Libratto

Saturday’s NYT sported an article about a working college student whose mother racked up over $250,000 in medical bills for the treatment of her eventually fatal brain cancer. It’s a sad story, with the son’s connections to Congress — members of which enjoy solid healthcare coverage — played to full effect by Robert Pear. The story goes on to explain how the son, Sergio Olaya, has decided to hold off on returning to college until he’s paid off the medical bills of his uninsured mother, and how he’s putting his mother’s home up for sale as a means to pay down her debt.

There’s a flip side to this story, however, and it doesn’t come to light until the very end of Pear’s piece: Olaya’s mother was almost certainly uninsured by choice. She’d been employed for more than 20 years, working at places such as the CDC and Unicef. The article is silent about the specifics, but she’d become unemployed (and thus uninsured) in December of 2006, and suffered a stroke the following March. COBRA (or the equivalent offered to federal employees) assures that employees can obtain health insurance coverage for up to 18 months following termination of employment. It’s virtually certain that Ms. Olaya declined COBRA-like coverage, rolled the dice, and lost.

I am not defending the cost of health insurance, nor am I judging whether Ms. Olaya’s decision was ill advised. One cannot, however, have it both ways. We would not think asking those who passed up coverage via COBRA and suffered no catastrophic illness to pay the premiums retroactively; why would we retroactively cover those who chose to forego paying their premiums? Sadly, it’s Mr. Olaya who is left with a mess to clean up.

As always, these opinions are mine alone.

When I was in graduate school, some friends had me complete a personality test. They we’re prompted by a book titled, “Please Understand Me”, a breezily written book for laypersons based on the Myers Briggs personality profile. At the time, I referred to that book as, “Please Pigeonhole Me” reflecting my skepticism about the overall goal of categorizing individuals in any meaningful way.

I’ve recently become interested in broad conceptualizations of personality. It turns out that the Myers Briggs scale is an operationalization of personality types hypothesized by Jung. Based on what I have been able to dig up (admittedly with little digging), there’s not a lot of support for the MB approach.

But does that mean that it’s impossible to categorize personalities accurately? The “Big Five” seems to be a step in the right direction. It’s got a few things going for it.

Testable hypothesis.  First, it’s based on the lexical hypothesis, which simply means that the language provides a “fingerprint” of the aspects of personality that we, as a community, deem important enough to name. In a sense, this is an example of grounded research, because the content and themes arise out of mostly unguided observation.

Clear set of assumptions.  Second, the methods used to convert the language into a set of personality attributes are fairly standard and relatively objective. In the 1930s, researchers combed two large dictionaries and made a list of all words that seemed to describe personality. They winnowed down this list of 18,000 to a more manageable 4,500 adjectives they deemed as both observable and relatively permanent. In the late 1950s, that list was reduced to an almost manageable 170 – 180 by rolling up synonyms to a single concept.

Up until this point in time, the work had been mostly accounting in nature: counting, making lists, and cleaning them up. A fellow named Catrell entered the picture, asking people to rate others they knew along each of the 170 – 180 adjectives. He then applied factor analysis — a technique made tractable by the growing availability of computing power — which revealed 12 factors. He added in an additional four factors; a subjective move, to be sure, but an understandable step given the 40+ years that had passed since the compilation of the original list. Bottom line: when Catrell was done, he had a 16-factor framework for describing personality. A few years later, a larger analysis of eight different studies resulting in compacting those 16 traits down to five.

Replicability.  Third, the whole thing has been replicated. In the 1980s, another researcher started from scratch with just the lexical hypothesis and an update dictionary in tow. Believe it or not, he wound up with a very similar set of five dimensions of personality.

Validation.  And finally, the Big Five has been shown to correlate with behaviors and outcomes of interest. For example, each of the ten personality disorders presented in the DMS-IV show a unique pattern in terms of the Big Five. Furthermore, in an evaluation of a number of studies totaling nearly 24,000 subjects, one of the Big Five factors (conscientiousness) was strongly correlated with job performance, with other factors coming into play consistent with one’s intuition (e.g., extroversion and performance in sales).

There are a number of sites that will allow you to see how you score on the Big Five. The one is used is Wikipedia entry for the Big Five in writing this overview.

NEWS FLASH

Researchers at the University of Bonn report “hard evidence” in the journal Science that 1) men enjoy getting a reward when performing well, and 2) they especially get a kick out of being paid more than other men who performed equally well.

The researchers scanned pairs of men assigned to the same task (i.e., counting the number of dots on a screen). Each subject was rewarded based on performance, and researchers were able to detect activation of a “reward center” in each subject’s brain. In some situations, subjects who had performed equally well were unequally paid; in this situation, the subject who got paid more showed greater activity in his reward center above and beyond what would have been expected.

In other words, size does matter, especially when you’re being compared to other guys.

GENES IN CHARGE (?)

Researchers reported in today’s journal Nature that babies as young as six months of age can distinguish between puppets that are cooperative and those that are not. In addition, they show a dose response preference for cooperation (cooperative puppets are preferred over neutral puppets; neutral puppets are preferred over non-cooperative puppets). Interestingly, the effect disappeared when the researchers reconfigured the puppets to look less human.

Although cooperation’s advantage to the group is becoming well appreciated, the means by which cooperation evolved and is maintained is less clear. One potential solution to this problem is group (rather than individual) selection. Because group selection imposes pressure on the group, social norms might emerge that reward punishment of cheaters. The early age at which humans can distinguish helpers from hinderers, and the preference for the former over the latter suggests a more individual mechanism (i.e., selection at the individual level) may be at play.

If moral sentiments regarding fair play and niceness are hereditary (which this study suggests but doesn’t prove), the mystery simply deepens: how are these sentiments advantageous to those of us who display them?