Blockchain Papers

Gordon D. Logan

I am honored and deeply touched by this Festschrift issue marking the 50th anniversary of my PhD. All of the authors are people who have meant the world to me throughout my career, including my closest collaborators and my greatest heroes. They were there in the most meaningful moments of my professional and personal life, sharing a love of psychology and a world of ideas and facts where logic and evidence prevail. Like me and unlike many friends and relatives outside the field whose eyes glaze over when I “talk psychology,” they were happy to do it anywhere on a moment's notice, in meetings, emails, and even in a line for coffee at Psychonomics. I have loved our many conversations, and I have learned a lot from them. They are always full of free-floating ideas that somehow converge to create a shared understanding of something none of us understood before. We explored new territories. We forged connections between disciplines. We developed deeper understanding of our own disciplines. The joy of discovery has been wonderful to share. I am deeply grateful for the authors’ kind words and their contributions to this special issue, which share the amazing things they discovered.It doesn't feel like 50 years. I feel the same hope for the future, the same need for one more publication, the same joy in designing experiments, and the ultimate joy of seeing the results. I feel the same joy in sharing the ideas with collaborators and the broader community. I have even learned to enjoy writing. The beat goes on and I'm still dancing. It is gratifying to hear echoes of the beat in the contributions to the Festschrift. True to my character, I can't stop myself from offering comments and questions for each of them.In the preface, Darryl, Matt, and Frederick summarize my academic and personal history. Each of them played a prominent role in that history, extending and reshaping my longstanding interests in automaticity and skill (Matt), cognitive control (Darryl), and response inhibition (Frederick), changing my life and making it better. Borrowing from my long-term interest in music, they listed six “greatest hits” from my curriculum vitae, which I feel are among my best and most influential publications. Artists have “favorite records” as well as greatest hits. My favorites include articles with each of them.The Crump et al. (2012) article on guitarists’ perception of guitar chords is dear to my heart for many reasons, not the least of which is having Gibson donate three Les Paul Junior guitars for our research. (I told my wife I felt like a rock star. She said, “Rock stars only get one guitar.”) It was easy to find skilled guitarists to test in Nashville, and testing them was great fun. Matt and I did many experiments on typing, but this one was the most fun.The Schneider and Logan (2005) article on switching tasks without switching task sets is another favorite. It was Darryl's first year research project that involved simulations, model fits, and some very cool data—an exceptional contribution for a first-year graduate student. We proposed the first stochastic accumulator model of task switching. It set the stage for a very productive and very happy collaboration, culminating in Darryl's dissertation. At the end of our meetings, I would ask whether there was anything else. Often, Darryl would give a little smile and say, “I had an idea for an experiment,” and that would become our next project.The Verbruggen and Logan (2008) article on automatic and controlled response inhibition is a highlight of the many articles we did together on the stop signal task. Frederick revived my interest in the stop signal task, addressing important issues such as sequential effects, learning and memory, and proactive control. In this article, Frederick found an elegant way to combine skill acquisition with cognitive control in the stop signal task, which has important practical implications (as Frederick documents in his article). Ultimately, the article led to a significant update of the Logan and Cowan (1984) race model (Logan et al., 2014).A personal favorite from my instance theory days is the Logan and Etherton (1994) article on what is learned during automatization. It assessed the role of attention in constructing the instances that support automatic performance, manipulating the consistency with which distractors were paired with targets in focused attention, divided attention, and dual task conditions. Performance improved more with consistent pairing, suggesting that the distractor was represented in the instance along with the target, but this advantage appeared only under divided attention and dual task conditions, which required attention to both targets and distractors. There was no advantage for consistent pairing in focused attention conditions, which directed attention to the target. It was clear that attention determines what is encoded in an instance and motivated further research on the interaction between attention and memory. I had hoped this article would have more impact because I think the interaction between attention and memory is important in many domains of cognition.Another personal favorite is the Logan (1995) article on linguistic and conceptual control of visual spatial attention. I had become interested in how cues direct attention to targets and realized that linguists have studied how language directs attention for many years. I wondered how space was represented and found better and clearer ideas in the linguistic literature on spatial relations than in the attention literature. Inspired by Landau and Jackendoff's (1993) linguistic analyses and Franklin and Tversky's (1990) memory experiments, I ran visual search experiments that cued targets with spatial relations analyzed by linguists, including above, below, front, back, left, right, next to, opposite, clockwise, and counterclockwise. Speed and accuracy varied systematically with cues in that were consistent with linguistic analyses of the of the relations and the to them. my was to attention research to and Ultimately, the article and the on the same did not have the impact I hoped I still think the questions are and the of attention research to is personal favorite I is the Logan et al. article on the which the that memory is attention We developed a memory of the and task and found that that the same of was article is a favorite because it of research on attention and memory and my interest in It and the important of and who were my for many and friends for many It felt like I was with them as we the I have for this article, but I have for my Each one is the most important article when I on and the next article most my own is with I on my first to in when was his interest in the stop signal task. was the first I with in and I was by the connections to the literature on and response I was even more by his of that literature and his to it to my next in was in the of his first stop signal project and shared the with me how of to a on without stop like the stochastic in and me how the when a stop signal is and the me a that the of was very from an of stop signal from the I was The model Cowan and I the coffee in my I to of this at least more I was to I of and the to with and who me on my with a great very I I with and and we a that our long-term has been a of and I am grateful to for as my personal clear and to my We have had more than I of in of to what I think are of the stop signal task as making in visual an of his with the stop signal task and a of the of cognitive experiments on They in from psychology and they from is a that many and many The are very both in of their to cognitive and and in of the that goes them. documents the important impact his research has had on our understanding of the and of and the stop signal task in of the race model et al., was my first and to I learned how were how were and the of with we the important of that to and it to our research. 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Gregg G. Van Ryzin

Peter John’s latest book, How Far to Nudge?: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy, is part intellectual history, part a tale of policy diffusion, and part a personal reflection on the behavioral science revolution in public policy and administration by someone who himself was one of its key rebels. John, who is a professor of political science and public policy in the United Kingdom, was an early protagonist and practitioner of behavioral and experimental approaches to public administration. In a sense, this book completes a trilogy of volumes by him on the topic: the first, Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behavior (John et al. 2011), documents cases in which John and his collaborators used behavioral insights (such as the tendency to comply with social norms) to test nudge strategies aimed at influencing citizens to recycle, volunteer, vote, and give to charity; in the second, Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (John 2017), John provides guidance on the design and implementation of randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions involving government programs and services. In How Far to Nudge?, John steps back to reflect more broadly on the origins, practices, limitations, ethics, and political implications of behavioral public policy. As he writes in the introduction: “Given the success of nudge, now is the time to broaden it out and to link it more closely to democratic practice” (p. 14). He begins by making the case that many important social, health, and economic challenges facing government have their roots in both individual and collective human behaviors. Diseases are often determined by health behaviors, for example, although John is quick to point out the structural influences (such as poverty and access to health care) that play a key role in addition to human behavior. Still, he makes a compelling argument for the important role of behavior change in many areas of public policy and administration. Next, he tells the fascinating story of the behavioral revolution in the social sciences. For those already acquainted with popular books such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman and Egan 2011), Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving (Thaler and Ganser 2015), and Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project (Lewis 2016), this story will be somewhat familiar. But John tells it from his own perspective as a political scientist and articulates the connections to public policy and administration. Amusingly, he enjoys cluing his reader in on some of the hype and self-promotion that accounts, at least in part, for the popularity of behavioral economics in the halls of government and in the public imagination. But he pays due respect as well to the important advances and insights of the likes of Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Thaler, Cass Suntein, Daniel Ariely, and others whose work over the years formed the intellectual foundations for behavioral public policy. The middle chapters of the book reflect on the practices and limitations of behavioral policy in government, a narrative informed to a large extent by John’s own extensive work in the United Kingdom and other countries applying nudge strategies to government. He discusses how nudge units were established in government agencies in the United Kingdom (especially the Behavioral Insights Team) and elsewhere and, importantly, how their continuation often depends on the contingencies of political leadership and changing priorities. Usefully, John specifies some of the key (and often unmentioned) limitations of behavioral insights in government, such as the limited range of application (mostly letters, forms, and messages), small and often temporary effects, limited generalizability, and the worry that a focus on nudge diverts the government’s attention from pursuing more substantive (and expensive) solutions to pressing social and policy problems. John also devotes a chapter to the ethics of nudging, which has been defined largely as a form of libertarian paternalism because it entails both choice and direction (nudge). John fully recognizes the dangers inherent in the creation of a “psychological state” but remains optimistic about the potential of nudging, given the generally limited and transparent nature of the nudge initiatives to date and the potential to incorporate nudge tactics into reflective, self-governance practices. Usefully, John also reminds us that public policy-making, in general, involves difficult ethical questions and that nudge is often a less intrusive instrument than laws, regulations, and other conventional instruments of government control over people’s behavior. In the last chapters, as foreshowed throughout the book, John make an original argument: nudges work well enough, but they must be made more open, democratic, and deliberative to truly sustain long-term behavior change and thus improve government and society. “Nudge plus (think)” is what he advocates. This approach envisions a behavioral public policy that leverages both System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking, following Kahneman’s well-known formulation, in the service of better outcomes for individuals and society (Kahneman and Egan 2011). Thus, John highlights ways in which nudge initiatives can incorporate citizen participation and can be made more transparent and explained more fully to citizens. In addition, he makes the point that nudge should not be just a tool of technocrats but should be decentralized to agencies, local governments, and civil society organizations to incorporate behavioral insights into their own autonomous activities. John explains: “The idea is that a combination of nudging and thinking can help the creation of an automated and self-regulating system whereby people get to their goals and where there is a synergy between social and individual aims” (p. 133). But, of course, this formulation is complicated by the implications of the very behavioral revolution John writes about. If we believe what modern psychology has to say about the large role in human behavior played by automatic thought processes (thinking fast), emotions (gut feelings), and our limited capacity for rational problem solving (bounded rationality), then conscious deliberation only gets us so far. The conscious mind is the tip of an iceberg, we have come to discover, consisting of a murky mass of evolutionary or deeply learned associations, construals, heuristics, and biases. But what John argues in his book, it seems to me, is that this conscious tip of the iceberg can nevertheless reflect on how it deals with and attempts to influence the unconscious mass of forces active below the surface. Just like a patient in psychotherapy learns to recognize and deal with the deeply buried emotions that intrude on his life, even if he cannot alter them, so too a democratic society can learn to recognize its cognitive biases and behavioral bugs and find ways, through democratic deliberation, to deal with them and thus live a better collective life. In sum, Peter John’s How Far to Nudge? provides a thoughtful, insightful and original take on the behavioral science revolution in public policy and administration. The book serves as a helpful resource for those looking for an overview of the current status of nudge in government, and it would provide a useful text for graduate courses that include a focus on behavioral public policy and administration. And yet the book is thought-provoking for those already familiar with the topic as well because, having worked extensively at applying nudge tactics in government and having read widely in the behavioral sciences, John is able to provide a uniquely informed perspective on the practices, limitations, ethics, and political implications of the behavioral turn in public policy and public administration as this approach assumes an increasingly prominent role in governments around the world.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Sonu Shamdasani

I find that one of the greatest bonds between us is our feeling for science and for what science really means. I hardly think that Freud always had a completely clear grasp of that. Ernest Jones to Marie Bonaparte, 2 July 1954 Why do the current controversies revolve around the history of psychoanalysis and the manner in which it has been written? Why such vehemence on both sides, why a ‘war’? After all, the philosophical, epistemological and political critiques of psychoanalysis never aroused such passion. Psychoanalysis was reproached by Karl Jaspers for mixing up hermeneutic understanding ( Verstehen ) and the explanation ( Erklären ) of the natural sciences, by Jean-Paul Sartre for confounding repression and ‘bad faith’, by Ludwig Wittgenstein for confusing causes and reasons, by Karl Popper for avoiding all scientific falsification, by Adolf Grünbaum for proposing an epistemically inconsistent clinical validation and by Michel Foucault for producing sexuality under the cover of unmasking it. None of this affected psychoanalysts. Even the provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus did not lead them to lose their composure. On the contrary, it is as if advocates of psychoanalysis were not perturbed by these debates because they legitimate their discipline, letting the adherents invariably escape unharmed, entrenched in the private sphere of the psychoanalytic clinic. The more Freud is debated, it is often said, the more it confirms his significance. Why then such sudden susceptibility concerning historical details, some of which on first sight appear to be quite trivial? Why is it so important for psychoanalysts to maintain the version of events given by Freud and his authorised biographers? Is it simply a question of a dispute between experts, a controversy between historians such as we often see? Not in this case, because the dispute here is not simply one between factions of historians, or of ways of interpreting the historical record. More deeply, it pits historians against a radically dehistoricised version of psychoanalysis, disguised as a ‘history of psychoanalysis’. From this perspective, similarities abound between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’, which rage elsewhere between historians, sociologists and anthropologists of science on the one side and scientistic ideologues on the other. In both cases, what is at stake is the historicisation, and correspondingly the relativisation, of ‘facts’, ‘discoveries’ and ‘truths’ ordinarily presented as atemporal and universal and shielded from the variations and contingencies of history (it is of little importance here whether psychoanalysis styles itself as a science or not, as it still nevertheless presents itself as a universal theory, a general ontology valid for all). These debates are not external to the science or the theory, because they bear on this demarcation itself: can one or should one separate the science or the theory from its history? To take up the famous Mertonian distinction, can one separate what is ‘internal’ from what is ‘external’? Can one, as Reichenbach would have it, trace a limit between the context of discovery (the anecdotal account of the emergence of concepts) and the context of justification (the properly scientific work of proof)? It is the refusal of these demarcations by the new historians of science and of psychoanalysis which has generated such scandal, because it puts into question the pretensions of this or that discipline to scientificity and to theoretical hegemony.