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.

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

media

News, fast and slow

May 25, 2015 Brian Martin

Are you wasting your time watching the news?

How much time do you spend following the daily news? Some people pay no attention; others watch a half-hour TV news show every day; yet others scour a range of Internet sources, looking for different angles on breaking stories. Some may devote a couple of hours daily to keeping up with the latest stories.

Some years ago, I did a study of the Rwandan genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed in just a few months in 1994 in the African country of Rwanda. My aim was to look at tactics used by the perpetrators to reduce outrage over their actions, so I read comprehensive accounts of the genocide. I tracked down a dozen or so books, found various articles and watched some videos. Prior to this study, I had heard about the genocide in news reports, but after studying it in some depth years later, I realised that I hadn’t really understood much about it — and it was far worse than I had imagined.

The studies of the Rwandan genocide led me to some related writings about wars in central Africa, especially in the Congo (officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo). I was astounded to discover that millions of people had died. I didn’t remember hearing much about that. Some sources called this the First African World War. It was salutary to remember that the so-called First World War was primarily a European war.

This experience got me thinking. During the 1990s, I had probably spent 30 minutes per day consuming the news, primarily by reading newspapers, a total of 180 hours. Would I have been better informed by instead spending those 180 hours reading authoritative studies of important world events? I think so. Careful studies are seldom very current. After all, as more information becomes available, it’s possible to write a more definitive and thoughtful analysis of events and their meaning and significance. So what’s the advantage of having the latest news?

Biases in the news

Western news reporting is systematically biased in a number of ways, so following the news gives a highly distorted view of the world. Bias in world news is especially important because few people have personal knowledge about events in other countries. Think about the wars in central Africa, with millions dead, but little coverage in western media. Other conflicts received disproportionate attention. The conflict in Israel-Palestine, with some 5000 deaths since 1990, receives vastly more coverage. Why should it be so?

The answer is provided by Virgil Hawkins in his important book Stealth Conflicts. He analyses attention given to conflicts since the end of the cold war. He starts by enumerating the most deadly conflicts – such as those in the Congo, Angola, Burundi, Liberia and Algeria – on down to far less deadly ones such as Israel-Palestine. Then he examines attention given to the different conflicts by four groups: governments, media, non-government organisations, and academics.

Virgil Hawkins

One of Hawkins’ conclusions is that most coverage and attention is concentrated on a few chosen conflicts, such as Bosnia in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s, while most of the others escape attention: they occur by stealth. He says there appears to be no correlation between how deadly a conflict is and how much attention it receives from any of the four groups. Academics, who you might expect would have the opportunity to study the full range of deadly conflicts, are swayed by agendas set by governments and the mass media. Even human rights organisations are pushed to follow these same agendas: in order to obtain funding from governments, foundations and the public, they need to address problems that others think are important. There are many honourable exceptions, but according to Hawkins the overall trends are clear. Wars and deaths in Africa, especially south of the Sahara, are almost invisible so far as the rest of the world is concerned. Even media in African countries will often report on conflicts far afield, in Afghanistan or Iraq, yet hardly mention a major conflict in a neighbouring African country.

Hawkins points out that the wars in the Congo led to nearly as many deaths as all other conflicts in the world since the end of the cold war, but they have received little attention.

Hawkins’ diagram of death tolls. The big circle is Congo.

This led me to reflect on my reading about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, about which a fair bit has been written. There is even a major Hollywood film, Hotel Rwanda. But few people know that the aftermath of the genocide was an invasion of the Congo by forces from Rwanda and other countries, leading to massive loss of life. One of the challenges is the complexity of the events. There is no simple storyline for media, governments and others to adopt.

The standard news values of the mass media, for example putting priority on conflict, locality and prominent individuals, mean that some important stories receive little attention. The media’s quest for markets leads to news as entertainment rather than information. Governments and corporations do what they can to shape news coverage. Using news coverage to become “informed” about international affairs may be like finding out about cars by watching advertisements for them.

Slow news

For some valuable advice, you can read Peter Laufer’s short book Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer. Laufer was a journalist and an avid news consumer, but in the spirit of the slow food movement, he advocates care and caution when dealing with the flood of information now available under the label “news.” He provides 29 rules for understanding and dealing with news. Each one is worthy of consideration.

A basic theme in Slow News is to avoid the rush of urgent news and instead concentrate on solid reporting that provides depth and context, and is not one-sided. In many cases, “breaking news” is based on preliminary information, later found to be incomplete, misleading or simply unimportant. How urgent is it to know about the latest information about a mass shooting in the US, an avalanche in Peru or a bombing in Yemen? Can you wait until tomorrow or the next week? Usually, unless you are directly affected.

Laufer is especially critical of the volume of irrelevant information arriving electronically, for example on Twitter. He is critical of citizen journalism, at least when those involved know little about the topic and do not distinguish between important and trivial information.

Laufer points to the role of governments and corporations in shaping the news. He advises obtaining information from multiple sources that give different points of view while avoiding advertisements pretending to be news stories.

It is apparent that Laufer still likes news. He just prefers it to be solid. He likes to read newspapers in the old-fashioned ink-on-paper version (rule 21: “seek news that does not require batteries”). He advocates avoiding news-only channels like CNN because they recycle the same stories throughout the day. He also advocates cutting back on the number of different forms of media for obtaining news, in particular recommending getting rid of your television, because in a 30-minute news programme there is little content compared to what can be read in a newspaper in the same time.

Rule 22 is “Don’t become a news junkie.” Some people always want to know the latest, and end up spending hours every day, but are seldom all that much better informed.

Laufer likes local news: information about people in the neighbourhood, about things that affect your life, such as what is happening at the local school or government body, or what plans are being made for construction or energy management. The implication is to encourage local journalism, such as neighbourhood newspapers, and cut back on consumption of national and international news.

Local news is where people have the best chance of being able to assess the quality and significance of reporting, because they have personal knowledge and can benefit from additional information. Few people have personal knowledge about what is reported in international news, so biases in selection and emphasis are harder to overcome.

Peter Laufer

This suggests a rule of thumb: for local events, seek rapid information; for distant events, take your time. This brings me back to Hawkins’ treatment of stealth conflicts: international news provides a highly distorted sense of deadly conflicts around the world. So to understand these, for most people it is better to avoid daily news coverage and instead seek authoritative studies giving historical and political context.

On the other hand, perhaps you like to watch the news as a form of entertainment. The latest ructions involving politicians are like a sporting event, or perhaps a soap opera. That’s fine. Just keep in mind that the really important things affecting our lives are probably happening elsewhere, in a slow or stealthy process that slips under the radar of what is called news.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Kathy Flynn for valuable comments.

education, self-development

Learning: how to do it better

May 18, 2015 Brian Martin

We continue to learn our entire lives. Research shows ways to do it better, but this means changing our habits.

Learning — we do it all the time, when reading messages, hearing the news, starting a new job, and in a host of other circumstances. Then there is formal learning, in classrooms and when studying for assignments.

Most people learn how to learn when they are young, and continue with the same methods for most of their life. What if there are better ways to go about it?

Benedict Carey is a long-time science writer, and since 2004 has written for the New York Times. Gradually, he became interested in research on how people learn, and set out on a quest, contacting leading researchers on learning. He was surprised to find that, according to the latest research, what he had done during high school, long sessions of concentrated attention on study topics, was really not all that effective. In his book How We Learn (Random House, 2014), Carey provides an accessible guide to key practical findings from learning research.

Carey makes his account engaging by telling stories about pioneering researchers who developed ideas taken up later. He then spells out the implications for learners, whether they are in schools, universities, jobs or everyday life.

The spacing effect

Which is better: studying for two hours in one session, or for two sessions of one hour each on two different days? The answer is clear: two separate sessions are better, whether you want to learn facts or skills. This shouldn’t be news. In athletics, where learning techniques make the difference between winning and losing, training is normally spaced out. Runners do not postpone training until the day before the race.

Yet generations of students have crammed for exams and other assignments. As an undergraduate, I stayed up all night on several occasions to write essays. It was the only time in my life that I drank coffee! The trouble with cramming is that nearly everything learned is quickly forgotten. Spacing out study is more efficient: you can learn more in less time and retain it longer.

But what’s the best sort of spacing? If you have two weeks to learn the names of the bones in the body, and want to spend a total of two hours studying, is it better to use two sessions of an hour, twelve sessions of 10 minutes, or some other breakdown? And how should the study sessions be spaced? Should one be just before a test? Or, if long-term retention is the goal, what’s the best option? Carey examines what is known about spacing. In general, more spacing is better, but there is still much to be discovered about the optimum spacing for learning different sorts of material.

The testing effect

If you don’t know anything about a topic – for example, Chinese history in the 1700s – then surely the best way to learn about it is to start studying. Actually, though, you’ll learn more efficiently if you take a test on the material before you start, even though you just guess at the answers. Somehow this primes the mind to pay more attention when you do start studying. This is a really strange research finding.

Educationists commonly talk about two types of assessment. Summative assessment measures learning whereas formative assessment is designed to improve learning. Actually, though, all assessment is formative to some degree: it is a method of learning.

Formal assessment is designed by teachers. But there’s another type of testing: self-testing. When you’re studying, you can test yourself regularly. Or you can try to explain the topic to a friend. Testing yourself can overcome the fluency illusion, in which you have the incorrect belief that you know something because it seems familiar. Carey writes:

These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying – the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 percent more powerful than if you continued sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, what you’ve forgotten – and fast. (p. 103)

Incubation

Many students think they’re learning only when they’re studying. Therefore, it doesn’t matter when they study, even if it’s at the last moment. It’s just necessary to put in enough hours. The spacing effect shows that something can happen in between study sessions: the unconscious mind engages with the material, and you don’t even notice it happening. There’s another aspect to this process, called the incubation or percolation effect.

Here’s the trick. When studying a topic intensely, it’s actually better to interrupt the process before finishing, and leave the mind to chew away at it before the next session. In terms of writing, this means not finishing an essay, but instead leaving it incomplete for the time being.

When a task isn’t complete, the mind won’t let it alone, so in the long run you learn more by being interrupted at odd times while pursuing a task. Carey:

… we should start work on large projects as soon as possible and stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that we are initiating percolation, not quitting. My tendency as a student was always to procrastinate on big research papers and take care of the smaller stuff first. Do the easy reading. Clean the kitchen. Check some things off the to-do list. Then, once I finally sat down to face the big beast, I’d push myself frantically toward the finish line and despair if I didn’t make it.
Wrong.
Quitting before I’m ahead doesn’t put the project to sleep; it keeps it awake. (p. 147)

The incubation effect is used by great creators who bore away at a problem for weeks or months and then take a break – and this is often when the best ideas pop up. The challenge is to trust your own mind and treat interruptions to significant tasks as opportunities rather than sources of worry.

Interleaving

The usual way of learning is to concentrate on a particular task until it is mastered, and then go on to the next task. It sounds logical, but actually there’s a more productive technique, which is to mix up the tasks.

Carey describes the technique of interleaving. Here’s a typical research protocol. One group of students learned artistic styles by looking first at six paintings by one artist, say Braque, and then six by another, say Mylrea, and so on through twelve artists. A different group of students saw exactly the same paintings for the same length of time, but mixed up in a random sequence. At the end, students in each group were shown paintings they had not seen before and asked to name the artist. Which group did better? It was the ones who saw the paintings in a random order.

This outcome has been reproduced in numerous studies involving discrimination. During the learning phase, students exposed to interleaving don’t feel like they are learning, but actually they improve faster.

“That may be the most astounding thing about this technique,” said John Dunlosky, a psychologist at Kent State University, who has shown that interleaving accelerates our ability to distinguish between bird species. “People don’t believe it, even after you show them they’ve done better.”
This much is clear: The mixing of items, skills, or concepts during practice, over the longer term, seems to help us not only see the distinctions between them but also to achieve a clearer grasp of each one individually. The hardest part is abandoning our primal faith in repetition. (p. 164)

Athletic coaches long ago figured out that exercising a particular muscle too much at a time is not productive, so they mix up training, switching between different muscle groups. The studies of learning artistic styles show that mixing things up is a more general learning strategy, with applications in many areas.

Other factors

Carey also discuses other factors that enable faster and longer-lasting learning. These include perceptual learning, which happens without having to think about it, and the role of different sleep cycles in consolidating learning.

Sleep helps to form memories.

It is fascinating that there are ways to speed up learning in a wide range of contexts, for example pilots comprehending the implications of different instrument panels or language students learning Mandarin.

It is tempting to think that it would be possible to take advantage of several of the techniques described by Carey and quickly become a much more efficient learner. If you are in the hands of one of the researchers or skilled practitioners using one of the techniques, such as interleaving or perceptual learning, then you have an advantage. But to take the initiative to adopt these techniques on your own is another matter.

One of the key considerations is habit — and many people’s learning habits are deeply entrenched. It can be quite challenging to replace one habit with another, though there is good research on how to do this.

To better understand the challenges of adopting some of the techniques presented by Carey, here I’ll discuss how they relate to the high-output writing programme I’ve been using for several years.

Writing

Robert Boice, a psychologist and educational researcher, addressed the problem of low research productivity. Many of his important studies date from the 1980s.

Robert Boice

He observed newly appointed academics and noticed that most of them struggled in the demands of the job, but a few were highly productive in research and furthermore were less stressed than their colleagues. Boice thought the techniques used by these productive new academics might be taught to others, and he showed how this could be done.

Boice’s approach was elaborated by Tara Gray and turned into a multi-step programme. The core of the approach is doing some writing every day or nearly every day, but not too much. Boice advocated stopping while still fresh, in order to have energy and enthusiasm to continue the next day. A central theme in Boice’s approach is moderation, to overcome the syndrome of procrastination and bingeing.

Gray says to start writing from the very beginning of a research project. For example, in doing a PhD, you should start writing the first day, rather than spending a couple of years first reading and collecting data. The slogan here is “write before you’re ready.”

How does the Boice-Gray approach to writing measure up in relation to the techniques described by Carey that enhance learning? First is the spacing effect: it’s more productive to space out learning sessions. That is actually the foundation of the writing programme: it is designed to overcome the usual approach of procrastination and bingeing.

Second is the testing effect: it is productive to use testing as a form of studying. In the writing programme, daily writing is done without looking at texts or stopping to look up references. You might have a few dot-point notes, but otherwise everything has to come from your head. In effect, it is a type of testing of your memory of what you want to say. For example, if you’ve read some articles the previous day, you write about them without consulting them: it’s a test, and a powerful learning tool.

Third is incubation. This is central to the writing programme. In between writing sessions, the unconscious mind is going over what to say next. In one of Boice’s studies, he looked at the number of creative ideas produced by academics in three conditions: no writing, normal writing (bingeing) and daily writing. No writing was worst for generating new ideas, normal writing was twice as good and daily writing was five times as good. The writing programme might be seen as turning the incubation process into a routine.

Another facet of incubation is that you learn more when you interrupt your study before finishing. This happens every day in the Boice-Gray programme, and can be enhanced by a simple technique. At the end of your daily writing session, finish in the middle of developing an idea, perhaps even in the middle of a paragraph or sentence. This incomplete expression of an idea serves to stimulate thinking, and often by the next day your unconscious mind has come up with a way to complete the thought.

Tara Gray

Fourth is interleaving: learning about a range of different topics at the same session. This is not usually part of the writing programme, but could be incorporated into it. Usually I write about the same topic from one day to the next, gradually writing the draft of an article or chapter. But sometimes I feel a bit stuck and switch to a different project and topic, coming back to the other one when I feel ready, which can be days, weeks or months later. No doubt interleaving can be used in other ways to improve writing productivity.

Fifth is mixing up learning contexts: you can consolidate your learning by studying in different surroundings and times of the day. The idea is to embed your learning in different environments. This is different from what’s usually recommended in the writing programme, which is to have a routine and stick with it. I think this difference points to an important factor not addressed by Carey: how to motivate continued effort at learning.

The practice of doing just a small amount of daily writing is designed to reduce the barriers to beginning a session. To add pressure, Boice asked academics to report to him weekly with a log of the minutes they had written each day and the number of words they had produced each day. This accountability process made a huge difference. Daily writing combined with reporting a weekly log to Boice improved productivity by a factor of nine compared to the usual procrastination-bingeing approach.

The technique of varying the learning contexts is worthwhile if your writing habit is well established. But few writers seem to have such a solid habit. Writing while travelling would seem like an ideal opportunity to vary contexts, but Gray reports that when travelling, away from the usual routine, writing at all is a challenge for her, and many others have told me the same.

Conclusion

The message here is that the techniques described by Carey are highly worthwhile and should be investigated by anyone for whom learning is important. However, a key consideration is how to turn a new learning approach into a habit. If you can do this, you’ve truly learned something worthwhile.

Benedict Carey

Meanwhile, generations of students are carrying on in their usual approach, and so does most teaching. There is important research being done on learning, and Carey has pointed to some of the most practical findings. When these will affect schools and training programmes is another matter. Not soon, I suspect. So read How We Learn, pick one or two techniques relevant to your needs, and become a more efficient learner – and enjoy it too!

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Don Eldridge for helpful comments.

health

Vaccination passions

May 12, 2015 Brian Martin

Vaccination seems to arouse stronger emotions than most other controversial issues. Jonathan Haidt’s research on the foundations of morality can help explain why.

When I started studying the Australian vaccination controversy several years ago, I was struck by the incredible passions aroused by the issue.

It is not a surprise that campaigners are committed and emotional – that was to be expected. I have studied other controversies, such as nuclear power and fluoridation, in which leading campaigners are personally invested in the issues. In the 1980s, the movement against nuclear war stimulated some fierce emotions: the future of humanity was at stake! (And still is.)

Vaccination is not as earth-shattering as nuclear war, but nonetheless evokes incredibly strong emotions. When acquaintances learn about my studies, many of them have asked me why this is so. I usually say I don’t really know, commenting that maybe it has to do with children’s health.

Both sides in the debate about vaccination put children’s health as their number one priority. They just draw different conclusions.

Supporters of vaccination say it is vital that every child be vaccinated (except for those for whom this is medically unwise) to create “herd immunity”, the protection for the population created when levels of immunity are high enough that an infectious agent cannot easily spread.

Critics of vaccination point to the risks of vaccination itself – it causes adverse reactions in a small percentage of children – and discount the importance of herd immunity, instead citing the importance of good nutrition, a healthy lifestyle and natural immunity acquired by contracting diseases.

There are other potential threats to children’s health, such as pesticides, x-rays, junk food, backyard swimming pools and parental violence. Nuclear war would harm children, to be sure, and continued global warming would be a major threat to the lives of future generations. However, vaccination is more personal: it involves a tangible intervention. Proponents can point to horror stories of deaths and disabilities from whooping cough, meningococcal and other infectious diseases, while critics can point to horror stories of adverse reactions to vaccines.

War – bad for children

The rider and the elephant

Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind offers additional insights into why the vaccination issue can be so polarising. Haidt doesn’t address vaccination, nor indeed any other such controversial public issue, but his ideas are relevant. (See also my previous comments about Haidt’s work, as applied to whistleblowing and deliberative democracy.)

Haidt, like many other psychologists, subscribes to the picture of the human mind as having two aspects or components. One is slow, logical, contemplative and careful. This rational component of the mind Haidt calls the “rider”. The other component of the mind is fast, intuitive and judgemental. Haidt calls this component the “elephant”. He argues, provocatively, that humans are largely driven by their elephants, namely the intuitive sides to their minds. The primary function of the rider, namely the rational side of the mind, is to come up with logical-sounding explanations for the judgements made by the elephant.

This certainly fits what I’ve observed in the vaccination debate. Most people have made up their minds, and it doesn’t matter what evidence is provided. They just ignore what is unwelcome and come up with arguments to justify their positions. This helps explain why the debate never seems to progress: the elephants hold sway and the riders are active in justifying the paths chosen by their elephants.

Only rarely do I meet someone who is undecided and who wants to hear both sides of the argument and ponder the issue before making a judgement.

The foundations of morality

Haidt’s special contribution concerns the biological foundations of morality. Citing a wide variety of research and ingenious experiments, he identifies six values that seem fundamental to people’s views of right and wrong: care, liberty, fairness, authority, loyalty and sanctity.

Haidt is especially interested in how these foundations of morality affect debates over politics and religion in the US. He discovered that libertarians, who oppose government regulations and support a free market, rely mostly on the value of liberty. He says that US liberals (who might be called progressives elsewhere), who support government interventions to assist the poor and disadvantaged, rely especially on the value of care, with liberty and fairness as additional influential values. He finds that US conservatives rely more equally on all six foundations.

This analysis helps explain why US people with different political orientations often seem to be talking past each other. What drives them is different. Their elephants are taking different paths, based on different intuitive moral judgements, and their riders give rational reasons to justify their choices. In this circumstance, rational analysis is, for most people, a sideshow that affects little.

Vaccination and morality

The six foundations of morality have obvious relevance to the vaccination issue. First consider care, something important for both liberals and conservatives. The morality of care derives, in evolutionary terms, from parents caring for their children. Groups of early humans with an innate commitment to protect and care for their own children were more likely to survive. In this sense, care is a fundamental aspect of most people’s sense of right and wrong: it is right to protect children and wrong to allow any harm come to them.

Wanting to protect children is intuitive and doesn’t need to be taught. So it is easy to see why vaccination can arouse such passions: it is about care for children.

But the limitation of Haidt’s analysis, at least when applied to vaccination, is that it doesn’t say how the value of care can come to be applied in different ways. It is straightforward to feed a hungry child or to protect a child from a threatening animal. However, vaccination is not such a simple matter.

Supporters of vaccination see children as the prime beneficiaries. Critics see vaccination as a possible danger. They both appeal to care, but have come to different conclusions about how to achieve it.

Supporters point to the dangers of infectious diseases such as measles and chickenpox. Critics point to the dangers of adverse reactions to vaccines. Pointing to the role of the morality of care helps explain why the passions around vaccination are so strong, but does not explain differences in attitudes towards it.

In part this can be due to personal experience. Some children contract infectious diseases and suffer seriously from them, or even die. Parents, other relatives and friends see this and may be influenced to support vaccination. Other children suffer adverse reactions to vaccines; their parents, other relatives and friends may be influenced to oppose vaccination.

Other aspects of morality are also relevant. Liberty is a value based around personal autonomy and resistance to overbearing rule. In evolutionary terms, according to Haidt, it derives from the value to groups of subordinates ganging up on any individual who assumes too much power. When vaccination is pushed on people, for example through mandatory vaccination of soldiers or health workers or through financial penalties for not vaccinating, this may trigger resistance in those for whom liberty is a key moral foundation.

Authority, as a moral value, means accepting the prevailing systems of hierarchy and leadership. When governments, health departments and doctors support vaccination, this invokes the moral foundation of authority.

Haidt says that conservatives are more likely to have authority as a key moral driver. However, this does not seem to fit the pattern for vaccination policy, given that many of the doctors and researchers promoting vaccination are “liberal” in Haidt’s sense. Still, it makes sense to say that vaccination gains support through the authority response in those for whom this moral foundation is salient.

Another moral foundation is sanctity. Disgust is one emotional response to a violation of the sense of sanctity or purity. Many people feel intuitively that certain practices are disgusting, for example incest or eating food that has fallen on the floor – even when the floor is perfectly clean. If that doesn’t disgust you, consider eating food that has fallen into a just-cleaned toilet. Sanctity, like the other foundations, is driven by the elephant, and people sometimes cannot give a logical justification for their reactions.

Some critics of vaccination may see the body as a sacred object that, when healthy, should not be assaulted by any medical intervention. If so, this can help explain their conscientious objection to vaccination. However, sanctity has declining relevance in societies like the US and Australia, where attitudes to personal behaviour have changed dramatically over recent decades.

Conclusion

To more fully understand how emotional reactions shape people’s views on vaccination would require research. Examining the role of the six foundations for morality elucidated by Jonathan Haidt is a promising basis for investigation. Each of the six foundations – care, liberty, fairness, authority, loyalty and sanctity – could play a role. However, the way that each of these values actually maps onto a person’s position on vaccination is not automatic, and may be influenced by personal experiences as well as the views of family and friends. This may be a fruitful area for study precisely because the passions are so great.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Don Eldridge for helpful comments on a draft.

PS I’ve applied moral foundations ideas to several other topics:

emotions, mobbing

Dealing with shaming

May 5, 2015 Brian Martin

Imagine that you posted a tweet or Facebook comment and suddenly became the target of an online attack, denounced by thousands of furious commenters. What you had intended as a joke was off-colour or poorly expressed, maybe, but it was nothing all that significant, yet your reputation was savaged.

This is what happened to Justine Sacco, who made an ill-advised tweet just before leaving on a long flight. On arrival, she found out she was the target of a massive campaign of abuse. She lost her job. It took her months to recover her bearings.

Justine Sacco

Sacco’s story is one of several examined in Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Ronson, a journalist, is the author of a series of highly entertaining books about weird topics. In his book Them he reported on his encounters with individuals holding extreme right-wing views. In The Men Who Stare at Goats – also made into a film – he told about US military experiments with psychic powers.

Ronson decided to investigate a recent phenomenon: public shaming via social media. Public shaming is hardly new. The Puritans famously put criminals in the stocks for public ridicule. What has changed is the ease by which someone’s casual comment can be broadcast to the world and lead to an orgy of abuse.

Ronson’s approach is to pick some juicy case studies and make contact with the key figures, interviewing them and using their stories to make wider points, or just to provide a vivid way of highlighting concerns. He begins with the story of Jonah Lehrer, a highly praised science writer whose books sold millions of copies. Lehrer was caught out having been sloppy in sourcing his claims and then lying about it. He consented to appear on a broadcast where he made a public apology with a twitter feed as a backdrop. His apology was unsuccessful: it triggered even more abuse.

Jonah Lehrer

In Lehrer’s case, there might be some sense of karma, in that a high-flyer, living in an expensive house and enjoying fame, was undone by his transgressions, and those who brought him down were lesser mortals simply using tweets. But other cases, such as Justine Sacco’s, show that something more ominous is occurring. Sacco was not a public figure and she didn’t do anything all that terrible: she made one tweet, a social comment in the form of a poorly expressed joke, and paid an exorbitant penalty. Ronson points out that we now live in a society in which deviations from some arbitrary orthodoxy of proper behaviour may be punished, in a seemingly arbitrary way, by a storm of online abuse. Meanwhile, there are plenty of big-time criminals of the white collar variety who escape public censure.

Ronson’s journey led him to Max Mosley, son of the leader of Britain’s Nazi Party during the 1930s, who made a life for himself in the motorcar racing scene. Mosley was outed in the mass media for engaging in S&M orgies, alleged to be Nazi-themed. Having the juicy details of these orgies recounted to the public would be, for most individuals, excruciatingly humiliating, but Mosley was unbowed, fighting the media in court – despite this leading to further publicity – and winning. Mosley was seemingly unperturbed by the exposures. He had been publicly shamed, but did not feel shame himself.

Ronson wanted to know whether Mosley’s emotional resilience could be replicated, so he joined a class run by Brad Blanton, who specialises in helping people overcome shame. Blanton’s technique is to invite course participants to reveal their deepest secrets to each other and discover that the feared consequences do not occur. Ronson observed a seeming competition by those present to reveal the most horrifying information about themselves – for example, having sex with cats – and was castigated when he himself could tell only of a few pallid transgressions of good taste. This deshaming technique seemed to be a dead end.

Brad Blanton

Ronson’s journey then took him in another direction: what to do for a person whose Google profile is overwhelmed by abusive comment. After public shaming episodes, Google searches for the person’s name bring up one derogatory comment after another. In Europe, there is now a right to be forgotten: requests can be made to Google to remove links. However, this works imperfectly for a number of reasons, including that there are some people publicising those who have sought Google-search invisibility and because searches outside Europe will still give the undesired results.

Ronson discovered a firm of reputation managers who, for a hefty fee, manipulate Google rankings. Ronson wanted to watch this in action, so he asked the firm if they would waive the fee if he could follow the operation and write about it — thereby providing publicity. Ronson found the ideal candidate for this treatment in Lindsay Stone, a disability worker who liked iconoclastic stunts, and who made the mistake of posting a photo of her shooting the bird (raising her middle finger) in front of a military cemetery. She was savaged on the web, and every search for “Lindsay Stone” led to abusive comments about her. She lost her job and became depressed, all for a silly prank. Others named Lindsay Stone were affected too: their Google profiles were obscured by the vitriol directed at the transgressing Lindsay Stone.

The reputation-management firm interviewed Stone, found out about positive or neutral aspects of her life, and gradually put up positive mentions about her (and other Lindsay Stones too). In a matter of months, the abusive comments were pushed to page 2 on Google, where few searchers bother to examine the links. However, to maintain this state of affairs, continuing efforts were required. This service doesn’t come cheap. Stone was exempted from the fee, but for others it might cost $100,000. Manipulating Google rankings is not easy for ordinary people who incur the wrath of an online mob.

Ronson, in studying public shaming, is on to an important topic. Shame is a crucially important emotion, and can be used for positive or negative purposes. On the positive side, shaming can be used as a method of rehabilitation: when people break laws and hurt others, the usual criminal sanctions are trials, fines and imprisonment. An alternative is meeting face-to-face with victims, making an apology and doing work in restitution. This approach can be a powerful and humane way of reintegrating transgressors into the community.

On the other hand, shame can be debilitating. In schools and workplaces, students and workers are constantly compared with each other and encouraged to feel ashamed when they do not measure up to expectations. Eventually, individuals start shaming themselves. For example, when they see a co-worker who is more productive, better looking or more vivacious, they feel bad about themselves. This is especially common in toxic work environments where bullying is rife. One part of surviving in such environments is to not accept the judgements of others and not to shame oneself, as addressed by Judith Wyatt and Chauncey Hare in their book Work Abuse.

This was the challenge Ronson pondered when interviewing Max Mosley, who did not feel ashamed by the publicity about his sex orgies. Journalists and others tried to shame Mosley, but he was having none of it: he did not feel it personally.

Max Mosley

The crucial step in challenging damaging shaming rituals is to refuse to accept the judgement of others. With emotional distance and independence, it is possible then to think in a clear way about responses. If shaming only affected emotions, this would be a complete response, but shaming rituals affect friends, many of whom drop away, and employers, who may fire or refuse to hire the target of abuse.

Shaming is not inherently bad. What is wrong is when it is disproportionate to what a person has done and serves no positive purpose. If someone is guilty of a violent assault or of stealing millions of dollars of investor funds, then shame can be a valuable tool for reintegration into society, with a changed consciousness that reduces the risk of repeat offences. But when the transgression is minor, such as making a racist or sexist remark, it hardly seems fair that a person’s reputation is trashed and career ended. This is not to excuse racist and sexist remarks, but there are so many of them that a harsh penalty for an unlucky target is unfair. If thousands of people jaywalk every day, it is not fair to single out one particular jaywalker for a massive fine or a stint in jail.

Ronson says that public shamings have a mob aspect, and he regrets having participated in many such shamings before he embarked on his investigation. To me, these collective manifestations of abuse suggest a role for the psychological process called projection, in which individuals disown a negative part of their own personality and attribute it to others, sometimes attacking them. A classic example is homophobia, in which men refuse to accept their own homosexual urges, seeing them as terrible, and instead see them in others, and attack those others.

In public shamings, participants are able to feel better about themselves in two ways. First, they feel good because their own transgressive impulses, for example to think inappropriate things, are disowned and attributed to a single target, who can be safely condemned and abused through electronic means. Secondly, they obtain the warm feeling of being part of a crowd with a common purpose. This is togetherness in righteousness. Ronson points out that public shamings are serving to narrow the bounds of permissible behaviour. Everyone must conform, otherwise they risk assault by the crowd.

Jon Ronson

The cases chosen by Ronson highlight the arbitrariness of public rituals of spontaneous condemnation, with most of the targets he has selected being just unfortunate. There is another type of public shaming, when it is instigated as a tool in a type of power struggle. Tom Flanagan, a Canadian political scientist and public commentator, was targeted by his opponents, who covertly recorded one of his talks and posted a misleadingly labelled excerpt from it, with the express intent of damaging Flanagan’s credibility and career. Flanagan’s methods of responding, described in his book Persona Non Grata, are a model for others. Some dissident scientists are subject to degradation rituals intended to cast them out of the scientific community – and there are ways for them to resist.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is the most entertaining book on shame available, and might serve as a warning to be careful about what you put online. A more important message is to avoid joining in episodes of public shaming.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

democracy, emotions, tactics

Politics and morals

April 19, 2015 Brian Martin

Jonathan Haidt has analysed the moral foundations of people’s political orientations. To fully explain people’s political allegiances, attention also needs to be given to the ‘tactics of assignment’. Proponents of deliberative democracy can learn from studying moral foundations.

Introduction

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who has investigated the foundations of people’s morality. In his engaging and pathbreaking book The Righteous Mind, he draws on a wide range of evidence to argue that morality has six main foundations: care, fairness, liberty, authority, loyalty and sanctity.

The ‘care’ foundation means caring for others, an extension of the instinct to care for children, necessary in human evolution for the survival of groups. Care in a contemporary political context means concern for those who need assistance, such as people who are poor, disabled or abused. This care foundation inspires support for government welfare services such as unemployment payments.

Haidt applies his framework to US citizens, with a surprising conclusion. He finds that libertarians rely especially on single foundation, liberty, which means opposition to domination. Libertarians oppose government controls, and taken to extremes this leads to surprising conclusions: they may oppose drug laws, environmental regulations and even taxation. A principled libertarian trusts in individuals and markets to solve social problems.

Liberals in the US – which might be called progressives or leftists elsewhere – draw heavily on three moral foundations: care, fairness and liberty, with care as their foremost value.

Finally there are US conservatives. The more a person follows a conservative line, in Haidt’s assessment, the more likely they are to rely on all six moral foundations in roughly equal measure. Conservatives are influenced by authority, loyalty and sanctity more than are libertarians and liberals.

One measure of where you stand on the liberal-conservative continuum is openness to new experiences. If you are stimulated by new foods, new ideas and people from different cultures, you are likely to be at the liberal end of the spectrum. Haidt notes that within universities, liberals greatly outnumber conservatives.

One important consequence of differences in moral foundations is that people do not fully understand what drives others. Unless you realise that libertarians prioritise liberty in their assessments of right and wrong, it can be hard to figure out how they come to their judgements.

Haidt has a message for liberals: conservatives have an advantage in political engagements. Conservatives, drawing more equally on all six moral foundations, can understand where others are coming from. However, liberals, emphasising just three foundations, cannot as easily understand the passions of conservatives, because for liberals the roles of authority, loyalty and sanctity are less salient.

A conservative, for example, may react viscerally to the act of defacing the American flag. This is a violation of a sense of sacredness that underpins emotional responses and consequently shapes viewpoints. A liberal might think, ‘it’s just a piece of cloth, so what’s the big deal?’ The liberal simply does not rate stamping on a flag (a violation of sanctity) as anywhere comparable to stamping on a person’s body (a violation of care).

Haidt says there is something to learn from conservatives, for example the value of traditions. More generally, he argues that politics needs to be based on mutual understanding. In particular, liberals need to better understand what drives conservatives so that each of them can move beyond pointless arguments that are based on deeply felt, but sometimes unrecognised, emotional responses.

The rider and the elephant

Haidt, like other psychologists, finds it useful to think of the mind as composed of two components. One is intuitive, fast and judgemental. Haidt calls this component the elephant. The other component, which is reflective, slow and strategic, Haidt calls it the rider.

The intuitive side of the mind is very useful for day-to-day life, making quick evaluations that enable survival. If you see an object rapidly coming towards your head, it is better to duck immediately rather than first try to calculate its trajectory. The rational part of the mind carefully considers evidence and options and is more suited for evaluation and long-term planning.

Haidt uses the labels elephant and rider because, according to the evidence, much thinking operates by the elephant making a quick judgement and the rider working out a way to justify it. There are some ingenious psychological experiments showing how the power of rationality is used to justify gut reactions, sometimes involving elaborate intellectual contortions. Those whose rational powers are more developed may actually be better at developing rationalisations for pre-made judgements. The rider usually follows the elephant’s preferences.

Applied to politics, this means that a lot of political argument is just a sideshow, because evidence and arguments are mainly used to justify positions based on intuitive judgements, themselves related to the six foundations of morality. The metaphor of the elephant and rider helps to explain why so few people change their minds when exposed to new evidence. More commonly, they ignore or dismiss the evidence, or find ways to undermine it. This is a feature of the phenomenon called confirmation bias, in which people look for evidence to support their current views and ignore, dismiss or criticise contrary evidence.

Assigning moralities

A question Haidt does not systematically address, though he is aware of it, is why moralities are assigned in particular ways and not others. For example, in relation to sanctity, why should someone care more about desecration of the US flag than, for example, the California flag or the UN flag? In terms of the fairness foundation, why should someone get more upset about welfare cheats than about inherited wealth?

There are big differences between the US and Europe in how some moralities are assigned. For example, in the US, people who have never been employed may not qualify for unemployment payments. In many European countries, universal unemployment insurance is taken for granted, and is far more generous. Does this mean that in the US, the fairness foundation is more important than the care foundation? Probably not: a better explanation is that US citizens have been conditioned to think about welfare in a different way than Europeans.

This is apparent in the US debate about ‘socialised medicine,’ which means universal health insurance. Many in the US see this as a dangerous idea, presumably appealing to the foundation of liberty, namely resistance to government domination. In Europe, universal health insurance is seen as normal, and appeals to the foundations of care and fairness.

Another example is transport. It is well known that US transit systems — trains and buses primarily — are limited in service, low in quality and expensive compared to many European systems. In the US, the car reigns supreme, a symbol of independence and freedom, appealing to the liberty foundation. But what about roads? The US interstate highway system, built in the 1950s onwards, was the largest public works program in the world. Yet no one in the US talks about ‘socialised roads’ or even castigates trains and buses as ‘socialised transport’. Admittedly, some libertarians would like to privatise the road system, but they are a tiny minority.

To explain the peculiarities of how moralities are assigned in different ways, Haidt refers to moral entrepreneurs, public relations people and political operatives. A moral entrepreneur is someone who tries to stir up passions about a topic. Anti-abortionists, animal liberationists and sellers of deodorants all are trying to persuade others to think and act a certain way, and doing it by linking their special concerns to moral foundations. Anti-abortionists and animal liberationists each appeal to the care foundation, but with very different objects of concern, while deodorant advertisers appeal to the sanctity foundation, trying to induce people to buy deodorants to prevent or disguise allegedly disgusting body odour.

Loyalty to what?

Moral entrepreneurs are active in all things political. Patriotism is a prime example, linked to the loyalty foundation. Early humans lived in small groups, comprising dozens to a few hundred individuals. Maintaining loyalty to this group often made the difference between life and death for group members, so in evolutionary terms it makes sense that human minds are primed for loyalty. As Haidt expresses it, loyalty is an aspect of the first draft of the mind.

But loyalty to what? Why should a mental preference for loyalty to small human groups be assigned to a country, sometimes with millions of people, in what we call patriotism or national pride? Why not loyalty to one’s nearest one hundred neighbours? Or why not loyalty to the entire human species? Or maybe loyalty to life more generally, in a type of pantheism?

The answer is that identification with one’s own country is cultivated in all sorts of ways, many of them so obvious as to be unnoticed. In school, children are taught about their country’s history, often in biased ways. Students in Australia learn much more about Australia — usually good things, sometimes bad things — than about Brazil or Ethiopia. Then there is the media, reporting national news as a priority. In sports coverage, it might be reported, ‘Australia took a lead over India’. Yes, it’s cricket, and nothing really significant perhaps, but it reinforces thinking about the world in terms of countries.

Democracy

Winston Churchill’s comment that ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried’ is often quoted. The system of government commonly called ‘democracy’ has taken on a type of god-like status. Indeed, it appeals to the sanctity foundation in many people who follow politics.

The media provide a steady diet of news about government policies, government crises, politicians and elections. It might be said that politics is one of the world’s leading spectator sports. Nearly everyone has an opinion.

Politics is indeed a spectator sport in an important sense: most people are spectators, not participants. Aside from occasionally voting and talking to others about politics, most people have no greater involvement. In terms of participation, electoral politics is quite low. Just as it is misleading to refer to a ‘sporting nation’ when many unfit citizens interact with sports only as spectators, it is also misleading to refer to ‘democracy’ when most citizens are passive spectators of rule by politicians, not to mention unelected lobby groups who serve the interests of the wealthiest 1%.

For these reasons, my co-author Lyn Carson and I prefer the expression ‘representative government’ over ‘democracy’. Historically, there have been quite a number of political systems with much greater direct participation in decision making, for example in ancient Athens.

For those who support greater participation, for example through referenda, town meetings, consultative forums, community representatives on planning bodies, and randomly selected policy-advising bodies, the challenge is how to move from representative government to participatory democracy. In Haidt’s terms, current attachments of fairness, authority, loyalty and sanctity are to the system of voting and elections — representative government — and not to more participatory processes.

This is not an easy task, to say the least. Representative government is taught to school children, is taken for granted in media coverage, is touted as the solution to autocracy, and is regularly legitimated through voting and elections, in which voters give their implicit consent to the system of rule.

The occupy movement challenged the system by pointing out the complicity of governments and corporations in serving the wealthy at the expense of the majority – the 99%. Representative government in many countries has become a tool of powerful groups and serves their interests regardless of which party is in power. The occupy movement had a presence on the streets of many cities around the world, but in the US was subject to police harassment. Challenging the system in a direct, open way can be a risky business.

Attaching to participatory politics

Many people have developed strong beliefs in the superiority of representative government and the impossibility of participatory democracy. Their moralities have become assigned to one particular moral matrix, namely a configuration of moral assessments. Voting is seen to be fair, and so is the election of rulers, even though having money and connections is crucially important to electoral success. Few people think it is unfair that most people have no hope of being elected to office.

On the other hand, some moral assignments are more compatible with participatory processes. For example, in countries where juries for trials are selected randomly, this is seen as fair — as a way of selecting an unbiased cross-section of the population to hear evidence from two sides and to make a considered judgement. That trial juries are seen as fair shows that the fairness foundation might be assigned in a different way in politics. Randomly selected groups of citizens might be brought together, provided with information about a controversial issue – such as town planning or nanotechnology – hear from experts and partisans, discuss the issue among themselves and reach a consensus. Such groups are called policy juries or citizens panels. Hundreds of such panels, in several different countries, have been formed and have deliberated on a wide range of issues. The challenge is to get more people to think of these sorts of processes as the epitome of fairness, rather than voting.

Participatory democracy can come in various forms, for example referendums and popular assemblies, which complicates the challenge of encouraging people to think of them as viable alternatives to representative government. Another important factor is deliberation, which means careful consideration of arguments, often in discussions with others, as in juries. Only some participatory processes are deliberative: referendums often are not, being determined more by campaigning, advertising and slogans, whereas citizens panels are.

Advocates of participatory and deliberative alternatives can learn from Haidt’s research on moral foundations. Rather than trying to convince people through information and logical argument that participation and deliberation are good things, it is likely to be more effective to come up with ways to get people to sense in their guts that these alternatives are valuable and worth supporting.

Probably the best advertisement for participation is the experience of participation itself. Many of the people chosen randomly to serve on citizens panels find it incredibly engrossing and satisfying: they feel they are doing something worthwhile and become committed to the process. The same applies to experiences in workers’ councils, neighbourhood meetings and social action groups. The occupy movement, for example, provided on-the-ground training in participatory politics.

The implication is that ‘doing democracy’ – namely participating in groups or processes that involve direct decision-making – is a powerful way to promote participatory alternatives to representative government. The challenge is to make these experiences as satisfying as possible, thereby building commitment to the process, without getting too fixated on changing things immediately. This is the familiar dilemma of task functions and maintenance functions within groups. Achieving the group’s goal is important, but so is maintaining good relationships within the group, as the basis for commitment and long-term survival.

Taking a lead from Haidt, promoting participatory alternatives needs to pay more attention to what affects people’s moralities — their senses of care, fairness, liberty, authority, loyalty and sanctity — and figure out how to reassign moral foundations to participative and deliberative processes. There is nothing automatic or inherent in patriotism or a belief in the superiority of representative government. Alternatives are possible; the question is how best to promote them.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Lyn Carson for valuable comments on a draft.

PS I’ve applied moral foundations ideas to several other topics:

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