Verbal Overshadowing and The Art of Rationality

Both of the studies linked to at the top of this post, on which the entire post is based, have been discredited. Even if they were true, I think it was a stretch to go from those to postulating a generalized verbal overshadowing bias.

With the benefit of hindsight I can say that this post was probably a mistake, which leaves me a bit dumbfounded at its karma score of 61 and endorsement by Newsome. When I scrolled down to the bottom I saw that I had already downvoted it, which made me even more confused.

It's not clear that the effect is really there, and certainly isn't as strong as originally thought:

http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/11438/the-decline-effect-haunts-science/

U.Cal-Santa Barbara psychology professor Jonathan Schooler has a problem. The certitude of a phenomenon that made him a rock star in academic circles — he called it “verbal overshadowing,” and he published the results 20 years ago — is beginning to break down. And its fragility is calling the entire scientific method into question.

It occurs to me that verbal overshadowing of feelings may be some of what people are complaining of when they consider explaining to constitute explaining away. It's a mechanism by which the explanation does, in fact, overshadow the feelings.

I am not a psychologist, but I do know that our current plan (of, for example, thinking about the brainteaser cases), is definitely not the way to develop actual expertise.

So what do the studies you read say about the right way to develop verbal expertise?

(Edit) You can pretty much ignore this comment, but you should read pangloss' responses below. I found them enlightening.

I am not a psychologist, but I do know that our current plan (of, for example, thinking about the brainteaser cases), is definitely not the way to develop actual expertise.

Personally, I think there are two extremes at studying something like this. One is to work from the edge cases toward the general/common cases and the other is to work from the general/common cases toward the edges. Some gradients in the middle certainly apply.

My hunch is that our perceptions of the common cases have been painted over by too many other ways of life/thinking. Rationality can have trouble getting its point through the layers. The edge cases make more sense to flesh out because the edge cases are explicitly designed to force specific ways of life/thinking into choosing between one or more well-defined options.

Edge cases also have the advantage of Jargon. We can make up our own words to mean something that we were not able to express previously and, by definition, be correct. While this is less amusing than describing it in laymen's terms it certainly gets the problem defined. Working from the edges with new descriptions is a long process and one easy enough to mess up. Pigeonholing is a great risk and we can describing large swaths of general/common cases with a new word is dangerous.

General cases have the advantage that they can provide a foundation that will instantaneously apply to related cases. The network can build faster but the definitions may not be as clear-cut. A word used to describe wine can be used to describe faces (e.g. bitter) and people will be able to follow the conversation. The danger this time is generalizing terms and cases so that we are no longer able to distinguish between specific concepts.

All that being said, language is nifty. Learning how to work with it correctly would certainly be useful.

(Note) I am making a fine distinction between pigeonholing and generalizing that may exist only in my head. I see pigeonholing as taking large numbers of varied things and trying to separate them into ill-defined categories that force more variance than is really necessary. I see generalizing as taking large numbers of varied things and slopping them into categories that begin to erase the variances. If someone else knows better terms for this, please let me know.

... this seems to explain why, if you're a music critic too long, you start to forget why you liked music.

(I still can't go to a gig without having a notebook handy, and can hardly remember anything that I haven't actually taken notes on right there and then.)

This has answered a decades-old mystery for me. Thank you.

So that's why I write half a comment, realize that's not what I'm thinking, delete it, repeat so often!

Regarding the wine experts: if I understood correctly their recognition of the same wine later is not impaired by their verbal description of it's taste. But I wonder how accurate their description is, are there even the right words to describe the taste of a wine? I suspect that they just have build up some standard associations of what word to attribute to what taste and then just regurgitate them. If you trained this a lot you can probably do it on autopilot and therefore don't have to really think, therefore your taste memory is not impaired. That would be my ad-hoc explanation. What do you think?

PS: the "doing without thinking" part would be in contrast to non-experts who would have to deliberately reason and look for the correct words to describe the taste.

In fact, the studies on Insight Puzzles in particular (i.e. verbal overshadowing with respect to explaining the actual process by which one achieved the solution to a problem), suggest that those of us who engage in verbalization tasks relating to our reasoning and inferences (say, those of us dedicating a lot of time and energy to writing posts or comments about it), had better figure out how to train our Generalized Explicit Verbal Thinking Process not to drop the ball when it comes to thinking about reasoning.

See also this comment, about verbal overshadowing of other types of thought processes, such as the ones involved in motivation and emotional belief.

Good post. Probably the most important part of rationality, as far as I can see, is knowing how your brain actually works. Knowing its biases is a big part of that, but it also includes having a rough idea of the different structures in your brain, what they do, and how they interact with each other.

Of course, we all have different top-level circuitry, which makes this rather difficult, and largely the product of rigorous self-examination. (As far as I can tell, our low-level circuitry is more or less universal).