Power posing and pain
The other day I knocked my arm- it hurt so I rubbed it and then thought, “What the hell am I doing here?” How can rubbing pain make it go away?
Here’s Amy Cuddy:
https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are
1.15 to 1.30 funny bit
5.15 to 6.30 in the MBA classroom
10.10 to 10.55 the poses
15.55 to 19.25 imposter syndrome (sex?)
How can changing your posture change your mind?
NOTE: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-overview-state-science-postural-feedback-power-posing-amy-cuddy/
Andrew Gelman on the stats
Anyway, that’s all background. I think Dominus’s article is fair [No, upon reflection, I don’t think the article was fair, as it places, without rebuttal, misrepresentations of my work and that of Dana Carney — AG], given the inevitable space limitations. I wouldn’t’ve chosen to have written an article about Amy Cuddy—I think Eva Ranehill or Uri Simonsohn would be much more interesting subjects. But, conditional on the article being written largely from Cuddy’s perspective, I think it portrays the rest of us in a reasonable way [actually no, I don’t think so. — AG]. As I said to Dominus when she interviewed me, I don’t have any personal animosity toward Cuddy. I just think it’s too bad that the Carney/Cuddy/Yap paper got all that publicity and that Cuddy got herself tangled up in defending it. It’s admirable that Carney just walked away from it all. And it’s probably a good call of Yap to pretty much have avoided any further involvement in the matter.
The only thing that really bugged me about the NYT article is when Cuddy is quoted as saying, “Why not help social psychologists instead of attacking them on your blog?” and there is no quoted response from me. I remember this came up when Dominus interviewed me for the story, and I responded right away that I have helped social psychologists! A lot. I’ve given many talks during the past few years to psychology departments and at professional meetings, and I’ve published several papers in psychology and related fields on how to do better applied research, for example here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I even wrote an article, with Hilda Geurts, for The Clinical Neuropsychologist! So, yeah, I do spend some time helping social psychologists.
Dominus also writes, “Gelman considers himself someone who is doing others the favor of pointing out their errors, a service for which he would be grateful, he says.” This too is accurate, and let me also emphasize that this is a service for which I not only would be grateful. I actually am grateful when people point out my errors. It’s happened several times; see for example here. When we do science, we can make mistakes. That’s fine. What’s important is to learn from our mistakes.
In summary, I think Dominus’s article was fair, but I do wish she hadn’t let that particular false implication by Cuddy, the claim that I didn’t help social psychologists, go unchallenged. Then again, I also don’t like it that Cuddy baselessly attacked the work of Simmons and Simonsohn and to my knowledge never has apologized for that. (I’m thinking of Cuddy’s statement, quoted here, that Simmons and Simonsohn “are flat-out wrong. Their analyses are riddled with mistakes . . .” I never saw Cuddy present any evidence for these claims.)
Good people can do bad science. Indeed, if you have bad data you’ll do bad science (or, at best, report null findings), no matter how good a person you are.
Let me continue by saying something I’ve said before, which is that being a scientist, and being a good person, does not necessarily mean that you’re doing good science. I don’t know Cuddy personally, but given everything I’ve read, I imagine that she’s a kind, thoughtful, and charming person. I’ve heard that Daryl Bem is a nice guy too. And I expect Satoshi Kanazawa has many fine features too. In any case, it’s not my job to judge these people nor is it their job to judge me. A few hundred years ago, I expect there were some wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent, good people doing astrology. That doesn’t mean that they were doing good science!
If your measurements are too noisy (again, see here for details), it doesn’t matter how good a person you are, you won’t be able to use your data to make replicable predictions of the world or evaluate your theories: You won’t be able to do empirical science.
Conversely, if Eva Ranehill, or Uri Simonsohn, or me, or anyone else, performs a replication (and don’t forget the time-reversal heuristic) or analyzes your experimental protocol or looks carefully at your data and finds that your data are too noisy for you to learn anything useful, then they may be saying you’re doing bad science, but they’re not saying you’re a bad person.
Selection bias in what gets reported
When people make statistical errors, I don’t say “gotcha,” I feel sad. Even when I joke about it, I’m not happy to see the mistakes; indeed, I often blame the statistics profession—including me, as a textbook writer!—for portraying statistical methods as tools for routine discovery: Do the randomization, gather the data, pass statistical significance and collect $200.
Regarding what gets mentioned in the newspapers and in the blogs, there’s some selection bias. A lot of selection bias, actually. Suppose, for example, that Daryl Bem had not made the serious, fatal mistakes he’d made in his ESP research. Suppose he’d fit a hierarchical model or done a preregistered replication or used some other procedure to avoid jumping at patterns in noise. That would’ve been great. And then he most likely would’ve found nothing distinguishable from a null effect, no publication in JPSP (no, I don’t think they’d publish the results of a large multi-year study finding no effect for a phenomenon that most psychologists don’t believe in the first place), no article on Bem in the NYT . . . indeed, I never would’ve heard of Bem!
Think of the thousands of careful scientists who, for whatever combination of curiosity or personal interests or heterodoxy, decide to study offbeat topics such as ESP or the effect of posture on life success—but who conduct their studies carefully, gathering high-quality data, and using designs and analyses that minimize the chances of being fooled by noise. These researchers will, by and large, quietly find null results, which for very reasonable dog-bite-man reasons will typically be unpublishable, or only publishable in minor journals and will not be likely to inspire lots of news coverage. So we won’t hear about them.
Conversely, I’ll accept the statement that Cuddy in her Ted talks could be inspiring millions of people in a good way, even if power pose does nothing, or even does more harm than good. (I assume it depends on context, that power pose will do more good than harm in some settings, and more harm than good in others).
A way forward
The Ted talk has a lot going for it: it’s much stronger than the journal articles that justify it and purportedly back it up. I have the impression that Cuddy and others think the science of power pose needs to be defended in part because of its role in this larger edifice, but I recommend that Cuddy and her colleagues go the other way: follow the lead of Dana Carney, Eva Ranehill, et al., and abandon the scientific claims, which ultimately were based on an overinterpretation of noise (again, recall the time-reversal heuristic)—and then let the inspirational Ted talk advice fly free of that scientific dead end.
There are lots of interesting ways to study how people can help themselves through tools such as posture and visualization, but I think these have to be studied for real, not through crude button-pushing ideas such as power pose but through careful studies on individuals, recognizing that different postures, breathing exercises, yoga moves, etc., will work for different people. Lots of interesting ideas here, and it does these ideas no favor to tie them to some silly paper published in 2010 that happened to get a bunch of publicity. The idea is to take the positive aspects of the work of Cuddy and others—the inspirational message that rings true for millions of people—and to investigate it using a more modern, data-rich, within-person model of scientific investigation. That’s the sort of thing that should one day be appearing in the pages of Psychological Science.
I think Cuddy has the opportunity to take her fame and her energy and her charm and her good will and her communication skills and her desire to change the world and take her field in a useful direction. Or not. It’s her call, and she has no obligation to do what I think would be a good idea. I just wanted to emphasize that there’s no reason her career, or even her famous Ted talk, has to rely on a particular intriguing idea (on there being a large and predictable effect of a certain pose) that happened not to work out. And I thank Dominus for getting us all to think about these issues.
so if I rub my arm, why does it soothe the pain?
The plausibility of conditioned pain by Paul Ingraham
“Can chronic pain be a “learned response” to things that shouldn’t hurt, like Pavlov’s dogs salivating to the ring of a bell? “Classical conditioning,” that is. It’s an interesting idea, with obviously optimistic implications — because what is learned might also be un-learned.
If that works, it would be a cool brain hack, a clever and surprising solution to one of the hardest problems there is.
Despite all the mysteries of life, we do know this much: conditioned responses are behavioural, physiological, and emotional — hunger, fear and anxiety, or excitement — and not sensations.
That is, we can’t be conditioned to sense things that do not exist, cannot learn to hallucinate on cue: smell a pie baking, see a walrus, hear a fart. So why would it be possible to learn to feel pain?
There might be some answers to that question — pain is quite complex, and there is plenty of controversy about how it works. For instance, the key to the phenomenon, if it exists, might be related to the fact that pain is interoceptive (sensing things inside the body), and interoception might be fundamentally more susceptible to conditioning than exteroception (sensing the outside).
But all such possible answers are still just speculative for now. The fact that conditioning doesn’t involve tinkering with sensations at all is a large conceptual hurdle — so large that it should make anyone hesitate to “believe” in conditioned pain without really good evidence. It is an extraordinary claim about how humans work … and most such ideas turn out to be wrong.”
https://www.painscience.com/blog/can-pain-be-conditioned.html