Dimensions

A report in Nature’s scientific reports series about peoples’ perceptions of a range of other entities, human and otherwise. How many dimensions do you need to describe that perception? A report with 4 authors, 6 pages of text and no less than 69 references.

A subject which we are told has attracted lots of research. We are social animals and the way in which we relate to others is interesting.

The four studies reported on involved a total of around 200 psychology students, mostly around 20 years old, mostly white Caucasian or east Asian, with maybe twice as many women as men. The authors came from Australia and California, but I did not find the bits in this report where it said where the studies were done or where the students came from – apart, that is, from their ethnicity.

In each study the students were asked to rate the 40 entities on a seven point scale for a selection of around half a dozen capacities, selected from the set desire, pleasure, fear, hunger, memory, morality, pain, perceive, self-control, sense, time. I think the snip above, taken from one of the zip files, gives all there was by way of support for the students doing the ratings.

The answer seemed to be that this sample of young people viewed the mental capacity of others – including here various kinds of humans, animals and other entities (a few of them the sort of thing which might once have been associated with gods or spirits) – in a rather one dimensional way, as summarised above. No need for the two or three dimensions of other workers, dimensions like being able to sense the world around and being able to act in or on the world around.

This answer comes with a lot of statistical baggage which I have not attempted to engage with. Phrases like ‘The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure indicated appropriate sampling adequacy’ and ‘Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was significant, χ^2(15) = 477.22, p < 0.001’. Which is possibly why I have no sense of the stability of the entity order in the snap above. But I am reminded of all the stuff I have come across in recent years about the abuse of p values.

I would also liked to have been told a bit more about the choice of capacities – without having to delve into the references.

And it would be interesting to see how all this panned out with larger samples of people taken from around the globe. Although such larger samples have to be paid for and I don’t suppose the method could be easily adapted at scale to the unlettered, the educationally challenged, the young, the old and the infirm.

I think the take away for me is that whatever it is that a brain does to classify the mental abilities of the entities, the things, that it comes across, that classification is not going to be terribly complicated.

PS: it now strikes me that this report might be of more interest to students of dimension than to students of people.

References

Reference 1: Evidence of the unidimensional structure of mind perception - Kallie Tzelios, Lisa A. Williams, John Omerod & Eliza Bliss-Moreau – 2022. A paper which comes with supplementary data (pdf) and survey data (zip).

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/incentives.html. Previous notice of the citation industry.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/in-praise-of-classifications.html. Previous notice of the classification industry.