In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".)

We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to have such a reputation so that their victims wouldn't resist as they looted their ships. There are parts of the pirate lifestyle, such as democracy and voluntarism, that we don't tend to discuss because they were part of life on a pirate ship but not something that they felt the need to advertise widely.

What is most notable is that pirates' way of life seemed to be significantly preferable, and their governance significantly more "progressive", than that on merchant ships, which tended to be highly autocratic and abusive. It also provides a different perspective when we realise that sailors went into piracy at a time of labour market oversupply due to the ending of the War of Spanish Succession, when the British Navy didn't have the funds to keep on so many sailors, and yet this was the career of tens of thousands of young men who now had to find a job elsewhere.

Overall, in these two recordings, I hope to have shown you that thinking about people's motivations and situations from the perspective of political economy makes a lot more sense, and builds a much richer picture, than merely psychological or sociological explanations (such as childhood trauma, psychopathy, or people's fundamental evil or violent nature). With this in mind, I hope that in future we can use more of this thinking when considering education, so that we can understand better how it works and how to improve it.

Enjoy the episode.

Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners.

I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions.

Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse.

There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructive on this point: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek; and The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson. This recording focuses on the former.

David Skarbek's book is fascinating and rich in both detail and theoretical explanation, so I focus on what I find most compelling and most relevant to transfer over to thinking about other contexts. First of all, he introduces existing criminological theories that aim to account for the rise in prison gangs, namely Deprivation theory and Importation theory. The former suggests that inmate behaviour is a result of the pain of imprisonment, and the latter focuses on pre-prison beliefs and experiences that are brought into prison.

Skarbek departs from both of these theories, grounding his own analysis in political economy. He introduces us to the basic assumptions of economics - that people are self-interested and respond rationally to incentives - and goes on to describe the role of governance in society. His fundamental thesis is that prison gangs provide governance, meaning that they provide a form of public good which enhances personal safety and opportunities for trade (mostly in drugs).

While I'm yet to fully apply the ideas of political economy to education (except for reading about it inThe Beautiful Tree, China's Examination Hell, and Education and the State), I feel that digging in to some examples like this can help us appreciate the reasons why people do things. Crucially, they are not all psychological.

Enjoy the episode.

Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about:

• Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence;
• Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field;
• apparent resistance to scientific findings from some people in the field of education;
• understanding expertise as a key to knowing how to improve education;
• the power of economic thinking in understanding motivation and behaviour;
• the failure of behaviourism, and the incorrect conclusions some people have drawn from it; and
• how school seems to be good for society, but the mechanisms of how this happens aren't completely clear, and I remain neutral on this point as I gather further evidence.

Enjoy the episode.

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This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem.

Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon).

Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle).

One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances.

Enjoy the episodes.

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Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning.

The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's.

However, the Handbook has shown me that a closer look at self-related beliefs paints a more positive picture, and shows that such beliefs are central to students' academic success, as well as to people's life outcomes. I have had to radically change my understanding of the role and impact of this kind of belief, as well as greatly increasing how important encouragement seems to be for young people to flourish.

In this first of two episodes on the science of self-belief and beliefs relating to the self, I will discuss self-concept, which is similar to self-esteem but domain-specific rather than global. For example, somebody might have a high self-concept for physical appearance (i.e. they think they are handsome / beautiful), but a low self-concept for physical performance (i.e. they think they are bad at sports); or a high self-concept for English (i.e. they think they are good at those classes) but a low self-concept for Mathematics (they think they are bad at maths). This domain specificity allows us to see through experiments where self-esteem interventions seem to do little, as often they do a lot for one specific self-concept, while not affecting the rest, thus making it seem that globally not much has changed, when in fact there has been a major positive impact.

Overall, self-concept seems to be a very important concept (ha) for understanding what makes people successful, and a vital lever to pull in helping people reach their potential.

Enjoy the episode.

***

RELATED EPISODES

13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen

45. The problem with self-esteem

46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff

SUPPORT

You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme.

A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different components, but we discuss this diagram in the interview so I have shared it here.

OVERVIEW. What is cognitive architecture? What is ACT-R? Why should we care?

EVIDENCE. What evidence is there for ACT-R? How much evidence is there? What sort of human activities can it model? Can it model non-goal-driven behaviours such as daydreaming, for instance? Has ACT-R been tested with people of different ages (children vs. adults vs. the elderly)? Has it been tested with people of different cultures?

SCOPE & ELEMENTS. ACT-R version 2.0 had no working memory component - why not, and what were the circumstances that led to it being introduced? How does ACT-R deal with consciousness? How is ACT-R being extended to deal with emotions?

APPLICATION. When did ACT-R become mature enough as a theory for you to move from basic science and theory-building to application? What are the educational applications of ACT-R?

PUBLIC RELATIONS. It took me over 7 years before I found out about cognitive architecture as a field. Nobody in education, or in the general public, seems to know about it, and it seems to never be mentioned by the vast majority of psychologists either. Given its achievements in modelling human cognition, why do so few people know about it?

Enjoy the episode.

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SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting http://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced.

I particularly focus on one theory known as ACT-R, though I have also been reading about other architectures such as Soar, LIDA, EPIC, and CLARION. I will be able to go into more detail about some of these in later episodes of the podcast.

For the moment, the biggest takeaway is what a cognitive architecture is and how impressive the achievements of the field have been so far. Cognitive architectures aim to describe human thinking and learning through analysing the mind into parts, and clearly specifying the role of each part and its interaction with other parts. It then makes predictions of how people would behave in a given situation based on these models - predictions that often achieve startling levels of accuracy, over a wide range of scenarios. The field is now mature enough that the architectures are routinely used by some psychologists to explain the results of their experiments, and the architectures are also used in technology as a basis for robot cognition or for computer game AI characters.

Enjoy the episode.

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RELATED EPISODES

79. What learning is

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85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham

95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought might be relevant. So this one's for you, Tom.

The chapter starts with an overview of the definition of what expert writing is as a task, followed by a description of the characteristics of expert writers, and finally goes on to describe something of the learning process of becoming a writer. Writing is a difficult skill to characterise because it comes in so many different forms, genres, and domains of expertise, but commonalities among expert writers are still possible to elucidate.

While this article is more of a study of experts and expertise rather than a detailed map of how to go from zero to hero in writing, it does help us to understand the nature of the task and the kinds of skills that need to be mastered in order to write well, as well as identify the sorts of issues that even the pros struggle with.

Enjoy the episode.

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In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain.

Enjoy the episode.

I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today.

Enjoy the episode.

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