Advance Planning

Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority are almost certainly the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control--a basic argument of almost all social psychology.

A familiar pose:  Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram

Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival's best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:

Michael Almereyda's Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda's screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder's performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams' entire life.  

No release date has been announced and no trailer is available yet. The best substitute I could find was this interview. This is not a film that's likely to be shown at the mall, so we'll have to pay attention in order to see it. Watch this space.

The best source of information about Milgram's life and work is Tom Blass's book, The Man Who Shocked the World.

The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo's prison simulation, a study closely related to Milgram's work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Phil Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it's worth checking out if you can find it.

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The Dirty Dozen(*) of 2014

April Fools

Unfortunately, these politicians are not joking.

The Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth.

                                                                   Rep. John Shimkus, R-IL

Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?
                                                                  Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-CA

In case we had forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is? It's a snowball, just from outside here. It's very, very cold out.

                                                                 Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, Chair

                                                   Environment and Public Works Committee

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Snow Job

A Blow to Baseball

Concussions are not as big an issue in baseball as they are in boxing, football or hockey, but they are a problem. Players can collide with a wall or one another on the field or basepaths. Batters can be hit in the head with a pitch, and pitchers with a batted ball. At greatest risk are catchers, whose facemasks are routinely jarred by foul tips. Concussions account for about 2% of time lost, and are increasing at a rate of 14% per year. Although baseball has a seven-day disabled list specifically for concussion victims, there is no universal time off standard. Players can return if they show no symptoms, pass a series of physical and mental tests, and have the approval of the team doctor.

© Getty Images

What makes baseball attractive for study purposes is the fact that individual performance can be quantified easily. A research team head by Jeffrey Bazarian at the University of Rochester compared the performance of 66 position players (non-pitchers) who suffered concussions from 2007 through 2013 on seven offensive metrics: at bats, batting average, on-base percentage, home runs, slugging percentage, OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage), strikeouts and walks. (Of course, these seven measures are not independent.) These data were calculated for the two weeks before the concussion (pre-event), the two weeks immediately after the player's return (post-event), and the period between 4 and 6 weeks after his return (long term post-event). To control for the possibility that performance was changed by time off alone, they computed the same measures for 68 players granted leave for paternity or bereavement. The analysis statistically controlled for position (catcher vs. non-catcher) and number of days off.

The results showed significant immediate post-event declines for concussion victims on four of the measures: batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS.  Overall, the players coming back from paternity or bereavement leave showed a slight improvement, suggesting there may be some value in mid-season rest. The concussion victims continued to hit more poorly relative to the leave group during the long term post-event period, but the differences were not statistically significant. Here are the means:

Batting Average

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.249	.227	.261
Leave	.255	.271	.269

On-Base Percentage

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.315	.287	.318
Leave	.331	.332	.333

Slugging Percentage

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.393	.347	.398
Leave	.393	.433	.404

OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging)

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.708	.633	.715
Leave	.724	.765	.736

The results suggest that these ballplayers had not fully recovered from their concussions before returning to action. The authors mention several possible explanations for the performance decline, including poorer visual acuity, slower reaction times, and problems with balance. Hitting a baseball thrown at 90 mph from a distance of 60 feet requires optimal performance of all these systems. However, the two measures most clearly associated with “seeing the ball,” strikeouts and walks, did not show significant change. Maybe the batters were hitting the ball at the same rate, but not hitting it as solidly.

I can understand why baseball players feel pressure to return to the field after an injury. The mean salary is slightly over $4 million, a loss to the team of almost $25,000 per game for time spent on the disabled list. This study suggests, however, that keeping the player on the bench longer might benefit not only the player but also the team.

Post Script

When this study was reported in the New York Times, the reporter interviewed Dr. Gary Green, Medical Director for Major League Baseball. The article states:

Dr. Green was . . . unimpressed with the study, which he said had major methodological problems and lacked proper controls. “You really can't draw many conclusions from it. If it shows anything it shows that the batting parameters—strikeouts and walks—are actually fairly consistent before and after injury.”

Green said he felt that there was no way to distinguish the changes the study found from ordinary variations over the course of the season that happens with all players.

There are several problems with Dr. Green's comments. Of course, no one is denying that there are consistent differences between players in batting performance. Since this study is a within-subjects design, one of its strengths is that it permits these individual differences to be statistically eliminated, allowing a more precise estimate of the effects of concussions. It was also disingenuous of Dr. Green to mention only strikeouts and walks, while ignoring the four other performance measures that are likely to be of equal or greater interest to the team management.

More importantly, Dr. Green has a fundamental misunderstanding of the logic of research design. When results are statistically significant, that means they are unlikely to be explained by ordinary variability over the course of the season. For example, if the probability of a result were less than .01, the likelihood of this result occuring by chance is less than one in one hundred. The probabilities of the four results reported in the above four tables were less than .005, .01, .004 and .003, respectively.

In my opinion, a reporter has a responsibility to do more than quote spokespersons on both sides of a controversy when one of them makes erroneous or implausible statements. Letting such remarks go unchallenged is a form of false balancing. The reporter should have pressed Dr. Green to explain what methodological problems he found with the study. He also should have briefly explained the meaning of statistical significance to the reader. If he felt uncomfortable saying these things in his own voice, he could have called one of the authors of the study and asked him or her to respond to Dr. Green.

Of course, this presumes that the reporter knows enough about research design to be skeptical of Dr. Green's remarks.

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