Thursday, July 13, 2017

Using Cognitive Science to Teach About Sex


Sex is a wonderful thing that has potentially life-altering consequences—particularly for teens.  Teen pregnancy can derail educational opportunities.  Sexually transmitted diseases from unprotected sex can have lifelong consequences. 
Because sex is so consequential, sex education is a routine part of teen education, though regions vary in the content of that education.  Some areas of the United States focus primarily on “abstinence only” education that asks teens to refrain from having sex at all.  Other regions have a broader base for their sex education that suggests that teens wait to have sex until they are older, but also provides information about contraception and ways to prevent sexually transmitted infections. 
The best possible outcome for sex education programs is for teens to have an appreciation for the desirability of sex and for them to be able to engage in healthy sexual behavior.  The longer that teens wait to initiate having sex and the more that they practice safe sex (like using condoms) the less likely that they will suffer from the potential negative consequences of having sex.
The most effective programs take a broad-based approach to sex education.  They provide facts about sexual function and healthy sexual practices.  They provide information about risks.  They also give teens practice having difficult conversations about saying no and using condoms.  In addition, they give homework to teens to speak to pharmacists about condoms in order to reduce their anxiety about buying them at the store.
A fascinating paper by Valerie Reyna and Britain Mills in the August, 2014 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General explored whether a sex education curriculum could be improved by using an understanding of differences between the way teens and adults learn about risks. 
Valerie Reyna and her colleagues have developed a comprehensive model of learning they call fuzzy trace theory.  One of the components of this model is that people store information in a number of different ways.  They learn about the surface of what they were told as well as the gist, which is a summary of the broad meaning of what they were told.
An interesting component of this theory is that adults tend to focus on the gist of what they learn, but that teens often focus on the surface details. 
In the case of sex education, this can be a problem, because many of the facts that teens learn about the consequences of unprotected sex are taught as probabilities.  For example, teens may be taught that the chances of getting pregnant after having unprotected sex are about 1 in 12.  That means that heterosexuals who repeatedly have unprotected sex are highly likely to create a pregnancy. 
Adults readily store this gist information, but teens tend to get focused on the details and remember the probability.  Consequently, they judge unprotected sex as less risky than they should.
In order to overcome this bias in teens, Reyna and Mills took an established sex education curriculum (called Reducing the Risk) and modified it to include more focus on gist level information and less focus on details that teens might remember in ways that would reduce their assessment of the severity of the risks of unsafe sex. 
In a randomized experiment, over 700 teens from three states were assigned either to the original Reducing the Risk curriculum, the modified curriculum that included more gist information, or a control condition that focused on communication skills. The classes in each condition involved a total of 16 hours of instructions with some homework.
The teens were given assessments of their sexual behavior and their attitudes and beliefs about sex before the classes and several times afterward with a final assessment a year after taking the class to which they were assigned.
A year after taking the class, teens who took either curriculum felt they were better equipped to say no if they did not want to have sex, were better prepared to use protection during sex, and had a better understanding of the risks unprotected sex than those in the control condition.
In addition, a year after the class, fewer people who took one of the two classes were deciding to become sexually active than those in the control condition.  Those students who took the course that focused on gist level information were least likely of all the groups to become sexually active.   For those students who were sexually active, those who took the course that focused on gist had fewer partners than those who took the standard curriculum or those in the control condition.  
In addition, the students who took the class that focused on gist also had a better understanding of social norms about safe sex than those who took the standard curriculum or those in the control condition.
That said, once students became sexually active, they engaged in about the same number of acts of unprotected sex and expressed about the same degree of intention to engage in safe sex regardless of whether they took one of the sex education classes or not.
Overall, these results suggest that a broad-based sex education curriculum does help reduce the amount of risky sexual behavior that teens engage in.  In particular, it can increase knowledge, decrease the likelihood of becoming sexually active, and potentially reduce the number of sexual partners that teens engage with.  Using an understanding of the way teens learn can improve the effectiveness of sex education, and it can help teens to develop more accurate knowledge about the risks associated with unprotected sex.
This is just another way that research in cognitive science can be used to improve the way people learn.

Friday, July 7, 2017

Saving Face by Using Ambiguous Language


When we use language, it seems so easy to understand what other people are saying that it is hard to appreciate the complexity of the act of carrying on a conversation.  Obviously, we miscommunicate at times, but most of the time, we do a good job of understanding what other people mean and making ourselves understood.
It is particularly striking that we are so good at communicating when we realize how often we do not say directly what we mean to other people. 
Even in everyday situations, we often speak indirectly.  For example, you might ask a colleague “Can you open the door?”  You are not literally asking this colleague whether she is capable of opening the door.  You are asking for her help. 
In addition to this indirect speech, we use a lot of terms whose meanings are ambiguous.  For example, in the previous sentence, I used the phrase “a lot.”  What does that mean.  It means more than a few and not as many as a ton but it does not refer to a specific number.
We use these ambiguous terms for many reasons.  One reason is that specific values may not be available (or all that relevant).  I don’t know exactly how many ambiguous terms there are in English, but a lot seems like a reasonable description of them, and so I use that term. 
An interesting paper by Thomas Holtgraves in the August, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines the role people’s beliefs about saving face on the way we understand ambiguous words.
Whenever we communicate with someone else, we are presenting something about ourselves to others.  The public view of our selves is called our face.  We want to manage the impression we give to others and to present as positive a face as possible.  In addition, most of the time we don’t want to put our conversation partners in a situation in which they will lose face in our interaction.
For example, suppose a friend cooks you a meal.  At the end of the meal, you can say, “I liked it.”  The word “like” is ambiguous, and so you can use it for a range of attitudes toward the meal, but it allows your conversation partner to maintain a positive impression while you are talking.
If people are sensitive to this use of language, then they should assume that when people use ambiguous evaluations like this when talking with friends, their actual impression of the object is less good than when there is no reason to be worried the face of their conversation partner.
To test this possibility, the researcher had people read fictitious conversations between people.  Sometimes, the speaker was evaluating an item (like a home-cooked meal) that was made by the hearer.  They used ambiguous words such as “liked,” “loved,” “good,” and “excellent.”  Other times, the speaker was evaluating an item that was made by a third person, so that the face of the hearer was not involved.  For example, Sue might ask Jenny whether she liked the meal that Harry cooked, and Jenny might reply, “I liked it.”  Then, participants rated how much they thought the speaker actually liked the item.
Consistent with the idea that people are concerned about preserving face in conversations, participants rated that the speaker liked the object (such as the meal) less when they used an ambiguous word and were talking to the person who created the item than when they were talking to a person who did not make the item.  That is, people assume that the speaker is trying to help the hearer save face by not telling the hearer exactly what they thought of their product.
In other studies, Holtgraves demonstrated a similar effect with words that refer to frequencies and quantities like often or sometimes.  In this case, the speaker was telling the hearer that the hearer had a negative quality.  For example, Sue might tell Jenny “You sometimes have bad breath.”  Or, Sue and Jenny might be talking about Harry and Sue might say “he sometimes has bad breath.” 
In this case, participants thought the speaker meant that the ambiguous word to refer to a higher frequency when it was used to save face than when it wasn’t.  That is, telling Jenny she sometimes has bad breath means that she has it more often than telling Jenny that Harry sometimes has bad breath.
These studies demonstrate that a lot of the complexity of using language properly is not a result of the language itself, but rather a result of the way we use language to manage our social interactions.  Because we are sensitive to people’s need to preserve a positive public face, we use the ambiguity of language to help them do that.
Ambiguous words are helpful, because they do not require us to come out and criticize other people forcefully when we want to give them bad news.  Instead, we can soften the blow and make the conversation go more smoothly by giving the hearer some wiggle room in how they interpret what is said.