Psychology – Page 8 – a sibilant intake of breath

Climate anxiety is widespread among young people

Back in 2008, I wrote about the Future Leaders Survey and the gloomy views it uncovered among young people about the future of the planet.

Recently, The Lancet published a study based on a survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries. It demonstrates that apocalyptic psychology is a broad-based phenomenon, not exclusively concentrated among climate change or environmental activists.

83% of those surveyed said people have failed to care for the planet; 75% that the future is frightening; 65% that governments are failing young people; and that just 31% think governments can be trusted.

Texas’ bounty-based heartbeat law

America’s unravelling continues, with the Supreme Court declining 5-4 to hear an emergency appeal of Texas’ bizarre and cruel fetal heartbeat anti-abortion law.

Laurence Tribe has written about what the law’s bounty system will do:

It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.

That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.

The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.

Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.

Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship.

It’s a heartless and unfeeling religious morality that sees this kind of harassment as desirable. The Supreme Court’s conduct will also further erode its own position as a unifying public institution and legitimate arbiter of constitutional grievances. When people lose faith in unifying institutions — and in the perception that there are legitimate avenues for pursuing their interests — it threatens complete breakdown in the country’s self-understanding as one polity, and further progression into settling questions of policy and law by force rather than through reason and democratic debate.

Cognitive benefits of walking

In fact, there’s one activity that is almost tailor-made to work [at helping you distance yourself from a problem you’re working on]. And it is a simple one indeed: walking (the very thing that Holmes was doing when he had his insight in “The Lion’s Mane”). Walks have been shown repeatedly to stimulate creative thought and problem solving, especially if these walks take place in natural surroundings, like the woods, rather than in more urbanized environments (but both types are better than none—and even walking along a tree-lined street can help). After a walk, people become better at solving problems; they persist longer at difficult tasks; and they become more likely to grasp an insightful solution… And all from walking past some trees and some sky.

Konnikova, Maria. Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Penguin; New York. 2013. p.134

Knowing how to look something up isn’t comparable to knowing it

There’s a voguish argument that in an era of easy information availability there is less cause to have any substantial body of knowledge memorized. I have seen articles arguing that the crucial cognitive skills for young people today are the ability to find what they are looking for, given access to the internet.

I think there is a huge and obvious shortcoming with this perspective. Knowing that I can look up the Wikipedia article on the Lutheran Revolution, for example, is just a one way mental link that stops there. If you know nothing about the history of Catholicism, or of religious conflict in Europe, or of the precepts of Christianity then knowing where to find someone else’s writing about the Reformation doesn’t give you any meaningful understanding of what it was or why it mattered. Someone asked a narrow question about the event will be able to find it through an online search, but without internalized knowledge they won’t be able to see the implications and connections to other phenomena. Knowing that you can look up thermodynamics or Carnot efficiency doesn’t give you the ability to apply those concepts when thinking about an application like heating or cooling or the efficiency of an engine.

The ongoing COVID pandemic is demonstrating the extent of scientific and medical ignorance even within rich industrialized societies. That manifests in people falsely believing that they can make health choices for themselves with no consideration of others, and of course in the enormous amount of nonsense that is circulating about vaccines. It’s strange to observe how society has become technological to an unprecedented degree — with technology literally making life as humanity is experiencing it possible — and yet culturally an interest in and knowledge about science is treated as an optional personal curiosity, like fly fishing or following a soccer team. Broadly speaking, I hold the view that to understand anything well requires knowing at least the basics about many other issues (nobody can sensibly evaluate public health policy without knowing the rudiments of medicine, statistics, and epidemiology for example). That concept of knowledge as an interconnected web demonstrates how the ability to pluck out a narrow fact with the help of technology may not translate into much real understanding.

It’s oversimplistic to apply a ‘deficit model’ to what people know about an issue like COVID or climate change, assuming that there is an empty void where knowledge ought to be and that filling it is the solution. For issues tied up in politics, and thus in questions about what people will be free to do, the desire to undertake particular behaviours can create the motivation to believe what’s necessary to keep doing them. Just as someone operating under motivated reasoning can never be swayed by facts or arguments, more education alone won’t combat the problem of people choosing to believe factually what supports their behaviours or ideological positions.

100 years ago, someone could have been appropriately laughed at for saying they know about Pitt the Elder or the Peloponnesian War because they know they can go to a library and find books about them. The instant availability of information online doesn’t really change that.

Elite overproduction and the superfluous man

My friends Patrick and Margot gave me a paperback of Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, translated by Paul Foote.

Reading the introduction, I was struck by the similarity between the idea of the protagonists of Russian novels from this period as “superfluous men” “set apart by their superior talents from the mediocre society in which they were born, but doomed to waste their lives, partly through lack of opportunity to fulfil themselves, though also, in most cases, because they themselves lacked any real sense of purpose or strength of will” and the notion of “elite overproduction” recently discussed in The Economist and elsewhere.

The introduction quotes the Russian literary critic Belinsky explaining how the Byronic protagonists of the novels of this period must be “characterized either by decisive inaction, or else by futile activity.”

Defining their term, The Economist says:

Elite overproduction can also help explain the malaise gripping the rich world of late. It has become extraordinarily difficult for a young person to achieve elite status, even if she works hard and goes to the best university. House prices are so high that only inheritors stand a chance of emulating the living conditions of their parents. The power of a few “superstar” firms means that there are few genuinely prestigious jobs around. Mr Turchin reckons that each year America produces some 25,000 “surplus” lawyers. Over 30% of British graduates are “overeducated” relative to their jobs.

These two related concepts seem to illustrate some of the pathologies of our partly-meritocratic but also increasingly oligarchic society, where one-time educational status markers are being eroded through a race for credentials which democratizes participation but leaves everyone who succeeds with less distinction. People who generations ago would have ended their educational careers bored out of their brains and doing the absolute minimum in high school now seem to frequently add on four more years of the same in college, hoping for but less and less in a position to expect social status and economic security as a result.

Sorting v. teaching in universities

Health and climate change

I was surprised just now to see that I don’t think I have a general thread on climate change and human health.

I’d say there are at least two big relevant dimensions to it.

First, because fossil fuel use causes so many bad health impacts, phasing out fossil fuels brings major co-benefits in terms of avoiding disease.

Second — whereas people seem to find environmental problems generally abstract and of low salience — people seem to have a much more consistent willingness to prioritize health related items. Thus, emphasizing the health impacts of climate change may help to motivate those presently unmoved or hostile to climate action.

There are certainly other important links, including how climate change will alter the distribution of mosquito-borne and other diseases and of course the intersectional ways in which health connects with public policy, economic justice, race, and global equity.

I did for a while host a Canadian government report on human health and climate change, which the Harper government decided to make available to the public only through the mail on a CD.

Health was also an important part of the case we made for divestment at U of T (PDF page 50 / printed page 44-7).

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)

One element of a science fiction future which I expect to see in my lifetime is the ability to directly connect human brains with computers and share instructions back and forth.

That seems especially plausible now that Neuralink has demonstrated a high bandwidth BCI with two tetraplegic people.

This evokes the idea of a Ghost in the Shell future where people can use their disembodied minds to control computer systems, robots, and prosthetics. Even just being able to control a computer with the rapidity of thought is essentially a superpower, since it would allow people to perform calculations and other tasks which their unaided brains could not manage. Beyond that, a transhuman future beckons.

Open thread: can life be simulated?

The rational mind as storyteller not decider

There is an intriguing hypothesis about the rational mind: while we think of it as a weigher of evidence that contributes to the decisions we make when faced with a choice, it’s possible that its real role is to construct a story after the fact about why we made the choice we did for instinctive or emotional reasons.

Chris Voss alludes to this in his book about negotiations:

In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice.

In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.

Voss, Chris. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Penguin Random House, 2016. p. 122 (emphasis in original)

It has occurred to me that while the fundamental units of the physical universe may be the particles of the standard model or superstrings or something similar, the fundamental units of the psychological universe may be stories. We make decisions — perhaps — by analogy and imagination, using the stories we know as templates for projecting what could happen from one or another course of behaviour. This is compatible with the idea that generals are always fighting the last war, or that decision makers find an analogy as a schema for assessing the options before them in the present case (famously, the notion that states blundered into the first world war arguably motivated the appeasement policy toward Hitler which was later judged to have contributed to the second, while the lesson learned about the dangers of appeasement fed the undue combativeness of the cold war).

The idea that rationalization is after-the-fact storytelling risks feeding in to a nihilistic perspective that our decisions are just uncontrollable emergent phenomenon, coming out of a black box which we cannot control or influence, but that does not follow if we accept that we can influence the conditions that influence our emotions and train ourselves in how we respond emotionally. Voss’ book elaborates on this view with numerous practical details and examples, not taking for granted that people are emotional so they just do as they do, but highlighting how often-subtle mechanisms for influencing how people feel can powerfully influence how things turn out.

The gradual sorting of partisans into the “correct” parties during the last fifty years has transformed a nation of cross-cutting political identities into a nation of increasingly aligned political identities. As Democrats and Republicans grow socially sorted, they have to contend not only with the natural bias that comes from being a partisan but also with their own growing intolerance, sharpened by the shrinking of their social world. A conservative Democrat will feel closer to Republicans than a liberal Democrat would. A secular Republican will feel closer to Democrats than an evangelical Republican would. The sorting of our parties into socially distinct groups intensifies the partisan bias we’ve always had. This is the American identity crisis. Not that we have partisan identities, we’ve always had those. The crisis emerges when partisan identities fall into alignment with other social identities, stoking our intolerance of each other to levels that are unsupported by our degrees of political disagreement.

Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 62-3

The psychological significance of groups

Even in the most basic definition of a group, [social psychologist Henri] Tajfel and his colleagues found evidence of ingroup bias: a preference for or privileging of the ingroup over the outgroup. In every conceivable iteration of this experiment, people privileged the group to which they had been randomly assigned. Ingroup bias emerged even when Billig and Tajfel in 1973 explicitly told respondents that they had been randomly assigned to two groups, because it was “easier this way.” The ingroup bias still appeared, simply because the experimenters distinguished the two groups. These respondents were not fighting for tangible self-interest, the money they allocated went to other people, not themselves. They simply felt psychologically motivated to privilege members of their own imaginary and ephemeral group—a group of people they had never met and would never meet, and whose existence they had only learned of minutes earlier. People react powerfully when they worry about losing group status, even when the group is “minimal.”
Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 11

Category: Psychology