Radiolab - Cosmic Habituation

Episode Date: May 3, 2011

In this short, Jonathan Schooler tells us about a discovery that launched his career and led to a puzzle that has haunted him ever since.

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You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W-N-Y-C. See? Yes. And N-P-R. Hey, I'm Chadabum-R. I'm Robert Crilwich.

This is Radio Lab. The podcast. And this week on the podcast, we did a collaborative thing with our friends at On the Media. A wonderful show produced here at WNYC. We decided to give them a headache. It was a very provocative idea, brought to us by Jonah Lehrer, one of our regular contributors, and we just couldn't get it out of our heads. It was such... Spooky! Yes. It begins with the work of a psychology professor, Jonathan Scholar, who many

years ago, to great acclaim, got a bunch of people in a room together, and he had them watch a video. They basically watch this bank robber walk into a bank, and he hands a note to the clerk, and he says, don't press the alarm and you won't get hurt. Clerk then hands him some money, and he exits. And these people watching the video, do they get a good look at the guy? You got a straight on look at the bank robber, absolutely. And here was the test. After everybody watched this thing, he had half the subjects, only half. Write down in as much detail for five minutes, everything they could remember about the appearance of the bank robber. So they'd write, you know...

Curly brown hair, mustache, thick glasses, whatever it was. Yeah, they just described the guy that they'd just seen. Now, only half of them did this. The other half did nothing. And then later, he had all the subjects. look at a police lineup and try and identify the robber. Pick the bank robber, see if you can pick them. Yeah. Now, you would think that the people who had to describe the guy

right after seeing him the first time, they would do really well at this, you know, because they had kind of set the memory. Yeah. That's not what they found. We found those people who had been asked to describe the face in great detail, they were actually less good at recognizing the face

than if they didn't engage in any description at all. Not just a little less good. They were like 30 or 40% less good. So it was pretty whopping. Wapping and just odd. Yeah, even more odd is that as he did more studies, he found it wasn't just a face thing. It happens when you're trying to remember all kinds of stuff. We found the effect with colors.

We found it later on with tastes. Choices. The effect was so strong and in so many different places that he gave it a name. Verbal overshadowing. Verbal, the words, overshadow the truth. Yeah. So there's some association here says when you talk about it, You get it wrong.

Exactly so. And we should say these studies made schooler into kind of a rock star. Yeah, it did get, it got some press at the time. He appeared everywhere, really. Including on a little show called Radio Lab. He was even here. And this is where our story really begins, because just as people like us were getting very excited about his work. The data began to go a little funny on him.

That's right. And it all began when he tried to replicate that original experiment. Yes. As you kept doing it, what happened? Well, over the years, over the next five or six years when I attempted to do it again, I would get the effect, but not to the same degree that I did initially. And this is a little troubling for him. That's Joan Alara, science writer, one of our contributing editors. He turned us on to this story, and it went like this, he says, the first time schooler tries to replicate that study, that effect?

Falls by 30%. And so he tried it again and again. And as we kept trying to replicate this study, the effect size got smaller and smaller and smaller. Meaning that big difference between the people who wrote about the bank robber and got it wrong and people who didn't write about the bank robber and they got it right, that big difference began to decline. This slow downward trajectory. It did sort of gradually get smaller. It wasn't as if all of a sudden it disappeared.

Now it's still significant. It's still publishable, but it's not nearly as exciting as it was that first time. So, as you can imagine, Jonathan Schuller was sitting in his office and he was like, what? It was happening here. I mean, it was so good the first time and then it started to fade. He's a very good experimental psychologist. He's not sloppy or anything.

No, so he's thinking what's happening here. And the first theory he has to really wrestle with. It's something known as regression to the mean. I mean, those are three of the most uninspired words put together. They're four words, though. Forwards. Forward to the mean. But Jonah, can you make it concrete for us?

Sure, so you flip a coin, right? Let's say you'll flip a coin 10 times. You may get eight heads and two tails. And you may say, oh my gosh, I've discovered a new law of coin flipping. When I flip coins in this room, they are almost always heads. But if you kept on flipping that coin for, say, a thousand times, your data would show almost certainly, unless you really had discovered something very peculiar about that room,

the results would get closer to the true result, which is about 50%. The results would regress to... The mean. Sorry, in case, his first thought was maybe that's what's going on here. Yeah. Meaning. When we first did the study, for whatever reason, we got lucky, or unlucky, as the case may be. You saw an outlier.

Exactly. That reality is full of quirky surprises we can't explain. But over time, and this is the miracle of the scientific process, you regress to the true effect size. But one thing about the regression to the mean account is it doesn't really explain why the effects gradually get smaller. Regression to the mean, you predict one big effect, and then it should basically totter around the actual value. This gradual decline doesn't naturally fall out of the regression to the mean account. Yeah, I mean, the effect could just go away, in which case you knew you were wrong, but why would it slowly get worse? Well, one possible explanation is that there was some aspect to the

procedure that was important, that we never really realized was important, and somehow, we were gradually not including whatever that secret ingredient was. Meaning, you know, as a scientist, when you try and do an experiment, you try and do it the same way every time, down to the floss that you floss your teeth with before you did the experiment. But there are too many things that you may not pay attention to. Yeah, there might be some little thing off into the side that you're not even thinking about. It could have been the color of the room in which he was conducting the experiments.

It could have been how charming his grad student was, who was actually asking the students to describe the bank robber. Totally making up a story here. Let's say that grad student was so charming, so good-looking, so charismatic, that he distracted the students. Then that grad student goes off, leaves the lab. Now he's got a much less exciting grad student, it's not nearly as distracting.

And now the effect size of verbal overshadowing has gone down. The only problem with that is that that little sound that Chad and I made, be-biz-bees-beam... means that you have to have your charming grad student at the beginning and your less-charming grad student in the middle and you're even less charming grad student. Yeah. Yeah, they have to get slowly less charming.

That's right. And so if you're thinking something is changing here, what is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? Did you go on some kind of mad search to figure out what you might be doing differently? We tried a lot of different things. And in the end, I just moved to another area of research.

You got out of town. And apparently, one of schoolers' colleagues told him, Don't worry about it. The only mistake you made was trying to replicate in the first place. Really? Yeah. But here's the problem. Turns out it's not just me who has experienced this peculiar decline effect. As he started to look around, he realized what was happening to him was happening all over the place. Other scientists, in all kinds of other sciences, were having the exact same problem.

In biology, there was a meta-analysis of many different biological findings showing... There are a ton of examples, he says, and here's one. In the 90s, there were a bunch of studies about animals using symmetry to find mates, like birds. Female birds choosing their sexual partners based on how even the male's tail feathers were. It was a very exciting idea. And the first year, there were eight tests of it. And all eight found that, yep, fluctuating asymmetry. That's what the phenomenon is called, is real.

We also got an effect size. So it seemed true. Yeah. That all over the world and all these different species, females had evolved this unconscious tendency to prefer symmetrical males. The next year it's tested 12 times and nine of the 12 confirm it. And then things start to fall apart.

You can make the sound effect. Exactly. Until by the end of the 90s, you're going one for 13. One for 13? One for 13. Now, of course, these studies are not black and white,

yes, no studies. There's some gradation. But this was the basic trend that Jonah saw. And just in case birds seem a little distant, here's another example. And I think this is, for me, the most troubling.

area, the decline effect. Because you see like second generation antipsychotics. Second generation antipsychotic. These are drugs used to treat people with schizophrenia, bipolar. When they first came out in the late 80s, early 90s, some studies found that they were about twice as effective than first generation antipsychotics. And then what happened is the standard story of the decline effect, cue the sound effect, which is clinical trial after clinical trial, the effect size just slowly started to fall apart. And that's not all. You see a similar decline with things like Prozac and antidepressants. The effect of the drugs have gotten weaker, but the placebo effect has also gotten stronger. I was talking to one guy at a drug company who, he was kind of interesting. He blamed that

on drug advertising. He said that they started to see their placebo effect go up in the late 90s when these drug companies started advertising. But then wouldn't that actually offer an explanation for this decline thing? Because, you know, if you know about what this drug is supposed to do, maybe it works differently somehow? Certainly, there are areas of psychology where that can change the outcome in one way or another. But it's very unlikely that, you know, and say these female preferences for symmetrical feathers, that the birds got wind of this symmetry finding.

And now all of a sudden they're not into it anymore. I don't know. You haven't been around chickadee conversation lately. Where it passes quickly amongst the chickadees. And so does that mean that you, can you explain why what you found at the beginning is not what you find now? And why it gradually went away? The gradually is still puzzling. I tell you, I find it very puzzling too.

I'm personally baffled. It's tough to come up with an all-purpose explanation or some easy fix. It could be a lot of different things bundled together into one phenomenon, he says. You know, maybe in some cases it really is to. Regression to the mean is almost sure to be a part of it. Or maybe in some cases it's, you know, this gradual change in the procedure in something that we just don't know what it was that happened. Can't rule it out.

But I would probably be less shocked than most people if something unconventional was actually involved in this as well. Unconventional, like. Like, I say this with some trepidation. But I think we can't roll out the possibility that there could be some way in which the act of observation is actually changing the nature of reality. That somehow in the process of observing effects, we change the nature of those effects. Oh, you're in real trouble. Essentially what he's saying, we think, is that when he discovered that thing with the bank robber experiment, that maybe the discovery itself somehow set in motion.

a series of events that made the thing he discovered start to sort of run away. Well, I'm not going to say that. I'm certainly not going to say that there's some sort of intentionality to these effects disappearing. More that it's almost, and again, this is just speculation, some sort of habituation. So just as when you put your hand on your leg, you feel it,

and then as you leave it there, it becomes less and less noticeable. Somehow there may be some kind of habituation that happens in, with respect to these findings. What is the hand and what is the leg in this? Well, in this most radical conjecture, there could be some sort of collective consciousness that's habituating. Again, radical speculation.

Keep in mind, the notion that the laws of reality are unchangeable is an assumption. It's a reasonable assumption, but we don't know it for a fact, and there have been physicists, who have even speculated that perhaps the rules change as time goes on. The problem with this idea is if you really believe it, then you can never really know anything. We're sliding into that kind of territory.

Like, you know, by this logic, you could never really know for sure because reality could change based upon the observer's position, habits, biases, information, whatever. So far, we have not really seen these types of things. in the domain of physics, but an aspirin might not do what it used to. There's a question that you haven't asked, which is, let's say that we were to do a study and demonstrate this decline effect that when you keep running experiments that they get smaller. Well, what happens when you try to replicate that effect? Does the decline effect decline?

Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe we could just get rid of the decline effect by studying it. But then if you were to study the decline of the decline effect, then it would undecline, and it would come back. Do you see what I'm saying? I see what you're saying. You're just stuck forever in the great seesaw of the universe. We should thank our friends at On the Media.

On The Media is a show that analyzes the media, as I'm sure you know. And it's an amazing show. I mean, it's an amazing show. Brooke and Bob, who hosts the show, are funny, hysterically funny and brilliantly smart. And it's the kind of show that it's just kind of essential. It's one of those shows. I could not recommend it more.

Onthemedia.org, all one word. On the media.org. Check it out. They're going to do an entire hour on the subject of data. And we have sort of snuck this issue that we've just talked about into the middle of that show. So it's the same thing, but in a very different context. You can go to their podcast on Friday the 13th of May,

and there it and we shall be. Until it and we decline. Yep. Into oblivion. I'm Chad, I boom, Ron. I was, and we'll continue to be, I hope. For the moment. Robert Ruehlink.

Bye. Hi, this is Colin Von Hearing. I'm a radio lab listener from Portland, Oregon. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.s.org. End of message.