Wrong, wrong, wrong

This week I read Simon Baron-Cohen’s book Zero Degrees of Empathy. I didn’t like it. He may well be best known among laypeople like me for his work on differences in the distributions of psychological traits among people of different sexes. That comes up in this book, but mostly incidentally, and in any case my problems with it aren’t anything to do with that.

Zero Degrees of Empathy is a book about empathy. Baron-Cohen (yes, he is Borat’s cousin) thinks that the common characteristic of three personality disorders and two types of autism is that people with the conditions have little or no empathy. He also thinks that we should stop explaining human cruelty in terms of evil, which is a bit of a non-explanation, and start explaining it in terms of a temporary or permanent deficit of empathy on the part of the perpetrators. I’m not sure how common it is these days to give a heavyweight role to evil in the explanation of cruelty, but if studying empathy helps us understand cruelty better, then empathy’s worth studying. No problems there.

My problem with the book is that it seems to be riddled with errors. Here are some of them:

• On page 14 there is a graph showing that he’s found people’s empathy levels to be normally distributed. He says it’s a spectrum, but divides it into seven evenly spaced levels, from level 0 (no empathy) to level 6 (Desmond Tutu). The graph shows the mean/mode/median to be at level 3. Then on pages 17-20 he describes what each level is like. In the descriptions, people at level 3 have to ‘pretend to be normal’, and may realize that they ‘just don’t understand jokes that everyone else does’. Level 4 is ‘low-average’, and level 5 is ‘marginally above average’. So the descriptions suggest the average is between 4 and 5, and contrary to the graph empathy isn’t normally distributed. He repeats the claim that empathy levels are normally distributed many times in the book.
• The same thing happens with his ‘systemizing’ spectrum: the graph on page 80 shows a normal distribution from 0 to 6 averaging 3, while the descriptions (page 80-81) suggest that the average is between levels 3 and 4, which isn’t what the graph says. It also means the distributions of empathy and systemizing are different, contrary to the impression given by the graphs looking exactly the same.
• Here’s a quote from page 48: “If you have empathy you will be capable of feeling guilt, while if you lack empathy, you won’t. This might make you think that guilt and empathy is one and the same thing: clearly this cannot be true, since a person can feel guilt (e.g. that they went through a red traffic light) without necessarily feeling empathy. So empathy can give rise to guilt but guilt is not proof of empathy.” (Italics added.) The two italicized phrases contradict each other, don’t they? He also uses the expression ‘clearly’ a lot when making claims which are not clear and may not even be true, which is well known to be an annoying thing to do.
• There is a diagram on page 31 illustrating the three forms of what he calls ‘zero-negative’ personalities. It looks just like a Venn diagram showing that zero-negative is the intersection of the borderline, psychopathic and narcissistic personality disorders. However, he wants to convey the quite different information that the three forms of zero-negative are those three personality disorders, and the diagram is pointlessly misleading.
• He defines empathy on page 12 like this: “Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” That’s fine: it’s a reasonable definition. But in chapter 6 (‘Reflections on human cruelty’) he says that it follows from the definition that people commit various acts harming people (his examples involve murders and terrorist bombings) must have their empathy switched off at the time of action. This isn’t true, because there is no inconsistency in feeling an emotion and acting in spite of it. The line of thought that empathy is incompatible with some actions, even some praiseworthy actions (see note iv), appears frequently, especially in chapter 6, and it isn’t right.
• Here is a quote from page 26: “…we react in a very sensory way when we identify with someone else’s distress. This clear brain response is telling us that even without any conscious decision to do so we must be putting ourselves into the other person’s shoes, not just to imagine how we would feel in their situation, but actually feeling it as if it had been our own sensation. No wonder we wince involuntarily when we see someone else get hurt. Of course, not everyone will have this strong empathic response to such emotionally charged situations. If our somatosensory cortex is damaged or temporarily disrupted, our ability to recognize other people’s emotions is significantly diminished. Surgeons may, for example, be well suited to their job precisely because they don’t have this emotional reaction, a prediction that was confirmed by Yawei Cheng who found that physicians who practise acupuncture show less somatosensory cortex activity while watching pictures of body parts being pricked by needles.” (Italics in original.) This suggests that a relaxed response to needles makes people more likely to go into acupuncture. He doesn’t explain why he doesn’t think the causation might be the other way round.
• His definition of truth (pages 77-78) appears to be formulated to annoy philosophers. “Philosophers and theologians have long debated what we mean by truth. My definition of truth is neither mystical, nor divine, nor is it obscured by unnecessary philosophical complexity. Truth is (purely and simply) repeatable, verifiable patterns. Sometimes we call such patterns ‘laws’ or ‘rules’, but essentially they are just patterns.” I am a philosopher, and I am annoyed.
• His view is that the variation in incidence of zero-negative personality types is explained in significant parts both by variation in genes and by variation in upbringing. This may well be true. He presents evidence for the genetic component (from twin studies and gene testing), but his evidence for the upbringing component seems to be that the parents of zero-negative people disproportionately often mistreated them. Such a correlation would (of course) result from a genetic connection even if there was no causal contribution from upbringing. Perhaps he has evidence that upbringing makes a difference, but it isn’t in the book as far as I can tell. This makes it irritating when on page 89 he says “we have seen bucket-loads of evidence for the importance of early experience”.
• While he does present actual evidence for the genetic contribution, he also says this (pages 88-9): “there are parents who used the empathic, non-authoritarian style of parenting, discussing things reasonably with their child, yet their child still turns out to be a psychopath. Equally, we all know individuals who have thrived despite growing up in difficult environments… [Professor Dante Cicchetti] is proof that growing up in what James Blair calls a ‘dangerous and criminogenic’ environment does not totally determine your outcome. In his studies he found that as many as 80% of children who suffered abuse or neglect went on that [sic] to develop ‘disorganized attachment’. But clearly it takes more than a harsh environment to make a psychopath. There must be a genetic element.” Well, must there? It seems to me that this argument is easily parodied: disproportionately many people without access to clean water die in infancy, although not all do, and not all people who die in infancy lack clean water. Would this mean there was a genetic component? There could be a genetic component, but the rest of the variation might also be down to non-genetic chance factors. Drinking the wrong bit of water, perhaps. Or in the original case, having an encounter with the wrong person on the wrong day. Witnessing the wrong murder. Having the wrong friends. The possibilities are endless. These chance factors – what I understand the pros refer to as the unique environment – could explain the rest of the variation, without a genetic contribution. If I know this, Professor Baron-Cohen should know this.
• Here’s his guess at why empathy is distributed as it is (page 128): “Presumably the reason that empathy is a bell curve (with the majority of people showing moderate rather than high levels of empathy) is because moderate empathy levels are most adaptive.” He goes on to tell a story about why this might be. But does he really think that when evolved traits are normally distributed we can presume that moderate levels are most adaptive? Does he think this applies to intelligence, beauty, physical fitness, height, fertility, resistance to disease and so on? Perhaps these things aren’t normally distributed, but I’m fairly sure some of them are. Normal distributions appear all over the place, and they don’t need explaining in terms of the mode being the most adaptive. Again, if I know this, so should he.

I could go on, but that’s enough. Perhaps some of my criticisms could be given satisfactory responses, but I'd be astonished if there wouldn't still be a lot for him to think about. Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor at Cambridge and has been in the business for thirty years. He shouldn’t be making mistakes like these. It’d be nice if you could just come across a book like this, write the author off as a hack, and ignore them in future. You can’t do that, though. People trust experts. Laypeople trust them, of course, but academics in related fields trust them too, because you can’t be an expert in everything. We trust mathematicians that the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem doesn’t have any errors in it (anymore), and Steven Pinker (in chapter 18 of The Blank Slate) trusts Simon Baron-Cohen [see correction]. There’s a lot of division of labour in our collective search for truth, and misinformation spreads. Of course people make mistakes, but if experts took a reasonable amount of care in their work then we could trust that their simple mistakes were reasonably rare. But it seems they don’t, and it seems we can’t.

UPDATE 17/08/12: CORRECTION

I said Steven Pinker trusted SBC in the chapter of The Blank Slate on gender. Sorry about this: I misremembered. He doesn't mention him there at all. In that chapter and others he relies on the work of a lot of experts in fields he isn't an expert in, so that part of the point still stands. SBC isn't one of those experts though, and is only briefly cited in the book, for his work on autism. Pinker and SBC do both hold the view that the average man isn't psychologically interchangeable with the average woman and that this is probably partly biologically caused, based on some of the same evidence. SBC's views on this (see especially his The Essential Difference) are however much more involved than anything Pinker defends in The Blank Slate. I might talk about TED in another post.

Famine, affluence, and psychopathy

I recently read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. It’s an engaging, entertaining and interesting read, and I’d warmly recommend it to people who like that sort of thing. It’s a book about psychopaths. Apparently they’re everywhere, but don’t worry: most of them don’t go round killing people. Mostly they’re just charming, lacking in conscience and empathy, easily bored, promiscuous, irresponsible and a few other things. It’s a dimensional thing rather than a binary one, but he said that by a pretty reasonable classification about 1% of us are psychopaths. Most are men. Lots are in prison.

Reading a Jon Ronson book tends not to make you an expert on anything, but it did get me thinking. Many of my readers are probably familiar with Peter Singer’s paper ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, in which he argues that rich people should give away most of their money to help save the lives of strangers in poor countries. Most people think it’d be terrible to see a child drowning in a shallow pond but not save it because you’d get your trousers muddy, and being surrounded by a crowd of equally callous onlookers doesn’t really get you off the hook. Peter Singer thinks blowing our disposable incomes on trivia when we could be saving the lives of strangers is much the same. Of course they don’t feel the same, but Singer doesn’t think that matters. Nor do I, really.

Now, the impression that I got from Jon Ronson’s book was that psychopaths are the sort of people who might see a kid drowning in a shallow pond and ignore it for the sake of their trousers. On the other hand, most of us seem to be the sorts of people who would hear of some children dying on the other side of the world and ignore them for the sake of something trivial. Maybe a nice new pair of trousers. Quite a lot of ink has been spilled trying to make excuses for us without excusing pond-ignorers, but maybe the psychopath analogy provides a more fruitful way of looking at it. My suggestion is that normal people stand to the kids in (at time of writing) Niger as psychopaths stand to the kids in the pond. If psychopaths are excused, so are we. If not, not.

One difference which I suppose is relevant is that if you’re not a psychopath and have a fully functional imagination you might be able to spot parallels between famine children and pond children and get appropriately worked up about the former. I guess that’s part of the point of those charity advertisements showing people suffering instead of just telling you about it. Maybe our failure to spot the parallels and engage our emotions consistently is culpable, so people who want to excuse the psychopaths but not the general public have a logical place to stand. But in any case, if there’s a reasonably common kind of person who would be as unmoved by a kid in the pond as the rest of us are by famine victims, then it seems kind of dense for the discussion of Singer’s arguments not to take them into account.

Chess in a dress

I’m bad at chess. One of the advantages of this is that when I play it against strangers on the internet I don’t get accused of cheating, but I’d still like to be better. It tends to surprise people how bad I am because I’ve always been pretty good at mathsy things. It surprises me too, but I think what’s killing my game is that I don’t take enough interest in what the other player’s thinking. As anyone who doesn’t suck at chess knows, that’s pretty important. If you’re too self-absorbed, they’ll have a plan and then catch you unawares with it, and you’ll lose. But now I may have hit upon a solution.

Regular readers will know that a while ago I read and enjoyed a book about psychological research into differences between men and women. If I remember rightly, she said (among other things) that when people imagine themselves as being of a particular gender they adopt the psychological traits they think people of that gender tend to have. One of the traits people in my country tend to associate with women is seeing things from other people’s point of view. Empathy, sympathy, emotional intelligence: whatever you call it,  the chances are that on some level a 21^st century Briton like me will think women are better at it. This is meant to work even if you've read and been broadly persuaded by a book suggesting the stereotypes may be largely unfounded. So if I want to be better at chess, I just need to write a first-person story from a woman’s point of view, and then use my magical mindreading skills to rumble my opponents' plans. Those strangers on the internet won’t know what hit them.

Now, I can imagine someone pointing out that the best chess players in the world are mostly men, and at the very highest level they’re all men. Presumably there’s something men are good at which outweighs the women’s ability to read minds. Well, one thing is that the technique makes you assume the traits you think women have, not the traits they actually have. Men may be actually just as good at mindreading as women are, but as long as I think women are better, if I think myself feminine I should become better. Another thing is that even if male dominance in chess is caused at least in part by psychological differences between men and women, these differences might benefit the men in obsessively learning openings and practising, rather than making them better players practice-hour for practice-hour. So I don’t think my hypothesis should be dismissed out of hand.

I did think I might be able to get in touch with my telepathic side by wearing a dress when I play, but it was suggested to me that this might actually draw attention to my maleness, since I’d be thinking ‘I’m a man in a dress’. I don’t know which way this effect would go, so I should probably test the hypothesis using the story method, which I understand is more standard. I’ll test the dress method too though, because if it works then it might catch on and top players would need to turn out in drag to stay competitive. That’s a turn of events for which I wouldn’t mind being responsible.

Experts

It’s seldom comfortable siding with the ex-mistress of a knight of the Garter, but a couple of days ago I was listening to Nicky Campbell’s radio show and that’s what happened to me. A man called Delroy Grant had just been convicted of some serious crimes and Campbell had taken this as a cue to have a nature/nurture debate. I’m currently reading and very much enjoying Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which is about the genetic contribution to human psychology, so naturally I was interested.

Edwina Currie was on the show and thought that some people were born bad, and a psychologist called Martin had called in saying she was wrong and that people’s psychology resulted mostly from childhood experiences. Here’s some of what they said:

Martin: ‘Our states of mind aren’t born in us; obviously our brains are very ready to take on eighteen years of experience but... our brains are learning machines.’

Nicky tries to say something

Edwina: ‘No, Nicky, no, Nicky, we readily accept these days that we have blue eyes or brown eyes because we’ve inherited them...’

Martin (talking over her): ‘But that is genetic... there’s no evidence...’

Edwina: ‘...our hair colour, our height... yeah but how can it be so obvious that our physical characteristics are one way and then say the genes that control our mood, our attitudes...’

Martin (talking over her): ‘Genes don’t control our psychological characteristics.’

Edwina: ‘...oh but they do! My goodness of course they do!’

Martin: ‘You’re not an expert in this area; you’re a politician!’

They carried on for a while, and UK readers can listen to it here if they’re quick. (Edwina comes in at about 43:50.) Now I’m not taking sides here in the debate about whether violence begets violence or whether people with a genetic tendency to be violent beget people with a genetic tendency to be violent. What I didn’t like was that Martin seemed to be using his position as an expert to dismiss the other side of a genuine controversy. (I don't want to misrepresent Martin, and he did go on to admit that genetics did affect psychology in some cases, but this is how it came over at the time.) He asked Edwina for some evidence, but he’ll already know about the evidence from studying twins and adopted children and what have you, and what’s more he’ll know why he doesn’t think it shows that genes control psychological characteristics and why some of his colleagues do.

Now if I was calling in to Nicky Campbell’s show to talk about philosophy I wouldn’t dream of representing it as the expert view that moral statements attempt to state facts, that conceivability doesn’t even nearly entail possibility or that there's nothing more to the meaning of a proper name than its syntax and its referent, even though I think all these things. If Edwina said that it was obvious that ‘Clark Kent’ and ‘Superman’ weren’t synonymous I wouldn’t dismiss her as a mere politician. I’d know full well that plenty of experts disagree with me and agree with her.

The point of listening to experts is that they know what the state of the debate is. They know what’s controversial among people who know and what isn’t. They know what's a sensible way of approaching a question relevant to their field. If someone exploits the fact there aren’t any other experts around to push a controversial line then they’re misrepresenting their expertise and abusing our trust. If that’s how they behave then people won’t trust them, and if we can’t trust experts then we’ll benefit a lot less from having them around. Nobody wants public debate to be conducted exclusively by ill-informed laypeople trading ill-informed opinions, but if experts aren’t careful not to misrepresent things then that’s what we’ll be left with.

Selling out

Without committing myself one way or another on the whole “are they selling out or aren’t they” debate (yet), I can at least see why celebrities endorse products. They’re paid to. If someone offers you a truckload of money to tell people to wear Nike trainers, that gives you a reason to tell people to wear them that you didn’t have before. Maybe it’s wrong to decide which trainers to endorse on the basis of who pays you rather than on the basis of who makes the best trainers. Maybe I’d vote for a party who said they’d ban paid celebrity endorsements. But it’s not illegal yet, and I can see what motivates the celebrities.

What I can’t see is why it works. People see Tiger Woods or Terry Wogan or whoever telling them to drink Coca-Cola or what have you, and they know they’ve been paid to do this, but they still respond by drinking Coca-Cola. Apparently, some people really respond this way. I hope I don’t, and you presumably don’t, but some people do. They must, or celebrity endorsements would be bad business. I’ve got a few theories about how it works, and I’m not happy about any of them.

My first theory is that people are extremely naive. They understand that celebrities are paid to endorse the products they endorse, but they think they pick the products they really like, and see the fee as a kind of bonus, or thankyou, or expenses. Or perhaps they’ve been watching Peep Show and think that money’s an energy and a lot of it seems to flow towards celebrities. If some of this is as fees for their autonomous and principled endorsements, well, that’s just the way the world works.

If people aren’t this naive, maybe they’re just suggestible and confused. Consciously they know that the celebrity is just doing what they’re paid to do, but unconsciously it still makes them want the product, as if the celebrity had endorsed it out of principle and for free. This doesn’t seem far-fetched to me. If a century or so of hilarious psychology experiments have taught us anything it’s that even intelligent people are easily manipulated in spite of themselves.

The third possibility is that putting a Nike logo on a celebrity is like putting one on a pretty girl. People like things they see next to things they like, so this will make the celebrity’s fans like the product.

So, are the celebrities selling out? I think it’s fairly obvious that if the second theory turns out to be true, celebrity endorsements are like subliminal advertising and it’s arbitrary not to ban the former once we’ve banned the latter. Even if we don’t ban endorsements, if that’s how they work then the people involved are much like subliminal advertisers. If the third theory is right, then I suppose the celebrities are selling out their fame, but only in the way that pretty people in car ads are selling out their prettiness. If the first theory is true, then celebrities who endorse products they wouldn’t endorse for free are, in a way, liars. But they are only lying to extremely naive people. At least they’re not lying to me.