Psychology – Page 37 – a sibilant intake of breath

Emotional responses to oil production

When I was a child, I remember seeing working on terrestrial or offshore oil rigs as an heroic profession: using knowledge and technology to do something difficult and important, at considerable risk to your personal safety. No doubt, that view was partly formed through exposure to advertising. Like the military and space programs, oil companies realized a long time ago that the combination of high technology with human dedication is an image that people find compelling. Throw together footage of people in hardhats riding helicopters between giant machines, with intense music in the background, and you can pretty easily create a sense of your company and personnel as impressive. Nonetheless, it still has a certain emotional validity, as long as the interactions you think about are all the voluntary ones: companies accessing oil reserves and then upgrading their crude contents into useful products that serve important functions.

Of course, when you start to think about the involuntary interactions, the waters get substantially muddied. Oil producers and users are both guilty of putting their own needs and desires ahead of those who are inevitably harmed as a consequence of their activities, through routes like air and water pollution and climate change.

Now, when I see ads for oil companies, I respond to them like personal insults. They look like taunts from powerful and politically influential companies that are fully aware of how much damage they are causing, but are happy to continue to do so, while continuing to try to foster the image I used to hold of them as brave technical experts.

Of course, there are still people out there who factually reject the idea that oil production and use causes significant suffering for third parties. From that mindset, it is almost inevitable that you would end up with a profoundly different view of oil producers and consumers. It is not all that surprising, then, that deep aesthetic and political disagreements about how the industry should be treated are ongoing.

Now, it seems like a real shame that so much energy, effort, and money have gone into building up an industry that has proven to be so harmful. If all the intellectual effort that has gone into extracting and processing fossil fuels during the last few decades had been applied instead to the development and deployment of renewable forms of energy, we would be a lot farther along the path to carbon neutrality today.

The internet and confirmation bias

The issue of confirmation bias has come up repeatedly here before. Basically, people evaluate new information in a way that is far from impartial; new information that seems to confirm pre-existing beliefs is generally filed as evidence for the appropriateness of those beliefs, while contradictory information is downplayed or ignored. While this phenomenon is ancient, there does seem to be good reason to think that it may be especially acute now, as the media becomes more personalized and segmented.

That danger is highlighted by Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman, who gave a TED talk on how social networks mislead us. Because we are exposed to the thoughts of people who are already much like us, we are at risk of being convinced that we are more typically than we really are, and our views are more mainstream and justified than may actually be the case.

How much of a problem would people say this is, both from the perspective of being well-informed citizens and in the context of being effective in promoting particular policies? Is there any way either social networks or individuals can combat this entrenching of confirmation bias? For my own sake, I have been trying to incorporate more articles from newspapers I disagree with into my daily reading.

Uncovering motivations

Often, it seems that people are not fully aware of the strategies they are following in various situations, or the reasons behind their choices. Psychological experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that factors that people do not consciously acknowledge can nonetheless affect things like knowledge and decision-making. That said, it stands to reason that people are not always fully aware of why they behave as they do, in relation to things like career choices and interpersonal relationships.

The task of trying to identify one’s ‘real’ motivations is a challenging one, with at least two types of error possible. On the one hand, it is possible to accept overly superficial explanations: ‘I stormed out of there because I found the offer unacceptable.’ While this may be true in a sense, it probably doesn’t capture the entirety of your thought process, or the factors that had put you in that particular state of mind. On the other hand, it is also possible to over-interpret your own decisions, in an almost paranoid way, and see them as more cynical or strategic than they really are.

I suppose all of this is indicative of how perplexing it is to be a creature that can never really step outside itself for purposes of comprehension. We have more information than anybody else about what makes us act as we do, but the same cognitive filters that determine how we act make it difficult or impossible for us to understand the process objectively.

On emotional control

The New York Times has an interesting piece today on emotional regulation. While being able to prevent sudden emotional outbursts is clearly a beneficial ability in general, the article points out how those with too much emotional control can alienate others, especially younger people who have not yet fully developed their own emotional control systems:

Socially speaking, in short, the ability to shrug off feelings of disgust or outrage may suit an older group but strike younger people as inauthentic, even callous.

It is an interesting observation and has the ring of truth to it. While we certainly don’t want the people around us to panic or freak out for unimportant reasons, it is not surprising that they might make us suspicious be responding in an overly cool way to emotionally fraught situations.

Does caffeine work?

You Are Not So Smart is a blog that seeks to catalog the many mental failings of human beings: from the confirmation bias to our ignorance about our past beliefs.

In one post, they argue that caffeine (coffee, specifically) mostly just alleviates caffeine withdrawal. Rather than lifting you up from ‘normal’ to a more wakeful state, it just brings you back to normal, from the depressed state that caffeine consumption establishes as your new norm:

The result is you become very sensitive to adenosine, and without coffee you get overwhelmed by its effects.

After eight hours of sleep, you wake up with a head swimming with adenosine. You feel like shit until you get that black gold in you to clean out those receptor sites.

That perk you feel isn’t adding anything substantial to you – it’s bringing you back to just above zero.

Neurologist Stephen Novella echoes this position on his blog:

The take home is that regular use of caffeine produces no benefit to alertness, energy, or function. Regular caffeine users are simply staving off caffeine withdrawal with every dose – using caffeine just to return them to their baseline. This makes caffeine a net negative for alertness, or neutral at best if use is regular enough to avoid any withdrawal.

As an experiment, I am going to try abandoning caffeine for a week or so. I will report on any notable effects, though it is always hard to determine which observed changes in ones mental life are the consequence of any particular change in circumstances, given all the complexities of life and all the failings of our mental faculties.

Worthy of respect, but outside your field

The psychology of romantic attraction is a topic that has arisen here before, but I thought I would share an idea of my own.

Healthy long-term relationships probably always need to be built on a basis of mutual respect. Many of us respect people who show knowledge, talent, or skill in a field that we consider admirable – from academic accomplishment to music to athletics.

At the same time, being in a relationship with someone in too closely related a field seems likely to cause problems for many people, as a consequence of inevitable competition. Two academics might find themselves feeling competitive about publications or grant money, for instance. While, for some people, that might be a spur to greater accomplishment, I think it would be more likely to be a source of strain for most people.

That makes me wonder whether perhaps we spend too much time looking for partners within groups of people overly similar to us. Students in the same program have social events together and meet through classes; people in the same profession socialize together; participants in the same sport meet during training and competitions. Less commonly, we spend time socially with those ideal candidates: people who are admirably skilled in an area we respect, but do not excel in ourselves.

I think perhaps aristocrats everywhere have learned this lesson. Aristocratic events (insofar as I know anything about them) do tend to mix together successful and influential people from many walks of life, from prima ballerinas to up-and-coming diplomats. It seems plausible that many successful romantic unions could arise from this.

Anne Boleyn on The Tudors

I think the casting people for the television show The Tudors managed to exploit human psychology in a couple of clever ways, in casting Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn. Specifically, I think they took advantage of the way in which increasing familiarity with someone makes them more attractive, as well as how seeing other people be attracted to someone makes them more attractive to you.

When I first saw her, she struck me as very distinctive but not especially beautiful. After a few episodes, and the operation of those psychological factors, she both seemed extremely attractive and quite distinct from the large cast of very attractive but less individually distinguishable female characters on the show.

Now, if only Zip.ca would send me fewer scratched, unplayable discs!

How Pleasure Works

After thoroughly enjoying his free psychology course, available on iTunes U, I was excited to read Yale professor Paul Bloom’s new book: How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. It was certainly very interesting. Though it may not quite have met my high expectations, the book certainly has a number of substantial strengths. It includes both original insights and a useful presentation of the research undertaken by others. Indeed, the book’s greatest strength is probably its accessibility. There is little jargon, terms are clearly defined, and good analogies and explanations are employed throughout.

Bloom’s main hypothesis is that people are ‘essentialists’ and that this has importance for what people enjoy. This concept has a bit of a Platonic flavour, as Bloom explains:

The main argument here is that pleasure is deep. What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and also for pleasures that seem simpler, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust.

Perhaps one reason why I found the book a touch disappointing is that this thesis seems uncontroversial to me. Bloom does bring up some interesting examples and related experiments, but never really sets out a credible alternative theory well distinguished from this ‘essentialist’ view. Perhaps his most interesting argument is that essentialism – the desire to understand the ‘real nature’ of things, and the related assumption that there is such a thing – is inherent, even in children, and not the product of socialization.

Bloom takes a thematic approach: discussing food, sex, objects with histories (like JFK’s tape measure), performance, imagination, safety and pain, and finally the respective appeal of science and religion. His discussions of imagination are one of the most interesting parts of the book, as the author teases apart the different ways in which imagination is useful and pleasant, as well as discussing the limitations it has (such as how we cannot surprise ourselves while daydreaming). His discussion of the importance of evolution to psychology, as well as the processes through which the mental life of children changes as they grow up, are also particularly worthwhile and interesting. While it is not a novel argument, Bloom also provides some nice illustrations of how the human mind evolved in a world very different from the one that now exists, with important consequences for individuals and society.

One thing that sticks out at times are little judgmental comments made by the author. They are all very justifiable, but they do stand out within a work that is largely a summary of scientific research, albeit one written in a manner intended to be accessible to non-expert audiences. For instance, Bloom repeatedly condemns the obsession people have with female virginity. He also talks about steroids in sports, the power of stories to inspire moral change, ‘evil’ in video games, the dangers of awe in relation to political figures, and ‘immoral’ pleasures. A few of Bloom’s claims also stand out as being unsubstantiated, particular several assertions he makes about non-human animals, without reference to either logical argument or empirical evidence to support them. All told, Bloom stresses strongly that humans are quite different from other animals, though he arguably fails to provide adequate evidence to make that claim convincing.

Another thing you won’t find in Bloom’s book is much concrete advice on how to live a happier life. If there is anything of that sort in the book, it is arguments that might make people feel less irrational for taking pleasure in things that are a bit unusual: whether it is collecting objects formerly owned by celebrities or paying somebody to tie you up and beat you.

To his credit, Bloom also considers the logical errors that can arise from the intuitive essentialism that people manifest. He argues that it contributes to some of the basic errors of logical deduction and probabilistic reasoning that people commonly make – and which are exploited equally by advertisers and despots. Bloom highlights how many of the aspects of our minds that evolved for certain purposes have ended up creating other social phenomena by accident, from obesity to paranoia about terrorism and serial killers.

While the book is full of interesting tidbits and pieces of information, the overall thesis is a bit of an overcautious one. Perhaps that is something to be expected from a scientist, given their hesitation to go beyond claims that can be clearly justified by the facts. Nonetheless, this book is a worthwhile discussion of the nature of human pleasure, from a scientific and psychological perspective. For anyone with an interest in seeing the topic treated in that manner, it is definitely worth a look.

Alief

One interesting idea discussed in Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works is that of ‘alief.’ Originally developed by Tamar Gendler, this concept refers to how we cannot entirely separate fantasy from reality in our minds. Even though we know better, we respond to fiction in similar ways to how we would respond to seeing the actual events described; similarly, we would hesitate at least a bit to drink from a cup marked ‘cyanide,’ even if we just saw it filled from the tap. We can quite rightly believe that the water is perfectly safe, while at least slightly alieving that it is poisoned.

Bloom highlights how children are more vulnerable than adults, when it comes to being emotionally influenced by alief. Partly, he thinks this has to do with their lesser sophistication about fiction. He points out how, when watching Free Willy II with his child, his child became frightened that characters on a raft could drown. While he was sophisticated enough to recognize that adorable children don’t drown in such films, his child was not.

In general, Bloom has a lot of interesting things to say about fiction and imagination – including why people enjoy tragedies and horror films, the appeal of varying degrees of masochism (from enjoyment of hot sauce to much more extreme varieties), to the limitations of fantasy and the effects they have on social dynamics.

Psychology and hard choices

Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works makes reference to some interesting research with public policy implications. P.E. Tetlock and others published a study entitled “The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals” in a 2000 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Among other experiments, they presented subjects with a story about a hospital administrator deciding whether or not to spend $1 million to save the life of one child. They found that the experimental subjects disapproved of the administrator, regardless of which choice they made.

This seems to mesh well with the inappropriate rage in the United States about health care ‘rationing.’ As Peter Singer very effectively explained, rationing is inevitable in health care, as well as in all other areas of government spending where demand is potentially unlimited. What varies is the mechanism by which the rationing occurs: by severity of illness, by the wealth of sick people, etc.

Does the knowledge that people dislike the makers of tough decisions have any other social or political relevance? Perhaps. Tough choices certainly abound when it comes to environmental issues. Where a fishery is being exploited at an unsustainale rate, do we limit it to protect access to fish in the future, at the cost of a lot of fishing jobs today? Do we force people to pay for expensive wind, solar, or nuclear power so as to reduce the effects of climate change in the future? To what extent can the general public mitigate their intuitive disapproval, in recognition of the fact that politics requires hard choices? Also, to what extent should such cognitive biases reduce the extent to which public opinion is a valid source of guidance in policy-making?