WHY are we thinking so much about thinking these days? Near the top of best-seller lists around the country, you’ll find Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” followed by Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” and somewhere in the middle, where it’s held its ground for several months, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Recently arrived is “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior,” by Leonard Mlodinow.
It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books.
Unlike most pop self-help books, these are about life as we know it — the one you can change, but only a little, and with a ton of work. Professor Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic science a decade ago, has synthesized a lifetime’s research in neurobiology, economics and psychology. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” goes to the heart of the matter: How aware are we of the invisible forces of brain chemistry, social cues and temperament that determine how we think and act? Has the concept of free will gone out the window?
These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.
psychology
Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them … Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work. William James ☀
We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If this were true, society might easily remedy its problems with cheating and dishonesty. Human-resources departments could screen for cheaters when hiring. Dishonest financial advisers or building contractors could be flagged quickly and shunned. Cheaters in sports and other arenas would be easy to spot before they rose to the tops of their professions.
But that is not how dishonesty works. Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.
During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open. The flip side is that, given how vulnerable one then is, love lessons — sweet or villainous — can make a deep impression. Wedded hearts change everything, even the brain. The Brain on Love ☀
Only the last explanation explained the findings. As described in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who spent time selflessly had a much stronger sense of personal power and effectiveness. Helping others apparently makes us feel we can accomplish more in less time, and this “fullness” of time seems to stretch time in our minds. It’s not that the volunteers don’t feel connected or that they don’t find the volunteer work meaningful and enjoyable; they do. But only the boosted sense of self-efficacy actually triggered the shifts in time perception.
Instead of arguing over who’s a racist, let’s shift the conversation to more important questions. Let’s debate instead the underlying tensions and tendencies that contributed to Trayvon Martin’s shocking death. About the implications of living in a society in which White parents rarely talk to their kids about race, but Black parents have to warn their sons to bend over backwards to avoid so much as the whiff of suspicion at the convenience store or routine traffic stop. About what it means when our laws (and our culture) shift from duty to retreat to stand your ground.
These are tough, unsettling questions. It’s less threatening to ponder who is and isn’t a racist, especially since we’re all so confident that this label doesn’t apply to us. But arguing about who the racists are–fruitless tilting at windmills that it may be–remains the easy way out because it preempts wrestling with the harder questions raised by Martin’s death.
In short, I don’t know whether or not George Zimmerman is a racist. And frankly, I don’t much care.
I do know that Trayvon Martin’s death is a tragedy.
I do know that while it’s unthinkably terrible to lose a child of any background, tragedies like this one are far too likely to befall African-American families (and even when not fatal, that similar outrages and indignities are suffered daily by a wide range of people of color in this country).
And I do know that to suggest that race shouldn’t be a factor in talking about Trayvon Martin’s death is at the very least hopelessly naïve and at worst a disingenuous effort to change the topic to one less threatening to the status quo.
Sleep had little effect on the ability to recall related words. But subjects who slept between tests were significantly better at remembering the unrelated words than those who got no shuteye.
Here is the most interesting finding: In the 24-hour retest—where all subjects had a full night of sleep—those participants who went to bed shortly after learning the words did much better than those who went through an entire day before sleeping.
And this leg up in memory was maintained on subsequent days. So if you need to remember something, try reviewing those notes just before bedtime. Instead of watching that rerun of Seinfeld you already have memorized.
Wielding a gun increases a person’s bias to see guns in the hands of others, new research from the University of Notre Dame shows.
Notre Dame Associate Professor of Psychology James Brockmole, who specializes in human cognition and how the visual world guides behavior, together with a colleague from Purdue University, conducted the study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
In five experiments, subjects were shown multiple images of people on a computer screen and determined whether the person was holding a gun or a neutral object such as a soda can or cell phone. Subjects did this while holding either a toy gun or a neutral object such as a foam ball.
The researchers varied the situation in each experiment—such as having the people in the images sometimes wear ski masks, changing the race of the person in the image or changing the reaction subjects were to have when they perceived the person in the image to hold a gun. Regardless of the situation the observers found themselves in, the study showed that responding with a gun biased observers to report “gun present” more than did responding with a ball. Thus, by virtue of affording the subject the opportunity to use a gun, he or she was more likely to classify objects in a scene as a gun and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior, such as raising a firearm to shoot.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. Yet pundits continue to hallucinate trends in freak events, like the Norwegian sniper (who shot all those young people on an island) and make wildly innumerate comparisons, such as between Afghanistan and Vietnam, or between today’s human trafficking and the African slave trade. It’s a holdover of the literary sensibilities of our science-flunking intellectual elite, who would be aghast if someone didn’t know who Milton was, but cheerfully flaunt their ignorance of basic science and mathematics. Steven Pinker ☀
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, speak as a keynote speaker at the 2012 Annual ITSM Pink Conference in Las Vegas.
He shared several concepts about how our brains are changing because of the internet. In part, he discusses studies that show a shift in us becoming more impatient the quicker information becomes easily available.
What I took away from the speech was that we are in a transition period. We may not realize it but, as a species, we are evolving to be heavily dependent on computers and the Internet to think.
Epistemic closure is a recently defined philosophical term that describes someone who is so thoroughly encased in the echo chamber of their own ideology that they are completely immune to considering other viewpoints. The term is derived from the Greek word pistis which means faith or trust. When people live in epistemic closure, they are immune to integrity because they only trust people who already agree with their ideology. They scan potential sources of information for the presence of code words that indicate whether or not the speaker can be trusted as a member of their own ideological tribe. As a pastor communicating in our “post-truth” environment of ideological tribalism, I try to be very attuned to both the code words that make me trustworthy and those that instantaneously discredit everything I have to say. Persecution and Epistemic Closure ☀
Even if those devices improve by leaps and bounds, reading a sleeping mind poses great, perhaps insurmountable challenges. The greatest of them is that you cannot really compare the images and stories you reconstruct with what a person actually dreamt. After all, our memories of our dreams are hazy at the best of times. “You have no ground-truthing,” says Gallant. It is like compiling a dictionary between one language and another that you cannot actually read. One day, we might be able to convert the activity of dreaming neurons into sounds and sights. But how would we ever know that we have done it correctly?
The paradox of thrift tells us that what applies at a micro level (ability to increase saving if one is disciplined enough) does not apply at the macro level (if everyone saves aggregate demand and, hence, output and income falls without government intervention). So if an individual tried to increase his/her individual saving (and saving ratio) they would probably succeed if they were disciplined enough. But if all individuals tried to do this en masse, and nothing else replaces the spending loss, then everyone suffers because national income falls (as production levels react to the lower spending) and unemployment rises. The impact of lost consumption on aggregate demand (spending) would be such that the economy would plunge into a recession. When common sense fails ☀
It seems like common sense that the principles of sound financial management should be the same for people and governments, and for centuries moralists (and to a lesser extent economists) have frowned on excessive levels of individual debt. But the economy is not a single entity in any meaningful sense. Rather it’s a vast, complex system of hundreds of millions of workers and consumers, hundreds of thousands of firms, thousands of government and regulatory agencies, hundreds of public figures whose words and actions can move markets, and so on — all interacting in an incredibly complex, dynamic, and co-evolutionary way.
One result of this complexity is that short-term government spending can either increase long-term debt or reduce it, largely as a result of how much economic growth it stimulates. As many economists have pointed out (here and here, for example), by negatively impacting future tax revenues, slow economic growth can increase long-term government debt far more than even profligate short term spending. And by exacerbating long-term unemployment, not to mention impairing social services and public infrastructure, short-term austerity can have a debilitating impact on societal wellbeing, as we are already witnessing in the U.K.
Public debt isn’t the only hot-button policy issue for which commonsense reasoning can be misleading. It seems like common sense, for example, that taxes should reduce the incentive to work (when applied to workers) or to create jobs (when applied to employers); hence increasing taxes should be bad for overall economic growth. The evidence, however, is that there’s no reliable correlation between marginal tax rates and economic growth: sometimes we see impressive economic growth following tax increases (e.g. during the Clinton presidency) while at other time we see the opposite, as happened under the most recent President Bush.
In spite of such evidence, the claim that debt and taxes are both inherently bad, and that fiscal austerity is therefore the only legitimate means for reducing long-term debt, remains compelling to many politicians and voters — largely because it comports with their commonsense intuition.
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
