Psychology – Page 39 – a sibilant intake of breath

Debit chic

Back in the heady days of high stock prices, rising house prices, and seemingly robust economic growth, having an elite credit card with a high credit limit was a status symbol. Now that the whole world has been forced to confront problematic levels of debt, it seems like having the ability to make impulse purchases on credit shouldn’t have much cachet anymore.

Indeed, perhaps the humble debit card should be today’s status symbol. By breaking it out and typing in your PIN, you can demonstrate to everybody around you that you have the cash on hand to fund your purchase right now, rather than the confidence of Visa or Mastercard that you will be able to pay them back later.

Materialism and free will

I have written before about the apparent contradiction between free will and materialism (the idea that the universe is exclusively comprised of particles that obey physical laws). The problem is easy enough to state: if every particle in the universe behaves in a manner governed by a combination of random chance and predictable laws, how can a physical entity like the brain respond to stimuli in a way that is neither random nor determined?

Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington recently summarized some experiments on monkeys that illuminate this issue. They found that they could use a computer to predict how monkeys will respond to visual stimuli, suggesting that such mental functions are automatic.

Of course, there is a big difference between parts of mental life like maintaining a steady heartbeat and tracking a moving object visually and those like making ethical decisions. That said, I continue to be unable to see what mechanism could exist between the former and the latter, and which could square our intuitive belief in free will with what we know about the functioning of the universe. That being said, we do not have any reason to act as though free will does not exist. The reason for that is simple: if free will doesn’t exist, we don’t have any influence over what we believe or how we act, while if it does exist we certainly want to behave appropriately. As such, if we do have any scope to choose, we should choose to believe in free will.

Age and openness to new ideas

I wonder whether there is a time in life by which our aesthetic and political preferences have been essentially locked in, after which we are no longer fully capable of integrating new ideas. It certainly seems plausible that this could be true. It could also help to explain the broader pattern of social change in society; as each generation rises to positions of influence, they bring with them the intuitive assumptions about politics and ethics that they absorbed when they were younger. Often, that means being willing to accept things that were outside the bounds of what was acceptable for the generation before, but which are less radical than what will be accepted by the generation after.

If true, this dynamic could also be a major reason for which people dying is an important form of social progress. To take one example, as there have been fewer and fewer surviving parents who would not tolerate having their child in an inter-racial relationship, the less taboo such relationships have become within society generally. I have also read about how scientific progress depends to some extent upon the death of highly respected individuals who have become overly wedded to new ideas in their old age, and who are now keeping the mainstream from accepting what the latest research has shown to be true about the universe.

Obviously, not everybody has their preferences and instincts ossified at exactly the same time, or to the same extent. That said, if there is evidence for such a phenomenon existing generally, it could have political and sociological importance. For one thing, it would highlight the importance of the education system and the overall collective of information available to youth, when it comes to determining what society is going to look like a few decades from now.

Do people think such a phenomenon is real? If so, what would the most important consequences be?

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!