psychology – Close Read

The Print’s ludicrous article on Niraj Bishnoi

The Print has just published a bizarre article about Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged “mastermind” (whatever that means) of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. I know nothing about Niraj Bishnoi; the article’s problem is that it has reproduced the Delhi police’s profile of Bishnoi and indications in that profile, provided by police personnel, of Bishnoi’s alleged deviancy sans any qualification. I’ve reproduced relevant portions of the article below (with a left-indent), and my annotations are intercalated.

But first, according to Sukanya Shantha, my colleague at The Wire: “These stories are quite common. They mean nothing in court. Defence comes up with such BS everytime before arguing on quantum of punishment. We saw similar stuff during Shakti Mills, and Delhi rape too. Even Ajmal Kasab was called ‘mentally deranged’ by his lawyer.” While such claims like those by defence lawyers may be common, I don’t understand why the media – and especially independent media – has to amplify them without sparing a thought for what they ultimately imply.

Suspected ‘Bulli Bai’ app creator, 20-year-old Niraj Bisnoi had 153 porn film downloads and lewd, sexual content in his laptop, sources in the Delhi Police claimed Thursday. The evidence in his laptop suggest Bisnoi is a “porn addict” and “has abnormal desires towards elderly Muslim women”, the sources added.

This para – the first – sets the tone for what you can expect from the rest of the article. And The Print considers the most important point vis-à-vis this article to be that Niraj Bishnoi had 153 pornographic films on his laptop, that he is a “porn addict” – presumably the Delhi police’s words – and that he harboured “abnormal” desires “towards elderly Muslim women”. We may never know how either the police or the author of the article leaped from pornography and fantasies to an implied justification for Niraj Bishnoi’s alleged crimes.

A 2015 article in Psychology Today did a good job summarising what we knew about pornography until then, and I think the conclusions still stand: a) there’s both good and bad to viewing pornography, b) the bad that is often attributed anecdotally to pornography is grossly at odds with the effects that psychologists have found; and c) even so, causal links between consuming pornography and holding specific beliefs or committing specific acts don’t yet exist. Against this context, what The Print has found fit to print is an unfounded opinion of the Delhi police and not a cause by any stretch.

Also, echoing Sukanya Shantha’s point, why is the Delhi police rising to Niraj Bishnoi’s defence, instead of Bishnoi’s lawyers? (Assuming of course that this is a defence…)

According to sources in Delhi Police, Bisnoi was introduced to the virtual world at the age of 15 and first hacked a website a year later, as “revenge”, after his sister was denied admission by a school.
“At the age of 16, he first hacked a school’s website when his sister didn’t get admission,” a source in Delhi police claimed.

“Introduced to the virtual world”. How clandestine.

First off, this is access journalism of the worst kind – neither to make sensible claims nor to name your sources. Public officials, including the police, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with being anonymous sources in articles; if they absolutely must remain unnamed, the publisher should specify the reason that the publication has decided to grant anonymity, on every occasion. (The Wire Science recently adopted this protocol, inspired by The Verge). Otherwise, as a reader, there is no one to hold accountable.

Second, I once ‘hacked’ a website to find out the class XII board exam score of a friend. However, does it count as ‘hacking’ when the website loaded the results for all roll-numbers as HTML, on its source page, but didn’t display them on the front-end, so all I had to do was right-click on the displayed page, click ‘view source’, and be able to access all the data? How good a hacker is depends both on the hacker’s skills and how well the object of their hack is guarded; if the object is barely concealed, we can learn nothing of the hacker’s prowess. And in this case, since Niraj Bishnoi allegedly hacked a school’s website, I sincerely doubt he did more than I did.

According to police sources, the code script of the Bulli Bai app has been recovered from his laptop — a high-end gaming machine, with a heady duty graphic card. Sources claimed the laptop only had games and porn.

Please, I’m laughing. A high-end gaming machine? My laptop is a high-end gaming machine. Any devices with Apple M1 or AMD Ryzen chips are high-end gaming machines. Many smartphones these days are high-end gaming machines. And what is “only games and porn” supposed to imply? Other of course than that the case against him apparently rests on one of the most tiresome snowclones of this age.

Those who know Bisnoi personally, also claim him to be a “loner”, someone who is more active in the virtual world than in the real one around him.
Sources in Delhi Police told ThePrint that Bishnoi displayed “abnormal behavioural traits” in his interaction with the police and has threatened to commit suicide multiple times since his arrest.
“He has told the police that he will fatally hurt himself — cut his veins with a blade, hang himself to death,” the source mentioned above claimed.
A second source added: “He doesn’t eat, has to be forced to eat. Today he skipped lunch. We had to order food from outside to feed him around 3.30 pm.”

This seems like the beginnings of some kind of personality profile that’s supposed to imply that Niraj Bishnoi was mentally unsound in some way – but which is psychotic in its own right for forgetting that none of these are excuses for what he allegedly did. I’m only prompted to recall the excuses many alleged perpetrators bandied about during the height of the #MeToo allegations – that they had PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.; some only alluded to vague mental health concerns. These individuals may actually have had these conditions or disorders, as the case may be, but none of them implied any consequences that would have prevented the individuals from knowing that what they were doing – at the time they were doing it – was wrong. Yet such excuses persisted, and only served to further stigmatise others who were unwell in the same way, especially in the company of their parents, employers and others.

The probe so far has revealed that Bisnoi is addicted to the internet and his laptop, claimed sources. They also claimed that the 20-year-old is accustomed to creating fake accounts and user handles on social media platforms.

Is my tax money paying for this probe? Also, I once created 22 GMail accounts, simply because each one comes with 15 GB of space on Google Drive. The point is none of this is dispositive proof – or even points towards dispositive proof – that Niraj Bishnoi did what he allegedly did. Wouldn’t the bit about fake handles on social media platforms be true for every troll out there? The story so far only suggests that the Delhi police is building a loseable case and/or that it is colluding with Niraj Bishnoi’s lawyers to manufacture sympathy for his plight.

“Bishnoi has said that he doesn’t talk to anyone much in the outside world, that he doesn’t like to talk to anyone and that he has no friends in the real world. His only interactions are under assumed names and identities in the virtual world. His day starts and ends with the internet and laptop,” the second source claimed.
Police claims of the accused’s being a recluse are repeated by acquaintances who knew Bishnoi while he was a school student, and who spoke to ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
All of them described the accused as a “loner”, someone who was used to staying “aloof” and “didn’t interact much with the outside world” since he was a teenager.
“He has created his own virtual world around him,” claimed an acquaintance doesn’t want to be identified.

Ah, the stereotype has landed. As another colleague of mine said, Niraj Bishnoi probably lives in his mother’s basement, too.

And Naomi Barton, yet another colleague, said: “Also, lots of people are loners who spend the majority of their time in digital spaces – and that can be both good and bad, for instance queer children who don’t have any community in real life. What this story is doing is pretty much just blowing innocuous, if generationally different, habits out of proportion to scare-monger.”

Referring to another of the accused’s behavioural traits, the second police source claimed: “Whenever the interrogation hits a certain peak, he urinates in his pants. He has done this three-four times. We have checked if this is because he has a medical issue, but he doesn’t.”

If The Print hadn’t already crossed a line, it has now – by forwarding as it if were a knock-knock joke on WhatsApp the Delhi police’s claim that Niraj Bishnoi can urinate on demand when the “interrogation hits a certain peak”. Hits a certain peak? Is this a euphemism for the intensity of the interrogation? And what sort of ‘behavioural trait’ is this in which the bearer of the trait urinates – the insinuation being that he does this for reasons other than what might make people pee in these situations – for anything other than because something has prompted him to?

All this claim does is bring to mind Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Fatal beatings’ skit.

According to the source, the 20-year-old has also not expressed remorse for his alleged involvement in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app.
“He said he did the right thing,” claimed the source.

Finally, something that doesn’t sound ridiculous, although it isn’t worth publishing.

Ultimately, if Niraj Bishnoi – and others, to be sure – was responsible in any part for the ‘Bulli Bai’ app, he needs to be brought to justice and he needs to have a fair (and sensible) trial. But what we could all do without is a ‘news report’ that brings the nonsensical claims of the Delhi police – words that appear to be designed to exonerate the alleged actions of Niraj Bishnoi, but which may yet backfire, and nothing to remain sensitive to the people that the app has harmed – out to thousands of readers, if not more, without qualifying/rebutting them as warranted instead of letting them rot in the rooms in which they were manufactured.

Featured image credit: karatara/Pexels.

The mad world

Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

… [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?¹

1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

A why of how we wear what we wear

There are many major industries operating around the world commonly perceived to be big drivers of climate change. Plastic, steel and concrete manufacturing come immediately to mind – but fashion doesn’t, even though, materially speaking, its many inefficiencies represent something increasingly worse than an indulgence in times so fraught by economic inequality and the dividends of extractive capitalism.

And even then, details like ‘making one cotton t-shirt requires 3,900 litres of water’ (source) spring first into our consciousness before less apparent, and more subtle, issues like the label itself. Why is the fashion industry called so? I recently read somewhere – an article, or maybe a tweet (in any case the thought isn’t original) – that the term ‘fashion’ implies an endless seasonality, a habit of periodically discarding designs, and the clothes they inhabit, only to invent and manufacture new garments.

The persistence of fashion trends also presents social problems. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, copied from a press release issued by Princeton University:

People perceive a person’s competence partly based on subtle economic cues emanating from the person’s clothing, according to a study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Princeton University. These judgments are made in a matter of milliseconds, and are very hard to avoid. … Given that competence is often associated with social status, the findings suggest that low-income individuals may face hurdles in relation to how others perceive their abilities — simply from looking at their clothing.

Let’s assume that the study is robust as well as that the press release is faithful to the study’s conclusions (verifying which would require a lot more work than I am willing to spare for this post – but you’ve been warned!). Getting rid of fashion trends will do little, or even nothing, to render our societies more equitable. But it merits observing that they also participate in, possibly are even predicated on, maintaining ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, demarcated by the awareness of dressing trends, ability to purchase the corresponding garments and familiarity with the prevailing ways to use them in order to incentivise certain outcomes over others on behalf of people who adhere to similar sartorial protocols.

(Aside: Such behaviour usually favours members of the elite but it’s not entirely absent outside the corresponding sociopolitical context. For example, and as a tangential case of enclothed cognition, the titular character in the 2016 Tamil film Kabali insists on wearing a blazer at all times simply because his upper-caste antagonists use their clothing to indicate their social status and, consequently, power.)

Obviously, the social and climatic facets of fashion design aren’t entirely separable. The ebb-and-flow of design trends drives consumer spending and, well, consumption whereas the stratification of individual competence – at least according to the study; certainly of likability based on status signals – sets up dressing choices as a socially acceptable proxy to substitute seemingly less prejudicial modes of evaluation. (And far from being a syllogism, many of our social ills actively promote the neoliberal consumer culture at the heart of the climate crisis.)

Then again, proxies in general are not always actively deployed. There are numerous examples from science administration as well as other walks of life. This is also one of the reasons I’m not too worried about not interrogating the study: it rings true (to the point of rendering the study itself moot if didn’t come to any other conclusions).

People considering a scientist for, say, career advancement often judge the quality of their work based on which journals they were published in, even though it’s quite well-known that this practice is flawed. But the use of proxies is justified for pragmatic reasons: when universities are understaffed and/or staff are underpaid, proxies accelerate decision-making, especially if they also have a low error-rate and the decision isn’t likely to have dire consequences for any candidate. If the resource-crunch is more pronounced, it’s quite possible that pragmatic considerations altogether originate the use of proxies instead of simply legitimising them.

Could similar decision-making pathways have interfered with the study? I hope not, or they would have strongly confounded the study’s findings. In this scenario, where scientists presented a group of decision-makers with visual information based on which the latter had to make some specific decisions without worrying about any lack of resources, we’re once again faced with yet another prompt to change the way we behave, and that’s a tall order.

Replication studies, ceiling effects, and the psychology of science

On May 25, I found Erika Salomon’s tweet:

Excellent comment thread on replication going on at the SPSP blog http://t.co/9dI72z0LGL

— Erika Salomon (@ecsalomon) May 25, 2014

The story started when the journal Social Psychology decided to publish successful and failed replication attempts instead of conventional papers and their conclusions for a Replications Special Issue (Volume 45, Number 3 / 2014). It accepted proposals from scientists stating which studies they wanted to try to replicate, and registered the accepted ones. This way, the journal’s editors Brian Nosek and Daniel Lakens could ensure that a study was published no matter the outcome – successful or not.

All the replication studies were direct replication studies, which means they used the same experimental procedure and statistical methods to analyze the data. And before the replication attempt began, the original data, procedure and analysis methods were scrutinized, and the data was shared with the replicating group. Moreover, an author of the original paper was invited to review the respective proposals and have a say in whether the proposal could be accepted. So much is pre-study.

Finally, the replication studies were performed, and had their results published.

The consequences of failing to replicate a study

Now comes the problem: What if the second group failed to replicate the findings of the first group? There are different ways of looking at this from here on out. The first person such a negative outcome affects is the original study’s author, whose reputation is at stake. Given the gravity of the situation, is the original author allowed to ask for a replication of the replication?

Second, during the replication study itself (and given the eventual negative outcome), how much of a role is the original author allowed to play when performing the experiment, analyzing the results and interpreting them? This could swing both ways. If the original author is allowed to be fully involved during the analysis process, there will be a conflict of interest. If the original author is not allowed to participate in the analysis, the replicating group could get biased toward a negative outcome for various reasons.

Simone Schnall, a psychology researcher from Cambridge writes on the SPSP blog (linked to in the tweet above) that, as an author of a paper whose results have been unsuccessfully replicated and reported in the Special Issue, she feels “like a criminal suspect who has no right to a defense and there is no way to win: The accusations that come with a “failed” replication can do great damage to my reputation, but if I challenge the findings I come across as a “sore loser.””

People on both sides of this issue recognize the importance of replication studies; there’s no debate there. But the presence of these issues calls into question how replication studies are designed, reviewed and published, with a just as firm support structure, or they all suffer the risk of becoming personalized. Forget who replicates the replicators, it could just as well become who bullies the bullies. And in the absence of such rules, replication studies are becoming actively disincentivized. Simone Schnall acceded to a request to replicate her study, but the fallout could set a bad example.

During her commentary, Schnall links to a short essay by Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman titled ‘A New Etiquette for Replication‘. In the piece, Kahneman writes, “… tension is inevitable when the replicator does not believe the original findings and intends to show that a reported effect does not exist. The relationship between replicator and author is then, at best, politely adversarial. The relationship is also radically asymmetric: the replicator is in the offense, the author plays defense.”

In this blog post by one of the replicators, the phrase “epic fail” is an example of how things could be personalized. Note: the author of the post has struck out the words and apologized.

In order to eliminate these issues, the replicators could be asked to keep things specific. Various stakeholders have suggested different ways to resolve this issue. For one, replicators should address the questions and answers raised in the original study instead of the author and her/his credentials. Another way is to regularly publish reports of replication results instead of devoting a special issue to it, and make them part of the scientific literature.

This is one concern that Schnall raises in her answers (in response to question #13):”I doubt anybody would have widely shared the news had the replication been considered “successful.”” So there’s a need to address a bias here: are journals likelier to publish replication studies that fail to replicate previous results? Erasing this bias requires publishers to actively incentivize replication studies.

A paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2012 paints a slightly different picture. It looks at the number of replication studies published in the field and pegs the replication rate at 1.07%. Despite the low rate, one of the paper’s conclusions was that among all published replication studies, most of them reported successful, not unsuccessful, replications. It also notes that since 2000, among all replication studies published, the fraction reporting successful outcomes stands at 69.4%, and that reporting unsuccessful outcomes at 11.8%.

chart_1 — Sorry about the lousy resolution. Click on the chart for a better view.

At the same time, Nosek and Lakens concede in this editorial that, “In the present scientific culture, novel and positive results are considered more publishable than replications and negative results.”

The ceiling effect

Schnall does raise many questions about the replication, including alleging the presence of a ceiling effect. As she describes it (in response to question #8):

“Imagine two people are speaking into a microphone and you can clearly understand and distinguish their voices. Now you crank up the volume to the maximum. All you hear is this high-pitched sound (“eeeeee”) and you can no longer tell whether the two people are saying the same thing or something different. Thus, in the presence of such a ceiling effect it would seem that both speakers were saying the same thing, namely “eeeeee”.

The same thing applies to the ceiling effect in the replication studies. Once a majority of the participants are giving extreme scores, all differences between two conditions are abolished. Thus, a ceiling effect means that all predicted differences will be wiped out: It will look like there is no difference between the two people (or the two experimental conditions).”

She states this as an important reason to get the replicators’ results replicated.

My opinions

// Because Schnall thinks the presence of a ceiling effect is a reason to have the replicators’ results replicated, it implies that there could be a problem with the method used to evaluate the authors’ hypothesis. Both the original and the replication studies used the same method, and the emergence of an effect in one of them but not the other implies the “fault”, if that, could lie with the replicator – for improperly performing the experiment – or with the original author – for choosing an inadequate set-up to verify the hypothesis. Therefore, one thing that Schnall felt strongly about, the scrutiny of her methods, should also have been formally outlined, i.e. a replication study is not just about the replication of results but about the replication of methods as well.

// Because both papers have passed scrutiny and have been judged worthy of publication, it makes sense to treat them as individual studies in their own right instead of one being a follow up to the other (even though technically that’s what they are), and to consider both together instead of selecting one over the other – especially in terms of the method. This sort of debate gives room for Simone Schnall to publish an official commentary in response to the replication effort and make the process inclusive. In some sense, I think this is also the sort of debate that Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus think scientific publishing should engender.

// Daniel Lakens explains in a comment on the SPSP blog that there was peer-review of the introduction, method, and analysis plan by the original authors and not an independent group of experts. This was termed “pre-data peer review”: a review of the methods and not the numbers. It is unclear to what extent this was sufficient because it’s only with a scrutiny of the numbers does any ceiling effect become apparent. While post-publication peer-review can check for this, it’s not formalized (at least in this case) and does little to mitigate Schnall’s situation.

// Schnall’s paper was peer-reviewed. The replicators’ paper was peer-reviewed by Schnall et al. Even if both passed the same level of scrutiny, they didn’t pass the same type of it. On this basis, there might be reason for Schnall to be involved with the replication study. Ideally, however, it would have been better if the replication was better formulated, with normal peer-review, in order to eliminate Schnall’s interference. Apart from the conflict of interest that could arise, a replication study needs to be fully independent to make it credible, just like the peer-review process is trusted to be credible because it is independent. So while it is commendable that Schnall shared all the details of her study, it should have been made possible for her participation to end there.

// While I’ve disagreed with Kahneman over the previous point, I do agree with point #3 in his essay that describes the new etiquette: “The replicator is not obliged to accept the author’s suggestions [about the replicators’ M.O.], but is required to provide a full description of the final plan. The reasons for rejecting any of the author’s suggestions must be explained in detail.” [Emphasis mine]

I’m still learning about this fascinating topic, so if I’ve made mistakes in interpretations, please point them out.

Featured image: shutterstock/(c)Sunny Forest