A. I got six, but not because I'm some kind of genius—I don't think I am, for the record—but because I have some experience with these kinds of puzzles, and a strong hunch as to what this one was doing. I especially liked the reasoning behind the answer: "the brain cannot process 'of'." If that were the case, we wouldn't be able to read, speak, or understand the word! The real answer is that we solve such puzzles by using shortcuts: most people glance at each word, and quickly figure whether there's an F in it or not: "finished," "files," and "scientif-ic." We skip over "of" because it's common preposition, and we often simply jump over it very quickly when we read (we'll sometimes even think the missing word is there if we don't read carefully enough).

Yes, I know I forgot to write "a" in the previous sentence. Did you catch it?

What this puzzle demonstrates is the very human tendency to use shortcuts and to automate behavior as much as possible—that is, we try to make tasks take as little attention as possible. If you're a good reader, much of the work of reading is automatic.

I did the puzzle by taking my computer cursor and examining each letter. I knew what the puzzle was doing, and I knew of the eye and brain's tendency to skip over common words, but even so, halfway through the puzzle, I was fighting the temptation to just read it at my normal speed.

So if you were caught, don't feel foolish: take pride in how well your automatic reading process works!

Q. What about the science of psychology: how do we predict what people are going to do when we can't really know what's going on in an individual's head, and laboratory studies are artificial conditions that may not apply to the real world? (This question is a paraphrase of the original to make it clearer.)

A. These are problems, all right. I could write an entire chapter explaining how psychology deals with these problems, but I'm going to try to keep it short. We really don't know what goes on in people's heads, and for the most part, we don't try to describe it. In fact, research psychology rarely considers individuals at all. That's because there are too many factors operating on people...or, if you prefer, people really are unique, and we can't expect them to behave like each other all the time. Instead, we predict in terms of groups, or probabilities: if we play a new song to people over and over, we predict that for most people, the more they hear the song, the more they'll like it. We can't say that one person will like it more, but we know that more people will than not. This isn't necessarily bad science: physicists can't guarantee which atom in a sample of uranium will decay next, but we can predict how many of them will.

As for laboratories, that's the way science is done. Going back to physics, the work they do is usually under highly artificial conditions. But the way we understand the world is by studying phenomena in isolation. If we're fortunate, we are able to re-examine the question in the field, to see if it still works in nature. Medicine, biology, chemistry, and physics all do a great deal of work in artificial conditions, but nobody finds this strange or noteworthy. As usual, psychology has an image problem.

Q. Continuing from the previous question, psychology deals with theories, not with facts. When do they become facts? How can psychology predict how people are going to behave? (Again, paraphrased for clarity.)

A. In science, theories don't have to become "facts." Facts are what we observe. They are the real phenomenon out there, discovered and recorded in experiments. Theories are the explanations for why things happened as they did. Going back to a football analogy, the score at the end of the game is a fact. That number isn't going to change. What changes are the explanations for why one particular team beat another one.

Just like in sports, the explanations can become "conventional wisdom," meaning everybody just believes it's true, and stops trying to challenge it...until some genius comes along and sees a flaw in the conventional wisdom and proves it wrong.

Academics in all fields are comfortable with this idea. It's true outside of academics, too, although people might pretend that we never change our minds. Consider that once upon a time, people were absolutely convinced that humans were never going to fly. A couple of gents from Ohio proved them wrong. Now we think anybody who believes humans shouldn't fly is an amusing throwback, and we congratulate ourselves on knowing the truth. Suppose five years from now they discover that people who fly are exposed to more cosmic rays because they have less atmosphere to filter them away, and therefore they are at higher risk of cancer? Conventional wisdom may revert once again.

But theories can become "facts," or almost. We call them "laws." A law is a theory that is so well supported by the evidence that we don't think it's every going to be overruled. Newton's Laws of Motion are very well established and thoroughly supported, although Einstein had to modify them a bit to deal with objects moving at nearly the speed of light. Biology has evolution, a theory so well supported by the evidence that it's all but unthinkable that it will be discarded. Psychology has only two laws that I am aware of: the Law of Effect, which says that if an organism gets a reward after doing something, it will be more likely to do it again, and the Law of Reciprocity, which says that if you do a favor for me, I will feel pressured to do a favor for you.

To get to the last part of the question, if I can belabor the sports analogy one more time, a fan's theories about his team helps him to predict who's going to win the next game, but he's hardly troubled by the idea that he could be wrong, and so could his theory. Sports predictions are frequently wrong. That's what makes watching the game exciting. In science, as in sports, we act as though theories are truth, but we always try to remember that a clever person (such as the person who asked this question) may find hidden flaws in it and come up with a better idea. And then our understanding of people improves by that little bit more.

Submit your own question: email me at dushayr@morrisville.edu

See earlier "Ask Dr. Bob" pages:

2003

August 25
September 1
September 15
October 20
November 17

2004

January 26
February 16
March 21
August 23

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