What it Means to Forget in the Internet Age

The New York Times has a thoughtful and comprehensive recent article by Jeffrey Rosen, The Web Means the End of Forgetting. With the shifting of more and more aspects of our lives online to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. (and blogs, of course... *ahem*) comes the realization that we ultimately have less and less control over our permanent social records. Even though an individual has a large amount of control of what information she publishes about herself -- I could choose to just cancel this post right now and kill it in utero -- once something is out there it becomes more and more difficult to take it back. If I choose to publish this post, it will be publicly accessible, free to be copied and quoted and referenced. Even if I delete it in the future, there will still be a copy somewhere in Google's archives. (Let's leave aside for the moment the problem of what other people publish about you, shall we?)

So is the internet's long memory a bane? There are some who have embraced this new zeitgeist: Microsoft, I believe, has a concept in development that would automatically record and archive what you see, what you hear, your conversations, your writing, essentially your entire life, automatically and continuously. And Rosen comments towards the end of his article about what it would mean to culturally shift (back, actually) to a holistic public persona. But most of us aren't there yet, and so more people are looking into ways to limit what the internet can remember by building in -- or adding on -- mechanisms of "forgetting."

Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read.

If you're reading this, you may know a thing or two about how forgetting works in humans, and you may be familiar with this idea of degradation over time. It's one theory, though not necessarily the most likely. Much work in the Bjork lab and elsewhere has supported the contending theory of interference as a principle driver of forgetting -- the passage of time tends to reduce the memorability of an event not due to some direct effect of time itself (as in apps like TigerText), but because subsequent experiences intrude.

This then leads to the idea of adaptive forgetting, that forgetting is a necessary mechanism for separating information and experiences into "important" and "unimportant," and ultimately for drawing conclusions and making more oblique connections -- an idea I've been exploring in my own research*. When something is experienced or learned, memorability is determined by the processing of the information at the time. But once established, memories can be altered. For example, if you haven't thought about something in a while but then suddenly find yourself searching for that information weeks or months (or years) down the line, what you are able to recall will come to mind much faster the next time; this information has become more of a prominent fixture in your mind. Likewise, the more often some information needs to be accessed, the more prominent it will become -- if it has passed out of consciousness in the interstices. Contrariwise, any information that is infrequently accessed, or only accessed in a short timeframe, will be easily forgotten, or less prominent in one's mind.

So am I arguing that attempts to create online forgetting systems should more closely resemble humans'? On the contrary, that's how it already works. Search engines, for instance, rely on the most visited and most heavily linked sites to determine page rankings. You could view the unique links and pageviews as analogous to memory queries in the human mind: the more successful "retrievals" -- people finding what they're looking for -- the more prominent the "memory" -- the particular information. That particular aspect of you is so highly viewed because people think it's the most important. If a search comes up empty, however, or if the information is buried so deeply in Google's o's that you're unlikely to uncover it, it remains unmoved.

And what about pernicious, stubborn information that refuses to go away -- a politician's affair or a workplace incident? Organizations like ReputationDefender promise to help you out by essentially laying out a net of interference, ranking up the positive information about you and ranking down the negatives. This is actually similar to some efforts to treat the persistent memories associated with PTSD.

This analogy hasn't been all that well thought-out, so I don't want to place too much weight on it. I've intended mostly to point out that discussions of "memory" and "forgetting" on the internet and attempts to address it could, and perhaps should, take very different forms. Forgetting is not the absence of information.

Finally, just a shout-out to some other psychology studies of note in the article:

• Browsing the web with an attentive human-like avatar leads people to less self-disclosure, compared to no avatar or an avatar that isn't paying attention.
• A recent study published in Psych Science (Back et al., 2010) shows that people's social networking profiles tend to be accurate reflections of their personalities.
  

* Rosen mentions a literary perspective on what it means to be unable to forget:

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom

There are a few published cases of individuals with this problem, but I'd love to read Borges' take on it.

Recommitting - A Mens Rea Manifesto

It's been quite a while since I last posted. This may well have become a ghost blog, if there were digital tumbleweeds that were able to blow through it. However, I've decided to restart and reboot Mens Rea.

Why now, and in what form? Mens rea is latin for "guilty mind." I began this blog because I've had a long-standing interest in forensic psychology, even though it's not my field of specialty, and in fact it was started for a class that I was TAing at the time.

However, under this new renovation mens rea takes on a new meaning. I've been experiencing a guilty mind myself with regards to my creative and professional output; in short, I should really be writing more than I am. So to counteract this, I'm returning to the blogosphere, and I'll be writing about more than just forensic psychology. I'll be writing about research I'm reading, research I'm conducting, and ideas that cross my mind; however, I'll also bring in some of my outside interests: more diverse areas of psychology, games and gameplay, sustainable development, and more. That being said, this won't exactly turn into a personal blog, either -- I'll do my best to put a critical, analytical spin on the topics that I cover.

Writing is like any other learned activity: it becomes easier the more you do it. So this is my dedication to make writing a habit.

Less Crime, Less Punishment

It's been a while since the last update. Unfortunately, not a lot of forensic research has been catching my eye lately. Fortunately, on the other hand, I've been busy with other areas of research. So don't take this radio silence as a sign of inactivity.

I'm writing today not about some new peer-reviewed research, but instead on a talk I just attended. Zocalo is a fairly new organization in Los Angeles which focuses on stimulating dialogue on a wide variety of subjects. I've been to a few before; tonight's topic was crime reduction. Mark Kleiman, a public policy expert and professor at UCLA, presented some suggestions and examples for effectively reducing crime while emptying prisons.

There wasn't much that I hadn't heard before in terms of general principles - swift and focused enforcement and punishment instead of empty threats and general-purpose jail sentences - but it was interesting to hear it from different perspective. As a psychologist, I came in expecting to hear more about the criminals involved and their behavior - why they're committing crime and why they do or don't stop. However, as a policy honcho, Kleiman spoke in terms of running numbers and top-down control. Early on I actually worried that he might be as detached from actual behavior as an economist, especially when he brought out the rational costs-benefits analysis of days in prison per burglary take.

No cause for alarm, though. As he went on and provided more specific examples of programs that have worked, it all started sounding much more familiar. Prison, and the threat of prison, are not effective deterrents because it's an abstract concept, and many of the people who end up there go in with a stoic resignation. But slapping on an anklet with an attached curfew can shake even the hardest thug.

Similarly, focusing interventions works. Kleiman gave some examples of programs with meth users on probation in Hawai'i and cocaine dealers in North Carolina, where law enforcement decided to go to the problem, repeat offenders, the source of the problem, and not lock them up, but give them specific warnings (or threats) with plenty of follow-through. Exactly the same learning principles work for offenders as work for dogs as work for children, etc. Consistency and specificity.

There were some other thought nuggets I appreciated in the talk, like his stance on the death penalty (completely irrelevant to the issue of crime), but primarily I came away with some hope that the system of American law enforcement is gradually turning away from the heavy-handed tactics that landed us with 1% of our population in jail, and turning towards more effective (and cost-effective), focused enforcement. If nothing else, every politician should be reminded that the primary task of law enforcement is not to lock people up, but to prevent crime when possible and punish crime when necessary.

By the way, Mark Kleiman has a new book, When Brute Force Fails. Check it out. Send it to your congressperson.

Ethics & Loss

Kern, M., & Chugh, D. (2009). Bounded Ethicality: The Perils of Loss Framing Psychological Science, 20 (3), 378-384 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02296.x

We all know that crime doesn't pay. But what if I told you that crime could prevent you from losing something? Would you be more likely to do it?

Mary Kern and Dolly Chugh put out a study earlier this year that looked at the issues of framing and ethical behavior. You should remember Kahneman and Tversky - I've talked about them before. (reference) If you don't, they were two of the guys who started looking at so-called cognitive biases, specific ways that we think that can sometimes lead to incorrect (or different) conclusions. They appear to stem from our basic cognitive architecture and I'm assuming they're universal, though I must admit that I haven't seen any data either supporting or refuting this.

While there are quite a few biases that we tend to fall victim to, one of their most famous (and the one that Kern and Chugh focus on) is manifest in "prospect theory." The basic tenet of prospect theory is that "Losses Loom Larger than Gains" - that is, it'll hurt a lot more if I give you five dollars and take it away than if I just tell you I'm not going to give you five dollars. Either way you don't have the five dollars, but when I take it away it's framed as a loss; otherwise, it's just not a gain. A similar idea is simply phrasing a probability as either a loss or a gain. For instance, if I said that there is a 5% chance of winning money on a particular gamble, more people would take that gamble than if I said there is a 95% chance of losing money - the probabilities are saying the same thing, but in a different way. (Same thing for if I said there is a 95% chance of winning versus 5% chance of losing - it's not just due to the presence of large numbers.)

The idea behind the current study is that this loss aversion may actually be strong enough to cause people to do things that they wouldn't normally do, in particular, behaving in ways that are considered unethical. (There's always a sticky divide between the definitions of moral and ethical, but the authors state that when they say "ethical" they're referring to a response that has a clear good or bad consensus.) Being from a management school, Kern and Bargh focus on ethical behavior in a business context - their first experiment involves using insider information in a business deal, the second is a negotiation about buying property, and the third is about lying while selling a stereo system. In each of the scenarios previously obtained ratings about the ethicality of the possible options, and there was a clear consensus on what was "right" and "wrong" in each case. In each of the experiments they manipulated losses vs. gains using probabilities (e.g., 25% chance of gaining vs. 75% chance of losing).

In each of the cases, framing the probability as a loss led to people reliably acting in a more unethical manner. So it does seem to be that raising the possibility of losing something will make people more apt to do the "wrong" thing in order to prevent that loss, moreso than they would to gain something they wouldn't otherwise have. But how far can we extend this finding? The argument could be raised that this is all white-collar crime we're talking about here - shady deals, broken promises, and white lies. Would this bias affect people's behavior if they had to get their hands dirtier? One of the consistent findings in the criminology literature is that economic conditions tend to predict crime patterns; when times are good, crime goes down, but crime goes up when times are bad. Could it be that not just not having money, but actually losing money you used to have is what's driving these trends? Let's say someone's given a 65% probability that their home will be foreclosed on, versus a 35% probability that they'll keep their home. Would that make them more or less likely to go out and knock over a liquor store? Well, despite our current economic slump crime stats have been pretty stable, which would argue against that hypothesis. Looking at the situation on a large scale like this might be hiding any small effects, though.

I'm tempted to link this article to another in the same issue of Psych Science - Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, and Nash's "Neural Markers of Religious Conviction" - which links greater religious belief with less activation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is associated with several things that are generally considered bad: errors, discrepancies, and pain, for instance - and possibly loss? Despite my attempts to make some story out of the two, however, I haven't come up with an intellectually honest way of doing so. Not just yet, anyways.

This Place is a Dump... Let's Trash It: Experimentally Testing the "Broken Window" Hypothesis

Keizer, K., Lindenberg, S., & Steg, L. (2008). The Spreading of Disorder Science, 322 (5908), 1681-1685 DOI: 10.1126/science.1161405

In class we've talked a lot about theories of crime that focus on characteristics of the person (e.g., biological, psychological) or characteristics of the social environment and culture (e.g., sociological, learning). But what about the actual physical environment? Can the simple fact of where a person is located influence him to break the law?

"Broken Window Theory" suggests exactly that - that the more disorder is evident in an environment, the more petty crime and further disorder will spread among people. (The name comes from the idea that there when one window in a house is broken, the others will go before long.) As the authors note, New York was counting on this theory in the mid-90's when they started an anti-graffiti and street cleanliness crackdown. This coincided with a decrease in petty crime, but since this was a quasi-experiment (at best) we can't really know what the cause was. Another big problem with this theory is that no one has ever really defined what's meant by the term "disorder."

Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg set about trying to test Broken Window Theory experimentally, with better operationalization of the variables than had been attempted before. They conducted their experiments on unsuspecting members of the public (has anyone already claimed the term "guerrila psychology"?) in two conditions: either a norm was violated or not (the contextual norm; example: graffiti right next to a "No graffiti" sign). The researchers then observed to see what people would do when presented with the opportunity of violating another, unrelated norm (the target norm; example: finding a flier attached to your bike handle, do you litter or pocket it?). The difference between the contextual norm and the target norm is major - broken window theory argues that seeing this disorder isn't just priming people to commit the same crime, but just to commit crimes in general.

So what did they find? In a series of six experiments they found that violation of the context norm definitely increased people's likelihood of violating the target norm. The percentage of people violating the norm was consistently 2 to 3 times greater when the context norm was violated, for target norms including littering, trespassing, and even stealing money from a mailbox.

These findings seem to fit with research on justice, which looks at how people feel about law enforcement, among other things. One of the main findings is that how law enforcement treats a person influences how likely that person is to break the law - if a person experiences rude or unfair treatment at the hands of a police officer, he or she will have a less negative attitude towards violating laws. (Unfortunately, the reverse doesn't seem to be true; once people have this negative attitude, fair treatment doesn't do much to change their minds.) The mediating factor in this relationship seems to be a perception of legitimacy. That is, if I've had good relations with police, I'll feel like they're good people to listen to, and this legal system is a good one to follow. However, if I've had negative interactions with the police, then I'll feel like this legal system doesn't have as much relevance for me. Going along with this idea, it may be that when people see that others have broken the law, they'll feel that there's not much chance of enforcement - that the legal system doesn't have much legitimacy around here.

Contrarily, there's idea of injunctive norms (standards of behavior for what not to do) and descriptive norms (what it's evident that most people do in a situation). The authors argue that when these norms conflict, as in their experiments, people will turn to other motivations, like what's easiest, in deciding what to do. At the end of the article the authors state that seeing the injunctive norms violated "...results in the inhibition of other norms... So once disorder has spread, merely fixing the broken windows or removing the graffiti may not be sufficient anymore." They hadn't mentioned before how or what evidence there is for norms being permanently changed like this. If this is the case, it'll be hard differentiating between a legitimacy explanation and a conflicting norms explanation. I'll have to think about this some more...

Do you not get it, or do you just not care? Psychopaths and mirror neurons

FECTEAU, S., PASCUALLEONE, A., & THEORET, H. (2008). Psychopathy and the mirror neuron system: Preliminary findings from a non-psychiatric sample Psychiatry Research, 160 (2), 137-144 DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2007.08.022

AGNEW, Z., BHAKOO, K., & PURI, B. (2007). The human mirror system: A motor resonance theory of mind-reading Brain Research Reviews, 54 (2), 286-293 DOI: 10.1016/j.brainresrev.2007.04.003

One of the main hallmarks of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. A psychopath is able to look at a person who's suffering and not feel the unease that you or I (hopefully) would. The idea, then, is that this empathic understanding that other people have the same feelings as you or I is a major deterrent to harming others; we feel what we cause them to feel, so ultimately we're looking out for our own self-interest in not feeling bad.

Well, within the past few years it looks as though researchers have identified one of the major components of how empathy is generated in the brain. Agnew, Bhakroo, and Puri do a good job of summing up the current state of knowledge, but a few highlights: Electrode studies in monkeys have revealed that particular neurons are activated whenever the monkey performs a certain action, but also when observing another monkey perform that action. Hence the name, "mirror neurons." Importantly, mirror neurons provide a link between perception and action. Beyond simple movements, mirror neurons also provide an explanation for how people can decipher others' intentions; we can differentiate whether a person is reaching for a cup or just moving our hands towards it, for example. In addition, mirror neurons have been linked with the ability to interpret and feel the emotions of others. This is what is usually referred to by the term "empathy," or emotional empathy, which can be contrasted with the motor empathy observed when viewing others' actions.

So the idea is that psychopaths are literally unable to imagine and feel the pain that they inflict on others. Fecteau and his colleagues set out to test this idea using TMS - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. (Warning: excessive abbreviations in this article. I'll do my best to navigate through it, but it can still get confusing. Damn psychiatrists.) The TMS apparatus is a high-powered (but hand-held) electromagnetic coil that can pick up patterns of neural activity. It can work in reverse, too, acting as a signal emitter as well as a receiver. Other researchers have used it to selectively knock out brain regions temporarily. Previous studies have found that witnessing a painful event will result in a temporary dampening in neural firing in response to TM stimulation (a motor-evoked potential, or MEP), but which is specific to the nerves connecting to the region that's receiving the pain. So: stimulate the somatosensory cortex with TMS and you get a MEP you can pick up on an electromyocardiogram; see someone getting hurt in the region associated with the stimulated area and the MEP gets dampened. If this dampening of the MEP signal is not observed, then the mirror neurons aren't responding to this particular stimulus, and aren't interpreting perception of others' pain into empathic pain.

So is this what they saw in psychopaths? Quick answer: no. Long answer: they saw the opposite.

Okay, to be fair, they didn't actually look at psychopaths. Instead they used the Psychopathic Personality Inventory to get a scalar measure of psychopathic traits in a normal population. There was some variation in the scores, however, so they had a range of personality profiles among their subjects. And back to the results, they actually found that people who scored high on one subscale, coldheartedness, actually showed greater dampening of the MEP signal when witnessing pain. What's more, coldheartedness is the subscale that most directly assesses empathy - whether people are sensitive to the suffering of others or not. So what's going on? Well, the authors argue that they're measuring motor empathy, but that in psychopathic populations this becomes divorced from emotional empathy. In fact, psychopathic people don't have any impairment in recognizing emotions or identifying when others are in pain; in fact, if anything they're better at it than non-psychopaths. This is part of the reason why they're so good at manipulating people. If this theory is correct (and to bookend with my title), then a psychopath knows exactly what you're going through; they just don't care.

Causes of violence: Take 2

Lee, T., Chan, S., & Raine, A. (2008). Strong limbic and weak frontal activation to aggressive stimuli in spouse abusers Molecular Psychiatry, 13 (7), 655-656 DOI: 10.1038/mp.2008.46

Raine, A. (2008). From Genes to Brain to Antisocial Behavior Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (5), 323-328 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00599.x


If the name Adrian Raine sounds familiar to you, then congratulations! You were paying attention. Raine was part of the USC group we had talked about in class – the one with the English accent, remember? Though Raine is now at the University of Pennsylvania, he's still putting out high-quality research looking into the biological bases of criminality.

Case in point: his 2008 paper with Lee and Chan. This was an imaging study performed to look for neurological differences between men who abuse their spouses and those who don't. Their idea is that men who tend towards battery are less able to control their reactions to negative emotions, and thus more likely to act on them – violently. This study relied on the old psychological standby of inhibition, the Stroop task. However, they also used a modified Stroop that focused on emotional content. What they found was that the abusers weren't any worse than the controls on the basic Stroop task, but when emotions were brought in they suddenly became significantly slower to react. This was reinforced by the fMRI data, which showed both less activity in prefrontal regions, responsible for control and inhibition, and greater activity in limbic regions (associated with emotion) including the cingulate gyrus and hippocampus.

So there are psychobiological distinctions between men who do and do not abuse their spouses. This is fantastic!, right? We can just do brain scans on suspects to determine whether or not they're at high risk of offending and separate them – maybe for treatment, maybe just for the protection of society. Well, if you're still excited about these possibilities (and I would have hoped that my neo-Orwellian rhetoric would have turned you off by now), let me refer you to his second paper, published in Current Directions in Psych. Science. Here, Raine quickly sums up where we stand in the nature/nurture dialogue (it's not a debate anymore) on antisociality: “...the field is now moving on to the more important, third-generation question: ‘Which genes predispose to which kinds of antisocial behavior?'” Part of that answer is mutations in genes like MAOA leading to behavior like deficits in moral reasoning.

However, there are two critical things to remember: one, that genes only code for proteins (usually), and not for specific behaviors; and two, that biology is not destiny. Raine points out that there are epigenetic factors that help determine an ultimate phenotype. The idea that what's coded in DNA doesn't exactly translate to biological manifestations isn't new, but it's easy to forget. However, things like diet or hormone levels in pregnant mothers can and do have life-long consequences in terms of development. Raine brings up some pointed ethical questions in his penultimate paragraph that should sound familiar to anyone who's studied or thought about genetics and behavior. The only thing I'll add to that is a reminder to exercise restraint when interpreting any study that claims to have found a link between some gene and... well, anything, really.