Okay, so today we're talking about why the Cowboys fight. You ask me some questions. Well, let's give Johnny Cash a second. Uh, you ask me some won

Okay, so today we're talking about why the Cowboys fight.

You ask me some questions.

Well, let's give Johnny Cash a second.

Uh, you ask me some wonderful questions that I put

all together and just stream them.

And all I wanted to show you is the ones

that I followed, and probably some as well.

We will be answering those questions to some degree, at

least in this in this lecture series itself, let alone

the other classes you'll take at UCL.

So lots of these will have some sort of answers

for you, I hope.

Not all of them.

Not the first one.

Is there a correlation between an individual's sexual kinks and

perception of their parents parenting style?

Yeah, I'm not going to touch that.

I'm going to take I want to I'm sure there

will be a class on human sexuality and you will

have an answer, but maybe talk to your parents first.

Uh, can hallucinations being distributed from reality?

Lots of questions about that.

Well, let's see, we're going to give you a hallucination

in a few weeks time.

You're going to have one reflects upon it and see

what you think.

We're going to induce one in you.

That is all to come.

So there are just hundreds of these things, I say.

All these ones, ones about free will.

We'll start talking about that next week and in the

weeks to come.

Lots of these questions we'll look at.

Or you can answer this one.

To what extent is being left brain or right brain

influence our learning styles?

Sort of.

Not at all in the sense that people are not

left brain.

All right brain.

That's a myth.

And sort of not at all because learning styles is

largely in it.

So you've got two imaginary things there.

So I guess they're connected.

Not at all or very much.

It doesn't really matter.

Both of those things are brainless that don't actually describe,

uh, people.

People have preferences for learning.

So there's no evidence that if you are cool to

that preference, they will learn any better.

They've all learned faster is largely a myth.

And we'll go into that when we talk about learning.

There's lots and lots of these things.

There are wonderful questions that we'll be picking through, uh,

throughout the term, genes and personality we will talk about

for sure.

Um, lots of things about stereotypes and emotions that we

will address just in this course.

And that's a little word cloud of all the things

that you are interested in, which is kind of interesting

to me, but even your brain and mental floss things

on emotion.

Lots of things about dreams, people fascinated by dreams and

sleep.

We'll try and attack a bit of that through the

memory and imagination.

And the hallucinations are those things about genetics and biological

things.

And what really is this thing thinking?

Where is it?

Is it biological?

Is it something else?

How do we map on to thoughts, to messy biological

things?

And that's exactly what we'll be talking about next week.

But for today we're talking about cowboys.

There's some cowboys.

Let me show you.

Uh, this is evidence to start off with.

Let me show you some documentary footage of real cowboys.

And actually.

The last thing we want is trouble with you good

citizens of this fine town.

Tell you what place on a house.

Uh-Uh, minus what brand of liquor you dragging, Jake?

My pleasure.

That brand.

Cowboy movie where everyone starts riding on what has.

Happened.

But it's something about that stereotype of a white American

southern male cowboy.

So this is what they do when we're trying to.

We're going to try and find out why it is

right now.

So what I want to do is first to prove

yourself that you really only think about these things before

we do this.

So while coming to this lecture, I gave the Holy

Grail time that you are waiting for.

And as promised, I told you we studied things like

stereotypes and prejudice and the reason people jump to conclusions

about each other, the mistakes they make, the reason all

of that stuff is under a microscope.

And that means you have to look at these things.

What do I say?

What do you think?

What's the matter?

You seem to look at that person being wrong that

people have to say the truth.

We have to be comfortable discussing this.

I'm not sure how we are going to be saying

things like a stereotype about gay men is that they're

weak.

I don't think that whatsoever.

But that is part of the problem.

The last thing we want is trouble with you, good

citizens of this fine town.

I know people are like.

Oh, we have to try and talk about that.

So this is a bit of a safe space where

we can use words that outside of this room might

be offensive because we're going deep into the history and

deep into the what.

I've never called another person before.

When we talk about the history of intelligence, we'll talk

about where that word came from, the mistakes it makes,

its reasons, and why it is the wrong thing to

say.

So be comfortable with a little bit of discomfort as

we do this.

Having said that, are there any white Southern American males

here?

I'm just going to say what everyone.

Doesn't matter.

What is the stereotype?

I said this friend of mine was from Texas.

Uh, what are your assumptions?

What do you think?

He's like a redneck.

What does that mean?

Around.

uh.

Uh, as some of.

You actually come from, uh, people who work in the

field.

You get some work here because they're working in the

field.

I think like farm labour originally, but now I have

other contacts.

What else?

You.

So many people.

Uh, other things you know about, uh, lack of education.

Lack of education.

Excellent.

Uh, that's what I'm saying.

Yes.

Sir.

What do you mean, exactly?

That word is a little politically, uh, since everyone wants

to say the same traditional tradition.

Yes.

A little bit of both.

A little bit rude.

Yeah.

Interesting.

We'll come back to that.

Have you met a Texan?

Yes.

Actually, that's some of the funniest people you'll have to

meet.

But we'll come back to that.

So I think you mean rude in a different context.

Anything else to see?

Yes.

Love.

Guns.

Love.

They've all got them there.

that?

Yes.

Culture of honour.

So it's like, ah, hang.

On.

Well, I just love that.

And to myself, that's what we're going to pick.

Slowly.

I want to get your stereotypes.

Yes.

Patriotic.

Trump hugs the flag.

Sometimes it's really creepy to watch.

Yes.

Generally.

That's absolutely true.

Yeah.

The Bible Belt is running right through that, as they

call it.

Let's have one more.

That's one over here.

Yes.

Misogynistic.

Do not like the ladies in a particular way again.

I thought that's true.

That in a particular way.

Probably not.

Well at all.

So the first point is you all have rich notions

of these things, right?

Who has actually met someone from Texas?

Oh, surprising number of you.

But far more than that.

Had something to say about women after all this theory.

It is.

It is not for movies.

We're quite readily able to drum up all of this

knowledge, and we'll talk about stereotypes, what that means later.

But the first question is, well, why is there more

violence in the southern US states?

I'll give you empirical evidence for a second, but it's

generally to go more homicides in the US and elsewhere.

Why is that?

And if we keep up, what's going to happen?

I can't be entirely sure that what country has the

most number of guns per anyone North America?

Has.

The most number of guns per head.

Which country?

Not Canada.

Good guess.

Higher than America, but not right.

Russia?

Not Russia is a bastion of violent gun crime.

Uh, Switzerland.

Okay, well, is it because Switzerland has a.

Standing army requirement and they have a gun safety?

It's the regulations around leather, but simply that undergoes some

is okay any other.

And this is why there's more violence in the South.

Yes.

Prejudice.

The cause is social tension.

So beliefs about each other.

Interesting.

Are there more prejudice about each other in the South

and in New York?

They have a lot of stereotypes about New York, Italians,

you know, Irish people don't if they are pure but

interesting, maybe that more connected to violence.

Uh, yes.

Culture of honour in the South.

We're going to unpack that in a second.

Yes.

Self-Defence is different in the perception of self-defence.

Interesting that we're going to unpack it.

Let's have one more.

Rule of law was kind of your own responsibility.

So if somebody stole something from me, you had to

solve it yourself.

Excellent.

We're going to skip on just even more people coming.

Yeah.

So there's a really interesting spread of questions from some

of the legislative ones about guns during interpersonal ones, about

what might start to sort of thoughts about what you

might do when there's a conflict.

Do you defend yourself as something about the culture?

We have a huge span of explanations here.

Any one of them probably doesn't work right, because there

are places you have as many guns, for example.

Certainly, but there are places that have as many stereotypes,

but they don't seem to translate the violence in exactly

the same way.

There's a heat increasing the amount of violence.

There are places that are as hot as the south

of America, so any one question doesn't seem to give

us an answer.

So what we're going to try and do today, if

we can rush through it at high speed, is look

at these different types of ants and try and assemble

them and pluck out of it some sort of scientific

answer to this question.

We're going to talk a little bit about ethnography.

What two people over here already raised this idea of,

well, what is the culture?

Can we understand that whole mindset that they're a part

of?

We'll talk a little bit about the history, why that

mindset might particularly be there.

And then we'll look at experimental insights.

We can conjure up all sorts of just some stories

about history.

But does that really matter?

Does that mean something today for those people where their

forefathers came from 100 years ago?

Maybe that's not connected at all.

Well, how do we get evidence about the mindset that

people have today?

That's our goal.

First of all, why should you look at history, right.

We're doing psychology.

Why not just look at experiments in the current moment.

And one reason is that alone throughout psychology, we are

situational creatures.

We're determined by the situation around us.

In fact, there's a bias to say.

So we're not all of our behaviours decided by a

personality.

That's an intuitive belief we have, but we susceptible to

external influences.

So it's important as a psychologist to map those and

to look at those connections.

For example, what's the connection between a coffee pot and

President Obama?

And now you're quite So, yes, they're both living creatures.

They are?

A little narrow, but true.

One got the other elected.

I won't tell you that.

Well, there is a connection.

It might be tenuous, but you can draw a direct

connection.

How do you do this?

Well, you have to go back 130 million years, uh,

to the Cretaceous period.

100 million.

Sorry.

If you go back, that green line was the coastline

of America.

The sea level was different.

It'll go back pretty soon.

We have no Florida.

Uh, if you look at Greenland, that's where the coast

was.

There's lots of shallow seas.

There are lots of sandy, shallow seas where copepods live

and die in their billions and billions, leaving behind a

trace of.

Chalk.

Chalk?

That's what lays down the chalk is lots and lots

of dead millions, creatures, billions and billions of dead creatures.

So where that is, is chalk.

What happens if you have a chalky soil?

It drains water much, much better and is much better

for certain types of crops.

One particular type of crop that was started by the

earlier European settlers to America is cotton.

That is the production of cotton bales in 1859 across

the US, and exactly follows that ancient coastline where all

that chalk is laid down.

Now, if you've got cotton and you're a rich European

at that point, you need someone to pick the cotton.

Where do you go?

You enslaved people from Africa.

Probably people from England and Bristol were selling them to

you.

So you bring people in from Africa such that if

you look at 100 years later, oh, that's the slave

population in 1860, again, up to 75% of the people

were slaves in that part of the country.

The huge majority along that line where black had been

taken from Africa, that 1860 when this cotton picking was

actually happening.

This is 92,000.

That's the distribution from the US census of black people

in America when they were voting for Obama.

That's just where the black people living in that particular

country, as they a self disclosed on the census data

still following that coastline.

And that's the people who voted for Obama and were

able swing the election in his favour in 2000.

There's a connection, right?

That's voting Matt in the 2008 election.

And that's the Cretaceous coastline.

A stream context matters.

There may be decent connections, but you have to understand

these maps to understand human behaviour.

So what is the particular historical data?

We're not going to go back to this period.

What is the particular context that might help explain this

strange phenomena of the cowboys?

Well, there is a particular historical context to America and

the first early waves of immigration in many more sense.

But some of the first ones came mostly from England.

The very first wave was from the south of England.

And these people were mostly farmers who claimed to be

escaping religious persecution.

There's a whole backstory about that.

That's not quite true, but that was their story.

And they came to America and settled mostly in the

North.

Then later on the south and the west.

The red areas that they will settle for people from

the north of England, from Scotland and from Ireland, a

different way of, um, of immigration, with people with different

qualities.

Those people came on were mostly hunters and herders.

They didn't have crops that they planted.

They have cattle and cows that they raised.

Now the question is, do those different ways of immigration

you see on that map have anything to do with

a typical voting map that we see today in America?

We've just got a similar division between north and south,

between central and the coastline as well.

Well, let's think about what does that historical context mean.

Why might that have psychological consequences and growth plans or

look after cows?

How is that different?

Something different.

Well, it's all about the form of life.

That's what we have to dig into.

So if you're Northern Ireland, farmers are only a very

stable thing, right?

Because you can't cross over a year for them to

give the yield and get the food.

Uh, it's a very stable society because one person or

a few people enrich enough to own that whole field,

and that can find lots of people to think.

So.

Wolf is very stable.

It's not dynamic.

Uh, no one can steal a field overnight.

You can't mix someone's crops very easily.

It's a very slow way to build up wealth that

stays in the hands of the same people, but can

support a very dense population.

Comparatively, that dense population needs control and needs to protect,

particularly the property of the wealthy people.

So you can afford a police force to look after

and enforce all those laws.

That's how life would grow up if you're a settler

from the farmers of the South.

But for the southern, it's different because they looked after

mostly cattle.

Again, that is a different form of life.

If you have cattle, they can be stolen overnight.

Someone can rustle up your entire flock and steal and

you don't have animals.

Also, as you know from, the reason we all have

to become vegetarians is meat, doesn't support a very dense

population, takes an enormous amount of land and resources to

produce one cow, the one that much food compared to

crop.

So if you look at the population density, it's much

lower with the South because you can't support that many

people with those crops.

That means you cannot afford things like a policeman to

look after your things that could be stolen overnight.

So what becomes very important is something someone over here

mentioned.

Defending yourself.

You're in charge of defending that wealth that can be

taken from you immediately.

It all springs up from the form of life that

these people have.

The phrase they use was sheriff of your own house,

half in your fireplace, sheriff of your own home.

You're in charge of discipline.

You look after yourself predominantly.

You don't call the police because they don't exist over

100 miles away.

And if you look at contemporaneous diary stories and studies

of those people, how they wrote to describe their lives,

you see that people saying things like this from an

early age, small boys were taught to take as much

their own hand and be active in its defence.

Uh, honour in a society meant a pride of manhood

and masculine courage, physical strength and warrior virtue.

I do not know what that is, but they are

very involved.

There are many children who are trying to defend their

own or without a moment's hesitation, lashing out against challenges

with savage violence.

And this is how people were taught this to be

taught in school.

This is the stories that they would tell you that

would structure your life and all of these things.

Reputation matters a lot.

Right.

So a seemingly minor affront someone bumps into you at

the grocery store or something must be understood within a

larger context of reputations of relative social status, enduring relationships.

Men are known by their fellows as a sort of

can be pushed around.

All the salt won't take any shit, so it's all

about defending yourself.

But it wasn't actually about defending yourself necessarily.

What it was about is having the reputation of being

someone who will defend yourself.

What really matters is I'm not going to steal his

house because he goes around shit crazy.

He kills everyone who even looks at this couple.

That's the reputation, because that protects your work.

It's like those days with a massive argument, right?

They're actually using the fight even to scare intimidate other

people.

So it's all about maintaining that relationship regardless of what

the facts are.

Your reputation is a thing that defended you.

That's your burglar alarm.

That's your protection, certainly not the police.

And because that was vital, that established what we now

call the culture of honour.

So historically, you don't know the history from diaries or

novels written at the time.

This is how people describe their lives.

Does it matter now?

Well, if you just look at the statistics, we can

see that there is a huge difference in those southern

and northern states.

So the ones in red are the ones we think

of as the South.

It's not quite geographically.

The South Florida doesn't fit this picture.

That's not the South proper in America, even though it's

more southern.

These are what we call the southern states of America.

And these are what we call the the North or

the not South.

And these are number of homicides per 100,000.

These dates are a bit old now, but I don't

believe that geographical differences have changed.

And there's a massive difference between.

Right.

Um, if you look at the average European country, just

for context, where about where Maine is the least violent

American state in terms of homicides is about where Europe

hovers.

So these are really high rates compared to the rest

of the Western world.

Moreover, if you look at why those things happen, right,

we've got lots of police records.

Why is it this particular that happened at this moment?

Some deaths are what we call felony related.

So that is a mugging.

You and I threatened me with a gun, and I

end up killing you and stealing your money.

Or there's a bank robbery, and I shoot the security

guard in attendance.

This is in the service of getting money or doing

a crime, I kill someone.

That's exactly the same in the north and the South.

Right.

So there's not more violent criminals that are doing more

violent crime.

But the huge difference comes is argument related.

And this is a sad thing, but no one's getting

bags of bank money.

No one's really no one's getting a car.

These are just arguments.

These are arguments in the bars that went sour.

The things that we saw in that first metafictional clip

of cowboys, these are just people arguing and it escalating

with no one gaining anything materially.

It's just an argument for those things end in death

in the South, where they would not less likely to

in the North.

So it does seem there's a difference, right.

We've looked at the history.

We've built up what this culture of honour thing is.

That fits quite nicely with many of the things we

showed historically.

With that, to show the people are still there's a

difference in the homicide rates.

But now I have to ask, well, how do we

show that?

How do we get evidence that all that stuff is

alive today and is actually describing and predicting that phenomenon?

And here we run into the problem because we have

to count stuff, right?

That's the meta point of this whole lecture is how

do we count stuff?

Science is all about counting stuff.

If you want to write something down, write that down.

Get it as a tattoo.

Science is about counting.

If you're not counting stuff, you're not doing science.

How do we count honour, right?

If you're doing chemistry, you're counting cells or heat or

measuring stuff.

That's easy.

How old?

Where's our yardstick for measuring how much honour is someone

in the South or the North?

Offering.

Operationalisation is a technical name for taking a concept in

personality or emotions or thoughts, and turning into a thing

that we psychologists can count, can measure and put a

number.

How on earth do we do that for honour?

Count the number of medals on someone's chest, you know.

What are we going to count?

Well, let me give you a few examples of those

things and a few of the problems that we run

into when we try and count this stuff.

So we could do.

So here's one thing we can count.

If you set up surveys and ask people this, these

sorts of questions, uh, which today these are sent to

parents of school age kids and ask them, would you

approve of the level, or would you expect your ten

year old son to do if he is repeatedly bullied

by another boy who stole his lunch money?

One of the answers was picked up later.

If you look at the difference in people who would

approve of that violent resolution to this particular problem, more

likely to do it in the South than the north.

If that was your situation, you told your parents I'm

being beaten up for my lunch money.

Whose parents would have said shit out of you?

Not not zero.

It's not an invalid answer at all.

But there is a big difference between the North and

the South.

How about this one?

Imagine you're you're on the tube and you're going out

for a dinner with your with your, uh, your partner,

your dressed up for a nice evening, and then someone

clearly drunk, stumbles on bumps into your partner, causing them

pain.

What do you do in that thing?

This rude person just hurt the person you love.

What do you do?

You passive aggressively roll your eyes and walk off.

Or do you punch him in the face again?

The real scenario is that do happen all the time.

And there's a big difference in what people say they

would do between the North and the South.

So there we've got our data.

Uh, but is this enough or is this going to

answer our question to prove that we have a difference

in the culture of honour?

No, no.

Why not?

Certain ways that things are more socially acceptable.

So for example, the the market has multiple agreements, but

not in the same way for fear of violence.

Right?

This could be bluster.

This could be people pretending to be tough guys.

Right?

We don't know what lies behind this answer.

They may just assume that's the right thing to say

or the wrong thing to say.

So okay, let's make it a little better.

This is still a survey, but it's sort of a

pseudo experiment.

Like it's sort of a lab.

It's not a lab study.

Sorry.

Um, it's a quasi experimental design.

You'll come to learn exactly what it is.

But here we're sending out a letter.

But we don't say this is an experiment.

People think this is a real letter.

And it was a letter that was sent out to,

um, car dealerships across America, right?

Like a big four car dealership.

And it was a letter asking for a job, saying,

here's my CV.

Would you mind if I could have an interview for

a job at your place of work?

And there were two versions.

That's a crazy experiment.

There were two versions of the letter that was sent

out All these things.

One of them said, uh, can I have a job?

But I have to be honest with you, and it's

just another one of those conditions that's going to control

one.

So what I did was I still calls for money.

Um, I got one for.

So Grand Theft Auto, obviously.

Um, I took one for brands.

I thought it was the wrong thing to do.

I was a kid.

I got into the wrong ground.

I paid my price.

And I want to have a better life.

Can I have a job?

The other people.

Exactly the same direction.

But once everything was saved, they only changed key sentences.

They changed as little as possible.

The other person.

I just got out of jail.

I'm happy.

Obviously, I killed the guy I wanted.

It was the wrong crowd in a story.

That was I was in a fall off, and some

guy got really aggressive with my fiance and try to

make a move on her, so we went outside.

The only two fight looks like, uh.

And I pushed him.

He slipped to his head and died.

So, you know, yes, it was my fault.

This was the circumstance.

I served my time, that it goes the same way

I served my time not long ago.

Then they got back replies by some people who thought

that they were real job applications.

Is there a difference now between the North and the

South?

So firstly, you can just count.

Did they reply with an application?

The control they were equal to reply.

But if you looked at that on a version, the

on World War I killed the guy.

Um, I killed him and that's why.

Because my honour was besmirched.

Because he insulted my fiancee.

There you have more people from the south replying with

a letter from the North, and in fact, slightly more

people from the South replied than if he had just

been in jail for making a car.

They prefer the guy who killed another person.

So again, this is still a survey, but we've got

different conditions that we can compare and people aren't just

saying the right thing.

We could imagine they think this is a real job

application.

You can also count other things you can count towards.

You can do this with a computer.

We just have a huge database of nice words like

please, kindly, uh.

Thank you.

We have negative words, right?

Curse of Russia.

I mean, you can you just run simple textual analysis

over anything you want and get a number for how

pleasant is this versus this to the text.

And if you look at the fuzziness, there was no

difference between the North and the South.

Uh, for the people, for the control letter.

For the honour letter, uh, the people in the North

were a lot less warm to the convicted killer who

had actually killed someone, as you would think.

Did not matter for the southern people again.

If anything, they increase the grief.

They said.

We look forward to seeing your film.

Thank you for your application.

There are nicer to this person who had that repeat

killed a person.

So again, this is still survey data, but it's the

systematic difference that we can contrast.

However all of this is still correlation.

It's all descriptive.

You're describing to this group.

And um putting numbers on the we are still just

describing what you see.

And as I'm sure it's been drummed into all the

time.

Correlation is not causation.

We can only learn so much from these connections because

we can't tell anything causal.

They are non causal links.

There might be other reasons these things are connected can

be really, really useful to do surveys.

You can understand a lot about how different variables interrelate,

but you can't say which is the important one.

You can't say if any of them did that causality,

it might be some ones you didn't even ask about.

So there's a hard limit to how useful this stuff

is.

And I'm sure you know this from statistics classes from

other things.

There are some things that correlate perfectly.

Tyler, as a statistician, you've got a wonderful website where

he showed that the age of Miss America correlates 0.99

almost perfectly with murders by steam, hot vapours and hot

objects across America.

I don't know how you murder someone with steam, but

someone has.

And it correlates exactly with the age of Miss America.

Are these things connected somehow?

That would be a stretch.

Um, there's a really strong correlation between the number of

people drown by falling a swimming pool and the number

of films Nicolas Cage is in.

Exactly.

Match 1 to 1.

Is there some eerie correlation where it's Nic Cage killing

these people and feeling guilty and making movies.

It would have to be all their accidental correlation.

And of course, we see these things all the time.

Owning a pet means you're less likely to be a

juvenile delinquent.

Does that mean if we hand our puppies in troubled

schools, we will solve crimes?

No.

Or why?

Those things are what it could be called.

Look, if I gave you a puppy.

All this would be another reason why owning a pet

and being in trouble as a kid are correlated.

Less likely if you have a puppy.

Any guesses why?

Oh, that's really nice.

It could be emotional support.

There's another type of support for you.

Your family is probably more affluent and also the.

Kind of families value.

Puppies are expensive, just a little bit more expensive.

Here in a family with a puppy, you have a

little bit more resources for emotional support for lawyers, for

all sorts of things, I'm sure.

All right.

Let's look at viscosity.

That's the thickness of asphalt.

That basically means if you look at concrete How soft

is it?

Some concrete is softer than other concrete, right?

Um, the viscosity of asphalt in playgrounds correlates to the

local crime rate.

Why is that?

Yes.

Um, it.

Might be because, like in playgrounds, kids.

Because you turn that around.

And then if the if the asphalt was, like, too,

like hard, then the kid might push it a little

too hard, and then the person might die and.

They might become rather well, if they push them over,

they bounce back.

No.

Ha ha ha!

Excellent.

We created this.

Because this reflects how rich or poor the area might

be.

Excellent question.

Again.

Completely wrong.

Oh, okay.

When I say that you're wrong, that's a really good

thing.

Being wrong as science is good.

I mean, that's a falsifiable theory that our evidence, when

people are saying wrong, I look really happy.

It's not because I'm gloating, but I'm really happy that

a suggestion was made to have evidence again.

So being honest.

Fantastic.

Well done.

You scraped from the wrong.

Any other wrong answers?

Yes.

It is the same reason that ice cream sales are

correlated with homicide.

When she goes up, the concrete melts, it becomes softer

and people get a bit more punchy.

All these things are connected.

Oh, having sex within the last month.

Correlated antigens in the immune system.

The more sex you have, the less likely you are

to get a cold.

Are those things connected, or is there another reason?

Yes.

Or maybe people who, like, have sex better, like interpersonal

relationships, and they're more likely to take care of themselves

and like, be more conscious about it.

And that is very sweet and will be problematic.

market research project, but possible.

So there's probably another reason.

Yes.

If you introduce somebody else's bacteria into somebody else's stuff.

Into.

Your body.

It's not the best credit line.

Otherwise, another explanation could be we just got this backwards.

It's all about having more sex and you have fewer

colds.

So if you've got a cold and it's not just

dripping out of your face, maybe not as hot as

you.

Probably.

Uh, smoking cigarettes causes, uh, cancer.

Those two things are correlated.

Uh, but it could be that it's just a living

in a dense, urban, uh, community with a higher number

of people where there's a large number of people wealthy

who can afford to smoke.

Also means you're in a dense urban area of more

traffic.

And it's the traffic that causes cancer, right?

All those things are true.

And all those things were argued by the cigarette lobby

for a very long time.

In fact, the reason causation or correlation is known so

well, at least in America, is because the tobacco lobby

is one of the few good things they did was

argue for 50 years of correlation, not to mention the

people giving these alternative explanations for promoting cigarette smoking in

cancer.

In fact, that is the real connection between these two

things.

But we know that not just because of those numbers.

We know that because we put cameras into lung tissue

and we've seen it mutate as we pass the cigarette

smoke.

We have lots and lots of evidence for that connection

outside of just those numbers.

So there is a real connection, but just not because

of those numbers for additional evidence that we brought in.

Finally, another one.

This is from the, um, uh, the practice that we

did on Monday.

Uh, if you give children too much sugar, they become

hyperactive.

That's false.

That's a real correlation.

Why do we think that that's true.

Why do you think that's a real correlation or causal

connection?

Yes.

Can I just tell my kids?

What's that like?

Our parents wouldn't give.

Us a message at all.

Because you're going to be quite.

Oh, it's a way not to get kids.

It's a good excuse.

Excellent.

Any other guesses?

Yes.

Even when we give children children with special occasions.

So they may get excited around the environment when she

happens to be present.

Yes.

Or even fatherless.

So it's a way to deny giving your kids sugar,

which is bad for their teeth, for lots of other

reasons.

So it's great to have a reason not to, but

also when the kids are getting a bit messy and

hyperactive, which is around 7:00 in my experience.

When they go a bit mental, you don't know how

to control them.

Oh my God, they've smashed something else.

They're getting out of bed all the time.

I treat you all for coming in exactly those circumstances.

But they are not when they're being nicely behaved because

you don't get them.

So again, it's an opposite action that we've latched onto.

And now we have this myth that sugar causes hyperactivity.

It does not.

It's been measured time and time again.

There is no connection, but any parent will swear that

that's true.

So how do we get around this big problem?

How do we really get those particular causal connections, not

just correlations?

Where's all the time for this picture?

Um, it's all thanks to this gentleman here.

He's one of my favourite human beings, Francis Bacon.

Uh, from Elizabethan around the time of Shakespeare.

And he didn't invent the scientific method in around sort

of thought in Europe for some time, but he codified

it.

He wrote it down to the right inspiration, where he

laid out exactly the steps that enable you to step

around this causal problem.

It's probably one of the most significant contributions to human

society, the scientific method.

It's amazing.

He's not on every single banknote we have, in my

opinion.

It all comes down to him who codified this thing

that gave us medicine.

It was astronomy.

It gives everything that we have today all started with

this guy who was slightly insane.

Is there a famous bisexual slut that everyone in the

Us Weekly thought might have written some of Shakespeare's.

Face.

And, um, stuffing a chicken full of snow to win

an argument about refrigeration.

And it's him who laid out the scientific method that

gets round these problems of causation, gets around these idea

of myths and what you do.

So the key step is you have two things the

independent and the dependent variable.

Sorry, boring names are very exciting things.

Basically you observe the system.

That's the dependent variable.

That's what you measure where you also intrude upon it.

You manipulate a thing, you change a thing, and then

you compare two systems.

One way you change one way.

You have.

You've given coffee, you've given sugar and the prime number,

the difference.

You made a difference between two situations, and you measure

the difference that you've made.

And because the only way these two situations differ is

the change that you did is the drug that you

introduce is the way that you tell that particular trial.

You can now say it's because of that, that the

difference happened.

It seems like such a trivial, boring, old methods things,

but it's the foundation of all scientific knowledge and we

don't trumpet it enough.

So when you design these experiments, not just observations, but

experiments where you change something actively, then you can make

a causal connection.

How can we do this all the time across science,

all the time in psychology of course, as well.

Our independent variables are things like the number of bystanders

in a room that what TV program is shown or

is subliminally presented.

You have all sorts of dependent variables like reaction times,

preferences for pictures, brain activity, eye movements, number of times

someone jiggles a foot, and how sexy they find someone's

armpit.

All of these things are things that we measure.

And of course, we're not really interested in armpits smell,

but we are interested in how it changes and the

particular conditions.

Are you going to ask about armpits?

Oh, I thought you had your hand up.

You'll just sniff it.

And look why you are angry for our species.

I'll leave you alone.

For example, you guys asked about creativity.

I didn't have time to say it in On Monday

when we did this crazy experiment in this deep swimming

pool somewhere in Venice, and we measured creativity.

And afterwards I said, well, how the hell do you

measure creativity?

It's very hard to put a number on things that

by its nature, you can't give rules for it on

your creativity, right?

So but always you can do it.

Let me show you briefly.

You can do what's called the alternative uses task.

So these are a number of different uses for an

empty bottle of Desperados.

Right.

You can drink horrible beer from it, but you could

also blow over it to make a whistle sound.

How many of those can come up with in a

minute?

We can cancel that now.

We can cancel them.

You can also look at creativity in terms of puzzle

solving.

What word goes with cream skate?

Cube ice should give you time to figure it out.

Or you can give people an open ended drawing task.

Complete this figure.

Well, how do we turn that into a number?

We give that to ten other people who just score

them like judges and say, I've created this.

I'm gonna go across ten people that I kind of

agree on something, and now we've got a number.

So those are the things are three things that we

measured to say that creativity increases.

We found that the left and the right hand was

increased after you had this crazy underwater experience, not the

middle one.

You didn't get better.

All sorts of creativity, just divergent.

Thinking about grabbing a different ideas and combining them actually

been this crazy thing of being underwater and upside down

while having all these new experiences.

So that's what we operationalise in all different ways.

And we need to measure.

Do we have time to do we've got to do

this very, very quickly.

So say our experiment, uh, just happened to make you

smarter.

That's your question.

That's what you want to answer.

So here's my little experiment.

I give Andrew coffee.

I give Phil no coffee at all.

Both take an IQ test.

Andrew scores higher QED coffee, caffeinated coffee.

Caffeine makes me smile.

Is that a good experiment?

Would you accept that as a review?

Why not?

What?

What sort of thing?

There's like there's differences between Andrew and Bill.

Great differences between Andrew and Bill.

One.

Andrew want to be clever all along.

Yeah.

We need a baseline measurement of their intelligence so we

can compare after caffeine's taken.

Great.

Okay.

Yeah.

We don't know anything about the history beforehand.

Yes.

There may be much more like confounding variables.

Except for the coffee.

Such as, uh, like.

Uh.

For example, if the bill is getting ill today.

Okay.

You may have a lower score, right?

You might be smarter overall today.

You might have a blinding headache.

Excellent.

Um.

There are.

So you can divide these up one set of these

sort of problems.

Apologies on going a little faster than usual.

Um, there's problems with the coffee.

Is one way to put it.

So when you give someone a coffee, you're giving them

lots of other things as well as coffee in my

experiment.

It might be just a hot liquid.

Helps you concentrate.

Right.

Because one person had hot leg, the other person didn't.

Also, you've come into this thing, you've got to put

them aside and said, here, have some coffee.

Oh, God, that's going to piss.

In what way was this coffee?

Right.

You give one person one thing.

That's unfair.

People don't like unfairness.

Screw your experiment.

Right.

So maybe Andrew just thought the experiment would like to

now want to compress to be a little bit flirty

because the guy bought him a coffee.

These things happen.

Maybe you're thirsty.

You can't concentrate, right?

As well as coffee.

You just had fluid in you.

Fluid helps.

Uh, sipping helps.

You think that's actually plausible, right?

If you look at kids during mass, they stick their

tongue out, and it turns out the bits of the

brain, uh, with your motor cortex, where the lips are

next to your brain, where you do find mental arithmetic.

So it's conceivable that mouth activity helps you think there

is a not implausible neural connections.

And maybe that particular coffee had traces of cocaine in

it, based on the film Beverly Hills Cop, where they

smuggled something.

I'm not.

It's true, but it's plausible.

So there's all sorts of compounds with the coffee, right?

Uh, so to get around these, you've got to balance

that somehow.

You've got to make all these things equal, right?

When A was given a coffee, he was given a

fluid.

He was given favouritism.

He's given more attention.

So you've got to balance those out.

And that's the key thing.

Make sure the only difference in those conditions is the

thing you care about.

Look happy.

Everything else is the same.

Absolutely everything apart from that one chemical, these claims and

testing everything goes is the same.

Then there's also problems with people as you mentioned as

well, right?

It might be.

Andrew has always been clever.

That's one example.

He's just a smarter guy.

There's only two people.

It might be he got more sleep.

It might be these ill, as he said, it might

be.

Bill is addicted to coffee.

He didn't get any.

Now he's got the shakes because he can smell it,

but he can't have it.

So he's got a pre-existing relationship with that chemical that's

compounding it.

Uh, Bill just might have hated the guy.

Right?

There's only two people he can't get rid of.

This bill might be.

Well.

That is tricky.

There's a whole thing about.

How do we know?

We'll come back to that later.

Does anyone Welsh 007.

Um.

It's to count to ten, and Welsh takes about half

an hour.

Because the names for numbers are so quick, so long

rather that it takes a long time to count to

ten compared to someone who's Chinese is someone Chinese can

count to ten quickly for me out there.

Yes.

Go on.

God.

He's not really quickly.

Yeah, yeah.

That's all the numbers.

1 to 10.

That will be the length of one word for a

number in Welsh.

It's just a huge difference.

And for a time, Welsh.

It's a story like they would take because they took

longer to do the kind of patience and comfort that

they were working in.

That was the subtext.

The point is, these sorts of differences cause differences in

behaviour all the time.

Uh, Andrew Marr, we've had lots of test training with

some expensive school where they tested it.

Uh, Andrew just got lucky, but it was only for

me, basically.

So this is the key thing.

The person variables.

I think someone said it.

How many times we said there's so many of them.

Age.

Caffeine.

Dependency.

Intelligence.

Whether or not you like the guy.

There's so many variables.

Can we.

Can we get baseline of intelligence?

Can we get baseline tracking of dependency?

Can we get baseline to any all of these.

Put them into a statistical model and try and control

them.

We could try.

But that's really difficult because we don't really know what

predicts how you do well in these intelligence tests.

We're just in the dark.

We only want to know about coffee.

So how do we track all of these potential differences

to figure out which of those is responsible, if not

the coffee?

How do we solve this problem?

People differ from each other massively all the time.

Well, one solution is if we're looking at people and

how they're not average and how they differ from average,

let's find the average person.

You can do that in America.

His name is our boss.

Some some journalists did this.

He looked at every single bit of survey data.

You could possibly find a lot of the most common

answers, then found the guy who had that answer.

So this is this is the most average market.

This is 20 minutes of a Walmart.

He takes a shower of 10.4 minutes.

He has fired a gun.

Uh, he drove them 50 miles in his current home.

So we can just do all of our experiments on

both.

Just keep them in a basement, keep plugging him with

our stuff.

We know that that's not going to work, because maybe

we're not interested in Americans.

Maybe lots of reasons.

So what we use is the key thing of random

assignment.

Now, you've heard of any assignment that you've got ahead

of you, even if not as being the same.

It must be a new message, and we sort of

brush over it as an uninteresting thing, missing the fact

that it's profoundly and beautifully important.

I get emotional talking about how wonderful which might be.

Um, the reason is it solves all this problem.

We've got all these differences between people that are head

spinning.

Complicated people are really, really complicated.

Subplot of psychology degree.

How do you ever understand those things and predict them?

How you ever get a chance to learn something systematic

about people when they're such complicated creatures?

Well, the answer is you give up, you completely give

up and you give in to the gods of chaos

and mathematics.

You accept that everyone differs in a million different ways

and you will never know.

I could never track.

So what do you do?

You make sure your people are randomly put in your

two conditions.

Really?

Only by tossing a coin.

There's no other reason for them to be there other

than chance.

So you've got a chaotic group of people who differ

on lots of different ways, and one group of chaotic

people differ on a lot of different dimensions than the

other group.

And here's the key.

Beautiful thing.

So chaos cancel each other out.

All of that stuff disappears, and we're left with the

one way that they differ.

One had caffeine, the other do not.

So we've done kind of like a Buddhist or a

judo.

We let all of our mass, we turn it into

our strength.

We use the language of statistics about what chance is

right to people.

If you measure more, groups of people will always make

you buy a little bit of a difference.

And they'll do that by random chance.

And the magic of statistics is it's a way to

recognise what random chance is.

So when we don't see it.

So when we see a real pattern, we can say

that's not just because of patterns.

It's because of that simulated difference.

And that's all statistics is.

It's a way to track, predict, recognise patterns on what

you don't recognise when it's not.

And all that is behind this little phrase.

Yeah.

They did it better than chance or significantly.

Let me throw these phrases around all the time, not

realising this really profound truth that lies behind it.

This way of doing this absolute magic thing that no

one outside of psychology understands.

We don't have to worry about individual differences because we

have an experimental difference.

And it's really hard to talk to people outside of

psychology because they always give these explanations.

So that terrible story with the sports cars and the

penises that I talked about, I was on Irish breakfast

radio, television where they're asking me about this, and I've

tried to explain it.

I kept saying, yeah, the microphone, he's got the accent.

My friend Brian's got a Ferrari.

He's got a really small thing.

He's like, I don't know, Brian.

I don't care about the I'm not trying to break

it.

And they kept coming up with other reasons that people

might buy a sports car.

Maybe they're just watching this one TV show.

Yeah, I don't care about that.

None of that matters.

So I ended up giving a five minute lecture on

experimental methods, which is not what they book me for

whatsoever.

So they simply didn't understand.

The key difference was we assigned people randomly to conditions.

So the individual variance disappears.

It's not a thing I have to care about or

know about because I've used the beauty of random assignment.

Not just a boring thing.

So how can we use this in psychology?

It's the last thing I'll tell you about this one

experimental measure of the, um.

This was done in the late 90s, and it's this

great measure with different operationalisation, different measures of all these

things.

So here's the study, in my opinion, an experiment.

Uh, and they gave me some cover stories about looking

at chemicals in your spit.

They give you a little swab of saliva and your

mail, by the way.

And you're from Chicago, which has this weird balance.

People have come from the South, and people come from

the north.

It's a town right in the middle.

So it's got this mixed population of northerners and Southerners

just because where it is.

So you're male in this experiment.

You're either from the north or you're from the South.

Uh, so you give this little saliva swab and they

say, can you take the swab down the corridor to

put it in the other lab?

You say, of course.

You take the swab, you walk out, and then there's

this guy, this guy who was a local bouncer from

a club that they hired who stood in the doorway,

just this massive guy.

And you've got to sort of get by him, and

you sort of end up squeezing by like that as

you go by.

Here's our independent variable.

He says, arsehole or not.

He jumped up the other side of the world.

Uh, you have another, uh, test.

Then you walk back to the elevator.

Then there's another person there, and you get this narrow

corridor, and you want to get by them, and you

do that chicken thing where you knock, knock again, and

we measure how close you are before you go up.

You go ahead.

This person was instructed these are all actors during the

struggle.

They are instructed not to back down to always be

the one waiting.

How long before you go?

Okay, you go on.

That was all dependent.

So we measured lots of different things.

So that person from the north or the south, they

were either insulted or not.

Right.

So the insult evokes the culture when you check out.

My reputation has been trying to kill me.

And also we will turn on that culture on the

South or not, if they're not insults.

So what is our identity as an older, a Southerner

and that fact that they are insult or not due

for all of these measures?

For systematically, we can see that there is a response

to being insulted.

So you ask people afterwards, are you angry or are

you a meet the people who are from the north,

not the culture of honour?

So this is a funny story.

There's this massive guy who wouldn't back down.

They tell that as a story.

That's amusing.

The people from the South, they're still pissed off.

They have been insulted.

They are under stress a little bit because they have

been insulted and haven't done anything about it.

What about their cortisol?

What are the control situation where there's no, uh, there's

no insult.

There's no difference between the groups.

But if they've insulted the Southerners.

Now, this way.

Consider that stressful when they get you ready to do

action.

They're pumping up this in their saliva.

Moments later in that second test from the saliva.

They've also changed the note of testosterone.

No difference in the control condition.

But if that Southerner has been insulted, they're pumping out

that testosterone.

They're getting ready to fight already.

And you can measure this in their body, in their

chemistry immediately at that second swap.

You can also measure that playing chicken, right?

So if the Southerner had been insulted, they waited.

They got a lot closer to the second guy before

they backed out, because that's a measure of sort of

dominance in that particular case.

Right.

If they hadn't been insulted, then they were very polite

and let the other guy go.

And in fact, in general, besides picnics over here, Southerners

are really, really polite.

If you don't insult them, they're hyper polite and mannered

and are very, very courteous compared to New Yorkers.

Shrug your arms.

Attractive.

It's only if you roll them that then they become

really very aggressive.

But before that point, actually the Politest people in America,

and they let the guy go by unless they're in

that case of being insulted, then they were ready to

fight.

They also, when they should make certain what has happened,

the experiment to have a glove with a precious sense

of it.

As soon as you win something.

Because.

Not not having a gentle shape.

So all of these things different.

They also ask them the manliness.

How manly do you feel right now?

And the Southerners insulted boosted that up.

So he got that their chemistry, their glands of different

hormones, their feelings, everything that gravity, things, everything has changed

just from that one word.

So we can get comprehensive, converging evidence that there really

is an active thing, this culture of honour that's been

triggered by those particular circumstances that we can measure today.

That is the story today, a story all about Operationalisation.

Look at all the different ways that we're able to

capture, measure the effects and count something and put a

number on this thing on.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Reflect upon the beauty of random assignment.

Have a nice weekend.

See you on Monday.