Episode 170: Social Psychology Gets an Asch-Kicking

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist, David Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing

[00:00:14] my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:11] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:19] Dave, today we're going to tackle some big meta-questions about the way we conduct scientific

[00:01:25] research.

[00:01:26] Would you call this episode methodology porn?

[00:01:31] I don't think anybody will get the enjoyment that was required with the word porn next

[00:01:37] to it.

[00:01:38] The sheer pleasure of discussions, specific techniques in the science.

[00:01:45] You don't think anybody will jerk off to this episode?

[00:01:47] Well that's a separate question, I just don't think it will be because of the methodology

[00:01:51] discussion.

[00:01:52] It'll be because of our luscious dulcet voices.

[00:01:55] Sultry voices, yeah.

[00:01:59] Independent of content really, that's why most people listen.

[00:02:01] Yeah, it's not at all the content.

[00:02:04] It is the form, in any case.

[00:02:07] So we're going to talk about two things today in the first segment, a short discussion of

[00:02:12] a New York Times piece by...

[00:02:16] C.T. Nguyen and Becca Williams.

[00:02:19] Yeah, and Becca Williams is a long time listener.

[00:02:23] She's a philosopher at the University of Minnesota, Mankato, where I recently gave a talk

[00:02:28] and met Becca.

[00:02:32] She's been listening I think almost since the very beginning.

[00:02:35] You look on our Facebook posts from 2013, you will see Becca Williams.

[00:02:41] I don't know if she still listens but she was an OG when it comes to...

[00:02:46] That's great.

[00:02:47] And good for philosophers.

[00:02:48] Forget it.

[00:02:49] I love it when philosophers get into the New York Times.

[00:02:52] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:02:53] Yeah.

[00:02:54] So it's called why we call things porn but maybe we should say what we're going

[00:02:56] to talk about in the second segment too.

[00:02:58] Yeah, we teased this last episode.

[00:03:02] It's Social Psychology and Science and Lessons from Solomon Ash by Paul Rozen, a 2001 paper

[00:03:09] which is a methodological critique of social psychology with some positive recommendations

[00:03:16] but definitely a critique of the way he worries that the field is or the course that it's

[00:03:23] taking.

[00:03:25] Because that discussion is so depressing, we decided to talk about porn.

[00:03:30] It is kind of depressing because it's not totally clear what to do about it.

[00:03:34] Right.

[00:03:35] But...

[00:03:36] It's like I'm just going to leave this here.

[00:03:38] And I don't even work...

[00:03:39] Yeah, you're in the field so we'll talk...

[00:03:42] Yeah.

[00:03:43] In any case, let's talk about porn first although not the fun kind of porn necessarily.

[00:03:48] This is a discussion about when we use the word porn when it's not threesome and

[00:03:55] step-sister.

[00:03:56] Step-sisters almost always step-sisters or step-mothers.

[00:04:00] It's really hard to find porn that doesn't have a stepmother in it.

[00:04:04] It's amazing that it's taken over so much.

[00:04:06] I have a good friend whose 75 year old dad is a recent widower and he's now remaring

[00:04:17] around age 75, 76.

[00:04:19] And all we could talk about was that now step-mom porn is going to take on a whole

[00:04:24] new level.

[00:04:25] So anyway, yeah, so it's this idea of why we call other things porn like food porn, real

[00:04:34] estate porn, closet organization porn which I actually love.

[00:04:38] I don't know.

[00:04:39] They don't mention when this trend happened.

[00:04:42] I feel like it's been in the last five years that it's really taken off.

[00:04:47] But even...

[00:04:48] I remember early us talking about the subreddit called Justice Porn.

[00:04:53] Yeah.

[00:04:54] Yeah, so it's definitely been around for a while but with the rise of Instagram, I think

[00:05:01] food, people taking pictures of their food and calling it food porn.

[00:05:05] And this is food porn not like Tempopo, that movie.

[00:05:10] Do you remember that movie?

[00:05:11] No.

[00:05:12] It's like a Japanese movie that really was like they would put culinary masterpieces on

[00:05:19] their naked bodies and lick them off and stuff like that.

[00:05:22] Yeah, that's not bad.

[00:05:23] That's not bad.

[00:05:24] Yeah, right.

[00:05:25] It's like these cooking shows which I've never gotten into and the closet organization

[00:05:31] porn.

[00:05:32] I don't even know what that is.

[00:05:33] Is that like that Japanese woman?

[00:05:34] Yeah, I guess so.

[00:05:36] Although she's more about a broader philosophy of organization.

[00:05:41] What is her name?

[00:05:43] Marie something.

[00:05:44] Yeah, Marie something.

[00:05:46] I was in a hotel and saw like a couple of her shows.

[00:05:50] Marie Kondo?

[00:05:51] Marie Kondo, yes.

[00:05:54] It was really weird.

[00:05:55] I had never...

[00:05:56] I had a moment of wait, I got to do this.

[00:05:59] I got to like go through my t-shirts and thank them and send them away.

[00:06:06] That's great.

[00:06:07] But she's brought ritual to the task in a way that I think as soon as you sort of at least

[00:06:18] me allow myself to not feel like it's stupid, then I realize that it is kind of a powerful

[00:06:25] thing to do.

[00:06:26] That's exactly right.

[00:06:27] It brings ritual and we're hungry for ritual in general I think.

[00:06:32] I don't know, maybe like some a lot of these porn things like the food just the ritual of

[00:06:36] cooking and a lot of these things maybe where our banking on our hunger and the relative

[00:06:43] absence of ritual in our lives.

[00:06:46] So okay porn so they these guys argue this new generic sense of porn is catching on

[00:06:57] because it's useful.

[00:06:58] There's a name to a specific kind of relationship we can have with images and other media.

[00:07:03] It's worth getting clear about the nature of that relationship for once we understand it

[00:07:07] we may discover that we have cultivated some porny relationships in some unexpected places.

[00:07:13] And so they quote the philosopher Michael Ray who says that an image is sexual pornography

[00:07:19] when we use it for immediate gratification while avoiding the complexities of actual sexual

[00:07:25] relationships like physical intimacy, emotional connection and romantic interaction.

[00:07:29] Now what do you think about that?

[00:07:31] Does that capture what you think of as what makes something porn?

[00:07:36] It definitely sometimes is that I guess it seems like there are other things you could

[00:07:42] use for immediate graph gratification sexual even sexual gratification while avoiding the

[00:07:49] complexities of sexual relationships like that could also apply to going to a prostitute

[00:07:54] or just hooking up with somebody you know Ashley Madison or something like that.

[00:07:59] Right right and I guess in his definition Michael Ray's it's about an image so he's

[00:08:06] Oh an image right yeah he's stating that it is an image but that doesn't mean right

[00:08:11] that means I don't know if it's something other than like you don't have you can

[00:08:15] have auditory porn I suppose.

[00:08:18] Yeah it used to be that like remember those 900 numbers that you would come

[00:08:23] Yeah and you were for that 976 yeah right then 1900 yeah I was too young to figure out how

[00:08:31] to call those. I was just old enough like as it was kind of coming to an end but

[00:08:39] definitely old enough to get some questions from my parents about the phone bill.

[00:08:45] So here's so when and this is central to what they are you because then then they use this

[00:08:51] to generalize to other kinds of things we call porn like food porn.

[00:08:57] So using it for immediate gratification while avoiding the complexities of actual sexual

[00:09:00] relationships like intimacy and then I guess it has to be the case since you're watching

[00:09:06] it as a third party so if your partner if your sexual partner sends you

[00:09:14] images graphic images of themselves naked or in sexual acts is that not pornography because

[00:09:20] it involved I guess so I guess that's right. Yeah then that seems right I guess the other

[00:09:25] thing you know if you watch porn with your wife or girlfriend or I don't know.

[00:09:31] I mean that's still okay like it seems fine it's good enough yeah.

[00:09:35] No no I want you to conceptually analyze this.

[00:09:39] Okay so generalizing this real estate porn is pictures of real estate used for instant

[00:09:45] gratification without your having to buy the house clean it or take care of all that furniture.

[00:09:50] Are there so are there any categories of visual porn like that that you actually

[00:09:55] enjoy like do you like the justice porn or the justice porn that website I really liked

[00:10:01] and I actually do think that definition of pornography or the generic sense of porn

[00:10:12] works pretty well with justice porn it was a way to see justice being done without having

[00:10:20] to do anything other than go to a subreddit and it was very gratifying often you know

[00:10:27] when they were good it was very gratifying to see without and I guess revenge movies have a

[00:10:35] have a porn element a justice porn element in that sense too and it is something that you

[00:10:42] avoid the complexities of actually what doing that in real life would entail so in that sense

[00:10:49] I think this is a good illuminating definition of right generic right and that's that's like well

[00:10:57] before I get to the moral outreach porn which is sort of the point of their op-ed there is a great

[00:11:04] I think a lot of people like like this subreddit or follow it it's called power washing porn

[00:11:10] and it's just little videos or gifts of people using a power washer to clean something

[00:11:15] and it is so it's so satisfying like it is instant gratification but I feel like a makeover shows or

[00:11:24] like you know things where you see beforeers and afters even movie montages where somebody's

[00:11:30] exercising and at the beginning they suck and then at the end they're really really good

[00:11:34] that's I think that fits the definition of right this is vicariously giving you the feeling

[00:11:40] like that you've completed something or that you've done something or that you could consume

[00:11:44] something without any of the cost you really like power washing porn yeah man I'm gonna link

[00:11:51] I'll link to it be there's there's these you know you'll see like say an old wooden deck that that has

[00:11:57] accumulated a lot of dirt and moss or whatever and then and then all of a sudden this power

[00:12:01] washer goes through and it looks like a brand new shiny you get to watch it you just see it

[00:12:07] you get to watch it happen it's great let me I need to take a break

[00:12:15] so then so I think that's a good that's a good account and then they start going into whether

[00:12:20] it's good or bad for society these kinds of generic porns that we've seemed like we're

[00:12:28] getting pretty attached to what they argue in the second half of this unfortunately very short

[00:12:35] essay is that certain things like food porn are fine real estate porn I guess might be fine although

[00:12:42] I could see it might make you unhappy about your house yeah exactly but then there is this this

[00:12:48] moral outrage porn which they talk about as like Facebook feeds or you know Twitter

[00:12:56] where you can where you can just watch people say outrageously horrible things or the latest

[00:13:03] thing that Trump tweeted or the latest the latest racist thing that the Republicans aren't condemning

[00:13:10] or whatever and that they argue is actually something that's problematic right and I mean it's

[00:13:19] it's a point that we've made in in previous episodes actually have a an article that I

[00:13:25] wrote not too long ago with with Roy Baummeister called superhero comics as moral pornography

[00:13:32] which is very similar to what they're saying here about the the desire to see cartoonish

[00:13:39] depictions of the enemy the satisfaction that it gives and the lack of nuance in these depictions

[00:13:47] in this in these portrayals right so you're you're flexing a moral muscle that is not

[00:13:55] well equipped to handle the moral complexities of the real world I think

[00:14:00] yeah is it you know yeah and it's arguably worse when you're doing it with real life

[00:14:05] events than when you're doing it with superheroes because you might interact with people who

[00:14:12] right are you know Trump supporters or supporters of Republicans or something like that and to

[00:14:19] carry around a cartoonish view about what they believe I think one of the central points

[00:14:25] that they make with the most important point here is that moral outrage porn can lead to inaction so I

[00:14:32] think that there's I don't know if there's research on this but but that once you express moral outrage

[00:14:38] you kind of feel like you're done and I think that's the similarity that that it might have

[00:14:44] to these other kinds like power washing porn I'm vicariously sensing fulfillment like it feels

[00:14:51] I'm getting that sense of satisfaction as if I had really done something but in reality I haven't

[00:14:56] done shit as if you really cleaned out your closet or power wash yeah exactly yeah and I didn't

[00:15:04] actually so it's getting it's kicking into gear that that mental system of satisfaction like a

[00:15:09] goal has been completed when I have done nothing and in the case of moral outrage

[00:15:16] like I've made may have done worse than than nothing I may have just incited somebody else to to

[00:15:23] express outrage and then do nothing you're not actually trying to fix the problems you feel

[00:15:28] like you've done your job my job is done here after you've posted on Facebook your

[00:15:34] condemnatory thing that will only reach everybody who already agrees with you I mean so there's

[00:15:41] there's a lot of overlap here with criticism the moral grandstanding stuff that we talked about

[00:15:48] so I think that yeah so they're two separate critiques which I don't think they have time

[00:15:52] to fully develop the one is that you don't actually get out there in the real world and

[00:15:58] try to solve the problems and then there's the other thing where you are getting this

[00:16:04] more cartoonish lack of nuanced view of people that when you do interact with them you will now

[00:16:16] view them in a way that it's it's both not accurate and it will be unproductive in terms of coming to

[00:16:23] some sort of agreement you will just be basking in your smugness about them rather than engaging

[00:16:29] them in a serious way right like they say a more a moral over time they've even developed a less

[00:16:36] nuance and more easily inflamed sense of right and wrong to increase their role outrage so you

[00:16:41] you can automatically you can very quickly put somebody into the evil bin and that's a quick

[00:16:47] and easy way to get you inflamed without really listening to them but I think that there is a

[00:16:52] big a big difference so when I was talking about a power washing porn I get that sense of

[00:16:58] satisfaction at the end but I'm very aware that it's wrong that it's false I'm very aware that I've

[00:17:05] been sort of tricked that like I should probably power wash my deck but I'm not going to so like

[00:17:11] this plate some trick them my intuition is that moral outrage in the porny sense is

[00:17:19] you're less clear that you have actually done nothing yes when you express you feel like you

[00:17:24] actually have done the thing that you do which is express it would be like you really if you felt

[00:17:29] like you had sex with like the porn star or whatever if people ask you like how many people

[00:17:35] yet sex within your like oh man probably I mean just in the last couple days no that's a great

[00:17:43] point I think that's right is in that sense it's more insidious because it's not those things are

[00:17:50] transparent to you it's like obvious to you upon introspection that it was porn not hence the guilty

[00:17:59] feeling at the end of your orgasm that sort of dejection you don't have that dejection after

[00:18:04] posting like exactly no right and in fact like you do kind of get the sense that some people

[00:18:11] have lost any sense that that isn't just all that's expected and that there is actually this

[00:18:18] kind of more difficult more complex messy engagement with the real world I mean that's

[00:18:25] overstating it probably but I think you're right that the people who do this the most are probably

[00:18:31] the people who would least think of what they're doing as porn right right I mean they take it

[00:18:37] seriously like to call back from our previous discussion on trolling this is not insincere

[00:18:43] this is sincere they think that it is their job I actually was sitting next to a guy I was on one of

[00:18:49] those shuttles to the rental car place and I saw a guy sitting next to me scrolling through his

[00:18:53] twitter feed and in the space of two minutes he must have tweeted really quick off the cuff like

[00:19:02] three or four replies to I don't know something that Trump had done with like exactly this like

[00:19:08] outrage just just and I couldn't believe it like you know this guy was like probably in his 50s the

[00:19:13] lesson as always is guard your your electronics when you're sitting next to David Pizarro

[00:19:24] but I think in a lot of cases they're doing it because they think this is the right thing to do

[00:19:28] we can't normalize this kind of behavior so yeah in that sense I don't think maybe porn is the

[00:19:35] right analogy for it so I was going to say maybe moral outreach porn is giving porn a bad name

[00:19:41] yes I think that's right actually but it is there is no other kind of porn that I can think of

[00:19:50] in this in this generic sense of the word porn that where a negative emotion is the target

[00:19:56] where you know usually it's just this actual goods like that we are riling ourselves up in this

[00:20:03] maybe calling it a negative emotion isn't fair but it certainly is more like anger and you know

[00:20:11] yeah I mean maybe like you know tragedies what you know really sad

[00:20:17] tear jerker movies or you know these kind of Greek tragedies where the goal is to evoke

[00:20:23] grief and right or fear and sadness and but those feel like they make you think more like

[00:20:30] contemplate you know the misery of existence or the tragedy of life yeah with an a distance

[00:20:37] that you know that you have that you're not confused about well I don't think I actually

[00:20:44] had sex with my mother and killed my father and tore out my eyes those those feel like

[00:20:51] closer to proxies for real life situations like like they're allowing us true practice

[00:20:57] for maybe feeling those emotions in real life and maybe not but at least it's closer to that

[00:21:03] in and and something that's horny is not really like and that's interesting because we don't think

[00:21:10] of these other ponds necessarily as practice in the way that we think of with great works of art

[00:21:16] and specifically maybe tragedy yeah I mean and you wouldn't call Hamlet

[00:21:22] a decision porn or something right you know like it is something different although the idea is sort

[00:21:30] of similar where you're you're getting vicarious access to certain kinds of situations that you

[00:21:37] wouldn't have had before that that's a separate I mean this is I guess where the I know it when

[00:21:43] I see it you know the famous court thing but the difference between art and porn is a separate

[00:21:50] kind of distinction that right so I was thinking about the this the difference between practice

[00:21:57] art is in this separate category but you can imagine that I was talking about power washing

[00:22:04] or real estate or closet organizing if it if it's a how-to if it's a step by step

[00:22:10] instructional on how to do something it ceases to be porn yeah right it's yeah it's it's it's

[00:22:17] only porn when all you get is that satisfying moment right like that ooh that looks really cool

[00:22:22] right so they end there with a interesting analogy where they say recall a traditional worry about

[00:22:29] sexual pornography that it evokes pleasure by portraying sexuality in unrealistic terms

[00:22:37] and that consumers of sexual pornography then risk exporting unrealistic expectations to the real

[00:22:45] world of sex with potentially disastrous consequences so I think the idea is that some kid is gonna

[00:22:53] you know wait why am I not doing like a 40 person reverse gang bang in real life

[00:23:05] and and then and then he tries to plan it and has he invites 40 female like

[00:23:10] eighth grade classmates to his birthday party like why not wait what like but they

[00:23:18] I haven't even blown out the camp yeah so and then they say the equivalent worry with moral

[00:23:24] outrage porn is that its consumers having simplified their moral systems for the

[00:23:28] sake of self-righteous pleasure will take that cartoon morality with them when they engage

[00:23:33] with the real world we may already be seeing the results now I don't know specifically what they're

[00:23:41] referring to but probably that we have maybe polarization where we're no longer engaging

[00:23:48] with people who disagree with us because we have this cartoonish sense of what they believe and

[00:23:55] how much better we are than them right so I was I was ready to disagree in in the sense that

[00:24:06] I think that in our everyday social lives we still maintain the nuance unless by unless by

[00:24:12] real life you mean Twitter or social media or whatever but there is a way that but then I

[00:24:18] thought about those people who refuse and I've mentioned this we've talked about it on

[00:24:25] on the podcast before people who refuse to talk to somebody as soon as they find out

[00:24:28] they're a Trump supporter right like so I've seen people just walk away like literally with no

[00:24:34] with no further comment no goodbye no I disagree just walk away yeah people have described

[00:24:39] Tinder dates or whatever that ended the moment somebody brought up their political belief they

[00:24:44] just get up and leave so in that in that sense then then maybe I can see the the results of this

[00:24:53] but I still I still think that in general we maintain you know and I guess I feel this way

[00:24:59] about sexual pornography I think in general you know you have to maintain some sense of

[00:25:06] realism when you're engaging with other real human beings in social context yeah and I think

[00:25:11] well I think it's true that we tend to interact less with people we disagree with I'm not sure it's

[00:25:17] because of moral outrage porn I think it's I think it might be these other factors we're just more

[00:25:26] segmented but when people do interact with others who disagree with them on maybe some fundamental

[00:25:33] levels you know I'm always amazed with my classes which are very mixed politically how

[00:25:39] how well students can with a lot of maturity just tackle disagreements that they feel really strongly

[00:25:50] about abortion is a great example even politics although there aren't that many even in the South

[00:25:58] there aren't that many Trumps open Trump supporters and my and my right so they might be

[00:26:05] keeping quiet but but it's it's that's not the same as a disastrous consequence you know there's

[00:26:12] right yeah and I don't know you know I've heard I've heard from many professors mostly good stories

[00:26:20] about how interaction in classrooms goes when people disagree and almost always with some sort of

[00:26:27] sense of surprise that that people can can disagree so maturely but I don't know why why

[00:26:33] the surprise and I've not heard very many stories of it going terribly wrong it's funny that because I

[00:26:38] agree I've had the same experience everyone I talked to expresses that same you know it seems like

[00:26:44] they've had a similar kind of experience that I have and yet when you look at the media you

[00:26:50] wouldn't think that like the media the way the media is portraying the classroom right now is

[00:26:55] very different than I think how the classroom actually is that's just a product of this

[00:27:02] different kind of outrage porn where now it's an outrage at liberals for being intolerant and well

[00:27:08] yeah yeah it's what they what they even mentioned in the article outrage at outrage so yeah although

[00:27:13] they talk about it in terms of civility I think this is different this is more the kind of outrage

[00:27:18] that I the outrage porn that I have which is the outrage just that people are giving a cartoonish

[00:27:25] depiction of college campuses I don't care that they're being uncivil I just think they're

[00:27:31] just being inaccurate and right they're being inaccurate right well as always with this discussion

[00:27:39] we'll get people giving us examples which is fine like if you have examples of it really going poorly

[00:27:45] I think that it's hard to get data on how many people stay quiet yeah because they're afraid

[00:27:52] so so who knows about that but at least at least I don't think that the instances of say people

[00:27:58] yelling at each other and storming out are you know I don't think and I mean and partly one of

[00:28:03] the reasons people might stay quiet is because of the misleading impression that the media has given

[00:28:09] about what would happen if you didn't stay quiet so you know this is a problem that sort of feeds

[00:28:17] on itself and becomes true yeah that's a good that's a good that's a good point well yeah it's

[00:28:23] a good little piece and you're right like I for some reason I just automatically assumed this was

[00:28:28] the stone the New York Times philosophy you know periodic philosophy column but this was

[00:28:34] just right in the New York Times so congratulations to Becca Williams and although I don't know him

[00:28:41] C.T. Nguyen apologies for butchering your name we'll be right back to talk about

[00:28:51] why Dave needs to find a new field

[00:28:56] this podcast is my new field okay I mean mine too yeah

[00:29:01] okay let's take a moment to thank one of our sponsors for this episode simple habit

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[00:33:03] welcome back to very bad wizards this is the time of the show where we like to take a moment

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[00:37:50] one last thing last time I talked a little bit more about that I'm giving a talk in Toronto

[00:37:54] I'll put another link up to that to that talk if anybody wants to attend but one of a couple

[00:38:00] of listeners actually have suggested that if I go maybe there might be a little meetup so

[00:38:06] so stay tuned if you're in the greater Toronto area I might be able to at least have a drink

[00:38:12] with some of you if you're around it's like mid-september I'll put a date up cool okay

[00:38:18] now let's talk about this amazing and depressing article by Paul Rosin which you suggested how did

[00:38:26] you come across this again so Mickey in oh yeah insulate ins like in one day you'll get it I'm not

[00:38:34] doing it I'm really bad with names he quoted one of the rosin quotes of Solomon ash and I

[00:38:43] forget which one it was but it was definitely so in my wheelhouse and I asked him where it came from

[00:38:50] and he gave me the reference and then also Sanjay Sravastava said that it was one of his

[00:38:57] favorite papers of all time yeah I think this was the quote they in their anxiety to be scientific

[00:39:03] students of psychology have often imitated the latest forms of sciences with a long history

[00:39:08] while ignoring the steps these sciences took when they were young they have for example striven to

[00:39:13] emulate the quantitative exactness of natural sciences without asking whether their own subject

[00:39:19] matter is always ripe for such a treatment so that was yeah that was the quote so I

[00:39:26] I have to say this is one of my favorite articles as well and I think every at least

[00:39:32] every social psychologist should be required it should be required reading I'm gonna say some

[00:39:37] so this was published in 2001 will as always put a link to this it's you can find it as a PDF

[00:39:42] online it's personality and social psychology review 2001 it's hard to believe that was 18 years ago

[00:39:49] well I think some things have changed there's a lot of the critique is just spot on you know

[00:39:55] still I just want to say some things about Paul rosin which is he's a treasure to social

[00:40:01] psychology he's he's one of my favorite psychologists he's one of the reasons that I do what I do he

[00:40:10] is the daddy the granddaddy of all discussed research but he's always just had

[00:40:18] you know when every when everybody was looking over here he was looking over here right so he

[00:40:22] was constantly pointing out that there was so many things that were interesting that we

[00:40:27] weren't paying attention to and that if we're going to call ourselves social psychologists at all we

[00:40:33] should be paying attention to and this is I think just the culmination of a lot of his thinking on

[00:40:39] what it means to be a social science in the sense of a science that is that is trying to

[00:40:47] understand social behavior of human beings and and kind of pointing you know it's a little

[00:40:55] the emperor has no clothes kind of critique which is in all our excitement of calling ourselves a

[00:41:02] science and acting like scientists were we're perhaps not only missing some very very important

[00:41:09] things but because of the way in which we're missing it we are failing to do the very thing

[00:41:15] we strive to to be which is a mature science you know it's hard to come up with an analogy

[00:41:22] but the idea that in in your attempt to imitate something you are putting yourself further away

[00:41:31] from the thing that you're trying to imitate yeah I don't know what a good analogy is I mean there's

[00:41:37] right we're we're like playing video game science or something you know we're really

[00:41:42] good at mashing buttons it's you're doing science porn without wrestling with the complexities of

[00:41:48] being a real science this is why by the way people should watch porn bloopers to get a sense of the

[00:41:55] reality of uh you know I've never done that but either because I'm not in the mood with that ruin porn

[00:42:07] I think it would at least ruin the moment what if it was ruined porn forever forever

[00:42:16] yeah it's one thing to kind of know it in the theoretically in the back of your mind it's another

[00:42:21] thing to sort of see it that'd be an interesting study speaking of stuff you should be doing as

[00:42:28] psychologists like measure their erections after watching a porn blooper like when they watch

[00:42:35] regular porn anyway all right so Rawlsson is making two general points which is um

[00:42:45] you know psychology just in general loves to when people when people critique it they love to say well

[00:42:53] you know we're only about a hundred years old give us a shot these other sciences have had

[00:42:57] hundreds and hundreds of years were a young science yeah if I had a nickel for every time

[00:43:02] you're just a call to say that what ash is saying is that um it is our youth that that we should

[00:43:10] realize that what what we've done in our eagerness to become a real quote unquote science um is

[00:43:19] that we've taken on the the attitude and the the theoretical approach to how to do science

[00:43:28] we've taken that from mature scientists prematurely so we've moved to um away from just descriptive

[00:43:39] observation to straight up quantitative experimental lab based model based hypothesis driven research

[00:43:49] before sort of mapping the lay of the land to begin with he thinks that that

[00:43:56] that what we're doing is we're it's a caricature of real science we're acting like real scientists

[00:44:03] we're going through all of the steps um that a real scientist would go through without we are

[00:44:09] failing to complete the first few steps that a science requires and those steps are

[00:44:16] are a real descriptive um observational just collecting observations about in this case human

[00:44:26] behavior right so so the analogy that he gives as somebody who is trained in biology is the

[00:44:32] examples of Darwin and the theory of natural selection and of Watson and Crick and and DNA

[00:44:39] um by pointing out that these theorists were heavily uh involved in just curious searching

[00:44:50] to describe the phenomena the real world phenomena that they were observing yeah if if if Darwin had

[00:44:56] started by trying to do systematic experimentation on say one species there's no way he would

[00:45:04] have gone to the insight that natural selection is the driving force of of the origins of species

[00:45:12] right and the voyage of the beagle which is the work that the rosin talks about it's like a almost

[00:45:18] like a just journal of his observations as he goes to the Galapagos uh and just describes

[00:45:25] what he sees it's a very inductive but there's no model there's no hypothesis there's no

[00:45:30] experiment being run it's just a collection of these kinds of observations and that is something

[00:45:37] that psychology isn't doing and it's not even clear that there's a like a space for that

[00:45:46] in within the field of psychology yeah that's and that's that's the sort of damning depressing

[00:45:51] thing to me the one of the depressing one of the more depressing features of this critique

[00:45:57] is that it's a very sharp critique on on that exact thing whether there is room in psychology

[00:46:03] as sort of as a sociological critique of our of our science whether we would ever allow for this

[00:46:11] to pass as part of the scientific enterprise so you know as he points out the insight that came

[00:46:18] from Charlie Charlie someone said we should do a super cut of me yelling at

[00:46:27] so you know Darwin's descriptive work led to this insight and as Ash points out none of the evidence

[00:46:35] that Darwin could have presented or even that many people can present now for evolution

[00:46:43] by natural selection none of it alone meets evidentiary standards for for proof it's

[00:46:50] the weight of evidence right it's it's the the weight of all of these observations with the absence

[00:46:58] of a plausible alternative account that that is what's convincing and to be clear one of the

[00:47:06] reasons he's talking about Darwin is at that point evolutionary biology is a young science

[00:47:13] and so that's the proper analogy is is Darwin and what Darwin was doing now of course conditions

[00:47:21] were very different and there is an aristocracy and Darwin was able to do that because of the

[00:47:27] aristocracy he was able to publish his his books he was able to take those trips he was able to

[00:47:33] you know he didn't need to get a grant he didn't need to right and we don't have that now I

[00:47:39] think that's what's so depressing is it's not totally clear what to do even if you agree with

[00:47:44] his conclusions and I emphatically do every point like I kind of agree with but I it's it's not clear

[00:47:53] what to do in the contemporary world right and so so what's what's missing from this

[00:48:00] cold because you could say well what's wrong with rigor right what's wrong with skipping to

[00:48:05] to rigorous hypothesis driven research and and I think Ash makes it clear that there's nothing

[00:48:15] wrong specifically right then in fact he even states the experimental method is you know one of

[00:48:21] the the the greatest scientific developments right it's crucial to to understanding causality

[00:48:29] and and drawing inferences about the natural world but what he what he thinks are what the reason that

[00:48:35] this criticism is especially poignant when it comes to social psychology is we're we're dividing

[00:48:43] things up we're chopping people up into these really really small little areas of study and

[00:48:51] we're never bothering to study the whole organism in its context like we're not we're

[00:48:57] not really studying persons we're not studying people we're we're failing to do all of the observational

[00:49:05] work that might lead to real insight about how people work and you can't do that when all you're

[00:49:11] doing is developing a hypothesis about say to pick on myself about how a bad smell can change

[00:49:19] judgments about politics right I we're not for somebody who self describes is studying human nature

[00:49:28] I have certainly removed a lot of the human in that kind of methodology which is interesting I mean

[00:49:35] I was hoping you would get a little personal about this because in terms of all of our

[00:49:40] conversations it seems like you are very much in line with this critique a lot of these

[00:49:50] quotes even and and these observations are ones that you've made in one form or another

[00:49:56] over the years yeah but then you know I think your work it's it's definitely the better side of

[00:50:03] the psychology work that would survive some of this critique but there's definitely a lot of

[00:50:09] stuff that would fall into the category of the thing that he's worried about yeah absolutely you

[00:50:15] know one of the things that we were chatting about before when we first were talking about this is

[00:50:20] you know a lot of my work is inspired by rosen himself right so so it's but well you know a

[00:50:27] lot of rosin's work is is lab based in fact rosin has collaborated with with yol I mean for

[00:50:32] one there's levels right so so yol and I have collaborated a lot on our discussed work and

[00:50:38] we have noticed ourselves that we think that our best work is closer to the correlational descriptive

[00:50:46] research that ash is more in favor of so so you know we have in general two kinds of of studies

[00:50:53] one is the experiment where we bring people in and we manipulate discuss and we measure something

[00:50:57] another one is just actually measuring discuss sensitivity in people like around the world

[00:51:03] right so doing what what we often avoid as calling descriptive research because

[00:51:11] because that's a bad word for many journals in our field because it seems less rigorous but

[00:51:17] but we're the most confident about just those and even then there are flaws to this method

[00:51:23] methodology but just asking people stuff across the world and seeing what similarities show up

[00:51:29] yeah right that yeah that kind of work has turned out to be more more likely to be replicated and I

[00:51:38] think more interesting yeah just in general well so there's the replication question which is a

[00:51:44] separate yeah what she doesn't address but I think for for similar reasons right this was

[00:51:50] way before the replication and I think that one of the things that one might have anticipated

[00:51:56] from his critique right there are lots of reasons that have nothing to do with this critique

[00:52:01] about replication and you know how many people we have per cell and all that stuff

[00:52:05] but there is the removing people from their context part yeah that we are creating new

[00:52:12] contexts devoid of all of the things that people encounter in everyday life as he points out

[00:52:19] you know not even taking into account things that are deeply meaningful to to individuals like

[00:52:25] their religious background or you know whatever they're they're upbringing that and and so that's

[00:52:32] it you know and then looking looking so much at just a small segment of the world's population

[00:52:39] undergrads in North America it's you know but so I take it one aspect of the critique is that

[00:52:48] you know like Darwin's voyage of the Beagle had nothing to replicate right he was just collecting

[00:52:53] observations there was no study to replicate there were no experiments so there's two different

[00:53:00] aspects of it there's the aspect of developing better studies with maybe more external validity

[00:53:06] which means that what is going on in the laboratory is likely to happen outside the

[00:53:13] laboratory but then there's also this absence of a different kind of inquiry which is still

[00:53:23] scientific if you think the voyage of the Beagle is scientific it's still scientific research

[00:53:28] but it's not something that either could or couldn't get replicated it is something that is

[00:53:34] just a gathering of observations and I yeah yeah no that's a really good point and I think that

[00:53:42] that that one of the reasons it might so we're fetishizing replication because we want so bad

[00:53:50] to be a mature science yeah and so in that sense you are I think this is very true about

[00:53:56] experimental philosophy too sometimes what it does is in their critique of the way things

[00:54:06] are are going they are falling victim to the way things are going in a different sort of way so

[00:54:13] an experimental philosophy they always criticize armchair philosophers who just say well people

[00:54:19] think that if determinism is true you don't have free will and then you run studies to show that it's

[00:54:24] right but then you're you're not asking the bigger question when you try to get more

[00:54:31] methodologically ridiculous you're not asking the bigger questions whether we're at a stage where we

[00:54:37] should even be asking that question right and and I and I think at um Roz and things that

[00:54:44] we're making a mistake to limit our notions of what science is in in just this way and and we

[00:54:50] should we should open ourselves to the the possibility if not the fact that science

[00:54:57] um that it is science to do a Darwin like collection of data in a broad sense and that we just don't have

[00:55:05] our Darwin like who we who is the Darwin of of social psychology and he points to some other

[00:55:11] science sciences that everybody agrees or sciences but that can cannot rely very much if at all on

[00:55:21] the experimental paradigms that we tend to use like astronomy and it reminds me of the

[00:55:27] the hard work in uh astronomy that was done by Taiko Brahe who was just an amateur astronomer

[00:55:37] he just collected data all he did was observe right so he just observed observed observed

[00:55:42] had meticulous records of the positions of all the stars for years and years and years

[00:55:47] he's kind of uh kind of kept the data to himself but uh Johannes Kepler was the one who took those

[00:55:54] data and looked for the regularities and generated his sort of universal laws of of planetary motion

[00:56:02] and then after him Newton came along and found the the generalities that would apply to all

[00:56:07] all objects moving but if it weren't for just somebody sitting there and observing with

[00:56:12] no hypothesis at all right doing the boring work of writing things down um meticulously we would

[00:56:19] never have gotten to the point that we got right if we had started and I think this was Rosalind

[00:56:24] saying if we just started directly coming up with theories and trying to disconfirm them through

[00:56:28] experiments and her observation and this is true for a lot of fields that the big the big time

[00:56:35] godfathers or godmothers although usually it's godfathers because of patriarchy because

[00:56:41] of biology they were amateurs right and so maybe one of the villains here and again this is something

[00:56:49] that it's very hard to know what to do about if this is true but one of the villains here is the

[00:56:54] increasing professionalization of research and absolutely if that's a culprit then

[00:57:02] you know this is where it gets depressing like there well like you said him he made this point

[00:57:06] earlier right like this requires a lot of leisure time and money yeah and and the reality just doesn't

[00:57:15] work that way anymore right the the to even to even have the luxury of publishing something

[00:57:21] slightly off the the center of the field to even publish to you know to even have the tools to

[00:57:29] know what it means to write up a paper right like all this stuff like it just things have changed

[00:57:33] so much that and then you go to grad school and you get rewarded and we've discussed this ad nauseam

[00:57:38] you get rewarded for very incremental very middle of the road within the paradigm within the paradigm

[00:57:46] in that sense not in the quality sense but rather very very much central to the field like

[00:57:51] like building off of this last person's experiment or this last person's subclaim of a subclaim

[00:57:57] and so so those sociological reasons make it hard but I I do think there are ways around this and I

[00:58:05] think that rosin is pointing to some ways around this and this is why we were joking that that our

[00:58:12] new field is podcasting one of the reasons that I get so much pleasure from doing something

[00:58:18] like this podcast is because it allows for a broader discussion of human nature we we found

[00:58:26] like you and I have found in others obviously a way to reward ourselves personally and perhaps one day

[00:58:32] career wise perhaps by actually engaging in the kind of stuff that we were increasingly not allowed

[00:58:40] to engage in as we got yeah you know in our own field right yeah um now I don't know that this is

[00:58:48] contribution but I do think and like maybe I'm being an optimist or maybe an egoist but

[00:58:53] we've had plenty of people say to us that our discussions provoked in them an idea that they then

[00:59:03] you know that they then try to look at more systematically or in more detail and that

[00:59:08] just comes from our armchair like the the luxury that you and I have of saying like we're going

[00:59:12] to read Kafka this week yeah right no that's right the optimistic side of me thinks that

[00:59:18] there is a tilt in that direction but then when you look at I said this to you off off here I think

[00:59:26] that there is an analogous version of this going on in philosophy I don't think this is restricted

[00:59:32] just to psychology his critique is mostly restricted to psychology and also economics really the

[00:59:38] social sciences but when you look at discussions of what the younger philosophers who don't have

[00:59:45] tenure I mean you know we're not going to get fired for for doing this and if we don't publish

[00:59:52] something because we've spent our time doing this it's not going to mean that we have to change our

[00:59:58] whole way of life and livelihood so we have an we have an incredible amount of luck and freedom

[01:00:06] and and yeah I don't know and I guess this is one of the good things about tenure is that it

[01:00:11] allows you to be more like a Darwin and you see that the people who not to not at all to compare

[01:00:17] ourselves no we are like modern day Charles Darwin I am Johannes Kepler you're a Kepler on

[01:00:25] Darwin yeah that's fair but I still think that so he quotes Solomon Ash and Ash is a

[01:00:33] you know one of the most famous OG social psychologists I show you know some videos of

[01:00:40] his conformity experiments right which would themselves be vulnerable to some of the critiques

[01:00:48] that Ash and Rosin are leveling at the field and I think Ash was aware of that but so so

[01:00:57] this is a paper so full of awesome quotes he says why is not social psychology more exciting

[01:01:02] more human in the most usual sense of the term why do I sense together with the current expansion

[01:01:08] a shrinking of vision an expansion of surface rather than depth a failure of imagination and it's that

[01:01:16] the field is just it rewards a shrinking of imagination it rewards an expansion of surface

[01:01:25] rather than depth and it rewards a shrinking of vision and it rewards them to such degree that

[01:01:32] if that you almost have to be like some kind of genius like Darwin or somebody right and we

[01:01:39] don't have the resources in place to even evaluate whether you're a genius like that or not yeah

[01:01:46] no I think you're right I think there are ways and so I want to think of some good

[01:01:51] example so so rosin himself offers some good examples he points to nisbidden and yeah it's

[01:02:00] culture of honor very happy to see very happy this is the reason yeah and this will give I think

[01:02:06] a bit of context to why why ash may not view his own experiments as as falling prey to this

[01:02:15] to his own critiques what's great about this working culture of honor is that it combines

[01:02:23] observation right and um and that sort of big picture trying to understand human beings in

[01:02:30] their context and and then from that point right trying to see if there is data like at a descriptive

[01:02:38] level that matches the intuitions that were generated from their informed curiosity right

[01:02:44] and then they have some descriptive data about the differences in violent crime

[01:02:48] among males in the southern and versus northern united states and then from and then at that point

[01:02:53] doing some experimental studies where you bring actually southern and northern males into the

[01:03:00] lab and that that sort of holistic approach to understanding the human being is I think

[01:03:05] so he's not saying abandon experiments and the statistical and methodological rigor but

[01:03:12] don't do it prematurely don't like and use a lot of different so culture of honor one of the great

[01:03:19] things about it it uses interviews it uses data from newspapers about the different kinds of

[01:03:26] violent homicides and and violent crimes and when the crimes are provoked by an insult and

[01:03:32] where when they're not although some of the most famous things like the asshole study of

[01:03:37] the guy in the hallway are controlled experiments a lot of the research isn't and some of some of the

[01:03:44] best ways of presenting their case comes from so they did this study where they sent out fake job

[01:03:53] applications where a person confessed to a manslaughter and they told the story behind

[01:03:59] the manslaughter which is that their fiance was insulted by a guy at the bar and so he went out

[01:04:07] to fight the person and compared how people responded to that people in the south and people in the

[01:04:14] north but then they quote in culture of honor and I quote this in my book and everybody quotes

[01:04:20] this the southern responses anybody you did the right thing anybody could it's just a bad

[01:04:27] break that you got you know and this is just it's not something that could be captured by

[01:04:32] statistics but it makes their point perfectly now maybe misleadingly I don't know like that's

[01:04:38] the problem with these things is when you when you rely on these kinds of interview studies

[01:04:45] you're selecting the the letter that will make your point and you know what you're trying to

[01:04:51] so right setting that aside it but but that's why you you pile on all these different

[01:04:59] that's right approaches that's that's exactly right that's that's that there is the there is the fear

[01:05:06] that you're going to be presenting a biased a story of you which we all do like well you know

[01:05:12] it's not that we want to it's just that like your more sensitive to evidence that's confirmatory

[01:05:17] and it takes a bunch of people making observations or you making a bunch of different observations

[01:05:26] to you know make any claims about the truth value of what your findings are right like it

[01:05:32] it's it's the wealth of evidence but in a field where that kind of data is not rewarded where

[01:05:39] it it is something that you're trained as an undergrad or in your first year of grad

[01:05:44] school to criticize interview studies or whatever descriptive research is is almost a bad word

[01:05:51] among certain circles then the wealth of evidence just isn't there it might very well be biased right

[01:05:58] you don't have a whole lot of people collecting all all those data you know I I want to point to

[01:06:05] some you know some other good examples like the work of Joe Henrich which is very much

[01:06:11] in line with with this where you are you are it is another way to do it where you actually open

[01:06:17] yourself up to entire other fields that are doing the kind of data collecting that you aren't

[01:06:25] either not trained to do or not motivated to do or haven't thought of doing and you combine

[01:06:30] you know in real good into interdisciplinary ways you you look for evidence but he was an

[01:06:37] anthropologist at first right yeah I think so I think so and he has and that's a great example

[01:06:44] because he combines ethnographies with experiments with all sorts of other forms of database

[01:06:52] research and observations and right right and and you know anecdotes are some of the coolest

[01:06:59] coolest things you know in his in his papers in his books in his talks when where he's

[01:07:03] talking he's he's giving a little microcosm of an example of say how culture shapes evolution

[01:07:09] and you're like ah that's like that makes so much sense right right one of my favorite

[01:07:16] articles in the whole field it was one of those papers that really really motivated me to study

[01:07:22] morality or at least solidified it was a paper that rick schwaider did where he you know he

[01:07:29] spent a ton of time in India doing in-depth interviews with people in India and in Chicago

[01:07:36] and using that data to sort of inform his critique of other extant moral development theories

[01:07:44] I forget if it took the form of a chapter because it's a very very long description of

[01:07:48] interviews with people in I think three or four different communities in India so city and rural

[01:07:57] and and in Chicago inner city and and sort of upper class where he was for instance asking them

[01:08:06] to list off all of the moral violations that they can think of right and just just looking at

[01:08:13] again this is something and something that rosin says this doesn't require statistics I mean

[01:08:17] you can apply the statistics if you want but like just looking some of the most interesting

[01:08:22] parts of this paper are just looking at where there's overlap in between what somebody in

[01:08:28] Chicago thinks is a moral violation and somebody in a little town in India thinks is a moral

[01:08:31] violation and then looking at where there's no overlap at all right like you know beating your

[01:08:37] child with a cane when they do something wrong right it's it's you just eyeball that and

[01:08:41] it's it's this data that is qualitative and descriptive but it's definitely

[01:08:48] giving you knowledge about these deep differences across cultures okay so I'm going to confess

[01:08:54] something embarrassing right now I think I have overlapped Rick Schwader and and Paul Rosin in

[01:09:02] my head which one it's rosin that was John Heights supervisor right yes but height worked with

[01:09:11] Schwader as well and in fact um and his Paul Rosin and uh John height have a paper called the CAD

[01:09:21] triad hypothesis were condemned anger and disgust where they build on Schwader's theory of community

[01:09:28] autonomy and divinity and I once made the so you won't be too embarrassed I once made the

[01:09:35] mistake of attributing that paper to Schwader and he quickly corrected me and told me that

[01:09:41] wasn't him at all and that he didn't agree with it good I definitely feel better thank you

[01:09:48] this episode of very bad wizards is also brought to you by prolific so we'd like to thank prolific.co

[01:09:54] for sponsoring us prolific if you recall from our last show is a new service that allows you to

[01:10:03] collect data by essentially giving you a pool of potential participants for any study that you're

[01:10:12] doing whether it's social science or marketing think about it as sort of an m-turk but without

[01:10:18] some of the problems that m-turk has one of things I really like about prolific is how much effort

[01:10:25] they put into their data quality um they you know usually when you run studies with m-turk

[01:10:30] you have to go way out of your way to to try to make sure that you're only getting quality data and

[01:10:34] that honestly sometimes means that you have to discard like a third of the people who have taken

[01:10:42] your survey because they're just people f-ing around and prolific actually goes out of its

[01:10:47] way to monitor and and improve their data quality so that doesn't happen to you but the other

[01:10:52] thing that I love is that yeah did you say they were f-ing around are we going for the

[01:10:59] non-explicit tag in the in the podcast now I think I've just been around adults for too long

[01:11:06] so the other great thing uh that that gets right to the heart of our our discussion that that

[01:11:12] we're having about um Paul Rosin's uh article and the wisdom of Solomon Ash is that you we have

[01:11:21] now greater access to representative uh samples than we ever have before so so for a long time as a

[01:11:29] social psychologist I had to defend using a variety of mental gymnastics and and judo

[01:11:36] why we only used uh white male and female undergraduates um in in our studies I don't

[01:11:44] have to do that so much anymore because now we have actual access to uh to nationally representative

[01:11:52] folks from the US and the UK so hopefully that makes our science more generalizable going forward

[01:11:57] so if you would like to get started using prolific which if you do any kind of data

[01:12:03] collection with with real human beings um I would highly suggest it's prolific.co

[01:12:09] slash very bad wizards if you go there our listeners will get a hundred dollar credit

[01:12:14] if they sign up and top up their account with 250 or more for the first time so if you start an account

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[01:12:28] so that means you'll have 350 to spend once again visit prolific.co slash very bad wizards

[01:12:36] to get that bonus it's available for July and August only which means now August only um

[01:12:43] but if you use that URL you'll let them know that you got there from very bad wizards so thanks

[01:12:49] to prolific for sponsoring this episode of very bad wizards. One thing that's interesting is this

[01:12:56] paper came out in 2001 which is the same year that John Heights paper uh The Emotional Dog

[01:13:04] and Its Rational Tale came out which is also now I don't know if this would be I don't know if you

[01:13:14] would consider this a good example of what Rosin is trying to accomplish but it is definitely

[01:13:21] he is not presenting a study it's a psychology review paper so he is but he is presenting a

[01:13:28] model I think what everyone remembers from it is a description of a study that I'm not sure it was

[01:13:36] ever published but the study of moral dumbfounding moral dumbfounding case and the and you know if

[01:13:44] you if you around this time would see him give a talk or a few years later he would always show

[01:13:50] a video of the fraternity guy kind of just refusing to accept that brother sister sex was okay

[01:14:02] what a dumbass what a bigot I know well this is before you know step sister porn which as we all

[01:14:10] know is just a code for sister porn but it's an interesting paper in that there was nothing

[01:14:16] really to analyze in terms of the methods of it it was just presenting a a description of a phenomenon

[01:14:25] that we all kind of felt like had some reflected some sort of reality even if it was presenting it too

[01:14:33] strongly and I don't know like again maybe if you're looking for an optimistic example maybe

[01:14:41] that could be one of them because I don't think he was John height sort of self admits that he

[01:14:49] well I guess there's no other way that John height could admit he other admits breaking news John height

[01:14:58] is a schizophrenic he admits that the psych review paper was responsible probably for getting

[01:15:06] him tenure okay and yeah and you know perhaps because he hadn't done enough of the rigorous

[01:15:15] empirical work that we reward his CV wasn't heavy on that kind of work so this is not to say like

[01:15:21] there are plenty of things that I disagree about like in fact I think you and I have

[01:15:25] like yeah probably would disagree with John Heights conclusions like you can be wrong

[01:15:30] and do this kind of descriptive right they'd be very wrong but you're yeah you're adding a

[01:15:35] richness that you know people in the 70s were doing like you know a good jillion papers on

[01:15:40] cognitive dissonance using the same manipulations and and you know getting tenure on it like and

[01:15:44] that's such a small slice of a small slice that that that it takes somebody to step back and

[01:15:50] maybe do something descriptive to to then because because then you saw like this you and I saw

[01:15:58] this this explosion of research that went straight to the empirical rigorous methodologically

[01:16:04] like big ideas led to people now doing like dual model theory those yeah or in using those like

[01:16:11] John Heights scenarios as like as as the the measure of moral judgment where it's like well

[01:16:17] I was never intended to be no I mean there's so many examples of this one of my like things

[01:16:23] that's driving me crazy right now is a proxy for you know how people will say human beings are more

[01:16:30] retributive under this condition and then the way they measure how retributive they are is

[01:16:38] how they respond in a survey that they would behave in a prisoner's dilemma or in a

[01:16:48] ultimatum game they don't have the money to actually do the prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum

[01:16:53] game which itself would be a lab study that you would worry about how much you could generalize

[01:16:58] from they're going by self reports about how you would act in those situations under these

[01:17:06] under this condition and then at that point and in this sense the John Heights paper as you said

[01:17:13] had a destructive effect because it made people it gave people all sorts of new avenues for for

[01:17:21] oversimplifying right in that way and uh one of the thing like this it's so full of great quotes

[01:17:30] but here's one premature advanced science prone to generate long lines of research

[01:17:36] that ultimately have little to do with the basic target of the field the social world and

[01:17:41] generally pulls people prematurely away from the real world where it all starts that's so good

[01:17:49] and so applicable outside of social psychology even as it's also applicable to social psychology

[01:17:58] really all the social sciences economic political science it I don't know it's it's

[01:18:03] something like a requirement of rigor and a requirement of being able to at least think

[01:18:13] that you can objectively evaluate something something that I think is a real problem yeah

[01:18:20] so so I think you know and I'm trying to be an optimist here because I think that at least

[01:18:26] there has been a move in social psychology you know in part the the weird critique right this

[01:18:34] this paper very much anticipates the the weird critique the western educated and industrialized

[01:18:43] yeah the Joe Henrich critique the Joe Henrich stuff there has been more of an attempt to reward

[01:18:52] studies now again this is usually you know you can you can write a paper you have to have the

[01:18:58] methodologically rigorous experiment but there is more of a move to accept other forms of data like

[01:19:05] you know like coding newspaper articles that kind of thing and with our ability to acquire

[01:19:13] data from other sources the ease with which we can and from other populations I think

[01:19:18] there is more of this but this what this does maybe is allow the freedom for creative people to

[01:19:25] to use what rosin calls their informed curiosity it still doesn't prevent the stifling the stifling

[01:19:32] no well creativity it's definitely better but it doesn't so here's the question

[01:19:38] so what's the relationship between psychology and sociology so social psychology is still

[01:19:43] the study of the individual the individuals cognitions and feelings and behaviors in a

[01:19:50] social context where sociology is studying more the group level right not the individual so

[01:19:58] so it's group level analysis not individual level analysis and what's the difference between then

[01:20:05] sociology and anthropology white people versus non-white people like I mean I'm half joking but

[01:20:13] that's it's usually I I mean obviously there are different methods you know that that are used

[01:20:19] but I think that it's not that unfair to say when you study people who are not from quote

[01:20:26] unquote civilization you're doing anthropology and when you're studying I'm sure there are

[01:20:33] plenty of anthropologists and sociologists who are yelling into there so so so here's a question

[01:20:39] should it just be one giant field instead of three separate fields I mean obviously it sounds like

[01:20:46] sociology and anthropology shouldn't be separate fields if it's just skin color and well to be

[01:20:54] fair it's probably like the studying of other cultures right like the study sociology can

[01:20:59] be the study of your own culture but it doesn't have to be no it doesn't have to be and they have

[01:21:04] different tools and methods right so like you're you're a lot of anthropologists certainly not all

[01:21:10] but a lot of them are their method is much more to get immersed in the culture of that

[01:21:15] they're studying so like have informants and talk you know talk to people about their customs

[01:21:20] but this is what I mean like why shouldn't that those methods be part of psychology and part

[01:21:26] it like why are those different fields you're all trying to figure out human nature right

[01:21:32] right so at least the difference between anthropology or between sociology and social

[01:21:36] psychology is the level of analysis which is something that that I also want to talk about

[01:21:42] here because it's part of rosin's critique is that we're getting the level of analysis wrong

[01:21:46] not I don't think that sociology and social psychology are the same in that in that sociologists

[01:21:51] really are studying you know you want to study what generation x is doing nowadays that's that

[01:21:57] sociology you're collecting data from a generation and you're aggregating it you're looking at trends

[01:22:03] in groups of people whereas I am concerned with like you as an individual coming in

[01:22:11] in this social context like doing an ash conformity study I'm interested in how that person

[01:22:16] is affected by their very local context not their like behavior of a group over time

[01:22:23] right it's it's it's not that we're not studying human nature a lot of us are studying human

[01:22:29] nature it's just a different level of analysis which is I think gets to what rosin's one of

[01:22:34] rosin's critiques which is that a lot of sciences maybe psychology in particular

[01:22:42] in order to be perceived as more rigorous they adopt the way of speaking and the methodology

[01:22:48] and the you know all all all of the sociological aspects of the science but like right below them

[01:22:56] right so so below them in terms of level of analysis so psychologists really want to

[01:23:02] want to be neuroscientists this this gets to the that really interesting anecdote

[01:23:09] about studying football we before we leave the distinction between sociology and so the way you

[01:23:16] describe the differences it doesn't sound like there should be that much of a difference in

[01:23:24] methodology the sociologists really are mostly descriptive that's what everyone makes fun of

[01:23:30] them about they don't seem to have science envy in the way that social psychologists do

[01:23:37] but it's not totally clear to me that they're that that's not a contingent

[01:23:43] part of the way these fields have thought of themselves that that's something that's

[01:23:48] that's tied essentially to what they're trying to study right I mean to me what's clear is that

[01:23:55] just what we're studying is different right so we're studying groups you could say the same

[01:24:00] thing of economists right why why aren't economists and psychologists the same isn't it just

[01:24:04] psychology about economic behaviors or economic and and it's it's just a difference in like

[01:24:11] you're asking different questions about different things one is a group the level of the group

[01:24:16] one is the very at the level of the individual I get that I guess what I'm so social psychology

[01:24:23] is very tied to model building controlled experiments studies sociology really is more

[01:24:32] like voyage of the beagle or at least it is yeah I mean a lot of the sociology because you know I came

[01:24:41] in a culture of honor stuff there's a lot of sociologists writing about that and most of it is

[01:24:47] not it's not all non experiments but it is more of a balance right I mean yeah and I guess

[01:24:56] I'm just wondering why why it doesn't seem like given that they're studying different things

[01:25:01] it doesn't necessarily mean that the methodologies would be that different as stars no no no so I'm

[01:25:07] sorry so I'm answering the question as to why they are two different fields right they could share

[01:25:12] methods and just study right different things so so but they don't you can't you can't do experiments

[01:25:19] very well on large groups of you know people like that right so so you can be informed by

[01:25:26] experimental research but it's harder to to think of what kind of an experiment a sociologist would

[01:25:32] would engage in like true experiment and I think that your your point that social psychologists

[01:25:39] should use more of the descriptive methods the sociologists use is just absolutely true

[01:25:45] with without having to say that they should be the same field I totally agree that we should

[01:25:50] adopt the the interview methods and the large large-scale descriptive analyses that sociology

[01:25:58] does and some social psychologists very much do that that right so like you know if you're studying

[01:26:04] politics at all you're probably being informed by a lot of sociologists and so cultural psychology

[01:26:11] is that just so cultural psychology as that term is something that rick schwader was at the

[01:26:18] forefront of if not coined the term where which is a marriage of anthropology and and psychology

[01:26:26] then you have cross yeah then you have a cross cultural psychology that is that is more like

[01:26:34] just regular social psychologists reducing entire cultures to one dimension

[01:26:40] like um which rick schwader would be very against like for him the term cultural psychology

[01:26:46] means like you have to really embed yourself like more like what joe henrik does like real deep

[01:26:52] deep studying of other cultures to inform to inform your psychology so I guess my point is

[01:26:58] not that they shouldn't be different fields but more there there shouldn't be such a demarcation

[01:27:05] of methods in each of the fields I mean I think you're right part of this is is sociological

[01:27:12] and in in the sense that you are trained you know you can there's a limited amount of stuff that you

[01:27:20] can study and become an expert in and some of the techniques that sociologists use are very different

[01:27:26] than the ones that psychologists do but that doesn't mean that we like there is increasing

[01:27:32] I you know here's some optimism again there's increasingly people who are who are collaborating

[01:27:37] across those very close disciplines sociology and psychology less anthropology because

[01:27:45] they're all fucking crazy I mean yeah they like don't like like they don't like the thought that

[01:27:49] there's anything universal in humanity but um a lot of them but I think like I think you're

[01:27:56] like we are push like at least I push my grad students to take courses in sociology if

[01:28:03] they're interested at all um they learn techniques that I never had a chance to learn and they can

[01:28:09] collaborate with those people but you know this in general gets to the problem of the reward for

[01:28:14] interdisciplinary work because it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of sort of commitment to

[01:28:21] you know humility commitment to spending spending your time learning something from other people

[01:28:27] and um kind of humbling yourself about it and then all of the social costs of collaborating with

[01:28:34] somebody in a completely different department and it's like do you want to put your grad

[01:28:38] student through that like the best of grad students will be will do that and they'll

[01:28:42] you know so okay let's talk about because I think this is relevant actually the the football

[01:28:48] the soccer analogy can you describe it it's he just kind of ends before his concluding

[01:28:54] remarks he ends with this analogy of aliens studying what we would call soccer that he calls

[01:29:01] football kind of right no no he's referring to football he's he's referring to football like

[01:29:06] when he talks about the oblong ball oh he is talking about like a very why did I think

[01:29:11] yeah he's talking about soccer because pretentiously he's because um yeah so this is a uh what he

[01:29:21] calls a whimsical scenario illustrating the problems of prematurely entering the advanced

[01:29:26] stages of science so he imagines that there's a martian institute of or foundation for furthering

[01:29:31] science and they have a subsection of it that's dedicated to sports and they have been studying

[01:29:37] tennis for quite some time then then somebody comes along and says hey you know if you're

[01:29:42] really interested in sports like there's this other sport called football that human beings play

[01:29:46] and we you should fund us for that we should like start looking at that if you're really

[01:29:50] interested in in what this domain of sports and they then he imagines that the tennis

[01:29:56] researchers researchers point out that no well we hold on hold on we've made great progress in

[01:30:01] studying tennis we now understand the scoring physics and other aspects of the sport

[01:30:07] there yet there were still meant is a quote yet there were still many problems to be tackled

[01:30:10] in the micro analysis of the game there was for example the well-known yellow ball problem

[01:30:15] a yellow ball was used on only on only some occasions and no one could predict the this

[01:30:20] distinct occurrence pigment analysis of the analyses of the yellow ball were just beginning

[01:30:25] why ask the tennis workers commit money to the murky enterprise of football when such

[01:30:29] good problems remain with tennis and that's a funny example because yellow balls are used

[01:30:35] at Wimbledon right um because they play on grass or for all a grass court tournaments

[01:30:41] and again it's one of these things where if you just ask a tennis player they would just tell

[01:30:46] you that or ask a tennis official but right um but but you know but like as he as rosen points out in

[01:30:54] this you know you can't asking people is not rigorous no you can't just rely on self-report

[01:31:00] and so he's he's he's going on uh talking about the precise quantification of the science

[01:31:07] of studying tennis um one proposal suggested correlating two measurable variables

[01:31:14] you know nice objective measurable view the number of the players an incontrovertible datum

[01:31:20] and the percent fat of known biological importance other proposals suggested electrical rather than

[01:31:25] biochemical analyses one group proposed the use of standard electroencephalogram techniques e.g.

[01:31:32] each player would be wired up in the total set of generated potentials for all of the players

[01:31:35] would be measured with the computer right so so he's pointing out these very sciencey ways in

[01:31:41] which you could imagine an alien trying to understand human behavior and like as you're

[01:31:45] reading this you're just like well that's so obviously the wrong level of analysis for understanding

[01:31:53] tennis and then football too so my favorite I actually think my favorite isn't a diss on

[01:31:58] psychology it's the economist one a group of economists proposed a model for football on

[01:32:04] the assumptions that a each player was totally independent of any other b all actions in the game

[01:32:11] were symmetrical c there was no change over time in the activities of any player or team d all players

[01:32:19] were seeking the same goods and e all players operated under the same constraints so sort of

[01:32:26] making fun of all the formal models and in you know classical economics these are these

[01:32:32] aren't experiments these are just formal models that make these assumptions that are just clearly

[01:32:37] not true that's such a funny parody of right and again it's like I'm embarrassed for thinking he

[01:32:45] was talking about soccer I don't know why I did but part of the reason is all the different

[01:32:51] ways in which he describes it it's not totally clear it's not totally right it's only it's

[01:32:58] only when he describes the shape of the ball that it would be you know so he's imagining that this

[01:33:03] group of slot this this study studyers of martian martian studyers of sports are

[01:33:09] a granting body and so he says that imagine some researchers proposed a research project where

[01:33:16] they were going to ask such open-ended questions as what is the purpose of the game is the ball

[01:33:21] important why do the players move toward one end of the field for a while and then to the

[01:33:25] other the committee unanimously rejected this proposal supported in this decision by

[01:33:30] unanimously negative reviews from tennis researchers the grounds for rejection contained

[01:33:35] in what might be called the quintessential pink slip were many so he's so one the study

[01:33:40] relied in large part on verbal reports which were questionable scientific status two worse

[01:33:45] the reports were retrospective three there was no control at a minimum it would be necessary

[01:33:50] to question a group of control people who were not familiar with football four the authors

[01:33:54] the authors were unaware of the importance of social desirability so trying to say what the

[01:33:59] researcher wants to hear five at best the research proposed in involved only a single study six the

[01:34:05] study might not produce interpretable data seven the investigators had no model for football

[01:34:10] they proposed simply to explore it i'm summarizing these eight the authors did not make clear

[01:34:15] what were the dependent and independent variables and it goes on which is just it just reads

[01:34:20] like a an actual set of negative reviewers i could tell like that and i'm having not tried to

[01:34:27] submit a grant but this must have been fun yeah totally kind of is like they probably cut and

[01:34:34] paste some of these um so in the beginning of the conclusion rosin says oh can we can we go

[01:34:41] through the one of the other ones so one reviewer thought of a clever alternative account of any

[01:34:47] data the authors might gather the reviewer noted evidence for a theater tradition on earth in which

[01:34:53] what were essentially imitations of real life were portrayed perhaps the reviewer proposed all

[01:34:59] the authors would be describing was such a theatrical portrayal with considerable distortions

[01:35:05] no doubt of the actual reality i i think there is this kind of but what if you know as a way

[01:35:14] of stifling creativity as a way of stifling these more descriptive more open ended ways of trying

[01:35:22] to investigate something you come up with some imaginable alternate hypothesis that would

[01:35:30] shed doubt on what you're present on what you're presenting and but i can imagine it

[01:35:36] happens all the time well i mean it's weird because when you're asked to review something

[01:35:42] you you don't want to write a review that says this looks great publish it right and why i don't

[01:35:48] i don't know why like you were you know there's some some social norm pressure to to generate

[01:35:55] real valid criticisms and so you come up with all the ones that you learned that you've

[01:36:00] learned about all the reasons why this might not be a good paper and so you're right those down

[01:36:05] and you know sort of ironically perhaps ironically the the older the researchers get in the more

[01:36:11] experience they get they're more likely to to just say like yeah this is good maybe they want to do

[01:36:16] this but i don't know it's the younger ones that are more religious about this you don't like i

[01:36:21] don't even want to read my first few reviews yeah these were like pages of like detailed criticism

[01:36:27] so so the point of this analogy is like and this is how grants go and yeah like you're

[01:36:34] coming up with like clearly the most the best way of trying to figure out what's going on in football

[01:36:40] or tennis and they are rejecting it unanimously because it doesn't fit the model of how science

[01:36:50] should be conducted right and embedded in this is is i think a critique that rosen doesn't make

[01:36:57] that explicitly but but there's there's a couple things one he's saying is that they are using

[01:37:03] a model of rigor from a more mature science but another one is that they are using a level of analysis

[01:37:12] that is uh from another more mature science that wouldn't make a difference like what like

[01:37:18] what if you want to understand why people play and how people play football

[01:37:23] doing eeg studies isn't going to give you right you know like the answer and and the fact that

[01:37:30] you're even asking that is sort of a weird it's a weird way of approaching the question but it's

[01:37:35] like well but it's objective right yeah that's like neuroscience like i mean that's i don't know

[01:37:42] if he had this in mind when he was doing that but you know like if you want to study what's the

[01:37:47] best way of teaching people to read don't look at their brain look at like what actually teaches

[01:37:53] people to read right you know right right um i want to give a couple of examples of of what i people

[01:38:01] who are doing like who have done good stuff one comes from robert provine who is a neurobiologist

[01:38:09] antipsychologist who has studied laughter the most and so he's written two books on laughter

[01:38:14] but you know he's a neurobiologist right so he could have just jumped to like the brain

[01:38:18] analysis of it but he's not like that he's actually a very creative and uh big thinker what he did was

[01:38:26] he systematically over 10 years sat in social situations and recorded people talking and

[01:38:34] their laughter and from those data actually came up with some real interesting insights on

[01:38:41] why people laugh and one of the the most interesting ones is that most people don't

[01:38:45] laugh at all in any attempt after any attempt to be humorous they just laugh after like normal

[01:38:51] things like 90 of laughter isn't a result of an attempt at humor and it takes patience but

[01:38:57] like a real kind of mind to be willing to spend that much time and resources to just

[01:39:05] descriptively study laughter right yeah like that's it's that's not an informed curiosity

[01:39:12] informed curiosity right i want to just briefly mention the work of genie sigh who's a

[01:39:19] who's a researcher at stanford who studies emotion across cultures because it leads to another point

[01:39:25] that brawls and makes which is that we're not like martians we're in the unique in the

[01:39:31] unique circumstance of having introspective access to what it is to be human right like

[01:39:36] so so we can even use our own feelings and thoughts and behaviors to to generate

[01:39:42] to motivate our research and to inform it and she she's looked at emotions across cultures

[01:39:49] but one of my favorite studies and the one that i always used to explain her theory isn't an

[01:39:53] experiment at all she's in describing the difference between east asian and and western

[01:39:59] westerners when it comes to emotions she says that well they in east asia they value a different

[01:40:05] kind of emotion and that is calmness right whereas uh whereas westerners value more like

[01:40:11] high arousal emotions and all she did was look at children's books and measure the size of the

[01:40:17] smiles of the characters in those books and she showed from that that uh you know as one piece

[01:40:24] of evidence certainly not not like the the final piece of evidence but um that that uh the smiles

[01:40:32] in western children's books are much bigger than they are in in east asian books and that's

[01:40:39] that's like you were you and i going to the library right like and just picking up a bunch of books

[01:40:44] that's that's the method that she's like and that's way more insightful than but you could

[01:40:51] you could see some grant committee that would never fly alone as a paper yeah and that's

[01:40:56] i guess that's the point i so i love that i i i do think though

[01:41:04] that the situation is more dire than you know let a thousand flowers bloom and it's good that

[01:41:12] certain people are doing more rigorous kind of experiments and certain people are doing

[01:41:17] stuff like that they're feeding off each other building off each other that would be how

[01:41:22] would be great if that's what was happening like at the best of like culture of honor and

[01:41:27] some of the henrik stuff but it's not like that and it's very healthfully tilted in

[01:41:34] the more rigorous more experimental model-based hypotheses driven as you said direction i mean

[01:41:42] it's illustrative that i don't know how many more examples right like these are these are my

[01:41:47] goalposts like you know these are these are things that i wish the field was doing more

[01:41:51] and i point to them only because i agree with you that it's a dire situation i point to them as

[01:41:57] as showing that in principle the kind of research that rosin is is calling for can be done

[01:42:05] and it can be done by good scientists but like but all of the pressures that we've described

[01:42:11] and all of the the training that goes the other way like yeah so here's here's what i want to propose

[01:42:20] as one of the sources of the problem and i don't know what to do about it exactly but we don't

[01:42:27] have a good way of evaluating the other kind like you can look at stats and you can look at their

[01:42:33] methodology and you can look at whether they pre-registered or not and you can you can

[01:42:38] like there are ways of analyzing that and feeling like okay you're giving this person a fair shake

[01:42:45] but to just kind of see if they've triggered something that's potentially interesting and

[01:42:51] worth exploring or you know like kind of shed light on something that was otherwise might have been

[01:42:59] concealed from us is a kind of subjective form of evaluation that i think people are maybe rightly

[01:43:08] but but also but maybe also problematically wary of engaging in and so we will always go

[01:43:17] in the direction of well at the very least i can give a fair evaluation of this because i know the

[01:43:23] rules i get what the rules are i don't know what the rules are this is true in philosophy

[01:43:28] like i don't know what the rules are for analyzing like a bernard williams essay or like thomas

[01:43:35] nagel's the absurd like it's a classic paper i love it but like what are the rules if some new young

[01:43:41] non thomas nagel person put something like that in with no citations no real field other than

[01:43:48] like can't move and like like no literature really like what are the rules for evaluating

[01:43:55] that what are their criteria other than just this is this is really illuminating and i find it fascinating

[01:44:03] and when you lack that it becomes very hard for something and and this is completely separate

[01:44:09] from whether it's a valid and insightful way to and to conduct your research when you lack that

[01:44:18] there will always be a shift in the other direction and i'm not sure how to like

[01:44:24] right yeah no that's a good way of putting it i totally agree with you that that evaluability

[01:44:30] is key because you know when you get to like so so this has been a critique of social

[01:44:35] psychology specifically there are i don't want to pretend like there aren't tons of people who

[01:44:39] are doing pure qualitative research and descriptive research and we just don't you know we dismiss

[01:44:44] it yeah but one of the reasons is from what for for the reason you say because

[01:44:51] how far is it from that to just like postmodern drivel where somebody introspects about doing

[01:44:58] their laundry and i think it's the the fear of falling into something like that that leads us

[01:45:04] to embrace greater rigor maybe perhaps but you remind me of there is an analogy with when

[01:45:11] you're buying products so i'm like i like gadgets and stuff like oftentimes things that are targeted

[01:45:18] toward nerds that like gadgets are charts with features and so this is true of many products

[01:45:23] right they'll have two products side by side and they'll have like the list of features in a little

[01:45:28] checkmark box right on each of them you know does this product compared to this product have

[01:45:34] whatever this feature versus this feature right like is this tv ultra high def this one is

[01:45:40] this one isn't is this tv have surround sound you know this one doesn't all that and that

[01:45:48] evaluability makes you think that you're making an objective decision right you are

[01:45:54] you're confident that you this is giving you the information that you need to buy it

[01:45:58] but what you're missing is the more holistic approach to the product that might actually

[01:46:06] completely change the way that you are right satisfied or enjoy that product what are the

[01:46:11] things that were even chosen to be on that list of features you know sure you can come up with an

[01:46:16] overall rating and average and like a score even um but and really what would be a better guide

[01:46:25] would be somebody telling you like i bought this tv yeah after i bought that tv and i really

[01:46:30] liked it and for these reasons someone you trust yeah and there's somewhere between

[01:46:37] you know somewhere between postmodern drivel and uh fake fake objectivity that that arises from

[01:46:45] from the illusion of you know the quantitative illusion of objectivity yeah so somewhere there

[01:46:53] is where where we need to be and finding that spot is is hard and finding how to

[01:47:01] uh let yeah let alone how to encourage that yeah how to encourage it and how to reward it

[01:47:06] and how to punish bad versions of it and that's i think the the real challenge and the and i think

[01:47:15] it really applies to so many domains of life yeah i think it's it's gonna increasingly be a problem

[01:47:22] as we become more quantitatively driven i mean you see this in the larger culture stem is now

[01:47:28] the big thing and you know the humanities suffer yeah and and and sometimes for good reason because

[01:47:35] there is a lot of drivel in right the more qualitative stuff but what we're losing and

[01:47:41] what we think we're gaining is could be a problem all right i i need we need to wrap up i i i i

[01:47:48] propose any researcher out here who's listening to maybe take a i don't know i don't like calling

[01:47:55] it a sabbatical is but doing taking a year and actually uh looking for something to to do on a

[01:48:02] purely descriptive level and you could be quantitative and descriptive but just like

[01:48:06] actually observe and record i think that would be maybe i'll try it yeah you do that come up with

[01:48:11] something yeah i will do then i would then i'll push a job this if anybody's gonna do it you can

[01:48:18] yeah it's just too much netflix won't watch itself tamela and i promise not to engage in too many

[01:48:26] x2 too much experimental overly rigorous experimental research and that and all that analytic work that

[01:48:32] you do is just so reductive i mean i like you know like some of my early stuff kind of is you

[01:48:39] know i wrote a paper on fucking zombies i can't believe it was you all right i hope you enjoyed

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