Just to continue on my beat of troubling narratives of achievement & cognition... mind-blowing to consider recent points made about social cognition and the flip of our deficit narratives
Let me try to put this in non-jargon terms. For years, it's been claimed on "classic" cognition tasks that lower social class (broadly speaking) predicts worse performance.
But what happens when you look at social cognition tasks that are thought to rely on the same core factors (like working memory)?
In fact, when you start to realize that SOME ways we look at cognition have invoked social processes more than others, you can begin to better explain some of the mixed effects in the research.
"Of particular interest to the current work, another underlying reason why the relationship between social class and cognitive performance is unreliable concerns how researchers conceptualize cognitive performance."
This fundamental failure to consider a strengths-based interpretation can be huge -- for instance children paying attention to multiple social cues during a task has been interpreted as a measure of a deficit in selective attention.
But a completely different story is possible: "Given that no differences emerged in neural reactivity or in memory performance to the attended channel, it could be that this work captured lower social class advantages in the ability to socially multitask"
One lens on this kind of difference brought by this paper is to consider differences as a signal for domain specific cognition, not deficit. "Social class operates as a potent psychological context that shapes cognition and neurodevelopment in crucial ways across the lifespan."
And if we take seriously a strengths-based approach to the cognition of these children, a new world unfolds where we see how much the benefits can cascade. In my humble opinion...what a beautiful set of strategies:
Greater active listening. Greater turn taking. Greater ability to consolidate multiple perspectives. A focus on joint contributions (which, tragically, is a kind of focus that can often not be rewarded by individualistic classrooms). And even if you're one of those "whatever pure cognitive power is the only thing I care about!!" (you're no psychologist then), "managing and acting on multiple perspectives in a group project would heavily recruit executive functioning and working memory processes"
This is the kind of story that makes me say to myself, do we really know what we think we know. Have we really asked what kind of problem-solving runs our world, and what we value. It's important to see just how wrong we can be when our mental model for cognition or ability itself might be the thing that's wrong.
Great waves of change have come through so much of what we thought we knew.
@grimalkina I was taken aback when I heard someone say, "there are no such things as scientific facts". Facts are current values. They may change in response to new data.
@woo this to me is honestly one of the very hardest things about communicating about science. A great deal of people want only facts, and sometimes they are right that we have situations where you must communicate hard and cold and fast. But science is about evidence and probabilities and an ongoing practice.
@grimalkina I am sure you are aware, but the whole literature on Joint Cognitive Systems and the whole domain that came out of it studying experts at work may be an interesting other angle into this same problem?
Finally if you, like me, occasionally encounter some individual in tech giving a treatise on how a history of minor group differences on highly selected cognitive tasks represent some "natural" division of ability that he takes to be predictive of all work possible in a domain (a certain memo from a large tech company comes to mind), you can thwack the citations in this work down on them & say it's really too bad those same tasks in other contexts show evidence for deficit in privilege.
It is my habit to reach out once a week or so to tell someone on social media how much I value their stream.
I think I have not told you, or not told you recently enough, so I will tell you:
Your work, and your sharing of it, makes my life better.
Sometimes it surprises me, which makes my life better, and sometimes it gives me the data and analysis I need to back my intuition up. Sometimes it does both.
> how a history of minor group differences on highly selected cognitive tasks represent some "natural" division of ability that he takes to be predictive of all work possible in a domain.
Why does circumstantial, point in time snapshot, judgmental, mutually exclusive subset logic, instead of inclusive union set logic almost always get applied to grouping & classification of human behavior?
Point of wonder: Each person has multiple, unique finger tip whorls.
@grimalkina I went down a weird rabbit hole a few weeks ago around the question of whether giraffes can swim.
The thought NOW is that they can, but even fifteen years ago the more general thinking was they could not.
I ended up making a tool to quickly create sets of date-bounded Google searches and it was fascinating how easily I was able to trace the changing thinking about swimming giraffes.
I think we way overestimate how static our knowledge is.
This is one of the reasons I dislike the advice "stay informed" when it comes to online literacy, bc it implies that complete knowledge/understanding is a digital state: you either have it or you don't.
Much more realistic to me is the idea of developing a rich network of resources that use the expertise and authority of others to guide you to a useful place to either begin or refresh your knowledge/awareness/understanding of a topic, be it swimming giraffes or otherwise.
@grimalkina Love this thread. Once upon a time, I was a psychology major; I was returning to the university after a few years away and was interested in studying decision-making and motivation. I expected to spend a lot of time on cognitive/personality-focused courses, but I realized almost immediately that social psychology was where it was at.
@maxleibman I'm happy you appreciated it/and have this in your background too!! To me so much of this stuff is at the heart of our biggest questions about the people around us
@grimalkina I'm no psychologist, but this rings true to me - I've had a theory for a while:
We privileged, specialized folks have enough capital that many problems can be solved using service providers. I can call a plumber, a mechanic, a handyman when I need something done. I don't need to rely on people in my network, and they don't need to rely on me. So, certain social muscles don't get flexed, and community isn't built.
@grimalkina I went to a comprehensive school with Upper, Middle & Lower streams (subtle, huh?) There was a Youth Centre on site. I went there too. I was always amazed how different arithmetic ability at the darts board was from mathematical performance in school. They saw the point of darts. Their Dad played darts at the pub. My Dad was a mechanical engineer who didn't drink. Our needs and expectations were very different.
@grimalkina Interesting. Thanks for translating into normal English. Frankly, "social cognition and the flip of our deficit narratives" seemed like words pulled at random out of a basket. The next sentence, "Let me try to put this in non-jargon terms," is what kept me reading.
@emjonaitis by standardized do you mean commonly used in the literature and empirically validated in at least some properties? Yes although I'm not a methods expert on these except for theory of mind. Examples they give for social versions of the classics are visual perspective taking (spatial), mental state inferences (working memory), theory of mind tasks (exec functioning), visual gaze paradigm (cog flexibility), there's a nice table with cites in the paper plus some commentary on debates
@grimalkina I mean like — is it something that could be used in a clinic? Are there norms, is there a kit one can use so that people can trust that it’s being done more or less the same way across centers, etc.
@emjonaitis I'd check out the lit as cited under these different tasks. I imagine it's a blend of some lab research methods only but some with some clinical application, like I think quite a few theory of mind tasks are used in clinical settings and I'm sure working memory tasks are part of early childhood work in some settings. But that's crossing over into very diverse areas of protocol and assessment that I really don't know well and there's probably massive variation in practitioner use
@emjonaitis they propose a starting taxonomy: "We recognize that some facets of cognition might overlap and could be tested using the same or similar tasks (e.g., the director task most likely tests both executive functioning and spatial reasoning at the same time;
cognitive flexibility tasks also recruit executive functioning and working memory processes). Finally, we note that this taxonomy is by no means exhaustive, but rather is a starting point for researchers ..."
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