Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Our appalling legacy

There’s another dire warning from the IPCC: Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’

There seems little reason to hope that people will react differently to this one than to the 1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2014 reports.

Our collective future is a massive ethical blindspot. People who wouldn’t think about missing a pension contribution or not enrolling their kids in an enriched learning program are collectively deciding by default to ravage the planet which we all depend on, and our political and economic institutions are acting almost exclusively to encourage that outcome.

Online romance

I have seen it argued in several places that among heterosexuals romance is a more egalitarian game for women than for men, with most women being able to find a partner, get married, and have children if they prioritize those things, while the least attractive men struggle to find anyone at all who wants them as a partner.

This is substantiated somewhat in a recent Economist briefing about online dating. They note:

Men on Tantan, he says, tend to like about 60% of all the female profiles they see, but women like just 6% of the male ones. The least attractive women receive similar levels of attention to the most attractive men, says Mr Wang; all can find someone reasonably attractive. Men at the bottom of the ladder end up completely matchless. This fits with the work by Ms Bruch and Mr Newman. In general, both men and women concentrate on people that the common opinion of the site rates as 25% more attractive than they are. Even for women not seen as desirable, that can work. For the least desirable men, nothing works. “I don’t expect that final 5% to be that easy to help,” says Mr Wang.

There’s bad news for women as well. Whereas men actually become more attractive as they age from 20 to about 45, women peak in attractiveness at the youngest end of the scale and decline gradually until about 65.

All told they make the case that online romance is a very good thing, giving everyone the opportunity to efficiently contact a wide range of partners, and being especially helpful for people who are looking for relatively rare characteristics. They note that 70% of same-sex relationships now begin online.

Resistance to World Health Organization Ebola efforts

Another case of conspiratorial thinking, selfish politicians, and conflict threatening to make a deadly serious threat into a dire global emergency:

Pockets of “reluctance, refusal and resistance” to accept Ebola vaccination were generating many of the new cases, Salama said.

“We also see a very concerning trend. That resistance, driven by quite natural fear of this terrifying disease, is starting to be exploited by local politicians, and we’re very concerned in the run up to elections, projected for December, that that exploitation… will gather momentum and make it very difficult to root out the last cases of Ebola.”

Some people were fleeing into the forest to escape Ebola follow-up treatment and checks, sometimes moving hundreds of kilometers, he said.

There was one such case to the south of Beni, and another to the north, close to the riverbanks of Lake Albert. Both were inaccessible for security reasons.

Neighboring Uganda was now facing an “imminent threat”, and social media posts were conflating Ebola with criticism of the DRC government and the United Nations and “a range of conspiracy theories”, which could put healthworkers at risk.

Ebola was a particular fear of mine in childhood, and it remains very worrisome and uncomfortable where we now live in a world where periodic outbreaks are now treated largely as business as usual.

Easier to blame people for their suffering than to perceive injustice

The researchers and trauma experts Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane write, “Reason and objectivity are not the primary determinants of society’s reactions to traumatized people. Rather … society’s reactions seem to be primarily conservative impulses in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people can be in charge of their lives, and that bad things only happen to people who deserve them.”

I have frequently seen such irrational and defensive “conservative impulses” applied to organizational systems over the years, but perhaps never more than when I have collaborated with child protective services (CPS) workers and firefighters. Both groups have gruelling, scary, demanding jobs, and yet the way people react to them is strikingly different. CPS workers carry a heavy burden of feeling that they are hated—by everyone. Firefighters, on the other hand, tend to have the benefit of an age-old image of them as saviors and heroes. This contrast speaks to every level we’re touched on: the personal, the organizational, and the societal.

van Dernoot Lipsey, Laura and Connie Burk. Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. 2009. p. 30–31 (ellipses in original)

saganangst — fear of nuclear war, and particularly nuclear winter

We live under constant threat of sudden destruction via nuclear war. It wouldn’t take that many warheads falling on major cities to darken the atmosphere — making the consequences of even a regional exchange (or the payload of a single ‘boomer’ sub) global, and potentially a threat to the integrity of human civilization. The control systems carry a frightening risk of malfunction, particularly in a crisis when nuclear-armed forces may be out of communication with higher level command and at immediate risk of nuclear attack.

The only safe option is to disarm as a global community — spare everyone the costs of the nuclear arms complex, while greatly diminishing the total severity of potential wars.

Open thread: shadow solutions to climate change

In the absence of real political solutions to climate change, Stephen Gardiner argues that: “we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.”

One example from today: Build walls on seafloor to stop glaciers melting, scientists say

Another example was back when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested we could adapt to climate change by altering our physiology.

TA-student experiential asymmetry

In life generally I am embarrassingly bad at keeping track of people with whom I’ve had only limited interaction. There are many people who I remember visually and may even know something about, but who I cannot name. There are probably even more people who look vaguely familiar, but for whom I couldn’t say if I know them from one place or another.

This all gets exaggerated in the context of working as a teaching assistant. University of Toronto “tutorials” routinely have more than 30 students enrolled, though attendance may be only 50-70% in a given week. For a single class, I will usually have 3-4 tutorials and I sometimes teach as many as three classes at once. Often, courses only last for the fall or the winter term, so I get a new set of students after the winter break.

From the perspective of a student, even if they take a full course load of five courses at a time and every class includes a tutorial, that’s only a maximum of 10 teaching assistants per year, or perhaps 40 during a bachelor’s degree. Furthermore, in all but the most active tutorials I will be speaking for a good portion of the time, so every student has reasons for their memory of me to be reinforced. Many of them will also see me in office hours to discuss essay drafts or grades.

From my perspective, during the seven years of my PhD I will probably have an average of two courses at a time with a 50/50 mix of year-long and one-term courses. At three tutorials per course, that’s 270 students per year, many of who I will only see in a minority of tutorials. As a result, there are probably already well over 1,000 students who remember me as a TA, and of those there are probably only 5% or so who participated enough for me to have any kind of clear memory of them and even then it’s probably just a “former student” flag without details about which course, much less what they said, their name, or any personal details about them.

It would be less socially awkward if I could remember at least those basic fields of data about everyone in the large set, but it’s possibly beyond what a reasonable human memory and cognitive capacity can achieve. It’s certainly well beyond what I can achieve, as someone who has routinely worked in groups or offices of 30 people or so in which I knew only a minority of names, even after being involved for months or years. In a way it may even be a good thing. I would prefer if tests and assignments at U of T were marked with student numbers only, not names. Inevitably, seeing a name you remember will subconsciously influence grading (though the impact is hard to predict: do I interpret the work of more involved students more leniently, or do I expect more from them?). I avoid looking at names on documents I am grading and it may be a further protection that even for the majority of students who I am currently teaching their name won’t be more than vaguely familiar to me and not tied to any specific memories of them as a person.

One awkward dimension of all this is the frequent expectation in the syllabus of courses that TAs will grade students for both attendance and participation. If participation is to be assessed by spoken contributions, I don’t think I can track it accurately at the same time as I am trying to facilitate a worthwhile discussion. I buy and distribute name cards to raise the odds that I will be able to identify students, but people don’t always use them consistently and it would be too embarrassing to tell a student months into the year that I have no idea who they are and can they please give me their name for my participation records.

I also question the fairness of grading people based on spoken contributions, since the people who feel empowered to speak may just be the most extroverted, confident, and privileged. Based on experience I can say conclusively that the most talkative aren’t necessarily the best informed or those who contribute the most value to the discussion. Students are also smart enough to game any system, so if they know that I am trying to check people off when they make a substantive contribution to each week’s discussion they know how to do just enough to get a checkmark.

One approach I learned from another TA is to give everyone a 10 minute writing task during each 50 minute tutorial, then rapidly scan that people have actually done it as they are leaving, checking it off against the attendance list. It means sacrificing some discussion time, but it also means that people cannot be entirely tuned out during the tutorial. It’s impossible for me to tell whether a silent person is listening attentively or thinking about something entirely unrelated. Teaching assessments suggest that students don’t find these writing tasks pointless or distasteful.

It would be interesting to try teaching undergraduates at a school that emphasizes teaching more and is willing to constrain tutorials to a size where it’s actually possible to know most students, and where most people will actually speak in any given tutorial. In my ideal world, I would also implement the system we used in graduate tutorials in Oxford, where someone at random is called upon to briefly summarize each reading in 2-3 minutes. It definitely drove me to do the readings then, out of fear of embarrassment. I did try the system at U of T, stressing how the summary can be very brief and how these records will be perfect study notes, but students hated it, complained about it in their teaching assessments, and said that it drove them to not attend class.

Open thread: climate justice

Both in the literature on fossil fuel divestment and when speaking with divestment activists the concept or worldview of “climate justice” is prominent. A good example is Jessica Grady-Benson and Brinda Sarathy’s paper “Fossil fuel divestment in US higher education: student-led organising for climate justice“. They contend that climate change is increasingly seen as a social justice issue.

As I understand it, the key features of the “climate justice” perspective are the view that climate change is not a distinguishable issue that can be isolated from others like unjust power differentials, poverty, or racism. That analysis helps produce a program of action that emphasizes intersectionality: the efforts of those in one justice-based struggle to assist those involved in others, even if the immediate connection between say, maternal health in low-income countries and environmental policy in European municipalities or conditions in American prisons, is obscure. The conceptual motivation connects to both networking and political pragmatism, through the hope that social movements can be mutually reinforcing and therefore that alliances between climate change activists and those advocating for racial or economic justice will help everyone achieve their policy goals.

This climate justice terminology is comparatively new. In a post back in 2007 I used the term to refer to the question of the fair international distribution of burdens in addressing climate change: a perspective much more along the lines of institutionalist liberal environmentalism which basically accepts the existing order of the world and seeks to make the institutions that already hold power change their behaviour for the sake of their collective longer-term interests.

The liberal environmentalist account sees problems like climate change as techinical, scientific, and with the potential to be solved within existing institutions. Climate change is an unfortunate accidental product of fossil fuel energy that doesn’t automatically carry any moral lessons beyond that. British Comedian David Mitchell has a ‘soapbox’ talk describing this view succinctly.

One relevant consideration concerns motivation. Even if I accept it intellectually, Mitchell’s portrayal of climate change as an accident that nonetheless obligates a response may lack the emotional heft needed to actually produce a change in behaviour. Another key issue is the need to not only adopt decarbonization policies but to maintain them for long enough (decades) to avoid the worst possible climate change effects. Arguably, this requires a political consensus that extends beyond the left or progressives and, in fact, a political program that demands agreement on every progressive cause risks being alienating and ineffectual rather than a path to solidarity and success.

All these questions are intensely contested, and certainly cannot be resolved in a blog post or subsequent comments. On the one hand, the case that climate change is interwoven with other issues of injustice is highly convincing; it’s because some people are privileged over others that it’s so easy to allow unfettered fossil fuel use for the benefits it provides to the privileged while ignoring the harms it imposes on the marginalized, non-human nature, and future generations. It’s also plausible that the climate change movement needs to forge and maintain strategic alliances to succeed. In the end, we can’t know in advance what will work because we have never faced a problem like this before. We may never have the opportunity to do so again, since a sufficiently bad failure on climate change carries the risk of making all other human political projects moot. As such it seems obligatory to me to open up and maintain multiple paths to success, including those that require reaching beyond comfortable networks of people who broadly agree and solutions that consist of behaviours that we largely see as desirable anyhow. Stopping catastrophic climate change will mean giving up a lot, not only in terms of personal comforts and indulgences, but also in terms of comfortable political associations and worldviews.

Conspiracy theories among climate change activists

Climate change activists often (plausibly) assert that “the science is settled” and present themselves as the informed contrast to people whose lack of scientific understanding or manipulation by fossil fuel actors has left them with the false belief that climate change isn’t happening.

At Toronto’s smallish Rise for Climate march on Saturday, I saw at least four people who were trying to convince people that chemtrails from aircraft are actually secret nefarious geoengineering by governments. Along with a large banner with pictures of aircraft chemtrails and frightening claims, they were distributing a colour handout:

It’s a bizarre document. It claims that chemtrails (themselves a conspiracy theory that has been around for many years) are a secret “form of climate change mitigation” via solar radiation management (SRM). It also claims, however, that “SRM aerosol cloud canopies trap more heat than is deflected by SRM programs”, so the supposed chemtrail program actually makes climate change worse. It also claims that along with the chemtrails “associated microwave transmission atmospheric manipulation” is “decimating the ozone layer”. It’s a fever dream re-interpretation of contemporary environmental politics, marrying an old conspiracy theory with new concerns about the real potential technology of geoengineering by solar radiation management. They throw in that the geoengineering chemtrails cause autism, along with allergies and dementia, and claim that the program “was fully deployed immediately after WWII”.

It’s crazy from top to bottom, from the claim that the secret program is somehow “illegal” to the contradictory claims that the program is “officially denied” but also that there are “countless official documents which confirm” it. It’s also a bit ironic given how self-conscious the public conversation about geoengineering has been, including about whether any sort of testing could produce unwanted side-effects and how any geoengineering ought to be governed.

When you lose trust in formal sources of information like governments and scientific bodies, it becomes impossible to have an informed position on climate change. The internet is full of nonsense, as everyone expects, and the environmentalist movement includes many who are highly credulous when it comes to claims that they are inclined to believe, whether those are about health and nutrition or about government conspiracies.