Psychology – Page 41 – a sibilant intake of breath

Psychological dualism

There is a distinction drawn in theories about the human mind between ‘monist’ and ‘dualist’ understandings of how it works. Dualists, like Descartes, see the mind as essentially separate from the body. Monists believe that “the mind is what the brain does,” and that there is no distinction between the two.

The position of the two views in society is an odd one, as an excellent Paul Bloom lecture discusses. We can readily understand situations that presume dualism: the continued life of the soul after death, the idea that the mind of one person could be transferred into another person or animal, etc.

Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Homer described the fate of the companions of Odysseus who were transformed by a witch into pigs. Actually, that’s not quite right. She didn’t turn them into pigs. She did something worse. She stuck them in the bodies of pigs. They had the head and voice and bristles and body of swine but their minds remained unchanged as before, so they were penned there weeping. And we are invited to imagine the fate of again finding ourselves in the bodies of other creatures and, if you can imagine this, this is because you are imagining what you are as separate from the body that you reside in.

Clearly, we are able to imagine minds that would remain essentially unchanged, even when altered into a radically different physical form.

At the same time at dualism seems to make intuitive sense to people, all the physical evidence we have is on the side of a monist view, in which ‘mind’ arises from the physical properties of body:

Somebody who hold a–held a dualist view that said that what we do and what we decide and what we think and what we want are all have nothing to do with the physical world, would be embarrassed by the fact that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life.

…

Somebody with a severe and profound loss of mental faculties–the deficit will be shown correspondingly in her brain. Studies using imaging techniques like CAT scans, PET, and fMRI, illustrate that different parts of the brain are active during different parts of mental life. For instance, the difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you’re doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you’re solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains, but it is extremely difficult to explain if one is a dualist.

The lecture includes many other examples showing why monism and the world as we observe it seem to mesh.

To me, the importance of this seems to go beyond settling scientific and/or metaphysical questions. It certainly seems plausible that beings that intuitively perceive themselves as essentially independent from physical reality will develop high-level theories about the world that take that into account, in areas as diverse as their religious, political, and moral views. By the same token, if one view really is far more defensible than the other, on the basis of observations and experiments we perform, that quite possibly has moral and political implications. It is all quite interesting, in any case, and I recommend that people consider watching the lecture series. The videos, transcripts, and slides are all available for free online.

Blog on the psychology of denial

Climate Change Denial is a group blog that really impresses me. It is focused on the question of where climate change denial comes from, and why it has been so successful at diminishing public support for effective climate change policies.

One especially good post is about how climate change campaigners may be in denial themselves, about the scope and seriousness of the problem and the difficulty of addressing it in the time we have left.

It is a site I will continue to read with interest.

Bright-Sided

From Oprah to New Age philosophy, ‘positive thinking’ has become a hugely influential movement in business circles, the religious sphere, in pop medicine, and elsewhere. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the case that the movement is poorly thought out and damaging. Her arguments are convincing, especially when it comes to situations where positive thinking is used to blame the victim when they suffer as the result of developments beyond their control: be it the movement towards corporate downsizing (which corresponded with the rise of motivational speakers in the workplace) or the unjustified assertion that cancer patients are responsible for their own worsening or recovery, on the basis of the mental attitudes they maintain.

Ehrenreich highlights how relentless optimism leads to dangerous groupthink, in which risks are downplayed and those who raise legitimate worries are sidelined. She provides ample evidence that these factors played a role in the inflation of the global house price bubble, and have continued to have important economic and political effects. These include the weird state of deluded isolation in which society’s richest people now reside. She also spends considerable time discussing the warped theology in which god is seen as a sort of mail-order service, happy to send you whatever good things (houses, cars, promotions) you are able to ‘manifest’ for yourself, simply by fervently desiring them.

Positive thinking involves a weird reversal, when it comes to dealing with risks. They cease to be external (concern that your company might fire you to improve their short-term profitability) and become entirely internal (fears about what your state of mind might do to you). It is also tied fundamentally to the notion that happiness is not most important in itself, but rather insofar as it influences events: “Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work – as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call ‘success.'” The former tendency puts people in danger of worrying about the wrong things, while the latter strategy puts them at risk of seeking to achieve particular outcomes in nonsensical ways. That is especially dangerous when it comes to making big purchases on credit, firm in your belief that the universe will provide you with the means of dealing with it later.

Ehrenreich’s points are well-taken, though the book can be a bit tedious to read at times. There are also some partial contradictions. It is repeatedly asserted that there is no medical evidence that thinking positively improves health outcomes, yet it is taken as plausible that George Beecher was able to speed his demise through negative thinking. In the course of her analysis on the medical evidence, Ehrenreich claims to be “not in a position to evaluate” evidence that those with a positive outlook may have some protection against heart disease, but is seemingly happy to evaluate research on other illnesses that confirms her hypothesis.

All told, Ehrenreich makes important points about the poisonous institutional culture that accompanies an excessive focus on positivism – and the view that individuals are almost entirely responsible for what happens to them. Her concluding call for ‘realistic’ thinking is certainly appropriate enough, though perhaps she does not go far enough in suggesting how the empire of positive thinking she has mapped the outlines of might be deconstructed. As the world continues to grapple with real problems, magical thinking cannot be a substitute for dispassionate analysis, risk management, and contingency planning. How we get from our world to one more like that, however, remains mysterious.

Torture, psychology, and the law

For the darkest day of the year, a couple of torture-related items seem appropriate. Firstly, there is this New York Times piece, which argues that senior officials from the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes, for authorizing and enabling torture. The editorial argues that there is no chance that prosecutions will be sought under an Obama administration, but that he ought to clarify the obligation of the United States and its agents to uphold the Geneva Conventions, as well as reverse executive orders that “eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.”

The prospect of high-level American decision-makers being put on trial for authorizing torture is so unlikely that it is a bit difficult to even form an opinion about it. At the same time, it is likely that nobody thirty years ago would have anticipated the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), or International Criminal Court (ICC). There is no clear reason for which high political office should be any impediment to being tried for war crimes, but it is very unclear how any such prosecutions would fare in the United States. It would certainly be seen as a ‘political’ act, and any connections with international law would likely be the targets for special criticism and scorn from some quarters.

The other story worth mentioning is an experiment conducted by Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University. It was a less intense re-creation of Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. Like Milgram, Burger found that a startling proportion of the population is willing to torture a fellow human being as part of a scientific experiment. This is when the only pressure placed upon the subject of the experiment is the authority of the actor pretending to conduct it. That naturally makes one nervous about what people would be willing to do when they felt an urgent and important issue justified it, as well as when far stronger sanctions could be brought against them if they did not proceed.

How politicians think

The Oil Drum has an interesting post on the psychology of leaders, arguing that their mindset has important consequences in relation to how they evaluate long-term questions like the future of hydrocarbon resources. The argument there is being made about Peak Oil, but it could just as well be applied to climate change:

Our leaders base decisions on lawyer thinking.

The outcome of a trial is not based on the facts; it is based on what they can convince the jury the facts might be. Likewise the outcome of an election is not based on facts; it is based on what they can convince the electorate the relevant facts, issues and threats might be.

Politicians do not deal in facts. They deal in perception. After years of working this way it becomes a framework in which they think.

The basic point is similar to the old joke about how public figures use statistics rather as drunkards use lamp posts: for support rather than illumination. Furthermore, the awareness that other politicians and politically active groups and individuals will use statistics in this way somewhat debases numerical evidence as a form or empirical awareness about the world.

Another important point is made about the differences between political and objective reality:

Politicians tend to inherently believe that the outcome of an event will depend on people’s perceptions and beliefs about that event. Politicians have very little experience with situations where objective reality is more important to outcome than the subjective perception of the reality.

This tendency is especially damaging when it comes to climate change. Because it progresses at an uncertain rate, it may well be that climate changes slowly while the perceptions of most people remain fairly stable, then changes too quickly for anything low-cost and effective to be done. On a problem characterized by uncertain time frames and potentially strong feedback effects, we need to get out in front of the issue, rather than being led by public or elite political opinion.

Apocalyptic psychology

Emily has written an interesting post about our half-longing for apocalypse and the psychology of climate change. Evoking the possibility of disaster sometimes serves rational purposes, such as providing a way to deal with uncertainties about costs. There are still people who argue that the benefits of climate change are likely to exceed the costs, and others who argue that the cost of addressing climate change is unacceptably high. Pointing out the possibility of catastrophic runaway change is one way to respond to such positions.

That being said, there are deeper and more emotive reasons for which the destruction of our civilization as the result of climate change has psychological poignancy. At some level, there is the feeling that we deserve it – that our abuse of the rest of nature has disqualified us from continued participation in it. Thankfully, quasi-religious notions of sin and damnation generally leave a space for redemption. Particularly if we can do it in a way that doesn’t leave the world littered with nuclear waste and toxic pollutants, moving to a low-carbon society could help humanity to redeem itself in its own eyes.

Helmets and driver psychology

Ian Walker, a researcher at the University of Bath, has uncovered an unfortunate tendency in human psychology. Drivers are more likely to hit cyclists who are wearing helmets. The hypothesis is that they compensate for the sight of a bare head by giving a wider berth when passing. On average, they gave a cyclist with a helmet 8.5cm (3.5″) less space. This was confirmed observationally by Walker himself, who used a sensor to evaluate 2,500 such incidents in Salisbury and Bristol. Motorists were most cautious around him when we wore a female wig and no helmet. Wearing the wig earned another 14cm (5.5″) of clearance, on average.

The study also found that larger vehicles are more likely to cut it close: “The average car passed 1.33 metres (4.4 feet) away from the bicycle, whereas the average truck got 19 centimetres (7.5 inches) closer and the average bus 23 centimetres (9 inches) closer.” That’s especially discouraging, given how the relative masses of a cyclist and a bus affect the dynamics of a possible colission.

A more comprehensive examination of the results (PDF) is available online.

The situation demonstrates the kind of game theory situation so common in safety and security. If you fall by the grace of your own actions, you are better off wearing a helmet. If a car actually does hit you, having a helmet is probably also a good idea. The degree of trade-off between reducing the probability of occurrence and mitigating the probable consequences is rarely easy to set effectively.

The take home lesson: there is a bit more reason to be wary of helmets, but cross-dressing could save your life.

IR theory and human nature

One thing I have always disliked about international relations theory is the tendency to assert a view of human nature as simplistic and unchangeable. Often, I think this is more the result of short descriptions of theories becoming caricatures, rather than the product of theories that genuinely fail to appreciate how human behaviour is (a) malleable within broad limits and (b) critically influenced by context. Lots of fascinating recent psychology has been demonstrating the latter point. Malcolm Gladwell’s work is an entertaining and accessible example. So too, the work on behavioural economics that has been attracting so much attention.

I have a chart on my theory notes listing the major alternatives: Realism, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Marxism, Feminism, and Critical Theory. In the column for ‘human nature’ the positions given are: ‘Fixed (essentially selfish)’, ‘Fixed (essentially selfish)’, ‘Fixed (essentially selfish)’, ‘Historically determined (corrupted by changeable)’, ‘Varies according to sub-model’, and ‘No fixed nature.’ Firstly, it seems like the issue of whether people generally behave selfishly or not isn’t sufficient to assert the existence of an essential human nature. Secondly, it seems like virtually all IR theories could pretty easily stretch to accommodate how people’s thinking and actions are conditioned by the environment in which they live. It seems like this is one of the major reasons for which neoliberals can continue to hope that conflictual elements of world politics will eventually give way to more cooperative ones. (Of course, we can also question whether the six traditions listed above constitute an appropriate taxonomy of IR theoretical approaches.)

The tendency to caricature I mention is another feature of IR. Because the discipline seeks to cover so much, it is often simplified to a dangerous extent. Key points are pulled out from historical situations ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, while theorists are often understood on the basis of a few quotes and bullet points. In any case, I have never found international relations theory to be a terribly useful or worthwhile enterprise. Both political theory and history have a lot more to say about the major issues involved, and both seem to have a more defensible approach to dealing with them.

Aside: Richard Rorty, American philosopher and inventor of the concept of ‘ironic liberalism,’ died today.

PS. The sore throat and aggressive cough I picked up on the Walking Club trip is still very much with me. I hope it doesn’t distract those around me too much during the exams tomorrow.

Haemodynamically responsive

‘Able Archer’ and leadership psychology

If you have any interest in nuclear weapons or security and you have never heard of the 1983 NATO exercise called ‘Able Archer’ you should read today’s featured Wikipedia article.

One fascinating thing it demonstrates is the amazing willingness of leaders to assume that their enemies will see actions as benign that, if they had been taken by those same enemies, would be seen as very aggressive. Case in point: the issues America is raising about Iranian intervention in Iraq. If Iran was involved in a major war on America’s doorstep, you can bet that there would be American intervention. This is not to assert any kind of moral equivalency, but simply to state the appallingly obvious.