.

Now, concerning the muzzle, should you stay with your original choice or should you switch?

Mystery #4 Why do we have blind driving?

Be the mind!

Mystery #5 Can there be a scientific explanation for the “life

flashing through the eyes”phenomenon?

Be the mind!

Next week:

When the search for reason is the reason for search

Class 1

Business

Transcript of Class 1