Would the Hulk plagiarize?

When I first started teaching I was surprised to find that about a third of my students would turn in papers containing quotations without citation - not in APA style as directed, not in MLA style (staunch English major?), or not even in some LMAO style (just making it up as you go along).  Nothing.  Not even a quotation mark.

When I informed them that this is plagiarism, they were shocked!  They knew that they had been a little lazy or careless but they didn't realize that this is a form of cheating.  From then on, I have emphasized APA style in-text citation as a main goal of my upper level courses. And I believe that in this week's meme I have found an ally in my citation obsession:

Click here for a more modern image of the Hulk keeping it real with his citation of sources.

Apparently Marvel's anti-hero, the Incredible Hulk, has read the APA's Publication Manual.  He may have a habit of breaking things and poor anger management but he does not plagiarize!  The Hulk also understands that if you want to strengthen your ideas, citing good sources is a great way to be convincing.

So if my students were plagiarizing by accident and the Hulk always cites his sources, who plagiarizes on purpose?  In 2010, Williams, Nathanson, and Paulhus conducted three related studies to answer this question (and that raise some questions about the Hulk part!).

In the first study, they wanted to know what type of person has a history of cheating.  Out of the 249 college students who completed their questionnaire, 73% admitted to cheating at some point in high school.  The questionnaire also included items that tapped into their personalities and dispositions: Williams et al. found that students who admitted to cheating were more likely to score high on a measure of psychopathy.  Now, to be clear, this does not mean that those students are actual psychopaths, instead it means that they were slightly more likely to demonstrate traits like, "...erratic lifestyle[s], manipulation, callousness, and antisocial tendencies" (p. 295).

To get a clearer picture of college students' current behavior the authors conducted a second study.  This time 107 students completed personality tests, general ability tests, and wrote two essays for their college psychology class.  Included in the assignment directions were clear instructions for citing quotations in APA style, a definition of plagiarism, and a warning that the essays would be screened by Turn-It-In.  Turn-It-In uses an algorithm to compare submitted papers to web pages, books, and a bank of student papers: if a student plagiarizes a source, the paper will get flagged.  Using this method, Williams et al. found about 15% of the students plagiarized on at least one of their essays.  The students who plagiarized scored higher on psychopathy or lower on verbal ability.  This suggests that some students cheat out of a devious mindset, but others may cheat because their writing skills are particularly poor.

In the final study, 223 college students reported their cheating histories, completed personality tests, and answered questions designed to reveal the factors that led them to cheat or to avoid cheating.  For the third time, high scores on psychopathy were related to cheating.  These students also revealed that they were motivated to cheat because a) they will do anything to get good grades and b) they do not believe that it is immoral to cheat.

Thus, the majority of students who do plagiarize are likely to hold attitudes and values are different from most of their peers'.  A small subset of students may use plagiarism to make up for their lack of writing ability.  What stands out to me as a teacher is that the most college students do not fit these criteria and would be unlikely to plagiarize.

Ironically, from Williams et al.'s results, we can question this week's meme.  The Hulk has unpredictable behavior, isn't particularly careful with others' feelings, and engages in some "antisocial" acts (like throwing cars at people).  The Hulk also demonstrates very low verbal skills: he mostly grunts and yells; and speaks like Cookie Monster on steroids.  (If you need evidence of these claims, check out this Hulk clip.).  We would associate these factors with a higher risk of plagiarism!

So always cite your sources in APA style if you want to be credible, but if the Hulk gets a higher grade than you do, you should be a bit incredulous!

Further Reading:

You can access a pdf of the Williams et. al (2010) paper on Craig Nathanson's Mendeley page.  You can also obtain a copy of the published article through your local college library.

A tutorial on the basics of APA style and good hints about in-text citation of quotations from the APA.  Don't risk plagiarism!

An NPR broadcast about Turn-It-In that raises some interesting questions about its use.

The history of the Incredible Hulk from Marvel.

The Walking Dead: New Parents

I went back to work when my daughter was 7 months old.  Even though I had taught psychology for a long time, the lack of sleep made it hard for me to remember even basic things.  Once I was lecturing on Piaget's stages and for a good 10 seconds I had to stall because instead of the names of the stages all I had in my head was this.  Eventually I remembered the stages; but I have never forgotten that moment.

So this week's blog is dedicated to all of the new parents out there...

First, is this plotting baby correct?  Yes - for the near future.  Newborn babies wake to eat every two or three hours - so in a given night the parents might be awakened four or more times!  A study by McDaniel and Teti (2012) found that one-month old babies wake two to three times each night and three month old babies still wake one to two times each night.  Babies this young require attention at night - to feed them, to soothe their gas pains, to change their diapers, to rock them - so if the baby is awake, that means that the parents aren't sleeping either.

So what is the problem?  Many studies including McDaniel and Teti's demonstrate that getting less sleep tends to go hand in hand with more clinical depression in new parents.  Most, but not all, find that this is especially true for new mothers who are more likely than new fathers to lose sleep caring for Baby's nighttime needs.  We can't be sure that it is only the loss of sleep that is causing the depression; but a positive correlation like this means that it's common to see these two things happening at the same time.

McDaniel and Teti also looked at how lack of sleep might relate to parents' perceptions of each other as parents.  This is important because, "...supportive coparenting, such as when partners endorse and support each others' parenting behaviors and cooperate with each other in raising their children, has been linked to increased relationship quality, less depression, and less parenting stress (p. 886)."  So if parents do not feel like they are a team, that also seems to go hand in hand with depression.

To unravel this riddle, the researchers used data from Project SIESTA (Study of Infants' Emergent Sleep TrAjectories) that included how 132 new parent (heterosexual) couples responded to a questionnaire about coparenting.  The parents rated themselves on how much they agree about parenting, how close they feel to each other and if they fight in front of their baby, their feelings of competition as parents, and how fairly they share the tasks of parenting.  This questionnaire, a measure of parents' depressive symptoms, and reports on their babies' nighttime wakings were collected when the infants were one month old and three months old.

Using a statistical method, McDaniel and Teti were able to determine how these things are related.  Put simply: between one month and three months, babies sleeping less predicted parents sleeping less; parents sleeping less predicted more depression symptoms; more depression symptoms predicted feeling worse about how coparenting is going.  This flow remained the same regardless of the family's social class and the baby's level of fussiness - so even well-off, well-educated families with easy-going babies were likely to show this pattern.

If this sounds miserable (and even more miserable for single parents doing it solo), you may be relieved to learn that most babies are able to sleep through the night by about six months.  Until then, there are some things that you can do to help your baby sleep and ways to make this sleep deprivation even a bit funny (see below) when you feel like a zombie parent.

Further Reading:

Get Your Baby to Sleep: Infant sleep suggestions from pediatrician, Dr. William Sears.  I like that he is clear:  each baby is an individual and each family has its own needs - so choose what feels right for you.

Adam Mansbach wrote a darkly humorous book for ADULTS who are suffering from child-induced sleep deprivation.  Its title and text does contain the F-word so don't click this or buy this book if it would be offensive to you.  Although it is meant to be funny, its angry and defeated tone is probably a good demonstration of depressive symptoms!

You can read the entire McDaniel and Teti (2012) paper here and find out more about Project SIESTA on Douglas Teti's homepage.

Spring Break 2015

My students are currently on Spring Break.  Some of them took an exam before the break began - so they probably will not study this week;  some of them will have an exam on the Tuesday after break - so they will probably be studying and cursing my name.  So in honor of that second group we have this week's meme:

At first glance, professors like this one come across as over-zealous killjoys who are so obsessed with their pet subject that they cannot imagine anyone taking a break from it.  While it is true that professors really like their subjects and spend a weird amount of time thinking about those subjects (...as I type out a psychology blog during my Spring Break...) most of us do not think that our students feel the same way.  So why the homework over Spring Break?

Think about what you learn in a college class.  It is a. lot. of. information.  In fact, a 2006 review by Proctor and Williams found more than 400 terms that are common across most Introduction to Psychology textbooks (see Further Readings for this list).  Even in a basic psychology class you are asked to remember a lot!  And for right or wrong, both professors and students use exam grades to determine how much the class remembers: high scores mean that they remembered a lot.

So why would it matter if a student takes eleven days off from studying then comes back from Spring Break to take an exam?

It goes back to an idea that Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote about in 1885:  you remember more after having several practice sessions than you would by just having one big practice.  Today we would say that distributed practice allows you to remember more than massed practice.  So you will remember more and do better on tests if you practice the material on more than one day; it also means that you will not remember as much if you just try to learn the material during one long practice session.  This memory boost from distributed practice is noticeable when there is some time that passes between the last practice and when the material is tested.

How much time should go in between each of these practice sessions depends on how long it will be until that information is tested.  For example, in a study done by Küpper-Tetzel, Kaper, and Wiseheart (2014), German school children did better on vocabulary tests if they practiced the words on two days, with a one day break in between, and then took the exam seven days later.  Interestingly, the break in between the two practices had to be longer (eleven days instead of two) if the exam would occur 35 days after the second practice.

So your professors want you to succeed and part of that success is to remember the course material.  If you remember the course material you will do better on exams - something that most students want.  Practicing the material in class and then practicing material at home creates distributed practice.

The Küpper-Tetzel et al. study might suggest that if my college students have 11 days between our last class and the test, they would be making a smart choice to study on day two, take a day off, study again on day four, and then take the remaining seven days off to enjoy themselves before taking the exam.  That would be a better method than doing one big marathon study session on day four before taking those same seven days off before the test.

Now if you are reading this too late to use distributed practice, there still may be hope for you!  Cramming, which is really an example of massed practice, does increase memory if you are tested right after the cramming session.  So my students might also find success if they spend the entire day before the exam practicing the material over and over.  The only problem (beside lack of sleep and caffeine abuse) is that this sort of massed practice does not work for long-term learning.  If you want to remember material beyond one exam it is much better to stick to distributed practice!

And, if you don't want to remember the material - don't practice it at all!

Further Reading:

If you would like more study tips based on psychological research, the American Psychological Association's graduate student magazine offers this article.

Here is the Proctor and Williams (2006) list of terms that are common in Introduction to Psychology textbooks.  It is a paper from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology's (APA Division 2) Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology.  Derrick Proctor and Alisa Williams are affiliated with Andrews University in Michigan.

A draft of the Küpper-Tetzel et al. study, "Contracting, equal, and expanding learning schedules: The optimal distribution of learning sessions depends on retention interval," can be viewed on Dr. Küpper-Tetzel's webpage.  The published journal article can be accessed at your local university library.

Die-hard history of psychology fans can read more about Ebbinghaus' original thoughts on repetition and memory on Christopher Green's website archive:  Classics in the History of Psychology.

Everybody is NOT doing it.

When I was a kid I sat through all types of 1980s "Just Say No to Drugs and Alcohol" talks given by teachers and professionals at my school.  My movie and TV watching was often interrupted by public service announcements like this one by Nancy Reagan and Clint Eastwood.  They all warned about Peer Pressure - promising that even us "good kids" might be forced by "bad kids" to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, or use drugs.  It was drilled into our heads, "say NO to Peer Pressure!"

That experience led me to this week's meme:

Philosoraptor poses a good question that exposes why "peer pressure" - a negative term - is not used in Developmental Psychology.  Instead researchers use "peer influence" or "friends' influence" because influence can be positive or negative.  So research on peer influence would answer Philosoraptor's question:  your peers CAN influence you to make a good choice!  For example, teenagers whose friends do not drink alcohol are less likely themselves to drink alcohol.

One little plot TWIST in the discussion of peer influence is homophily:  or "liking the same."  As teens and adults we only become and stay close friends with people who share our values.  This would suggest that the reason I did not do drugs as a teenager was because a) I was personally against doing drugs, and b) I only chose other teens to be my close friends if they were also against doing drugs.  Looking back I can confirm that not one single friend of mine in middle school or high school used drugs or offered me drugs.  I never needed to "just say no."

Another plot TWIST is that we may not only resemble our friends in values, we may also be more likely to share similar genetic histories.  In 2014 Christakis and Fowler found that certain genotypes tend to be shared by friends "at the level of fourth cousins (p. 10796)."  Because traits like addiction and alcoholism can have genetic roots, it may also be that we are not only choosing friends who share our values but also friends who share our genetic risk for those issues.  So maybe I never had to "just say no" because my friends and I were all lacking a genetic urge toward addiction?

A 2012 study by Cruz, Emery, and Turkheimer addressed these issues.  They examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that included sibling, identical twin, and friendship information.  They were interested in teen drinking behavior and how that behavior might change as those teens became young adults.  These researchers looked at the effects of shared genes, shared environments (such as growing up in the same home), and friends' drinking behaviors.  Their results suggest that, although genes may have some effect, the link between how much you drink as a teen or young adult matches up with how much your friends drink.  For example, even identical twins who share 100% of the same genes and live in the same household could differ in drinking:  the twin whose friends drank the least would be the twin who drank the least.

Cruz et al. noted that friends choose friends who share the same values, but they also pointed out that the quality of the friendship and what seems to be expected from the larger peer group also matter.  You are more likely to do the things that a close friend does; and what seems normal to you is often driven by what all of the people in your friendship network think is normal.

So just say YES to positive peer influence!  And if you are trying to change your ways, look for new friends who are already living the way you would like to be living.  They will encourage that new, healthier behavior.

Further Reading:

You can read the entire study here:  Cruz, J. E., Emery, R. E., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Peer network drinking predicts increased alcohol use from adolescence to early adulthood after controlling for genetic and shared environmental selection. Developmental Psychology, 48(5), 1390-1402.

Listen to a nice NPR story on the work by Christakis and Fowler, or you can look up their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in your local university library.

If you are worried about your own alcohol or substance abuse, the Department of Health and Human Services runs a national website that includes a toll-free hotline (1-800-662-4357) for information on substance abuse and can give you treatment referrals in your state.  They also have an online treatment locator.

All you need is...wi-fi?

Recently we went on a trip and were surprised that the place we were staying at did not have Wi-Fi.  We realized how dependent we are on the Internet to allow us to make plans with local friends, find out where the nearest grocery store is located, look up the bus routes, and stay in contact with work and family back home.  Without Wi-Fi our smart phones were not so smart.  Feeling this stress, I really laughed when I saw this meme's play on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

Published way back in 1943, the original theory tried to explain people's motivations.  Maslow was a Humanist and believed that people are motivated in more complex ways than are animals.  His concept was that a more Basic Need needs to be at least partially satisfied before a person will start to desire fulfilling a Higher Need. 

To put it simply, once you have shelter, enough to eat, drink, and have a sexual partner (Physiological) and you feel safe and confident in your daily life (Safety), you start to want to have relationships that go beyond the physical (Belonging-Love).  This is the emotional connection that we share with our romantic partner, but also our bonds with friends and family.  Next is a desire to feel good about yourself as a successful person (Self-Esteem) often through performance at school or at work.  Once these basic needs are satisfied, Maslow believed that a person would be drawn to Self-Actualization.  He wrote:

...we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming (p. 382).


Or as a current Reebok ad would say, once we have those other needs we will have an urge to "Be more human."

So when I was stranded without Wi-Fi at the start of my vacation, was I really missing a basic need that would win out over food, shelter, water and other Physiological Needs?  Probably not.  In fact, I would argue that once those needs are taken care of, the Internet helps us fulfill all those other needs:

My world is more predictable and I keep myself safer when I use my smart phone to look up addresses and bus schedules.  I can make plans with friends and stay in touch with people, even in other countries, over social media.  A lot of my work and even this blog post involves access to the Internet.  And if I am going to "be more human," my creativity can be inspired by and posted on the Internet to inspire others (see, there IS a reason for Pinterest).

So I would redraw the Hierarchy meme like this:

Now, you might not agree with that - and even Maslow noted that there are individual differences in what people need most.  Some recent surveys commissioned by Google and by Bank of America imply that we might even give up certain Physiological needs if faced with the loss of of the Internet or of our smart phones.  For example, a poll by BCG showed that 21% of us would rather give up sex than lose Internet access for a year; 13% of respondents to a survey by Braun Research Inc. agreed that they would give up sex if their smart phones were taken and that was the only way to get them back!  What would you give up?

Read more about those studies and find a link to an Internet Addiction online quiz (ironic, right?) below.

Update:  The Meme-verse has found an even more basic need than Wi-Fi: a charged battery. What good is a signal if your device cannot turn on?



Further reading:

Psych Central's version of an Internet Addiction quiz.

A Washington Post article of "A Complete List of Things People Would Give Up for the Internet." This includes references to the 2012 BCG study (the stats on what people would give up instead of losing the Internet for a year are found in the pdf file under Country Profiles) and a similar report in 2015.  It also links you to the results of the survey done by Braun Research Inc. on smart phones.

You can access Maslow's original paper through PsycArticles at your public university library.  Maslow, A. H. (1943). Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370-396.