All posts by Brian Martin

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and vice president of Whistleblowers Australia. He is the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles on dissent, nonviolence, scientific controversies, democracy, information issues, education and other topics.

academic freedom, education, health, science

An orchestrated attack on a PhD thesis

February 1, 2016 Brian Martin

Judy Wilyman, an outspoken critic of the Australian government’s vaccination policy, undertook a PhD at the University of Wollongong. She graduated in December 2015.

On 11 January, her PhD thesis was posted on the university’s digital repository, Research Online. On the same day, anticipating an attack on Judy and the thesis, I posted a document titled “Judy Wilyman, PhD: how to understand attacks on a research student“, which turned out to be remarkably accurate in characterising the nature of the attack, which commenced within 24 hours.

The attack included a series of biased articles in The Australian by journalist Kylar Loussikian, numerous hostile blogs and tweets, a one-sided Wikipedia page, and a petition. Never before have I heard of such an outpouring of rage over the award of a PhD in Australia.

As a sociologist, this phenomenon is fascinating in its assumptions and motivations. I am hardly a neutral observer: I was Judy’s principal supervisor at the University of Wollongong, and quite a bit of the outrage has been directed at me, my supervision and my research. On the other hand, I have considerable inside knowledge, enabling insight about the claims being made.

Given the volume of hostile commentary about Judy’s thesis, it is not possible for me to undertake a comprehensive analysis of it in a short time. Therefore my observations here are preliminary. Rather than try to provide detailed evidence to document my generalisations, I merely illustrate them with a few comments made by signers of the petition against the university and the PhD. Down the track, I hope to provide a more detailed response, including to some of the treatments that address matters of substance.

SAVN attacks

The outrage over Judy becoming Dr Wilyman can best be understood by studying the operations of the group now calling itself Stop the Australian (Anti)Vaccination Network or SAVN. Since 2009, SAVN has been attempting to censor and discredit any public criticism of vaccination, using misrepresentation, ridicule, complaints and harassment, as I have documented in a series of articles. SAVN’s agenda has been to cleanse public discourse of dissent about vaccination. Judy Wilyman has been one of SAVN’s many targets.

Judy had been under attack by SAVNers for several years. Therefore, I and others at the University of Wollongong correctly assumed there would be a hostile response to her graduation. Consider two hypotheses for how I and university officials would behave in this situation.

Hypothesis 1. We would push through a sub-standard thesis.

Hypothesis 2. We would take extra care to ensure that the thesis was of requisite quality and that all university processes were followed carefully. This would include sending the thesis to technical experts and choosing external examiners of high standing.

To me, it beggars belief that anyone would believe hypothesis 1, especially given that outsiders lack information about the operation of university processes. Yet in practice it seems that many outsiders, based on limited knowledge, assume that the thesis must be no good, my supervision was inadequate and the university was derelict.

The rush to condemn the thesis and the university can be understood this way: opponents assume it is impossible to undertake a scholarly critique of vaccination policy (or at least impossible for Judy to do so). Therefore, they condemn everyone involved in the process.

Furthermore, opponents do not acknowledge that scholars can differ in their evaluation of evidence and arguments. Instead, in various scientific controversies, including the vaccination debate, dissident experts are subject to attack.

Agenda-setting

Within media studies, there is a well known and widely discussed view that mass media do not tell people what to think, but are quite influential in determining what people think about. The articles by Kylar Loussikian in The Australian apparently were highly influential in getting a lot of readers to think about Judy Wilyman’s PhD. Their agenda was set by the mass media yet, as noted within agenda-setting research, few readers realised their focus of attention had been so influenced.

Associated with media agenda-setting is the significance of framing, which is about the perspective from which people see an issue. Loussikian’s articles framed the issue as about shortcomings of a PhD thesis and the credibility of the student, the supervisor, the examiners and the university. This frame was adopted by most (though far from all) commentators.

It is an interesting thought experiment to consider the likely response to a differently framed set of articles about the thesis, in which the central issue was an attack on academic freedom by SAVN over a number of years. However, The Australian was unlikely to adopt this frame. Indeed, a couple of years earlier, an Australian journalist had adopted SAVN’s agenda against Judy.

Assumptions about scholarship

Many of the attackers seem to have assumed that scholarship and criticism of vaccination are incompatible. How else could they justify condemning the university? An alternative view is to support current Australian government vaccination policy while accepting that it can be subject to a scholarly critique.

SAVNers for years have proclaimed that there is no debate about vaccination, by which they mean that there are no valid objections to the dominant view. To acknowledge that a scholarly critique is possible is to accept there is something to debate. Apparently this possibility is so threatening that it must be met by denigration and abuse.

Looking at the thesis

In “Judy Wilyman, PhD” I anticipated the sorts of attacks that would be made. This was not difficult: I simply listed the methods that had been used previously. Here’s what I wrote in a section titled “What to look for in criticism”:

When people criticise a research student’s work, it is worth checking for tell-tale signs indicating when these are not genuine concerns about quality and probity but instead part of a campaign to denigrate viewpoints they oppose.

They attack the person, not just their work.

They concentrate on alleged flaws in the work, focusing on small details and ignoring the central points.

They make no comparisons with other students or theses or with standard practice, but rather make criticisms in isolation or according to their own assumed standards.

They assume that findings contrary to what they believe is correct must be wrong or dangerous or both.

The attacks on Judy’s research exhibit every one of these signs. Her opponents attack her as a person, repeatedly express outrage over certain statements she has made while ignoring the central themes in her work, make no reference to academic freedom or standard practice in university procedures, and simply assume that she must be wrong.

My preliminary observation is that most of the hostile commentary about the thesis exhibits one or more of these signs.

petition

There have been numerous derogatory comments made about Judy, me and the university, most without providing any evidence and many based on misrepresentations of the thesis. Proponents of evidence-based medicine might ponder whether it is legitimate to condemn a thesis without reading it, condemn a supervisor without knowing anything about what happened during the supervision process, and condemn a university without having any information about the operation of university procedures. (Tell-tale sign 1)

The awarding of a PhD for such a poorly researched and polemically biased thesis gives credibility to science deniers everywhere, and gives an elevated status to one of our most celebrated anti-vaccination cranks.— Ian McMillan, Imbil, Australia

Some of the opponents of the thesis have referred to comments made by Judy in other contexts. Likewise, questions have been raised about some of my other research. This is the technique of attacking the person in order to discredit their work. (Tell-tale sign 1)

When raising concerns about a piece of research, the normal scholarly route is to send them to the author, inviting a reply, not to immediately publicise them via journalists. An alternative is to submit them to a scholarly journal for publication, in which case many editors would invite the author to reply.

Alleging there are errors in a piece of work does not on its own challenge the central arguments in the work. For this, addressing those arguments directly is necessary. Very few of the critics of Judy’s thesis have addressed any of its central themes. (Tell-tale sign 2)

I’m horrified that anyone could accept this thesis as well researched and evidenced. How could it possibly be when the whole thing is based solely on conspiracy theories that have been debunked time and again? — Allyson Lees, Melbourne, Australia

The intensive scrutiny of Judy’s thesis on its own does not enable a judgement of its quality, because it is necessary to benchmark against other comparable theses. None of her critics has attempted a similarly intensive scrutiny of any other thesis, much less a set of theses large enough to enable a fair assessment of her work. Experienced examiners have assessed many theses, as supervisors and/or examiners, and are well placed to make the required judgements about quality. This is in stark contrast to outside critics, many of whom lack any experience of thesis supervision or examination. (Tell-tale sign 3)

Science is not something that can be cherry picked as suits one’s emotional convictions. Conspiracies and misinformation are causing the re-emergence of diseases that had effectively been eradicated. Universities should be the hotbeds of revealing truths that can be verified and by implication, vociferously expunging anything that cannot. — Adrian Elton, Melbourne, VIC

Why is there such a hue and cry over Judy’s thesis? Many theses tackling controversial topics or taking non-standard positions are published every year. Many of the critics of the thesis apparently believe no thesis proposal critical of vaccination should be accepted at an Australian university, and that for such a thesis to be passed necessarily reflects adversely on the university. The thinking behind this seems to be based on the assumption that criticism of Australian government vaccination policy is dangerous and should be censored. (Tell-tale sign 4)

I care. I believe in freedom of thought and speech, however this unscientific bullshit has to stop. It’s endangering lives — Kate Hillard, Broome, Australia

The net effect of these techniques is striking. A group of campaigners, with a well-established agenda of attacking critics of vaccination, sets out to discredit a thesis. Disdaining accepted scholarly means of critique, they feed material to a journalist. They take sentences from the thesis out of context and assert they are wrong, going public before offering the author an opportunity to reply. They ignore the central themes of the thesis. They show no awareness of scholarly expectations in the field, instead asserting the superiority of their own judgements over those of the examiners. Based on this charade of intellectual critique, they then condemn the thesis, the student, the supervisor and the university in an orchestrated campaign.

The role of expertise

SAVNers and quite a few other commentators state or assume that vaccination policy is a scientific issue, rather than one including a complex mixture of science, ethics and politics. These commentators then jump to the conclusion that only scientific experts are qualified to make judgements about vaccination policy. There is a contradiction in their discourse, though, because few of these commentators themselves have relevant scientific expertise, yet they feel entitled to make pronouncements in support of vaccination. So their assumption is that anyone, with relevant credentials or not, can legitimately support vaccination policy but no one without relevant scientific expertise is entitled to criticise it. They ignore the significance of policy expertise.

This is a familiar theme within scientific controversies: critics of the epistemologically dominant view are dismissed because they are not suitably qualified. There is another way to look at policy issues: all citizens should be able to have an input, especially those with a stake in the outcomes. This participatory view about science policy has been well articulated over several decades, but few of those commenting about Australian vaccination policy even seem to recognise it exists.

Many opponents of the thesis and critics of the university have declared this issue is not about academic freedom but about academic standards. This claim would be more convincing if these opponents had ever made scholarly contributions about academic freedom or if they were not making self-interested judgements about their own behaviour. Their actions show their agenda is suppression of dissent.

The SAVN message

What is the implication of SAVN’s campaign against Judy Wilyman? And why do SAVNers and others continue to attack the University of Wollongong despite lacking any concrete evidence of any shortcomings in the university’s processes? There is one underlying message and two audiences. The message is that no university should consider allowing a research student (or at least an outspoken research student) to undertake a study critical of vaccination.

The first audience is the University of Wollongong. The second audience is other universities, which are being warned off critical studies of vaccination, or indeed of any other medical orthodoxy, by the example being set by the attack on the University of Wollongong.

There is also another message, which is along the lines of “Don’t mess with SAVN. We will launch a barrage of abuse, ridicule and complaints, and use our connections with the media and the medical profession, to assail anyone who crosses us.”

The original reason I became involved in the Australian vaccination debate is that I saw SAVN’s agenda as dangerous to free speech. If adopted more widely, SAVN’s approach would stifle discussion on a range of issues.

I am therefore buoyed by the support I’ve received from my colleagues, including senior figures, at the University of Wollongong, who believe in the importance of open debate and of scholarship that challenges conventional wisdom.

It is apparent that academics and universities need to do more to explain what they do and to explain the meaning and significance of academic freedom.

Postscript

education, self-development

Think freakier

January 2, 2016 Brian Martin

The authors of Freakonomics have now written Think like a Freak. Their stimulating perspective is an invitation to think in even more original ways.

Steven Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who became famous for his book Freakonomics, in which he applies logic and mathematics in original ways to both longstanding and novel problems and issues. The book’s co-author, Stephen Dubner, is a writer who can turn dry statistics into page-turning adventures.

One controversial topic covered in Freakonomics was the cause of the decline in the US crime rate in the 1990s. The authors presented the idea that the legalisation of abortion nationwide in the early 1970s led to a significant decline in the birth of children in disadvantaged circumstances, and as a result the crime rate went down 15 to 20 years later. They cite statistics and references to back up this hypothesis. Freakonomics looked also at why teachers cheat, the economics of drug dealing, and fashions in naming children, among other topics. Levitt and Dubner later extended their popular treatments of unorthodox perspectives in SuperFreakonomics. As well, the authors run a blog and a radio programme.

Steven Levitt

Because of the huge sales of Freakonomics, it is not surprising that Levitt’s research findings have come under considerable scrutiny, with some data and findings contested. As well, it is debateable whether the topics covered should be considered part of the economics discipline.

Most recently, Levitt and Dubner have written Think like a Freak, aiming to explain their approach by using engaging examples to motivate general comments. This book is my focus here. Learning to think in unorthodox ways can be worthwhile even if the results are sometimes questionable.

Think-like-a-freak

In Think like a Freak, the authors tell, for example, of Takeru Kobayashi (nicknamed Kobi), a slightly built Japanese man who became involved in competitions to eat as much as possible in a short time. After some initial successes, he entered the biggest event in the field, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, New York. The annual contest involved eating as many hotdogs as possible in 12 minutes. Other competitors followed the then conventional wisdom, which was to train by eating as much as possible. Kobi, though, decided to train in a different way: he experimented with different approaches, for example eating the sausage separately from the bun and soaking the bun in water so it could be swallowed more quickly. Going into the competition, Kobi astounded the field by winning and by smashing the record, eating nearly twice as many hotdogs as the previous highest number.

Takeru Kobayashi, 2006

From this example, Levitt and Dubner highlight a few key points. Kobi didn’t just accept the conventional approaches: he tried out new approaches, tested them and practised them. Another thing was that Kobi focused on how he ate, namely applying the methods he had developed as well as possible rather than comparing his performance to previous efforts by others. In this way he was not held back by the expectation that records can only broken incrementally. Finally, Kobi developed a mental technique, including his focus on process, that allowed him to enjoy the process of gorging himself, despite the pain and discomfort involved.

Levitt and Dubner pursue this path of presenting simple ideas that, when applied in unorthodox ways or to unexpected topics, lead to potential breakthroughs. One chapter is “Think like a child.” Of course they don’t mean always think like a child, but in some circumstances children can cut through conventional ways of seeing the world, conventional for adults that is. A magician friend of the authors told them he was hardly ever caught out by an adult, but quite a few children could see through his tricks, for a variety of reasons: they were less focused and hence harder to distract, they were more attentive to details adults wouldn’t notice, and they were shorter and could see things that adults couldn’t because the tricks were designed to be seen from above.

Freakier

Levitt and Dubner describe meeting with David Cameron just before he became Britain’s Prime Minister. They pointed out some ways to make the National Health Service more efficient by introducing charges for service, a perspective that comes naturally to an economist. But Cameron switched off: the NHS was not to be tinkered with.

Levitt and Dubner here subscribe to conventional rationality of planning by elites, those who supposedly know best. But there is more to decision-making than rationality. Part of the picture is involving citizens in the decisions that affect them, thereby enabling far better uptake of policies. Cameron instinctively knew he could not implement major NHS reforms, even if he wanted to, without winning over the population. (Incidentally, the US fee-based health system is hardly a model of rationality.)

Levitt and Dubner advocate going to the roots of problems, not just treating symptoms. They tell the now-familiar story of how Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that ulcers are caused not by stress and spicy foods but by a bacterium that can be eliminated by antibiotics. They had to fight the medical establishment for recognition. Marshall and Warren, now Nobel Prize winners, had addressed the cause of ulcers. So far, so good.

Then there is crime, a favourite topic for Levitt and Dubner. In reprising their studies of abortion and crime, they point out that some measures, such as more capital punishment and tighter gun laws, do not reduce the crime rate. They instead prefer to focus on something deeper, children’s upbringing.

There are other ways to look at crime not examined by Levitt and Dubner. One is to point out that nearly all crime appearing in US police statistics is by people at the bottom of the social pyramid. Those who are poor, with less education and few opportunities, are far more likely to commit the sorts of crime that result in arrests and imprisonment. However, available evidence suggests that the biggest criminals are at the top of the social hierarchy, including white-collar crimes by individuals and major crimes by corporations and governments. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, have been fined billions of dollars for crimes leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but few executives are ever called to account. So crime statistics should be treated as an artefact of a class-based approach to criminality: most of the big boys (and girls) can cheat and steal with impunity, while those further down the hierarchy are subject to far greater scrutiny and punishment.

The sociologist Randall Collins wrote an insightful chapter presenting an unfamiliar perspective on crime. He argues that all societies need to define some activities as deviant, and those considered most deviant are criminalised. So crime rates reflect deeper processes of social stratification and exclusion. In this case, thinking like a freak may not get you as far as reading some sociology.

Collins-Sociological Insight

Levitt and Dubner write about a study by Jörg Spenkuch of German Protestants and Catholics that found people living in Protestant areas earned a little more money on average than people living in Catholic areas, although their hourly wages were the same. One factor was that those in Protestant areas worked longer hours. Is the lesson from this, as suggested by Levitt and Dubner, that kids should be encouraged to be more hard-working like Protestants? An alternative lesson is that by working fewer hours, Catholics are increasing their well-being: it is well documented that higher incomes have a minimal impact on happiness compared to spending time with family and friends.

Persuading people

Levitt and Dubner include a useful chapter on how to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded. They make some useful recommendations. One is to give credit to the other side’s strong points, because an opponent is unlikely to engage in debate with an obviously biased perspective. In studying numerous scientific controversies over the years, my observation is that it is rare for a partisan to give a fair summary of the opponent’s argument. In the Australian vaccination debate, each side presents its strong points and criticises the other side’s weak points. There’s very little persuasion going on.

Another recommendation made by Levitt and Dubner is not to insult the opponents, for example by calling them ignorant, foolish, dupes or crazies. Going by past behaviour, many vaccination partisans won’t be following this advice.

The authors use climate change as an example, pondering the difference between the scientific consensus about the reality of human-induced global warming and the considerable scepticism among the US public. However, they omit one important factor: in the US, there is a powerful fossil-fuel lobby that does everything it can to create doubt about climate science. In many other countries, climate sceptics have low public credibility. So perhaps Levitt and Dubner could make another recommendation: have on your side a powerful and wealthy group that intervenes in the debate.

Stephen Dubner

Levitt and Dubner use a different example to good effect: driverless cars. These are getting better technologically, but to argue for them, they say it is wise to acknowledge possible dangers, for example that a driverless car could plough into a preschool, killing lots of kids. They provide the figures to show that dramatic events, reported in the media, give an unrealistic picture of technological dangers. Cars (with drivers) are the big killer of kids in rich countries, and if driverless cars reduced the road toll even a little, many more kids would be alive and uninjured.

However, there is another way to look at the issue of driverless cars, which is to ask by so many billions of dollars are being devoted to a slight improvement in a transport system that is inherently unsafe, as well as being damaging to the environment. For decades, critics of the car have been advocating for a range of alternatives: walking, cycling, public transport, and design of cities to make walking and cycling safe and attractive. Recognising such alternatives does not require thinking like a freak, but rather being open to possibilities that clash with the powerful road and auto lobby in the US. Thinking about transport like a freak in Copenhagen, where commuting by bicycle is commonplace, would be different than thinking like a freak in Los Angeles.

The final chapter of Think like a Freak is titled “The upside of quitting.” They say that quitting has an unfortunately bad reputation, often being associated with failure. They note that quitting a project, a job or a relationship can have many advantages, but quitting often is not contemplated because of sunk costs and lack of consideration of opportunity costs.

They describe tech companies that try out lots of ideas with the aim of testing them promptly and, if they don’t measure up, quitting without investing a lot of money. It makes sense to spend some time and effort, but no more than necessary, determining whether something is a bad idea.

Levitt and Dubner even set up an online operation that offers to flip a coin for people to make decisions, for example whether to leave a job or a relationship. This has attracted tens of thousands of participants who are asked to report on the outcome of the process. Despite some intriguing outcomes, I have reservations. There is research showing that people systematically misjudge what made them happy in the past and what will make them happy in the future. Indeed, there are several illusions involved in people’s explanations for their current state of mind. So while I sympathise with Levitt and Dubner’s encouragement to see the positives involved in quitting and failure, actually measuring the consequences of choices can be challenging.

Think like a Freak is engaging and informative. It is written as a set of stories, and the authors are well aware that story-telling is a powerful technique for getting a message across. The book concludes with some modest comments.

All we’ve done is encourage you to think a bit differently, a bit harder, a bit more freely. Now it’s your turn! We of course hope you enjoyed this book. But our greatest satisfaction would be if it helps you, even in some small measure, to go out and right some wrong, to ease some burden, or even — if this is your thing — to eat more hot dogs. (p. 211)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Think like a freak: how to think smarter about almost everything (Penguin, 2015)

education, self-development

Marking blind

December 17, 2015 Brian Martin

When marking an essay, it can be better not to know who wrote it.

As a university teacher, one of my regular tasks is to mark assignments, and I want to be as fair as possible to the students. One method I use is to “mark blind,” namely without knowing the name of the student whose work I’m marking.

Most teachers try to be fair and say that knowing the identity of the student makes no difference to them. However, there’s plenty of research about in-group favouritism, where the in-group can be based on family, religion, age, ethnicity or viewpoints, among other possibilities. Teachers are likely to be affected by all sorts of unconscious bias, including expectations about how good a student is.

Students create impressions on their teachers. Some students are more articulate, engaging, humorous or astute in their comments. Then there are the effects of appearance, dress and demeanour. Maybe a student really tries hard, creating a favourable impression of diligence.

Wine tasters evaluate wines without knowing their origin. Vintages can vary considerably from year to year, so it’s better not to be influenced by previous perceptions. Similarly, the quality of a student’s work can vary from class to class and from assignment to assignment, and teacher expectations can affect evaluations.

Even a student’s name can influence perceptions. Male or female? Ethnic? Pretentious-sounding or ordinary? Stereotypes abound and can influence attitudes. If you know a student well, in-group favouritism is a risk; if not, then stereotype bias is a risk. When marking and knowing the student’s name, it’s therefore likely that some mental image of the student will be present, and it’s likely this has an effect on the marker.

My way of limiting this bias is to mark assignments without knowing the student’s name. I ask students to list only their student number on the assignment, not their name.

I find this changes my attitude while marking. My focus becomes to comment on the work done, with less concern about the relationship of the comments or mark to the student. I don’t worry about a student who comes across well in class doing poorly or about a seemingly lackadaisical student doing well. After finishing marking all the assignments, I go online to recombine student numbers with names, and send my comments to the students.

One good aspect of marking blind is that I can say honestly to students that my mark is on their work, not on them personally. They can be more confident that if they receive a good mark, it is a reflection of good work and likewise that if they receive a poor mark, it is not about who they are.

Practicalities

In recent years, I have had my students submit their work electronically, either directly to me by email or through an online forum. Usually this means I can see their names as well as their student numbers – but only temporarily. I put the submitted files into a folder, with each file having as its name the student’s number. By the time there are a few files in the folder, I have forgotten which one is which.

Sometimes, when marking an assignment, I recognise the student. Perhaps it’s because we had talked about it beforehand, or the student gives some revealing personal detail, for example being from Finland when there’s only one Finnish student in the class. More commonly, though, it’s because the student includes their name somewhere in the assignment.

Whatever the reason, I put that assignment at the bottom of the pile and turn to another one. Usually after marking ten or so assignments, I’m on automatic pilot in terms of applying the assessment criteria, and knowing the student’s name is less important.

Sometimes, when marking an assignment, I think I know which student did it, but if I’m not absolutely sure, it helps me switch focus from who did the work to the quality of the work. I want the mark to be appropriate whoever did the work.

If I want to give feedback specifically for a student, supplementary to my comments on the student’s assignment, I can add this after reconnecting student names to assignments.

The pitfalls of familiarity

There’s an inherent tension in any system in which teachers mark their own students’ work. Teachers in such circumstances have two conflicting roles. One is to provide guidance, support and feedback to assist learning. The other is to provide an assessment of the student’s performance.

The trouble is that the assessment role can inhibit the support role. If students are worried about what mark they are going to get, they may be cautious about exposing their ignorance, thereby reducing opportunities for useful feedback. They may also try to curry favour with their teacher.

The way around this is to separate teaching and assessment roles. This occurs with research students in the Australian and British systems. The supervisor supports the student to produce a satisfactory thesis. Then the thesis is assessed by independent examiners. At the University of Wollongong, there are strict rules to ensure independence. At the PhD level, for example, examiners cannot have worked at the university in the past five years, nor have collaborated with any supervisor or the student, among other restrictions.

In years gone by, supervisors were examiners for their own students’ honours theses, but this was open to abuse, with some supervisors becoming advocates for their favoured students while some unfortunate students, who had clashed with their supervisors, were treated harshly. The rules were changed to prevent supervisors being examiners, though in some parts of the university there was resistance, with supervisors insisting that only they had the expertise to judge their students’ work.

One year, I made an arrangement with a colleague at another university: he would mark the final assignments from my undergraduate class and I’d do the same for him. This enabled me to be a support person for my students, giving them feedback on drafts before marking by my colleague. I thought the system was worthwhile, but it seems that few academics are receptive to this sort of exchange. My colleague never supplied me with the essays from his class. My guess is that he did not feel comfortable relinquishing his control over marks for his students. If, instead of needing to mark the work of 90 students in a semester, the figure was closer to 40, I might try again to arrange an exchange with a colleague or with one of the other tutors in my classes.

Other biases

Blind marking can limit biases due to knowing who did the work, but it doesn’t eliminate other sorts of biases. One of the most common is ideological: if students say things you agree with, they are more likely to create a favourable impression than if they challenge your beliefs. If you’re teaching on topics where there are strong differences in opinion, for example addressing abortion or biotechnology, being fair can be difficult.

There’s another problem too. Students are very sensitive to the views of their teachers, and many students will say what they think their teachers want to hear. This is probably more damaging and insidious than teacher bias itself.

Many years ago, I taught a course on environmental politics and used case studies as a basis for understanding theory. Many of the students were doing an environmental science degree, and most of the students thought of themselves as environmentally conscious, and it was hard to get them to think critically about their own beliefs. When nuclear power was the case study, nearly all students were opposed to it, and few students had the confidence to present pro-nuclear arguments. Furthermore, the students knew I was an opponent of nuclear power.

Then I introduced fluoridation as a case study. Some students asked me during class, “What do you think, Brian?” I’d respond that I was studying the controversy as a social scientist and didn’t have a strong personal opinion. This answer frustrated them: they obviously wanted to know my view so they would know better what to write in their assignments.

Furthermore, there was no standard environmental view about fluoridation, and different class members had different views on fluoridation, leading to more stimulating discussions than on other topics. The students had to think for themselves rather than regurgitate a standard line or say what they thought I wanted to hear.

On just one occasion, I used one of my books as a text. I didn’t like this, because I felt students were inhibited. Personally, I would have liked to hear their criticisms of my ideas, but few students have the confidence to question their teacher’s well-formed views. Basing teaching on your own research means you have greater knowledge, but does it help students learn more effectively?

Conclusion

Fairness is just one consideration when marking. Ultimately, the goal is helping students to learn and to become independent, critical, ethical, self-motivated learners. How to do this is a continual challenge for which there is no single answer. I recommend trying blind marking to see what it’s like and to see how students respond.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Anne Melano and Caroline Colton for useful comments.

Subject outlines illustrating how students can be instructed to submit blinded assignments.
CST228, 2015: see pages 11 and 15
BCM390, 2015: see page 17

politics

The well-dressed anarchist

October 10, 2015 Brian Martin

How does an anarchist dress? One image is the hippy, with long hair, sandals and sloppy, colourful, unkempt clothes. Another image is the punk, with nose rings and pink hair. Yet another image is the subversive, wearing all black.

And what is this mythical anarchist doing? A common idea is shouting and making threatening gestures, perhaps throwing bricks or maybe even a bomb.

An anarchist?

Is it possible for an anarchist to be well dressed in a conventional sense? Imagine an anarchist wearing a fashionable dress, or suit and tie, in smart casual clothes with a stylish haircut, almost indistinguishable from an advertisement for trendy garments.

Could an anarchist talk politely, be friendly and always avoid the slightest hint of violence? If so, how can anyone tell whether a person walking down the street is an anarchist? Maybe anarchists are in disguise, looking just like other people!

Anarchism as a political philosophy has been seriously misunderstood for most of its existence. In the media, “anarchy” is treated as a synonym for “chaos.” The word is used to suggest that order has broken down, and people are doing all sorts of things — violence and mayhem, perhaps — that are normally forbidden. This meaning leads to images of anarchists being strange and threatening in appearance and behaviour.

Anarchists?

But what is anarchism really? Just looking at dictionary definitions gives a different picture. For example, the online Oxford Dictionary gives this definition: “belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion.”

Among anarchist groups, especially those familiar with anarchist writings and theory, anarchism has several dimensions. One is opposition to all forms of rule or domination. Anarchists historically have opposed the state, namely systems of government with rulers at the top, whether popularly elected or dictators. Anarchists are opposed to government as a system. But they oppose more than just government; they reject other forms of domination, including capitalism, state socialism, patriarchy, organised religion, bureaucracy, heterosexism and human chauvinism (domination of nature and non-human animals).

If this is what anarchists are against, what are they for? The short answer is “self-management,” which means people organising their own lives through cooperative processes. Self-management occurs when members of a string quartet decide for themselves what music to play. It occurs when students help decide what and how they will learn. It occurs when workers collectively make decisions about what to produce and how to do the job. Self-management can also be called participatory democracy, a type of democracy not requiring elections of officials, but instead using methods involving everyone’s participation to reach agreements.

An anarchist?

So, anarchists are against domination and instead want people to cooperate to make decisions about social arrangements. This sort of participatory decision-making is found within many families, groups of friends, some clubs and some workplaces. But it is not common within governments, large corporations or militaries.

Anarchism or anarchy, as properly understood, is not chaos at all. It is not the absence of order, but rather is a different sort of order. Rather than a social order involving hierarchy and authority, it is a social order involving respect, cooperation, and struggle over priorities that tries to avoid creating new forms of domination.

The popular image of anarchism is thus almost the opposite of what it should be. It is easy to see the source of the image. Anarchists are opposed to domination, which means they are a threat to powerful groups. Government leaders do not like anarchism, because it means the loss of their power and status. For them, anarchism is a threat to order, namely the traditional order of hierarchy and authority. It is a short step from thinking that anarchism threatens the system of government to thinking that it causes chaos — because, for those who think government is order, any different sort of order is almost impossible to imagine.

Anarchists?

Corporate leaders also do not like anarchism. If workers can run workplaces themselves, in a cooperative fashion, then owners and managers are not needed. This is the reason why, when workers try to take control, they are so fiercely opposed by owners and their government allies. For capitalists, workers’ self-management feels like chaos, because the familiar order of managerial control is lost. A different type of order, organised by workers, is almost impossible to imagine.

Many socialists and Marxists do not like anarchism. In socialism, the government has more power. It is said to be exercised in the name of the workers and the people, but it is still government, and government leaders often have great privilege and power. For many socialists and Marxists, anarchism seems like chaos, because their idea of social organisation is undermined. A different sort of order, without parties and party leaders, is almost impossible to imagine.

Anarchism has been caught in a pincer movement, attacked by the traditional authorities in the state and corporations and attacked by socialists. Karl Marx was just as opposed to anarchists as were factory owners. So perhaps it is not surprising that anarchists have been so misrepresented.

Anarchists do not seek to take power and to impose their own views on others — that would be a perversion of the idea of self-management. This has meant that anarchists have never had the resources or desire to mount propaganda on their behalf, and therefore have been at the mercy of misleading descriptions from corporate and government leaders, whether neoliberal or socialist, and mass media serving government and corporate agendas.

The result is that anarchism is more misunderstood than just about any other major political philosophy or body of theory. The basic ideas of socialism, atheism, racial equality and feminism are widely understood, even if in a distorted sense. For example, many people do not like feminism, for example, and may misunderstand it, but they generally know it has something to do with women’s equality. Feminists have been more effective in spreading their ideas than anarchists — or perhaps anti-feminists have been less successful than anti-anarchists.

An anarchist?

So to return to the vision of a well-dressed anarchist: there is nothing inherent in anarchist theory to say that an anarchist has to dress a particular way. Some do decide to dress alternatively, as hippies, punks or members of the black bloc. But others may use other dress codes, including conventional ones.

Some types of clothes involve exploitation or other undesirable consequences. Perhaps shoes are produced in sweatshops. Leather products may involve harm to animals. Maybe clothes manufacture causes environmental damage. Very expensive clothing might involve diverting resources away from human needs into fashion houses and advertising. Choosing clothing does have political implications. A sensitive dresser pays attention not only to personal appearance but to human and environmental impacts.

Still, it is possible to dress in an attractive fashion without spending huge amounts of money. Attention to colour and style can compensate for high prices. Second-hand clothes sometimes look as good as those for sale in regular shops.

The issue of clothes is not really all that important, but it points to a deeper question concerning anarchism: can a person be an anarchist and work or live in a hierarchical institution, for example in a corporation or government? Somehow it is assumed that being against domination means being outside the systems of domination — so an anarchist has to be out in the streets, not in the boardroom.

An anarchist?

But this isn’t the way other liberation theories are treated. Feminists can join male-dominated workplaces. Some try to rise in governments and corporations. Marxists get jobs in factories or join social democratic political parties. They try to take their views into the system and to bring about change. There is no requirement that someone who wants the world to be better has to avoid interacting or participating in systems that need to be changed or abolished.

It is good that some people try to live a pure and principled life, but others make compromises in order to help create their ideal. That means that you might find an anarchist — or a person with anarchist sentiments, though unfamiliar with anarchist theory — just about anywhere. Maybe in an army or a small business or a government bureaucracy.

Can an anarchist be well behaved? A common image of anarchists is of throwing bricks through shop windows and forcibly clashing with police, like some members of the black bloc at alter-globalisation demonstrations. The stereotype of the violent anarchist has some historical basis: some anarchists supported assassination of rulers, and in the 1930s anarchists fought for the revolution in Spain against fascists.

But there has always been another side to anarchism, a side based on refusal to use violence. It includes resistance to conscription. It also includes commitment to nonviolent methods of struggle, using strikes, boycotts, rallies, sit-ins and a host of other methods that do not involve physical violence against opponents. Gandhi, the pioneer leader of nonviolent struggle, can be considered an anarchist: he opposed all forms of domination and advocated a type of village democracy that fits the model of self-management.

Anarchists?

A classic anarchist principle is that the means should embody the ends or, in other words, the methods used should be compatible with the goal sought. Anarchists reject the Marxist-Leninist approach of destroying the capitalist state and creating a socialist state as a step on the road to a truly communist society (without a state), because the means, a socialist state, is not compatible with the goal of a society in which the state has withered away. Likewise, if the goal is a society without organised violence, then the most suitable means will not involve violence.

The stereotype of the anarchist as violent is hard to break. When there is a vigil, strike, boycott or occupation, not many viewers think, “Ah, a nonviolent protest — anarchists must be involved.” Not only is it possible to be an anarchist and reject violence, but many anarchists fit this picture.

What about an anarchist working in an organisation, maybe in an office? A common image might be of a person shouting at a meeting and rudely challenging the boss. This stereotype reflects an assumption that opposing domination means breaking the rules — in this case, the rules of polite behaviour. But it is quite possible to be a well-behaved anarchist.

What does an anarchist do inside an organisation? Promote self-management, of course! This can be in small ways, hardly noticed, such as helping less confident workers to assert themselves, resisting managerial impositions, advocating greater participation in decision-making and supporting organisational responsibility to the wider community. Lots of workers do these sorts of things, helping to make organisations more socially responsible and more tolerable to work in. Few of these workers would think of themselves as anarchists, but some of their commitments and efforts are compatible with anarchist principles.

Anarchists?

So it is possible for anarchists to be well-dressed, well behaved and committed to nonviolence. In fact, there are quite possibly more anarchists like this than the number who fit the dishevelled, shouting, brick-throwing stereotype. Perhaps the respectable anarchists are just as effective too, or more so, by achieving change without drawing much attention to themselves. Maybe some of them are modest too.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Further reading

London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, In and Against the State (London: Pluto, 1980).

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business Administration (Chichester: Wiley, 1983).

Geoffrey Ostergaard and Melville Currell, The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-Violent Revolution in India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

Acknowledgement Jørgen Johansen provided valuable comments on a draft.

science

Evolution of a different kind

September 30, 2015 Brian Martin

Humans are dominating evolutionary processes, according to synthetic biologists. But who is dominating decision-making about human futures?

It’s a summer day in suburbia, and the lawnmowers are going. As well as cutting grass, residents plant shrubs, remove or poison weeds, and in generally intervene to make their yards look the way they want.

We hear all the time about the importance of evolution in the origin and development of species. The usual idea is that some species thrive and others die out. When there is a mutation or gene recombination favourable to survival, it will spread, so the combination of genetic variation and environmental pressure leads to genetic changes and eventually to species changes.

However, what happens daily in suburbs goes against the standard thinking, because humans are making the decisions about which species survive, by introducing desired plants and getting rid of unwelcome ones. This is a type of “unnatural selection,” according to Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans in their book Evolving Ourselves (2015). Suburban gardeners might be small players in global evolution, but then think of urbanisation and agriculture, including interventions such as irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides, now covering a significant proportion of the earth’s surface. The areas for traditional natural selection are limited and are being replaced by human-influenced selection.

Then there is molecular biology, in which scientists insert genes in places where they would not occur naturally, creating new genetic sequences. Enriquez and Gullans call this “non-random mutation,” and say it is replacing the random mutation that was the basis of Darwinian natural selection though evolution on earth, until recently.

Evolving Ourselves is an entertaining ride through the science and social implications of humans taking over their own evolution and that of other species. Enriquez and Gullans have a lot of fun in the way they write, and cover an astounding array of topics, for example allergies, autism, diet, obesity, reproduction and the decline in human violence. Some of the developments are here today, some are experimental and some are speculation. If Enriquez and Gullans’ thinking becomes reality, so-called synthetic biology will have impacts comparable to information technology, and indeed will interact with it in significant ways. As I will discuss later, a key omission in their treatment is the question of who makes decisions about synthetic biology.

Genomes

DNA is the basis for inheritance. According to previous conventional teaching in biology, the environment does not affect DNA. That it might was rejected as heresy, called Lamarckism.

Juan Enriquez

Enriquez and Gullans describe how this perspective is outdated. They say that humans have four genomes, or genetic systems. The first is DNA, in cells, the basis of traditional genetics. The genes in DNA are not affected by the environment, but their expression can be affected in a process called epigenetics, that can have long-lasting effects on species. Enriquez and Gullans start with the example of the famine in the Netherlands in the end of World War II, triggered by a Nazi blockade. Although Dutch DNA was not directly affected, the effects of the famine were experienced through several generations by chemical tags that can activate or deactivate individual genes. Research on epigenetics is booming.

The discoveries kept piling on; in 2013, a Cornell team demonstrated that epigenetics, not gene code, was a critical factor when trying to figure out when and why a tomato ripens. Similar epigenetic effects were discovered in worms, fruit flies, and rodents; a creative and slightly meanspirited experiment let mice smell sweet almonds and then shocked their feet. Soon mice were terrified of the smell of almonds. When these mice reproduced, the kids were never shocked, but they were still quite afraid of the same smell. So were the grandkids. The brains of all three generations had modified “M71 glomeruli,” the specific neurons sensitive to that type of smell. (p. 69)

The implication is that the massive environmental changes in human lives – including processed food, sedentary lifestyles, watching small screens, and chemicals in the environment – can be affecting human evolution, epigenetically through genes being switched on and off over generations.

Part of the environment that affects humans is microbes: bacteria, viruses and parasites. Microbes have caused more deaths than all wars. Enriquez and Gullans describe an ongoing war against microbes, through four stages: vaccines, antiseptics, antibiotics and antivirals. These massive wars against microbes have largely been successful, but there is a fightback, for example antibiotic-resistant infections.

The story for Enriquez and Gullans is about evolution, and so they introduce the third human biome: the huge number of microscopic organisms that live on us. These organisms, which interact with us, have their own collective genome. What’s interesting is that we are changing human evolution by changing the microbiome, including through the wars against microbes.

Then there is the human virome, composed of viruses that live in cells and in bacteria in the microbiome. Virome DNA is the fourth human genome, along with the core DNA genome, epigenome and microbiome DNA. The environment affects these four genomes through Diet, Enriched environment (information and so forth), Stress, Toxins, Infections, Nurturing and “You” (human decision-making), giving the acronym DESTINY. Humans are driving evolution by changing their environment, affecting the endocrine system, the nervous system and the immune system, all of which affect expression in the genomes.

One top of this, molecular biologists are inserting genes in all sorts of unusual places, with the potential to dramatically alter the usual pattern of evolution. Rather than evolution occurring by natural selection applied to genetic changes that also occur “naturally”, molecular biologists are practising a type of “unnatural selection” by making the choices for genetic change. Enriquez and Gullans say these developments are occurring in a wide range of labs. There is no centralised control, but overall the outcome is a different sort of evolution, a form of human-instigated “fast evolution”. Indeed, the technology and skills for genetic transformation are becoming accessible to people outside the scientific mainstream, in what can be called do-it-yourself synthetic biology.

Wild-sounding futures

Enriquez and Gullans make a good case that humans are dramatically altering their evolutionary path, very rapidly, through the two processes of unnatural selection and non-random mutation. From this they move on to other possible developments, some of them sounding like science fiction. They discuss them as real possibilities, giving evidence that makes them sound just around to corner, or maybe a few decades away.

Individuals could be bioengineered for extraordinary athletic abilities, in conjunction with designer drugs, generating complex challenges for sporting authorities.
Drugs could be developed that enter cells and change your DNA, allowing for all sorts of therapies and capacities.
3D optical neural implants could become standard, allowing interfacing with databases. This would potentially allow interventions into people’s brains, for example to reduce violence.
Body parts, such as arms or eyes, could be cloned and grown externally, so people become composed of organs they didn’t have at birth.
People’s bodies can be reinvigorated so they can live far longer, perhaps centuries.
Humans could be cloned.
Human minds could be downloaded and uploaded into new bodies.
The human species could differentiate into multiple species.

Enriquez and Gullans provide plausible pathways to each of these possibilities. For example, concerning cloned organs, they write:

Researchers at Harvard’s dental school have already rebuilt copies of many people’s teeth in small glass dishes. And if you can rebuild teeth using the genetic instructions in every person’s body, and you can decipher the instructions and create the right scaffolds, eventually you can rebuild any human organ. (pp. 178-179)

Steve Gullans

Who decides?

Evolving Ourselves is written in a breezy style, with ideas from synthetic biology presented in an accessible fashion. Enriquez and Gullans note the social implications of synthetic biology and possible objections to it, but they basically see the push of biology into all sorts of applications as proceeding in labs around the world in an unstoppable way, with the implications needing to be addressed. They mainly point to positive outcomes, trying to make the craziest possibilities seem plausible, indeed inevitable. (The assumption that technology has an inevitable momentum is called technological determinism.)

A key omission is any systematic discussion of the political economy of synthetic biology. In a typical fashion, the developments are seen as something “we” are doing and therefore “we” need to consider the implications. The role of vested interests, the possibilities for malign use, the lack of citizen oversight and the potential for exacerbating inequality in an unjust world are not addressed in any depth.

Consider this statement by Enriquez and Gullans.

The quiver of instruments we have created to redesign and drive fast evolution is so powerful, effective, and dominant that we are not going to give them up, or even curb them much. (p. 217)

The use of “we,” referring to humans, skates over the fact that decisions will be made by only a few people, not in a participatory process involving everyone. Their statement that “we are not going to give them up” is a clear articulation of technological determinism. This reminds me of the early hype about nuclear power, which was seen both beneficial and inevitable, despite its historical connections with nuclear weapons.

Enriquez and Gullans continue:

We will continue evolving bacteria, plants, animals, and ourselves to our particular desires. So now is the time to ask: Having put ourselves in charge of our own evolution and that of other species, what will we choose to do with this extraordinary power? (p. 218)

Who are we?

Again note the use of “we,” hiding huge differences in power over human destiny, and the assumption that synthetic biology is unstoppable (“We will continue …”).

Enriquez and Gullans make synthetic biology sound amazing, attractive and mostly positive, once the spectacular possibilities are considered. But it is also possible that the technology will be used for purposes many will oppose. Military researchers look at biotechnology as a potential tool against enemies, just as they look at every branch of science, indeed funding and monitoring research in numerous fields.

It is salutary to remember that citizen campaigners have challenged and altered technological trajectories. In the 1970s there were plans for fleets of hundreds of supersonic transport aircraft. Due to opposition, only a few such SSTs – the Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144 – were ever produced, and they fly no more. On a bigger scale, peace movements around the world have been instrumental in preventing nuclear war and in pushing for a shrinking of arsenals, though the goal of nuclear abolition is far from being achieved.

Then there are movements for “appropriate technology,” in the widest sense, promoting energy, transport and other technological systems that serve human needs and are under the control of local communities rather than imposed by governments and corporations.

Whether synthetic biology turns out to be largely beneficial or a catastrophe for the world will depend, to a large extent, on citizens being involved in discussions and campaigns about what sort of world is desirable. So read Evolving Ourselves for an entertaining view of future possibilities, but replace the authors’ assumptions about inevitability with a parallel perspective that might be called Deciding Ourselves.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jason Delborne, David Mercer and Peter Taylor for valuable comments.

emotions, personality, self-development

What’s on your mind?

September 16, 2015 Brian Martin

People have the capacity to be able to figure out what others are thinking. But there are lots of traps involved, according to research reported in Nicholas Epley’s book Mindwise.

For most of my life, I thought I was no good at guessing what other people were feeling. I marvelled at the capacity of friends who, through their powers of intuition, could understand other people.

Then a few years ago I was a subject in a research project on “personality coaching.” After taking a comprehensive psychological test, I met with a coach, had a look at my personality profile and decided what if any aspect of my personality I would like to change. Many other subjects chose to reduce their anxiety or depression, but I scored very low on “neuroticism.” Instead, I chose understanding others’ feelings, something I thought I was poor at. Over ten weeks of coaching, I was encouraged to think about and practise some ways to improve.

I’m not sure whether I actually improved, but I discovered I was better than I had thought at picking up on the emotions of people I knew, for example when talking on the telephone to my PhD students.

Now I’ve read Nicholas Epley’s illuminating book Mindwise (Penguin, 2014) and learned that my original view was probably more accurate, namely I’m not that great at deciphering others’ emotions. However, my view of others’ skills was skewed. Most of them are probably not very good either. Epley reports that those who are poorest at understanding others are the most overconfident in their abilities.

Epley is a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago and does research on what he calls “mind-reading.” This is not extra-sensory perception but rather using our senses to understand — in the words of the subtitle of his book — “what others think, believe, feel, and want.”

Mindwise is an engaging treatment of research findings in the area. Epley uses a variety of examples, including from his own life, to illustrate insights. He has packaged this material into a logical framework, progressing through various dimensions of mind-reading. The book is the best sort of popularisation: it conveys key ideas in an understandable, engaging way while being faithful to the original research.

Knowing yourself

Compared to understanding others, it should be far easier to know our own thoughts. But actually it’s not.

A book that greatly changed my thinking is Timothy D. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves. Wilson reported on research showing that there are parts of our minds that we cannot consciously access. He recounts a famous experiment in which young men acted on the basis of an incorrect assessment of their own emotions. Wilson concluded that, in some circumstances, the person sitting next to you knows as much about what you are feeling as you do yourself! It’s hard to believe, but the research is convincing.

Epley, covering some of the same ground, devotes a chapter to “What you can and cannot know about your own mind,” offering numerous fascinating observations about a key shortcoming of the mind. When you feel happy, for example, you usually know, but you seldom know why you’re happy, and systematically make incorrect assumptions about the reasons. Epley says we know what mental products are like as completed products but don’t have a clue about how they were created. Therefore, to make sense of our thoughts and emotions, we manufacture a plausible story and “we’re left with the illusion that we know more about own minds than we actually do.” (p. 30).

When pollsters ring to ask about your voting intentions, they now ask who you would vote for if the election were held today. In doing this, pollsters draw on psychological research. They don’t ask who you would vote for in a few weeks or months, because most people do not know their own minds well enough to accurately predict their future preferences.

Then there is the issue of bias. People assume that others are biased, not themselves, and hold fast to their own illusions. Not understanding one’s own mind in this case leads to mistakes in reading the minds of others.

Adam Goodes

Take the case of Adam Goodes, Australian rules football star and former Australian of the Year. For the past two years he has been subject to booing by spectators every time he has the ball, something unprecedented in persistence. Many commentators attribute this to Goodes being an Aborigine and, furthermore, outspoken in opposition to racism. Those who boo or otherwise criticise Goodes say they aren’t racist. However, it’s quite possible that they do not understand their own motivations. To justify their beliefs and behaviours, they come up with rationalisations, such as that Goodes has been playing unfairly, a view that conveniently ignores the dozens of other footballers who play the same way. Hardly anyone these days admits being a racist. In this case, others may be able to read the minds of those who defend booing better than they can themselves.

Dehumanising others

One of the most serious flaws in the human mind-reading system is caused by proximity. The part of the brain engaged by the system is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). People close to us stimulate greater activity in our mPFC: they are seen as having minds. By the same token, those who do not trigger mPFC activity are seen to be mindless and hence less than human. This psychological distancing is the source of mistaken judgements and underlies many crimes and atrocities.

People from other cultures are harder to understand and are candidates for dehumanisation. Have you ever gotten to know a terrorist? Those who haven’t are prone to systematically misinterpreting their thinking and motivations. Epley says that terrorists are not psychopaths, but rather have an overwhelming empathy for their own group, connected with a contempt for other groups. “They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause without regard for the consequences for oneself” (p. 53).

When dehumanisation can be countered, the benefits can be enormous. Epley recounts the well-known story about a General Motors plant in California that was closed in 1982 due to abysmal productivity and quality control. Then GM entered a partnership with Toyota. The new Japanese management reopened the plant, rehired most of the same workers and started treating them as mindful humans with intrinsic motivations rather than as mindless ones interested only in money. Before long, the plant became a top performer. Despite this well-tested insight about the value of intrinsic motivation, bosses in workplaces around the world continue to treat workers as mindless drones who can only be motivated by fear or financial rewards.

Nimmi auto plant in Fresno, California

Because of inadequate understanding of the minds of others, most people are apprehensive of striking up conversations with strangers. Have you ever sat on a bus or train and noticed how people will space themselves out, avoiding sitting next to strangers? In one experiment, commuters were asked whether they would prefer to sit alone or talk to a stranger, and nearly all said sitting alone. Then they were asked to talk with strangers and nearly all found it more enjoyable. This shows that people are mistaken about the likely responsiveness of strangers and about their own emotional responses.

Minds when there are none

The capacity of humans to understand the minds of others can sometimes be deployed when it’s not appropriate, in what is called anthropomorphising, namely seeing things as having human qualities. Have you ever seen someone berating their computer, saying “Why do you keep causing me trouble?” This is anthropomorphising: the computer is attributed will or motivation.

Epley reports that inanimate objects are more likely to be seen as human when they are unpredictable. The computer that sporadically plays up is seen as more wilful than the one that always works – or never does. When something needs to be explained, we are more likely to infer the existence of a mind.

Another reason for attributing minds is appearance, for example a face. The animated feature film Cars is more engaging because the cars have big eyes and mouths, so the fiction that they can think and talk is less jarring. A feature titled Rocks showing expressionless rocks would be less likely to attract audiences.

Epley writes that the process of anthropomorphising is not mysterious: “Forming a connection requires you to consider another person’s mind, to adopt his or her perspective, to do your best to get into his or her head” (pp. 78-79), and this can occur with non-humans. He notes that musicians often form a personal bond with their instruments, even giving them names. I guess my mind-reading sense is unlikely to be triggered in this way. I’ve been playing the same clarinet for 50 years and never thought of giving it a name.

Someone else’s clarinet

It’s all about you

When trying to figure out what others are thinking, one of the biggest challenges is getting over egocentrism, in particular the assumption that others think the way we do. People were asked their views on a range of ethical choices, for example “Is it ethical to call in sick to get a day off?” Then they were asked how they thought others would answer, namely to estimate the percentage of others who would agree with them. On this question, 71% answered that it is ethical, and these subjects estimated 66% of others would answer the same way. So far, so good: 66% is close to 71%, so mind-reading seems to work. However, 29% answered that it is unethical, and these subjects incorrectly estimated 64% of others would answer the same way. On a whole set of questions, people thought the majority of others agreed with their answer, even when they were in minorities as low as 10%. This illustrates that, in the absence of specific knowledge about others, the usual assumption is that they think the same way we do.

Most people overestimate their own contributions to shared tasks, for example housework. They also overestimate their role in negative interactions, taking more than their share of responsibility for starting arguments. An excess of self-centredness leads to paranoia.

Another aspect of self-centredness is that most people think they feel emotions more strongly than others. This is because we feel our own emotions very strongly but have only indirect information about others’ emotions. On this particular aspect of self-centredness I can plead not guilty, because for most of my life I’ve assumed I don’t feel emotions as strongly as others (which, of course, could be true).

Another aspect of a self-centred bias is called the “curse of knowledge”: once you know something, it is very difficult to imagine what it’s like not to know it. The result is that highly knowledgeable people are sometimes poor teachers. Studies show that someone who has just learned how to use a mobile phone can teach a beginner more quickly than can an experienced user. The curse of knowledge is especially relevant to me as a university teacher. I try to counter it by setting up conditions for students to learn from each other. One of the counter-intuitive implications of the curse of knowledge is that I may be better at helping students learn when I haven’t previously taught a subject.

Stereotypes

When you don’t know much about a person, it’s convenient to assume they fit a stereotype, about being a woman, an Egyptian, a plumber or a redhead. Epley describes research showing both the strengths and weaknesses of stereotypes. Most stereotypes accurately portray differences between groups. For example, those on the political right are more likely to support bosses against workers than those on the left. The shortcoming of stereotypes is that they give an exaggerated idea of how great the differences between groups are. The differences between right and left on many issues actually are fairly small, maybe 1/10 as great as the stereotypes might suggest.

Stereotypes thus can lead to clashes between groups that don’t really differ very much, because each group operates on the basis of its exaggerated idea of the views of the other group.

This is one reason why deliberative democracy has more potential than you might imagine. Put together a randomly selected group of 12 citizens (a so-called citizens jury), give them information about some subject, say genetic engineering or climate change, and have them try to reach consensus on a policy. It sounds like it wouldn’t work, but hundreds of actual citizens juries show that it usually does. When people are brought together, get to know each other and exchange ideas, stereotypes give way to more realistic perceptions, and usually there is more commonality than initially imagined.

Actions

Most people are susceptible to “correspondence bias.” When someone acts violently, we may assume they are angry or aggressive. Many people in the US assume that the 9/11 terrorists hated America and wanted to destroy the American way of life, despite explicit al Qaeda statements about their real motivations.

Correspondence bias can reflect an assumption that other people’s actions are internally motivated rather than conditioned by the environment. If your friend Lauren walks by without saying hello, you may assume she is unhappy with you when actually she was just preoccupied and didn’t see you. Epley notes that people in collectivist cultures, such as in Japan, are more attuned to the existence of environmental influences and are less likely to be subject to correspondence bias.

Correspondence bias can have serious consequences. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005, officials assumed that those who had not been evacuated didn’t want to leave. The officials didn’t take into account the factors that constrained the desires of residents. Epley says “They didn’t need convincing, they needed a bus” (p. 151).

How to read minds

When someone looks to the side while talking to you, does this mean they’re lying? When they fold their arms and keep their distance, does this mean they’re resisting your views? A lot has been written about body language and how to interpret it. Despite reading several books on the topic, I have always thought I was poor at interpreting body language. According to Epley, I’m not unusual: it’s very difficult to learn a lot from it. If you’re going to try, it’s better to listen to someone’s voice rather than watch them.

Then there is perspective-taking: imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes and thereby gaining insight into what they think and how they feel. I always thought this was valuable, but Epley cites many studies showing it is subject to serious shortcomings. We can imagine ourselves in someone else’s circumstances, but often this isn’t accurate at all.

There’s one method for figuring out what other people are thinking that is usually pretty helpful: ask them, and carefully listen to what they say. It seems obvious but, as Epley notes, in many cases people are overconfident in thinking they already know the answer, so they don’t bother to ask. A boss assumes a worker needs higher pay to work harder, or arrives late due to being slack, and doesn’t ask for the worker’s explanation.

The key to getting an honest answer is to reduce the threat of repercussions. Epley tells how he used this approach with his son. Performance appraisals at work are useless when employees fear reprisals for being honest.

Nicholas Epley

Mindwise is filled with insights. If figuring out what others are thinking is important to you, it could be one of the most useful books you’ll ever read. An important message is that most people are overconfident about their mind-reading abilities. As Epley concludes, “Sometimes a sense of humility is the best our wise minds can offer, recognizing that there’s more to the mind of another person than we may ever imagine” (p. 184).

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Don Eldridge for useful comments.

nonviolent action, personality, whistleblowing

The story-editing solution

August 10, 2015 Brian Martin

The way people think about their lives can have profound effects on the way they behave. Timothy Wilson explains how to reap the benefits of story-editing.

Two groups of US students sit down to take a maths test. The groups are similar and the questions they are asked are identical, but there is one difference between the groups. At the top of the test, students in one group are asked to indicate their sex, male or female; the students in the other group are not.

It seems like a trivial difference, but it’s not. Boys aren’t affected, but girls are: the girls who are asked to indicate their sex before the test do worse. This is an example of a stereotype threat: bringing to consciousness a stereotype, in this case that girls aren’t good at maths, harms their performance.

What is going on? Being reminded of being female stimulates mental effort to deal with the stereotype, and this is mental energy that can’t be used to focus on the maths problems.

This is one of numerous examples of how beliefs about ourselves can affect how we behave and perform. There’s a large amount of social and psychological research about this phenomenon. A really valuable overview of the research and its implications for policy and practice is Timothy D. Wilson’s book Redirect.

Wilson makes two main points. The first is that social interventions need to be carefully tested, preferably with a design in which individuals are randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group. It is not good enough to undertake interventions that seem like they should work because they are obvious and sensible.

Wilson’s second main point is that the story-editing approach, namely getting people to change the narratives they use to understand themselves, can be far more powerful than other methods.

Scaring kids

There is a popular programme in the US to discourage teenage delinquency. At-risk youngsters are brought together to hear lectures from prisoners, who tell them about what is in store for them should they make the wrong decisions about their lives. This programme is well-meaning and seems plausible: scare these kids with warnings about their possible fate and they’ll be more likely to go straight. There’s one major problem: it doesn’t work.

Wilson uses this example as one of many in which a well-meaning intervention was rolled out across the US before it had been adequately tested. When controlled trials were finally undertaken, it turned out that the lectures intended to scare the kids out of trouble were actually making things worse. These kids were more likely to drop out of school, be arrested and go to prison. Wilson provides example after example of plausible interventions that have no benefit or even make things worse. He assigns the “bloodletting” award to counterproductive interventions: doctors used to treat many illnesses by drawing blood, thereby making the patient more likely to die.

What was wrong with the scaring-kids intervention? Thinking in terms of stories people tell about themselves, an explanation goes like this. Some supposedly at-risk kids previously thought of themselves as regular, honest and well-intentioned. They did the right thing because that is how they thought of themselves. But then they were put into a group labelled “at risk” and given lectures about the dangers of crime. Some of them started thinking their reason for avoiding crime was to avoid the consequences: their motivation, previously internal, became external, and this is not as effective a deterrent when the circumstances are less favourable. Furthermore, these kids were put in a group of others considered at risk, and this is truly a risk, because they are influenced by peers setting a bad example.

Timothy D Wilson

Wilson’s main attention is on interventions to address social problems in the US including poverty, low education, crime, sexism and racism. The bottom line is that all interventions should be tested before being used on a wide scale, and that story-editing approaches are often extremely effective.

It’s possible to use the insights from the story-editing approach to look at some other sorts of issues, including ones where interventions cannot be readily tested.

Whistleblowing

When a worker speaks out about a problem in their workplace, such as corruption or hazards to the public, they often suffer reprisals such as ostracism, petty harassment, reprimands, referral to psychiatrists, demotion and dismissal. This seems a harsh response to someone who is concerned about problems. What are the stories told about this common scenario?

From the employer’s point of view, the worker is out of line, challenging management and threatening the viability of the enterprise (not to mention seeking to expose management involvement in unethical and criminal activities). The worker is labelled a traitor, malcontent, snitch or dobber. The story provided is that the worker is in the wrong, due to personal failings. Rumours may be spread that the worker is a poor performer, has a mental illness or is involved in unsavoury sexual practices. Quite separately from the labels applied, the actions taken against the worker suggest their own meanings. Being referred to a psychiatrist is demeaning and signals to others that the worker is mentally unstable.

In some cases, the worker starts believing what is said about them, thinking “There must be something wrong with me.” The late Jean Lennane, former president of Whistleblowers Australia, worked as a psychiatrist, and treated quite a few such workers. After hearing their stories, she would say, “You’re not insane. You’re a whistleblower.” This is a story-editing intervention. Jean changed her patient’s script from “There’s something wrong with me” to “There’s something wrong with the organisation.” She changed the label from “dobber” to “whistleblower.”

Edward Snowden: hero or traitor?

Back in the 1990s, the NSW branch of Whistleblowers Australia held weekly meetings. Some people who attended for the first time said, “I’m not a whistleblower, but …” and went on to describe experiences that perfectly fitted the usual idea of a whistleblower. At that time, the term “whistleblower” had a negative connotation and many workers were reluctant to accept the label.

In the following years, the label “whistleblower” gained in status in Australia, in part through media stories that used the term in stories portraying gallant individuals challenging abuses of power. Workers were less likely to acquiesce in labels applied by bosses and more likely to take pride in calling themselves whistleblowers. Employers are more often losing the story-editing struggle, though reprisals against whistleblowers remain all too common.

War

Another arena for story-editing struggles is war. A familiar example is what to call a fighter challenging a repressive government: a terrorist or a freedom fighter. Governments have far more power to label than do their opponents, as shown by the ubiquity of the label “terrorism” applied solely to challengers, not to governments themselves, even though many government actions fit standard definitions of terrorism.

By labelling opponents as terrorists, governments might in some cases actually be assisting their enemies in recruitment, especially when entire groups are stigmatised. It is useful to remember that the South African apartheid government called its armed opponents “terrorists,” that the US government, during the Vietnam war, called the National Liberation Front “terrorists,” and the Philippines government calls armed opponents “terrorists.” Commentators in the US have called some environmentalists “eco-terrorists.” The aim in such labelling is to stigmatise, but is this effective? It is possible that it may cause some activists — even ones who had not considered the use of violence in resistance — to identify with the government’s opponents.

A related story-editing struggle concerns what to call those who refuse to fight, by refusing conscription or by deserting from the army. Military leaders typically call them “traitors” or “cowards.” Within the peace movement, they might be called conscientious objectors or war resisters and be seen courageous or even as true patriots.

Vaccination

What should a parent be called who has reservations about vaccination, or who declines some or all vaccinations for their children? They can be called conscientious objectors or, more pejoratively, vaccination refusers or deniers. Some campaigners who raise concerns about vaccination are called baby-killers.

Does this sort of labelling help promote vaccination? From a story-editing perspective, derogatory labelling of people with concerns about vaccination could be ineffective or even counterproductive, by alienating some parents who had cautiously expressed concerns and found themselves grouped with more vociferous critics. In addition, hostile labelling may drive some parents towards vaccine-critical groups as a source of identity.

A different approach to vaccination critics is to label them concerned parents and to provide information about how their concerns relate to vaccination. The story promoted with this sort of intervention is that it is legitimate for parents to have concerns about their children’s health and that choosing to vaccinate is one possible resolution for their concerns.

In this case, the story-editing struggle occurs mainly between advocates of vaccination, namely between those who stigmatise parents reluctant to vaccinate and those who respond to their concerns with sensitivity and sympathy. From a story-editing perspective, the latter approach is more likely to be effective, though designing a way to rigorously compare the two approaches would be extremely difficult.

Conclusion

Redirect provides a powerful summary of a body of research showing that the way people think about themselves makes an enormous difference to their behaviour. Seemingly trivial interventions that change self-perspectives can have long-lasting impacts.

Wilson has two main aims in Redirect. The first is to show the power of story-editing and the second is to emphasise the importance of careful studies of social interventions. Research shows that all too many well-intentioned interventions appear to be ineffective or, even worse, counterproductive.

Yet in some areas it can be difficult or almost impossible to carry out controlled tests. I’ve outlined three areas where story-editing struggles take place: whistleblowing, war and vaccination. Based on the evidence provided in Redirect, the preliminary hypothesis in each case is that a key in such struggles is changing the way people think about themselves. It might even be possible that derogatory labelling is ineffective or counterproductive. Read Redirect and decide for yourself.

***

Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: changing the stories we live by (Penguin, 2013)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jørgen Johansen and Cynthia Kardell for useful comments on a draft.

health

Healing via the brain

July 27, 2015 Brian Martin

Norman Doidge tells about the amazing possibilities for healing by using neuroplasticity.

It was a fine, quiet morning early in January 1996. When I woke up, I noticed a high-pitched sound in my left ear. This wasn’t all that worrying — a couple of times every year, I would hear such a sound for five or ten seconds, and then it went away. This time was different. The sound continued indefinitely. It was a pure tone, continuous, and was there whenever I checked. Little did I know that checking to hear whether the sound was there was the worst thing I could do.

This was tinnitus, the term for ringing in the ears. Some people have multiple tones, or thumping or rumbling sounds. Some have it so bad their lives are ruined; a few commit suicide to escape the condition.

My case was minor by comparison, but still distressing. As an amateur musician, I value my hearing greatly. My doctor said I would just have to accept it, as nothing could be done.

A few weeks later, there was a new, additional sound, louder and lower pitched, in my right ear. I felt sick to my stomach. I believed the standard view that tinnitus is irreversible and potentially progressive, getting worse with time. Luckily the second sound went away after an hour.

Then, fortuitously, I heard an interview on the radio with a scientist who described a new treatment for tinnitus. I looked it up on the web: “tinnitus retraining therapy.” What I picked up was the idea that tinnitus is not a problem in the ear but rather in the brain. All the time there are signals going from the ear to the brain, for example from blood flowing through the eardrums, but normally the brain treats these signals as irrelevant, and does not bring them to conscious attention.

However, occasionally these routine signals are treated as a source of alarm and raised to consciousness. My brain was treating this high-pitched tone as something to be noticed — and I did. Tinnitus retraining therapy is based on changing the brain’s response.

Apparently if you are put in a soundproof room for an hour, there is a 90% chance you will develop tinnitus — the brain is constantly monitoring sound inputs, and when there are none externally, it starts to pay attention to internally generated signals. This helps explain why people with hearing impairment are more likely to suffer from tinnitus.

There are places to go for brain retraining, but I decided to apply the principles myself. I practised ignoring the high-pitched tone. When I noticed it, I would say to myself, “That’s boring” and turn my attention elsewhere. I became much more accepting of background sounds. Rather than craving silence, as before, I welcomed the capacity to hear naturally generated external sounds.

The high-pitched tone in my left ear gradually became less frequent and less noticeable and went away entirely after several months. My tinnitus was gone as a result of retraining my brain, and I did this by conscious efforts to change how I paid attention.

Neuroplasticity

With this experience, I was attuned to the idea of brain plasticity, which refers to the capacity of the brain to rewire itself. I read about therapies for stroke that seemed miraculous. The usual idea was that because stroke destroys part of the brain, disability was permanent: limbs would be useless, speech was impaired, and so on, depending on which parts of the brain were affected.

Constraint-induced movement therapy changed all this. Rather than using only the good arm and leaving the impaired one alone, this therapy in essence tied the good limb down and forced the patient to use the damaged limb intensively, up to hours per day, with gradually increasing challenges. For example, with your impaired limb, you repeatedly attempt to put a ball through a large hoop, then a somewhat smaller hoop, chalking up hours of forced effort.

The effect of this is not on the limb, which wasn’t directly damaged by the stroke – though it may weaken due to non-use – but on the brain, which was. The intensive training triggers major changes in the brain: to carry out the tasks, the brain uses unaffected parts of itself to carry out the limb function. The repetitive practice induces the brain to rewire itself. With this technique, in many cases normal or near-normal function can be regained.

In 2007, Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself was published. It describes constraint-induced limb therapy and many other wonders that can be achieved by taking advantage of neuroplasticity. Doidge, a psychiatrist, interviewed leading researchers in the field and wrote about their work in an engaging way, often using stories of individuals to motivate discussions of more technical matters.

Norman Doidge

Doidge was making accessible information from the frontiers of research and therapy that challenged long-established views about the brain, and offered hope where there had been little previously. I thought the book was highly important and wrote a comment about it. I could understand why it became a bestseller.

When I was young, my friends and I somehow learned that the brain was a static and degenerating organ. We would humorously remind each other that the brain loses 50,000 cells every day, a relentless downhill descent. Now I was learning that actually the brain creates new cells one’s whole life. Just as importantly, it is constantly changing its structure as well as its content. New experiences do not just add memories, but change the way connections are made in the brain. Furthermore, this can be achieved by simply thinking.

One example is a study of strengthening a little-used muscle, the one that moves your little finger away from the ring finger. One group exercised this muscle by moving the little finger against resistance. The other group simply imagined doing this without moving the little finger. Amazingly, just imagining exerting muscles in your little finger can make it stronger. Actually, the muscle may not be stronger, but the mental circuits that activate the muscle become better developed, a process that also occurs in conventional weight training. Mental rehearsals of physical actions can be effective in many fields.

The Brain’s Way of Healing

Because of the popularity of The Brain that Changes Itself, numerous people contacted Doidge, introducing him to other work on neuroplasticity. His new book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, examines various techniques and therapies that utilise neuroplasticity. Doidge again uses personal stories by healers, scientists and individuals dealing with their own health problems to motivate his descriptions of approaches to healing. Many of the stories are remarkable.

John Pepper first developed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in his 30s. After many years with declining capacities, he started a programme of moderate “conscious” walking, using his powers of concentration to force his body to move in the conventional way, rather than in the usual habitual pattern. With this approach, he was able to keep his Parkinson’s symptoms under control. What seems to have occurred is that he forced parts of his brain to consciously take over functions that are normally controlled unconsciously by brain areas that were degenerating.

Another route to healing via neuroplasticity is to shine low-intensity lasers on parts of the body, even the brain itself. This somehow causes the body to reorganise scrambled nerve systems, that send unwarranted signals, and eliminate the problem. The treatments Doidge describes seem miraculous.

Doidge is willing to examine approaches to healing that are dismissed by mainstream medicine, though always putting these in the context of the science of neuroplasticity. Doidge devotes a chapter to Moshe Feldenkrais and his methods. The Feldenkrais method is normally thought of as in the same context as the Alexander technique or Pilates, namely as some sort of alternative health modality. Doidge, however, presents Feldenkrais as a pioneer in using neuroplasticity as a tool for recovery of normal body functions, decades ahead of the laboratory studies that would explain how his methods worked.

Moshe Feldenkrais

Other tools for healing that Doidge discusses include listening to manipulated sounds and an electronic device placed on the tongue to stimulate neuromodulation. The picture that comes across is that the brain can be stimulated to rewire itself and to function more normally by using a variety of techniques, involving virtually any way of sending signals, including using the mind to do this.

Paying attention

The key to several of the methods of healing Doidge describes is focused attention. Sustained concentration is a powerful way of creating long-term brain change. The brain is like a muscle: physical activity strengthens the components that are exercised, and paying attention is a way of doing this.

The problem is when bad mental habits take over: unlearning these habits is difficult and requires sustained effort. Doidge tells about psychiatrist Michael Moskowitz who developed chronic pain and studied research in the area until he came up with a new approach.

Moskowitz’s inspiration was simple: what if he could use competitive plasticity in his favor? What if, when his pain started – instead of allowing those areas to be pirated and “taken over” by pain processing – he “took them back” for their original main activities, by forcing himself to perform those activities, no matter how intense the pain was?

What if, when he was in pain, he could try to override the natural tendency to retreat, lie down, rest, stop thinking, and nurse himself? Moskowitz decided the brain needed a counterstimulation. He would force those brain areas to process anything-but-pain, to weaken his chronic pain circuits. (p. 13)

Moskowitz went on to conquer his own severe pain and became a pain medicine specialist, helping many others. In this case, as with other therapies, focused attention becomes a way to reprogramme the brain.

Pay attention!

Focused attention is also a powerful tool in other contexts. In the form of deliberate practice, it is the key to expert performance in many domains, such as chess, golf, writing and playing the violin. In the form of meditation or mindfulness, it is one of the most potent tools for achieving increased happiness. In these and other areas, the capacity to focus attention needs to be combined with knowledge about what to focus on and how. Research and practice are opening up new avenues, all of which exploit brain plasticity.

Conclusion

Doidge tells many stories of recovery from seemingly hopeless conditions, including chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease, brain damage and autism. The overall message is that there is hope where previously there was none. However, the treatments are not sitting on a shelf to be purchased and applied. Quite a few of them are in the early stages of development, many involve specialised equipment, and all require practitioners to have advanced skills to obtain good results. Furthermore, not every technique will work for every sufferer. And not everyone can afford to travel to specialised treatment units or to provide the intense therapy required.

If you or someone close to you has any of the conditions addressed by Doidge, it may be worthwhile to read his books as a starting point, check out his website, and decide whether to investigate further. If doctors say you will never regain a function, they might be right, but invoking the power of neuroplasticity is making some of their predictions out of date.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Chris Barker for valuable comments on a draft.

emotions, media, personality

We’re being analysed

July 12, 2015 Brian Martin

A new era of data analysis is dawning, and it’s because people are sharing so much information about themselves.

Christian Rudder is one of the founders of the popular online dating site OkCupid. People under 50 can go to the site, enter information about themselves and then make contact with prospective dates and mates according to suggestions made by the site’s algorithms. Rudder realised he was sitting on a mine of data that can reveal new insights about the human condition. He’s written a book about it, titled Dataclysm (London: Fourth Estate, 2014).

At OkCupid, users make judgements about various things, including the looks of other people. Examining only the judgements of self-declared heterosexuals, Rudder plots the age of the member of the opposite sex who is rated most attractive. For women up to the age of 30, the most attractive man is slightly older; thereafter, the most attractive man is slightly younger than they are. Rudder shows this on this graph.

Then he does the same thing with men, and comes up with a very different sort of graph.

The men, overwhelmingly, see 20 to 23-year old women as most attractive. Not too surprising, perhaps, but here is the bonus. This sort of data enables research that overcomes many of the shortcomings of conventional psychological research, for which the experimental subjects are mostly university undergraduates in artificial conditions. On OkCupid, a broader cross-section of the population is included, and the conditions are real-life.

There are methodological obstacles to be sure. One of them is that people lie, for example about their own attributes. But there’s something more in the data that people are unlikely to lie about: their behaviour. Subscribers at OkCupid, after obtaining the address of a possible match, can choose to contact the person, or not, and the recipient of a message can choose to respond, or not. Given the information collected by OkCupid, it is possible to look for correlations between this behaviour and any number of attributes, for example age, looks, ethnicity and sexuality.

There is yet another source of information: the words people use to describe themselves. Rudder provides some useful tables of words characteristically used by particular groups on OkCupid, for example white men. He tabulates the words used by white men that most distinguish them from black men, Latinos and Asian men: these include “my blue eyes,” “blonde hair” and “ween.” In contrast, words most distinctively used by black men include “dreads,” “jill scott” and “haitian.” And so on with many more words for each group, and for various other groups, such as Asian women. Then there are the antithetical words, namely the words a group is least likely to use compared to other groups. For Latinos, these include “southern accent,” “from the midwest” and “ann arbor.”

Rudder uses data from OkCupid because he knows it best, but he also draws on data from Facebook, Google, Twitter and other sites that have far larger user numbers. He provides fascinating insights by looking at people’s locations, political views, sexuality and much else. Who would have thought, for example, that data can be used to show that two people meeting through an online dating site, with no prior information about appearance, would be equally satisfied with the date independently of the difference between their attractiveness ratings. As Rudder notes, “people appear to be heavily preselecting online for something [attractiveness] that, once they sit down in person, doesn’t seem important to them” (p. 90).

Christian Rudder

Rudder confirms the widely noted bias in favour of good looking women. He goes beyond this to comment on a perverse result:

Think about how the Shiftgig data changes our understanding of women’s perceived workplace performance. They are evidently being sought out (and exponentially so) for a trait [beauty] that has nothing to do with their ability to do a job well. Meanwhile, men have no such selection imposed. It is therefore simple probability that women’s failure rate, as a whole, will be higher. And, crucially, the criteria are to blame, not the people. Imagine if men, no matter the job, were hired for their physical strength. You would, by design, end up with strong men facing challenges that strength has nothing to do with. In the same way, to hire women based on their looks is to (statistically) guarantee poor performance. It’s either that or you limit their opportunities. Thus Ms. Wolf [Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth]: “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.” She was speaking primarily in a sexual context, but here, we see how it plays out, with mathematical equivalence, in the workplace. (p. 121)

One of Rudder’s key topics is racism. One way to detect racist views using Internet data is by looking at the terms people put into search engines. Using Google data (in particular, the Google Trends tool), Rudder plots the number of searches for the word “nigger” against the months before and after Barack Obama’s election victory in November 2008. Several spikes in the graph connect to significant events in the campaign. As Rudder puts it, the graph enables you to “watch the country come to grips with the prospect of a black president” (p. 129). Rudder also uses online data to show that racism in the US is pervasive; biases are widespread rather than restricted to a few open racists. On the other hand, racial biases shown by US data are nearly absent in comparable data about people in Britain and Japan.

Then there is online mobbing, when people gang up against a target. Rudder uses the example of Justine Sacco, who tweeted a poor attempt at humour. She was condemned by thousands for racism, received death threats and lost her job. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was followed by tens of millions of people. Rudder tells about his own effort to inject some sense into the conversation about Sacco, only to be countered by a damaging claim about Sacco — a claim that turned out to be false.

Rudder reviews what researchers say about rumours, gossip and human sacrifice, as social phenomena in history and in the Internet age.

So much of what makes the Internet useful for communication — asynchrony, anonymity, escapism, a lack of central authority — also makes it frightening. People can act however they want (and say whatever they want) without consequences, a phenomenon first studied by John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University. His name for it is the “online disinhibition effect.” The webcomic Penny Arcade puts it a little better:
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad (p. 145)

Reading Dataclysm

Rudder comments that it is strange to be writing a book, in old fashioned hard copy, in the digital age. But what a book it is! It is stylishly laid out, with an elegant font and beautifully crafted diagrams. It is not quite a coffee table book — there are no colour photos — but for an intellectual work it is exceptionally attractive.

Rudder’s writing style is equally striking, with a mixture of colloquial language, wide-ranging cultural references, scholarly citations and astute observations. Referring to the Twitterstorm against Justine Sacco, Rudder muses:

… this, to me, is why the data generated from outrage could ultimately be so important. It embodies (and therefore lets us study) the contradictions inherent in us all. It shows we fight hardest against those who can least fight back. And, above all, it runs to ground our age-old desire to raise ourselves up by putting other people down. Scientists have established that the drive is as old as time, but this doesn’t mean they understand it yet. As Gandhi put it, “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”

I invite you to imagine when it will be a mystery no more. That will be the real transformation — to know not just that people are cruel, and in what amounts, and when, but why. Why we search for “nigger jokes” when a black man wins; why inspiration is hollow-eyed, stripped, and above all, #thin; why people scream at each other about the true age of the earth. And why we seem to define ourselves as much by what we hate as by what we love. (pp. 148–149)

Implications

Rudder suggests that a new approach to studying human behaviour is emerging. Rather than relying on studies of undergraduate students in experimental (artificial) conditions, data will become available for examining human behaviour in “natural” conditions, namely when people think no one is looking at them. This is the idea underlying the subtitle of Dataclysm: Who We Are* — with the footnote *When We Think No One’s Looking.

Rudder is quite aware that online data are incomplete. Those who use OkCupid are not a perfect cross-section of the population between 18 and 50. Even Facebook, with its billions of users, does not incorporate everyone. But there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative jump in what it is possible to analyse: the behaviour of millions of people in natural conditions. This requires access to the data and knowledge of quantitative methodologies.

Rudder comments on the disappearance of privacy, and the fact that most people seem not to care too much: they willingly share all sorts of intimate data, for example on Facebook. It is now possible for marketers to predict fairly accurately, on the basis of automated analysis of data and words, whether you are gay, straight, unemployed or pregnant, among other information relevant for marketing. Analysts are working on how to assess a person’s intelligence from their online presence. Few people realise the potential implications for their careers of their casual interactions on social media.

Conclusion

Masses of data about individuals now available can be mined for insights about human behaviour, and many of these insights are fascinating, sometimes confirming conventional ideas and sometimes challenging them. Readers of Dataclysm can obtain a good sense of a future, part of which is already here, in which data obtained about seemingly innocent activities — such as your Facebook likes, the words you use on Twitter or the terms you enter into search engines — can be used to draw inferences about your prejudices, activities and capabilities. Perhaps, like Rudder, you may decide to become a bit more cautious about your online activities.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

self-development

Dealing with information overload

June 10, 2015 Brian Martin

How well are you coping with the flood of information produced and distributed these days? A common malady is “information overload”: more information is coming in than you can process properly. For some guidance, read Daniel Levitin’s book The Organized Mind. It’s a big book. More information! But it has many useful perspectives and tips.

Levitin is a neuroscientist. He starts with how the mind makes sense of the world. A key process is making categories. Levitin tells about this through simple examples, such as “vegetable” being a broad category and “potato” being a more specific one. Then there are types of potatoes.

You may already be impatient. What’s the punch line? What’s the key to surviving the information onslaught? So here’s Levitin’s central insight: externalise your mind. Rather than trying to remember everything, you should set up systems to hold information vital to you, in ways you can easily manage. And do it in a way that takes advantage of the way the mind deals with categories — like “vegetable” and “potato.”

A classic example is the to-do list. A daily list of things to do, preferably in priority order, addresses information overload in a simple way. Rather than try to make decisions about every new call, visit, message or thought, you consult your to-do list and concentrate on proceeding through it. Once you set your priorities, the endless succession of messages, including advertisements, communications from family, friends and workmates, and all sorts of electronic enticements, can be subordinated to your own agenda.

Active sorting, namely putting things into piles according to their importance, enables you to focus on what you’re doing:

Active sorting is a powerful way to prevent yourself from being distracted. It creates and fosters great efficiencies, not just practical efficiencies but intellectual ones. After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful. Other things can wait — this is what you can focus on without worrying that you’re forgetting something. (pp. 34–35)

Levitin has a bigger agenda than simply being efficient at getting things done at work, a topic that has already been capably analysed. Levitin addresses cognitive overload, and how to deal with it, in several key domains: at home, social life, time management, life-and-death decisions, business and teaching children. Information overload is a problem in each of these areas, and so is a related problem: decision overload, namely having to make too many decisions.

Daniel Levitin

Priorities and tasks

A key insight from neuroscience is that “The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize” (p. 6). What happens with overload is that there are too many decisions to be made, and the brain gets tired in the sense that willpower is depleted. If you haven’t prioritised what’s important, you will be worn down making trivial decisions and won’t be well placed to deal with the important ones. This is why dealing with electronic messages — Facebook, texts, email — can be undermining. You have to decide whether to read a message and then what to do with it: remember it, file it, act on it or, more likely, skip it or delete it. All those little decisions exhaust willpower. This is overload in action.

Levitin notes that people think they are being more efficient when doing more than one thing at a time, but actually, “ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.”

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. … Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson of Gresham College, London, calls it infomania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an e-mail is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. (pp. 96-97)

Life-and-death decisions

Levitin encourages readers to organise the information relevant to their life in a more efficient fashion and to develop skills for making decisions. This is more than just paying attention to what’s important. One of the skills Levitin promotes is using fourfold tables to work out probabilities. Suppose you’ve taken a test for a rare cancer. The test returns a positive result, and naturally you panic. But wait: what’s the chance you actually have cancer? You need to know some figures first. If the cancer occurs in one in a million people, and the test has a 10% chance of a false positive, then most likely you don’t have cancer. Many doctors don’t understand the probabilities and will recommend treatments that are more likely to cause harm than reduce it. Levitin provides examples for working out the figures.

If the chance of being struck by lightning is one in a million, what is the chance of being struck by lightning twice? To calculate the answer, you have to know whether the two events, namely getting struck by lightning, are independent. Often they are not. This basic insight about probabilities applies to many areas. What is the chance of having your house burgled twice? What is the chance of two global financial crises within 20 years?

At home and work

In organising things at home, Levitin offers suggestions on the use of categories, and recommends having a “junk drawer” for the miscellany of things that don’t (yet) warrant a category of their own. In organising your time, he addresses the roles of sleep, noting that most people don’t get enough, which means they haven’t set the right sort of priorities for use of their time. In organising your social life, he points to the cognitive challenges involved in an ordinary conversation, given that both literal and implied meanings are nearly always involved. To maintain relationships, you need to take both into account.

In looking at being organised in the business world, Levitin notes that highly productive executives have an advantage over the rest of us: they have assistants who organise their files, their time and their interactions. They don’t have to worry about whether the activity they are doing right now is the most important: they know their assistants have arranged that it is. This helps explain why they can be so focused in meetings: they are less distracted by worries about other things they need to do.

This is an example of Levitin’s central point. Given that memory is fallible and making sense of a cacophony of information inputs is cognitively draining, the key to being organised is to put parts of your mind outside your body. You may not have personal assistants, but you can use computers, phones, diaries, apps and even one of Levitin’s favourites, 3-by-5-inch index cards.

Managing your time

To give a sense of the wide-ranging nature of The Organized Mind, consider the chapter “Organizing our time.” It starts off noting the importance of the prefrontal cortex in time management, addresses the biological importance of time and the rise of precise time measurement (which is pretty recent in human history), considers the mental challenges of temporal frames and planning in a wide variety of tasks (from watching television to the invasion of Normandy), examines the many roles of sleep, looks at what is called flow (immersive engagement in an activity), and addresses reasons for procrastination. Within the procrastination section, Levitin considers various topics including attention deficit disorder, delayed gratification, and beliefs that facilitate procrastination.

Also important is to disconnect one’s sense of self-worth from the outcome of a task. Self-confidence entails accepting that you might fail early on and that it’s OK, it’s all part of the process. The writer and polymath George Plimpton noted that successful people have paradoxically had many more failures than people whom most of us would consider to be, well, failures. If this sounds like double-talk or mumbo jumbo, the resolution of the paradox is that successful people (or people who eventually become successful) deal with failures and setbacks very differently from everyone else. The unsuccessful person interprets the failure or setback as a career breaker and concludes, “I’m no good at this.” The successful person sees each setback as an opportunity to gain whatever additional knowledge is necessary to accomplish her goals. The internal dialogue of a successful (or eventually successful) person is more along the lines of “I thought I knew everything I needed to know to achieve my goals, but this has taught me that I don’t. Once I learn this, I can get back on track.” The kinds of people who become successful typically know that they can expect a rocky road ahead and it doesn’t dissuade them when those bumps knock them off kilter — it’s all part of the process. As Piers Steel would say, they don’t subscribe to the faulty belief that life should be easy. (p. 200)

If you can organise your time well enough to spend ten minutes per day reading The Organized Mind and implementing some of Levitin’s suggestions, you can become even more efficient, focused and mentally calm, and also assist your children and others in your life to thrive. It’s worth the effort, because all the signs suggest information overload isn’t going away. Instead, it’s likely to become worse.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

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