The Compleat Aussie Academic

I've been contemplating writing a guide for the American academic who takes up a position at an Australian University. It would include the kinds of things that don't appear in other guides to the country--the 'unadvertised' stuff. A few that come to mind today:

• Australian students (certainly those who study psychology) don't like to buy books after the first year of uni, and often their instructors merely suggest books, rather than require them for the final exam. A couple of reps from academic publishers told me that it is really difficult to sell textbooks here (compared to the States), even though there isn't really a huge difference in price (maybe 5-10% higher here).
  
• Three-hole punch loose-leaf notebooks are available here, but the two-hole paper punch and notebook are much more the norm. Why anyone prefers just to keep their papers in such a notebook (the two holes are near the center of the page, leaving the tops and bottoms hanging around pretty loosely) is a mystery to me. Of course, this mystery goes in both directions. I once asked a student to use my American three-hole punch with a three-hole notebook for a lab project, and she responded, "Why?"
  
• They're called brackets, not parentheses, here. I don't think there is a way to differentiate between () and [] in normal Aussie speech, although perhaps you could say "square brackets" when referring to the latter.  And, quotes (' ') are referred to as "inverted commas."
  
• If you don't have the rank of Professor, be happy being addressed as "Dr." Of course, the students will probably call you by your first name anyway. In fact, the only people who don't use my first name when they first meet me are usually international students from Canada or the U.S. Back in Atlanta, where much of the etiquette is full of strong Southern tones, I worked with a PhD student who called me "Dr. Vanman" the entire five years I knew her--even though I repeatedly insisted that she call me "Eric."
  
• The document created by a Master's student here is called a "dissertation" and the one produced by a PhD student is called a "thesis." That's exactly opposite of the American convention.
  
• PhD students here don't normally have to defend their thesis orally.  In fact, the examiners of the thesis don't even come from one's own university.  When the student submits his or her thesis, it's sent to two examiners with an international reputation who have 6-8 weeks to write a report about the thesis. The student then responds to any suggestions/criticisms when the reports come back. Back in the States, a student gives an oral presentation of their dissertation, followed by questions from their dissertation committee and the audience. Then, they continue with another 1-2 hours of interviews with the 4-5 members of the dissertation committee. The dissertation committee is made up entirely of faculty members from the university, unless there is a need to have someone outside the university with special expertise. Finally, after the defense, there's usually a celebration with champagne and nibbles. Here, because the examination process carries on over several months, it's much harder to feel like one is done at some particular point.
• Australian academics like really, really long PhD theses. I was the examiner for one that was nearly 400 pages long. By contrast, my own PhD dissertation was about 50 pages long.  This norm appears to be changing, as international assessors of Aussie theses often refuse to examine such long documents.
  
• Australian universities like forms. There's a specific form for any activity here that a student undertakes. It's driving me nuts.
  
• Australian undergraduate students like to focus on their "Assignments" during the semester (they can usually tell you exactly how many they have across all their subjects), and then, and only then, do they start to think about the final exam when they have heard the last lecture.
  
• School (or Department) governance is more often run like an oligarchy or is even completely concentrated in the all-powerful Head of School. This is changing in my school, where input from staff members (i.e., "the faculty" in U.S. parlance) about major decisions is increasingly welcome. Back in Atlanta we spent countless hours discussing nearly every matter as an entire faculty group.  More democracy occurred there, but it was also a lot of wasted time. I am much happier with the benevolent (and competent) dictator model here.
  

Of course, the list largely reflects my limited experience in this one department at this one university. Perhaps I will find other North American academics to contribute to it...

Life at 1, 2, 3...

I am currently swamped at work. It's nearing the end of the semester, so I've been editing my honours students' theses, marking papers for one of my courses, and trying to complete a lecture on neuroeconomics. I haven't had much time to watch TV, but I wanted to alert you to a fantastic program that the ABC aired in the past two weeks, called "Life at 3." It's a documentary-style series about a group of eleven 3-year-olds who have been followed since birth. They are the public face of a much more comprehensive, longitudinal study of 10,000 Australian children that is being conducted by an excellent team of scientists. I have been a fan of the older British Up series, "7 Up," 35 Up," etc., which has followed a cohort of people since the early 1960s. There's also an American version that started more recently. But this Australian series is different in many ways. It is really focused on both increasing our understanding of, and teaching the public about, a wide range of developmental issues. For example, V. and I watched last week's episode on "Bad Behaviour." While that episode was telling the story of 5-6 children who differed in the ways they were handling stress in their lives at the age of 3, the narration was peppered by findings from the greater longitudinal study about individual differences in resiliency and what psychology knows about risk factors for later problems. Personally, I was gratified to see that our son is doing well by comparison, and that the form that his occasional tantrums takes is amazingly similar to that of some of the kids on the show. Unfortunately, it looks like the producers are only managing to put out two episodes a year (where's some big American money to produce another 20 episodes?!), so I will have to wait until next October for something more. In the meantime, you can watch the episodes on the ABC website.

Sometimes I Just Disappear

One of the more embarrassing aspects of being a researcher is that many of us are obsessed with reading the reference sections of new articles in our field of interest to see whether we are cited.  In my case, possibly because of a drop in my productivity a few years ago, I am quite used to not finding my name listed in articles in my field. I can live with that, and I am now attempting to rectify this omission with greater productivity. However, every once in a while I come across a review article or a particular passage that is directly related to my published work but I am still not cited.  In the past week this has been a frequent experience while I was preparing a lecture on the social neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping.  Amazingly, researchers I know well who have attended my talks at various conferences or were even on the same conference panel as me, simply don't mention anything that I have ever done in the past 10 years in their articles.  It leaves me feeling a bit sad, and it reminds me of the way that Kip Williams describes what it's like when someone ostracises you.  I'm paraphrasing here, but he said that being shunned by others "is similar to what would happen if you were dead. You experience life as if you didn't exist."  When people I respect don't find any of my work relevant to theirs (although I find what they do highly relevant to mine!), it feels like I never existed.  If I don't exist, then it begs the question: What have I been doing these past fifteen years when I was conducting and writing up all this research?  In an occupation that has few rewards, recognition by one's peers becomes that much more important.

Time Zones

Phil Zimbardo was in Brisbane yesterday to give a talk to customers of his textbook publisher.  You have probably heard of him if you know anything about the Stanford Prison Experiment.  This was the 1971 study in which subjects were assigned to play the role of a prisoner or a guard in a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University.  All sorts of interesting things happened, which you can read about here, but the experiment led Zimbardo to study many related issues over the next 35 years.  Yesterday's talk was not about those issues nor did he promote his best seller, The Lucifer Effect (although he did sign my copy!).  Instead, his 75 minute presentation was about time--a topic that I have written about before in this blog.

Zimbardo has developed and validated a research questionnaire that measures five main dimensions of a person's time orientation.  He argues that most people are not aware of where they lie on these dimensions, but these 'time zones' strongly influence what we do at any given moment.  Here's a brief description of a high score in each zone:

• past positive:  someone who frequently thinks about their past in a positive way; strong ties to family and friends; likes traditions; particularly resistant to new things
  
• past negative: someone who frequently thinks about their past, but in a negative way; tends to think of themselves as a victim of abuse, neglect, bad circumstances; strongly associated with depression
  
• present fatalistic: someone who thinks only about today, but largely from a "how am I going to survive today?"; believes there is little they can do to control their futures, so they tend to be reactive rather than proactive; more common in people with impoverished lives
  
• present hedonistic: someone who lives in the moment, trying to maximise their pleasure and minimise pain; they tend not to carry watches, schedule appointments, and are frequently late; strongly associated with addiction; most likely to enjoy sex; little no or concern about the consequences of their actions
  
• future: these are people who are most likely to think about the consequences before taking action; they tend to have highly scheduled, busy lives; tend to be most successful of the five time zones; experience more anxiety but less depression; more socially isolated; fewer sensual pleasures

It's an interesting framework to think about many personal and societal problems, and Zimbardo has about 20 years of research on all of this.  For example, he finds that Stanford students who score high on Future do better in all their classes, whereas Present Hedonists only do well if it's a class they like.  Minority students from impoverished backgrounds tend to be Present-oriented, which puts them at a disadvantage in school because they don't tend to think about the probabilities of different outcomes.  Societies with many people in Past-Positive (think of Sarah Palin and her friends at the Republican Convention!) tend to be slow to change, and will likely have more problems with increasing globalisation.  The closer one is to the equator, the more you find Present oriented people, probably because they don't have to worry about the change of seasons.

According to Zimbardo, it's best to have a mix of the time zones to offset the negatives of each.  The optimal profile is to be high in Past-Positive, mid-high in Future, and mid in Present-Hedonist.  That is, have rich positive connections to your past with a good dose (but not too high) of a future orientation and ample enjoyment of the moment.  Reaching such an optimal balance can be challenging, however, depending on where you live, what you're up against, and your life experiences.  Here's a link to his book, if you want more info.  He also spoke about some trends in American society, a country that is probably overloaded with Future people.  A USA Today poll in 1987 found that 59% of respondents had a family dinner each day, whereas today it's 20% that do.  More than 50% of today's respondents say they are busier this year than last year.  What did they tend to sacrifice to make up the time?  Friends, family, and fun.  What would they do if they had an extra day in the week?  Most said they would use it to catch up with work.  

I found this talk highly stimulating.  Interestingly, Zimbardo rarely refers to biological processes in his work (he's a strong environmentalist).  I'm thinking that social neuroscience could help flesh out some of the details.

A Whole of Lot BIRGing Going On

One of the many strategies we all have to boost and maintain our self-esteem is Basking in the Reflected Glory of others, or, as it's known in social psychology, BIRGing. We can do this on an individual level ("my friend just won a gold medal") or as part of the group ("my football team won this weekend!"). One of the puzzling aspects of this phenomenon is that the person doing the BIRGing has usually done nothing to assist the other person with the success or good fortune, but somehow finds pleasure in knowing that they are connected to this successful person in some way. By the way, the opposite of BIRGing is CORFing (cutting off reflected failure). One famous social psychology study found that Ohio State students were much more likely than normal to wear their OSU apparel on Mondays following a win by their football team, but they were also less likely to wear such clothes on Mondays following a loss. Both BIRGing and CORFing have a very public element associated with them--our friend (or team's) success (or failure) has special value when it is broadcast to others. Well, what follows is a bit of such broadcasting, but I am going to stick to BIRGing for now...

Over the years I have been guilty of BIRGing along two general categories--my friends' connections to the famous and my friend's noteworthy successes. As examples of the former category, my friends have included (a) a relative of Allen Ginsburg, (b) the target of a pick-up by Tori Spelling (my friend refused her advances, btw), (c) someone who was employed to be a "friend" of the daughter of a famous billionaire, (d) the daughter of a Hollywood film director, and (e) someone who lives in Kevin Bacon's building (which gives me all sort of "six degrees" connections!). The other BIRG category is probably more impressive, as they include a friend who is a successful TV and film actor, the bass guitarist for a great '80s/'90s band, many highly productive academics, a top journalist, a successful artist, and several friends who are now department chairs or deans. Today I can add another high school classmate to the list--Dan Gesmer, who runs a successful skateboard business and is a performance artist. Dan invented a style of freestyle skateboarding that you can see in this video. What's more, he was recently asked by Cirque de Soleil to become part of their winter show, Wintuk, in New York City. This is the first Cirque show to feature skateboarding, and it looks like they specifically recruited Dan to perform based on some of the videos he has made.

Wow! I know someone who has performed with Cirque de Soleil!! I'm on BIRG overload today!!

Psychology Online

I came across this page at PsychCentral today.  It includes a list of the 'Top Ten Online Psychology Experiments.'  It's a dream of mine to develop a line of research in which participants could be recruited from around the world, but I haven't yet figured out what I might explore using the internet.  Anyway, check out my favourite site on this list, FaceResearch.org.  I recently learned that I might be able to recruit a patient with acquired prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognise familiar faces.  A little over 100 hundred such patients have been identified in the world, so I am planning an experiment with this patient that might reveal more about how we emotionally process faces.  FaceResearch.org has plenty of interesting stimuli that I might use.

Time Slip

I turn 45 this year. I'll admit that it's a bit old to be starting a new life in a foreign country, giving up tenure for a new job, raising a two-year old, and erasing many of the financial assets that took us so long to accumulate. There's also the challenge of forming new friendships while all the rest of this is going on. Sometimes I feel like I'm just starting out in my 20s again (although this time I have a toddler and a wife!). The major difference is that I probably have only 20-25 good work years ahead of me, rather than the 40-45 that I had in 1988. Thus, time has become much more precious to me. For instance, there is so much more that I want to accomplish in my career, but I know that I can't really work long days and nights with a family at home. Thus, I want to become more effective in managing my time so that I can end up spending more of it doing more meaningful things: more time playing with Will and talking to V., and less time watching "The Top 25 richest people in Entertainment;" more time developing my research and less time sitting in meetings that don't benefit me; more time getting exercise and less time sitting in the car.

Getting a handle on time management is probably easier for some, but for many of us our old habits are hard to change. I was recently inspired, however, by some lectures given by Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University. Pausch is about three years old than me and has had a successful career in computer science (much of it having to do with virtual reality), and he has three young children and a wife at home. He's also dying of pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to his liver and spleen. In October 2007 he gave an inspiring "Last Lecture" at CMU, in which he talked about how to achieve one's childhood dreams. He has also posted a lecture on time management that he gave a few weeks later at the University of Virginia. The latter is interesting, given that Pausch learned to manage time highly effectively many years ago. I recommend that you watch both of these videos--you won't be wasting your time! A few tips that I have tried to incorporate from his time management lecture:

• keep you email inbox empty, reading each email only once
• schedule every minute of every day
• keep your own meetings as short as possible
• delegate when possible
• keep your workspace tidy
• develop an effective filing system, and use it
• remind yourself what is most important to you and plan to spend your time accordingly

I may not have cancer, but I do feel like there's some urgency in my life, as much of it is starting over. Now, if I could just figure out what to do with all this silver hair on my head...

Micro versus Macro

Being both a teacher and a researcher in psychology, I am often faced with the problem of using the results of a study based on the average responses of groups of people to explain the behaviour of a single person. For example, a study may have found that people are more likely to help a stranger when they are randomly assigned to an experimental condition in which they are first made sad (an actual finding, by the way!). A student hearing about this study might respond, "but I was depressed last month, and I didn't want to help anybody!" Or, I might talk about another study which found that university men were much more likely to accept an offer of free sex from an attractive researcher than were women (another actual finding, although the researchers didn't sleep with anyone!). Again, a male student might respond to this study by saying, "but I am in a committed relationship with my girlfriend, so I wouldn't want to do such a thing." In both of these examples, the one single anecdote from the student is put forward as single-handedly destroying the logical conclusions of the research. In my teaching, I try to emphasize the difference between the group-level finding and what any one individual would do, but it is still difficult for many students to comprehend this.

A similar problem goes in the other inferential direction. For example, according to a blog entry at Talking Points Memo, CNN discussed a poll last week that showed that:

Texas voters that watched the Clinton-Obama debate supported Obama by a margin of 20 points, Texas voters who followed news about the debate but didn't watch it broke even, and Texas voters who paid no attention to the debate went for Hillary by 20 points.

According to an "expert" guest on CNN, the poll's results show that:

...downscale voters look to the political process to "deliver" for them, and that's why they want specifics, and that's why they support Hillary. Upscale voters, on the other hand, want to "identify" with a candidate, and that's why they support Obama.

Note that the original polling data said nothing about the socioeconomic status of those polled.

Take another example that hits closer to home: the continued drop in home resales and prices in January. Economists are keen to say things like, "home prices haven't dropped enough yet," and "people are waiting until the prices go down further." Of course there are many reasons why people aren't buying houses, right? And, more importantly, it turns out that home prices actually increased in some parts of the U.S. Another example of this explaining a macro phenomenon with individual behaviour comes whenever the stockmarket takes a plunge: "Mr. Analyst says that people are selling out of fear that oil prices will rise next week." That's a pretty amazing statement to make when you consider that millions of people are selling shares and there are still millions of others who are buying those very shares.

So, in my first set of examples, individual (micro) behaviours are used to refute the group (macro) phenomena. In the second set, the micro behaviours are used to explain macro phenonema. We're probably comfortable making such leaps from micro to macro (and the reverse) because it's quite hard to imagine that human behaviour is determined by many, many factors. In psychology, we are more comfortable predicting behaviour on the basis of probabilities, although we are nowhere as precise as we expect the weather bureau to be.

Selection

Many of my friends thought I was crazy when I left a tenured position at my old university to come to here on a 5-year contract. Early career academics in the U.S. are entirely focused on landing the tenure-track job and then actually obtaining tenure (as was I!), so it did seem rather foolish to throw it all away the moment I finally earned it. Luckily for me, however, someone in my department at UQ (and in my area) resigned in August, which meant a ‘continuing’ position suddenly opened up. In Australia, tenure doesn’t really exist. Instead, one has to pass a probationary period of 3-5 years in a continuing appointment before it becomes 'permanent.'

I applied for the open position. I was then chosen on the short list of five candidates, made up of people from Australia and the United States. Each of us gave a school seminar last Thursday and went through the interviews on Friday. Again, this is all different from what is done for academic appointments in America. In my old department, the short list usually had three candidates, and each would come separately to visit the campus for two days, with all the candidates spread across a two-week period. In Australia everyone comes to campus on the same two days, which meant that I kept bumping into the other applicants (we were the only men wearing ties!). We also gave our seminars one after another. There is only one official interview here--a panel of six sit around a table and take turns asking questions for 30-45 minutes. Back in the States, candidates for a job face several 30-min interviews with 1-2 faculty members at a time. Another major difference is that here the panel (the search committee) makes the final decision about whom to hire, usually right after the last interview. At my old department, the entire department faculty would make that decision at a meeting that could run a few hours, and which was based on information from several sources.

This was my third interview in 13 months for a particular position at UQ. My first was when they flew me over in October 2006 for a job that I didn’t get. The second attempt was in January of this year, when I applied for the 5-year position that I currently have. I didn’t have to come to Brisbane that time, but was interviewed by the panel via a satellite link. This third try was also successful. I found out about 90 minutes after my interview that I did get the continuing position. This means that V., Will, and I no longer have the 5-year countdown to deal with. I still have to make it through the probationary period (which is much easier than getting tenure in the States), and I will still be working like a maniac to move up the food chain, but we can now breathe a bit more easily. Staying here permanently has become a real option, if that’s what we choose.

But is it Art?

Back from D.C. last night, I got up early this morning to watch the season finales of "Heroes" and "Lost." Oh my! I was very moved by both shows, but, on "Lost," Jack's surprise flash forward (did you happen to notice that the name of the funeral home was an anagram of this?--I didn't!) and Charlie's final palm message were some of the best dramatic moments I have experienced in a long while. Both of these shows, as well as "The Office," are absolutely brilliant--three solid reasons why people should never get rid of their TVs. How am I going to survive without these shows for so many months? And I have no idea how the American broadcast dates for these shows correspond to when they air in Australia, so I may be waiting even longer...

Anyway, I have plenty of snobby friends who think my love of good television (and Diet Coke, for that matter) betrays my 25 years of education, which makes me wonder how I could be so wrong and they could be so right. Well, at the APS meeting I attended this past weekend, I saw a talk by Paul Bloom, a Yale developmental psychologist (and someone about whom I have blogged before), titled "But is it Art?" He recently studied how young children perceive art and discussed his findings in the context of broader philosophical theories of art. Among the various points he made (I didn't take notes, so I'm doing this from memory):

• Adults and children place special value on artistic reproductions of the real world. This explains the preference most people have for portaits, landscapes, pictures of still life, etc.
  
• Adults and children prefer original works of creation over perfect copies. Think about how everyone reacts to the news that a revered painting by a great master is actually a forgery. Three-year-olds have this same response when they are given a chance to have an exact replica of their favorite attachment blanket or toy instead of the original.
  
• The more we (and children) perceive that the artist labored, the more we value the end product. Bloom cited a study in which subjects reported liking an abstract painting more when they learned that the artist spent 28 hours or so on it, compared to a condition in which subjects were told that the artist spent 9 hours creating the same work of art.
  
• Adults and children recognize that the artist's intention is more important in appraising the art than what the end product actually resembles. As Bloom noted, tell a young child that the stick figure that she has just drawn not only looks like "mommy," but everyone else in the family, and you'll end up with a very upset child.
  

I believe that Bloom comes from an evolutionary psychology framework, and his bottom-line argument is that there may be a few basic principles that we all share when we evaluate works of art that reflect basic cognitive processes we use in other areas of life. I am not sure that this analysis works in the case of my favorite television shows, but in these shows I do appreciate the originality, the attention to realism (so that I become absorbed in this new reality), and the apparently huge amount of work it takes to create such a quality product. Why my snobbier friends don't have these same appreciations of my television shows, or why people the world over differ in their artistic tastes, certainly has less to do with the inherent qualities of the art, and more to do with what we already know about the artist and/or perceive in the art in the ways in which Bloom described.