Psychology and "geek culture" (yeah, this'll go well)
When I wrapped up the "Virtue-signaling" series a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would stay away from science fiction-themed posts for a while. I wanted to change things up a bit. Don't get stuck in a rut. That was why I got sick of The Unmutual Political Blog. And then, well... you know the Godfather III quote. Here's the deal. The other day, an article came across my feed from Gavin Miller, "Fan of sci-fi? Psychologists have you in their sights." They baited me to click.
In case I needed another reason to have a problem with Psychology, Miller's article describes some trends over time in the field of Psychology describing the appeal of science fiction as ranging from delusional to narcissistic.
Miller's article at The Conversation is, at least, more skeptical of the nonsense being spewed by psychologists, and includes discussion of some of the more literary and thoughtful writers, singling out the great Ursula Le Guin, whom you may recall me mentioning many times recently. (Big thumbs up on Le Guin.)
However, Miller points us to recent "research" (yes, those are sarcasm quotes) by Jessica McCain, Brittany Gentile and W. Keith Campbell. "A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek Culture," (from PLOS ONE, November, 2015). Well, gee, that sounds innocent enough, right? Oy vey, this is bad.
So here's the deal. Campbell is a Psychology professor whose research is all about "narcissism." Not just the DSM classification of narcissistic personality disorder, but a broader range of things that get called "narcissism," and therein lies at least part of the problem, because with DSM disorders, you have a checklist, rigorous definitions, and yadda, yadda, yadda. That's the point of the DSM. There's a broad range of stuff, where definitions get stretched. I don't like stretching definitions. Scholarly bias. Never mind, though. This doesn't even touch on the big stuff. Anyway, Campbell and his grad students decided to go fishing for another application of his favorite topic-- narcissism.
You know the old joke that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
I'm not sure why I thought of that.
Moving on, McCain, Gentile and Campbell came up with a very broad and very weird set of activities that they defined as "engagement" with "geek culture." They "verified" their system with factor analysis, and do not get me started on factor analysis. Remember, I'm a statistician.
You can look at their list by clicking on the link I gave you, and finding Table 2 in the article. Just look at that list.
These authors aren't geeks. I am. We can smell our own. I'll get to this. It's a big part of the problem.
Anyway, McCain, Gentile and Campbell then test for statistical associations between engagement with any aspect of "geek culture," as they define it, and a variety of stuff, including things like "grandiose narcissism."
Why would engagement with "geek culture" be related to grandiose narcissism, you may ask? The authors present something called "the great fantasy migration hypothesis." Basically, the world is hard, and life is hard, so geeks are going to imagine ourselves as great fantasy heroes with great magical powers and whatnot, and eventually, we are going to lose our sense of self and reality within the fantasy worlds created by science fiction, fantasy and all of that.
Does anyone remember when Dungeons & Dragons was going to create a wave of satanism? This was a thing, back in the 1980s. How about when comic books were the great threat to the fabric of American society? I made mention of this in my wrap-up of the Virtue and virtue-signaling series, when discussing the Comics Code Authority.
Once upon a time, chess was the great threat to the moral fabric of the youth because it was an abstraction of war, and it would teach everyone to be cold-blooded psychopaths.
There is nothing new under the sun.
So, bringing this back to McCain, Gentile & Campbell, they find that there is sort of an association between "geek culture" and a lot of stuff, like "narcissism," (sarcasm quotes), but that it gets far less clear when you start factoring in demographics. Basically, they're stretching the data if you weed through the analysis because Campbell really wants to say that everything in the universe is narcissism. He has his hammer, and everything is a nail.
You're expecting me to reference Mjolnir, aren't you?
No. I won't do it. Why not? Because that's not a geek reference anymore. And that's a good place to pick up what's wrong with McCain et al.'s article.
What is it to be a geek? None of these authors have a clue. Once upon a time, Mjolnir was a geek reference. There were two primary ways to catch the reference-- the history/mythology reference, or being one of the very few people who actually read the Marvel comics that included Thor as a character. Comic books have historically been something that could be called, "geek," but within the Marvel realm, the big stuff? Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four (once upon a time)... Thor was never big in the comics. Until the Marvel movies, comic book fans might do a, "Thor? Was he in there? Oh, yeah, I guess maybe. Whatever."
Thor is famous now because the Avengers movies are big. They are popular. That makes it no longer a subculture. It's now main culture. People may not be able to spell the name of Thor's hammer, but Thor is famous, as a character.
And then it circles back around, when Neil Gaiman writes Norse Mythology. (Good. Read it.)
So, what else do McCain et al. think counts as "geek?" Computer games? Seriously? That's completely mainstream. Once upon a time, maybe that counted as "geek," but not anymore. Then, along with that, the authors include not just obscure hobbies like puppetry which... OK, that's obscure but geek? Um... stretching definitions here.
The authors then throw in "furry." If you don't know what that is, go Google it. And there's other stuff a little more in that milieu. I'm not typing it, because I don't want to attract the spambots to this blog. I have a blocker to prevent the comments from showing up, but it does show up in my email account, and I don't want to deal with it. The point, though, is that while there are people who count as geeks who happen to be into this stuff, it isn't "geek."
Then, Broadway is geek?!
None of this makes sense. I look at the author's categories of geek engagement, and as a geek, I don't know what they think a geek is. Do I know geeks who appreciate Broadway? Yes. Why? Actual people are multidimensional. But let's put it this way. Walk up to a random person on the street, and ask that person to picture, in his or her mind's eye, a geek. Do you think that person is picturing a theater kid singing "I am the very model of a modern major general!" or this week's hit adaptation of a stupid movie because that's what theater is these days?
Geek isn't the Venn diagram exclusion of everything non-mainstream. And even if it were, it couldn't include computer games!
I know geeks who, for reasons that escape me, watch at least one sport. I don't get that, but it's a thing. That doesn't mean sports are "geek." Just because some geek out there happens to watch soccer doesn't make soccer "geek." No. No, no, no. And there are plenty of people in the geek subculture who even watch whatever other sportsball games get more attention in American mainstream culture. Same principles apply to Broadway, and other elements of their list.
So, you ask me: how would I define "geek culture?"
I wouldn't. And it's not my challenge to define it because I'm not the one trying to write that silly paper.
But here's the big methodological problem when you construct a "culture" that broadly, and then look for any association between anything you can think of, and whatever you choose to define as "geek." In methodological terms, we call that "a fishing expedition." When you go on a fishing expedition, you are guaranteed to find at least some appearance of a statistical association.
And with such weakly defined concepts and weakly defined theories, it will usually be spurious. This paper is pure fishing expedition.
And of course, the fishing expedition is one of the many reasons that Psychology is undergoing a replication crisis. The less-than-scientific researchers in the discipline do this kind of thing all the time. They do a set of studies in such a way that no matter what the reality of the world is, they end up with something that is "statistically significant," even if that significance is spurious. We use the term, "p-hacking," to reference the p values that result from the process. Go check out Andrew Gelman's writings on this stuff. Fishermen then publish these spurious, statistically significant results and move on.
Try to replicate what they did, and you can't, because it's bunk. This paper is probably bunk. If you tried to replicate it, I doubt you could. It has all the telltale warning signs of un-replicable bunk.
But you know what? I doubt anyone will bother trying. Because who cares? I do. I'm a geek, an academic, I read the occasional Psychology paper, I read The Conversation (because I write for them), and I'm obsessed with the replication crisis. So, McCain et al. write a junk science paper telling geeks that we're grandiose narcissists looking to escape the world under the "great fantasy migration hypothesis," and none of the authors appear to have a clue what geek culture is. So I care, but other psychologists? They won't. So it'll stand in PLOS ONE, mostly ignored, occasionally cited, providing academic verisimilitude to the ongoing diminution of science fiction and fantasy in the arts when the authors don't appear to have a clue what geek culture is, nor what science fiction or fantasy literature are.
The Iliad or The Odyssey? Beowulf? The stuff of grandiose narcissists because they are fantasy? No. High culture. Why? Canon! Shakespeare? Shakespeare! Ghosts, witches, critters of various persuasions. The Tempest! Prospero was a wizard, and if you want a fascinating retelling, I'll point you to Jacqueline Carey's Miranda & Caliban. Yes, I've mentioned Carey before. I'm a fan. Nobody dismisses The Tempest as mere sci-fi/fantasy because it his high art! The Bard! Canon! Yet, if Jacqueline Carey writes a retelling of it, emphasizing what a villainous douchebag Prospero was, those of the McCain/Gentile/Campbell persuasion will dismiss it as the stuff of grandiose narcissists who want only to escape from the challenges of real life amid the great fantasy migration hypothesis.
It's the bloody Tempest!
To say nothing of the escapist nature of all other fiction.
PLOS ONE should not have published that paper. It is junk science. It is bunk that will probably never be formally debunked, merely because it is more likely to go ignored while other scholars go on to conduct more junk science.
What is the likelihood that any of the authors of that paper have actually read any Ursula Le Guin? Or Neal Stephenson? Or Jacqueline Carey? NK Jemisin? Alan Moore? Played D&D?
I am a quantitative political scientist. In order to get to the point that I can crunch the numbers, I need to understand the substance of the politics. What went so dramatically wrong here is that the authors have no understanding whatsoever of "geek." (And I don't even think they have a rigorous definition of narcissism, outside the DSM classification of narcissistic personality disorder.) So they went fishing.
So much badness. So much bunk.
Really, next week I want to write a Sunday post on music. I do know music.
In case I needed another reason to have a problem with Psychology, Miller's article describes some trends over time in the field of Psychology describing the appeal of science fiction as ranging from delusional to narcissistic.
Miller's article at The Conversation is, at least, more skeptical of the nonsense being spewed by psychologists, and includes discussion of some of the more literary and thoughtful writers, singling out the great Ursula Le Guin, whom you may recall me mentioning many times recently. (Big thumbs up on Le Guin.)
However, Miller points us to recent "research" (yes, those are sarcasm quotes) by Jessica McCain, Brittany Gentile and W. Keith Campbell. "A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek Culture," (from PLOS ONE, November, 2015). Well, gee, that sounds innocent enough, right? Oy vey, this is bad.
So here's the deal. Campbell is a Psychology professor whose research is all about "narcissism." Not just the DSM classification of narcissistic personality disorder, but a broader range of things that get called "narcissism," and therein lies at least part of the problem, because with DSM disorders, you have a checklist, rigorous definitions, and yadda, yadda, yadda. That's the point of the DSM. There's a broad range of stuff, where definitions get stretched. I don't like stretching definitions. Scholarly bias. Never mind, though. This doesn't even touch on the big stuff. Anyway, Campbell and his grad students decided to go fishing for another application of his favorite topic-- narcissism.
You know the old joke that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
I'm not sure why I thought of that.
Moving on, McCain, Gentile and Campbell came up with a very broad and very weird set of activities that they defined as "engagement" with "geek culture." They "verified" their system with factor analysis, and do not get me started on factor analysis. Remember, I'm a statistician.
You can look at their list by clicking on the link I gave you, and finding Table 2 in the article. Just look at that list.
These authors aren't geeks. I am. We can smell our own. I'll get to this. It's a big part of the problem.
Anyway, McCain, Gentile and Campbell then test for statistical associations between engagement with any aspect of "geek culture," as they define it, and a variety of stuff, including things like "grandiose narcissism."
Why would engagement with "geek culture" be related to grandiose narcissism, you may ask? The authors present something called "the great fantasy migration hypothesis." Basically, the world is hard, and life is hard, so geeks are going to imagine ourselves as great fantasy heroes with great magical powers and whatnot, and eventually, we are going to lose our sense of self and reality within the fantasy worlds created by science fiction, fantasy and all of that.
Does anyone remember when Dungeons & Dragons was going to create a wave of satanism? This was a thing, back in the 1980s. How about when comic books were the great threat to the fabric of American society? I made mention of this in my wrap-up of the Virtue and virtue-signaling series, when discussing the Comics Code Authority.
Once upon a time, chess was the great threat to the moral fabric of the youth because it was an abstraction of war, and it would teach everyone to be cold-blooded psychopaths.
There is nothing new under the sun.
So, bringing this back to McCain, Gentile & Campbell, they find that there is sort of an association between "geek culture" and a lot of stuff, like "narcissism," (sarcasm quotes), but that it gets far less clear when you start factoring in demographics. Basically, they're stretching the data if you weed through the analysis because Campbell really wants to say that everything in the universe is narcissism. He has his hammer, and everything is a nail.
You're expecting me to reference Mjolnir, aren't you?
No. I won't do it. Why not? Because that's not a geek reference anymore. And that's a good place to pick up what's wrong with McCain et al.'s article.
What is it to be a geek? None of these authors have a clue. Once upon a time, Mjolnir was a geek reference. There were two primary ways to catch the reference-- the history/mythology reference, or being one of the very few people who actually read the Marvel comics that included Thor as a character. Comic books have historically been something that could be called, "geek," but within the Marvel realm, the big stuff? Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four (once upon a time)... Thor was never big in the comics. Until the Marvel movies, comic book fans might do a, "Thor? Was he in there? Oh, yeah, I guess maybe. Whatever."
Thor is famous now because the Avengers movies are big. They are popular. That makes it no longer a subculture. It's now main culture. People may not be able to spell the name of Thor's hammer, but Thor is famous, as a character.
And then it circles back around, when Neil Gaiman writes Norse Mythology. (Good. Read it.)
So, what else do McCain et al. think counts as "geek?" Computer games? Seriously? That's completely mainstream. Once upon a time, maybe that counted as "geek," but not anymore. Then, along with that, the authors include not just obscure hobbies like puppetry which... OK, that's obscure but geek? Um... stretching definitions here.
The authors then throw in "furry." If you don't know what that is, go Google it. And there's other stuff a little more in that milieu. I'm not typing it, because I don't want to attract the spambots to this blog. I have a blocker to prevent the comments from showing up, but it does show up in my email account, and I don't want to deal with it. The point, though, is that while there are people who count as geeks who happen to be into this stuff, it isn't "geek."
Then, Broadway is geek?!
None of this makes sense. I look at the author's categories of geek engagement, and as a geek, I don't know what they think a geek is. Do I know geeks who appreciate Broadway? Yes. Why? Actual people are multidimensional. But let's put it this way. Walk up to a random person on the street, and ask that person to picture, in his or her mind's eye, a geek. Do you think that person is picturing a theater kid singing "I am the very model of a modern major general!" or this week's hit adaptation of a stupid movie because that's what theater is these days?
Geek isn't the Venn diagram exclusion of everything non-mainstream. And even if it were, it couldn't include computer games!
I know geeks who, for reasons that escape me, watch at least one sport. I don't get that, but it's a thing. That doesn't mean sports are "geek." Just because some geek out there happens to watch soccer doesn't make soccer "geek." No. No, no, no. And there are plenty of people in the geek subculture who even watch whatever other sportsball games get more attention in American mainstream culture. Same principles apply to Broadway, and other elements of their list.
So, you ask me: how would I define "geek culture?"
I wouldn't. And it's not my challenge to define it because I'm not the one trying to write that silly paper.
But here's the big methodological problem when you construct a "culture" that broadly, and then look for any association between anything you can think of, and whatever you choose to define as "geek." In methodological terms, we call that "a fishing expedition." When you go on a fishing expedition, you are guaranteed to find at least some appearance of a statistical association.
And with such weakly defined concepts and weakly defined theories, it will usually be spurious. This paper is pure fishing expedition.
And of course, the fishing expedition is one of the many reasons that Psychology is undergoing a replication crisis. The less-than-scientific researchers in the discipline do this kind of thing all the time. They do a set of studies in such a way that no matter what the reality of the world is, they end up with something that is "statistically significant," even if that significance is spurious. We use the term, "p-hacking," to reference the p values that result from the process. Go check out Andrew Gelman's writings on this stuff. Fishermen then publish these spurious, statistically significant results and move on.
Try to replicate what they did, and you can't, because it's bunk. This paper is probably bunk. If you tried to replicate it, I doubt you could. It has all the telltale warning signs of un-replicable bunk.
But you know what? I doubt anyone will bother trying. Because who cares? I do. I'm a geek, an academic, I read the occasional Psychology paper, I read The Conversation (because I write for them), and I'm obsessed with the replication crisis. So, McCain et al. write a junk science paper telling geeks that we're grandiose narcissists looking to escape the world under the "great fantasy migration hypothesis," and none of the authors appear to have a clue what geek culture is. So I care, but other psychologists? They won't. So it'll stand in PLOS ONE, mostly ignored, occasionally cited, providing academic verisimilitude to the ongoing diminution of science fiction and fantasy in the arts when the authors don't appear to have a clue what geek culture is, nor what science fiction or fantasy literature are.
The Iliad or The Odyssey? Beowulf? The stuff of grandiose narcissists because they are fantasy? No. High culture. Why? Canon! Shakespeare? Shakespeare! Ghosts, witches, critters of various persuasions. The Tempest! Prospero was a wizard, and if you want a fascinating retelling, I'll point you to Jacqueline Carey's Miranda & Caliban. Yes, I've mentioned Carey before. I'm a fan. Nobody dismisses The Tempest as mere sci-fi/fantasy because it his high art! The Bard! Canon! Yet, if Jacqueline Carey writes a retelling of it, emphasizing what a villainous douchebag Prospero was, those of the McCain/Gentile/Campbell persuasion will dismiss it as the stuff of grandiose narcissists who want only to escape from the challenges of real life amid the great fantasy migration hypothesis.
It's the bloody Tempest!
To say nothing of the escapist nature of all other fiction.
PLOS ONE should not have published that paper. It is junk science. It is bunk that will probably never be formally debunked, merely because it is more likely to go ignored while other scholars go on to conduct more junk science.
What is the likelihood that any of the authors of that paper have actually read any Ursula Le Guin? Or Neal Stephenson? Or Jacqueline Carey? NK Jemisin? Alan Moore? Played D&D?
I am a quantitative political scientist. In order to get to the point that I can crunch the numbers, I need to understand the substance of the politics. What went so dramatically wrong here is that the authors have no understanding whatsoever of "geek." (And I don't even think they have a rigorous definition of narcissism, outside the DSM classification of narcissistic personality disorder.) So they went fishing.
So much badness. So much bunk.
Really, next week I want to write a Sunday post on music. I do know music.
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