Neandertal communication must have been different from modern language. To repeat a point made often in this book, Neandertals were not a stage of evolution that preceded modern humans. They were a distinct population that had a separate evolutionary history for several hundred thousand years, during which time they evolved a number of derived characteristics not shared with Homo sapiens sapiens. At the same time, a continent away, our ancestors were evolving as well. Undoubtedly both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens continued to share many characteristics that each retained from their common ancestor, including characteristics of communication. To put it another way, the only features that we can confidently assign to both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens are features inherited from Homo heidelbergensis. If Homo heidelbergensis communicated via modern style words and modern syntax, then we can safely attribute these to Neandertals as well. Most scholars find this highly unlikely, largely because Homo heidelbergensis brains were slightly smaller than ours and smaller than Neandertals’, but also because the archaeological record of Homo heidelbergensis is much less ‘modern’ than either ours or Neandertals’. Thus, we must conclude that Neandertal communication had evolved along its own path, and that this path may have been quite different from the one followed by our ancestors. The result must have been a difference far greater than the difference between Chinese and English, or indeed between any pair of human languages. Specifying just how Neandertal communication differed from ours may be impossible, at least at our current level of understanding. But we can attempt to set out general features of Neandertal communication based on what we know from the comparative, fossil, and archaeological records.

As we have tried to show in previous chapters, the paleoanthropological record of Neandertals suggests that they relied heavily on two styles of thinking – expert cognition and embodied social cognition. These, at least, are the cognitive styles that best encompass what we know of Neandertal daily life. And they do carry implications for communication. Neandertals were expert stone knappers, relied on detailed knowledge of landscape, and a large body of hunting tactics. It is possible that all of this knowledge existed as alinguistic motor procedures learned through observation, failure, and repetition. We just think it unlikely. If an experienced knapper could focus the attention of a novice using words it would be easier to learn Levallois. Even more useful would be labels for features of the landscape, and perhaps even routes, enabling Neandertal hunters to refer to any location in their territories. Such labels would almost have been required if widely dispersed foraging groups needed to congregate at certain places (e.g., La Cotte). And most critical of all, in a natural selection sense, would be an ability to indicate a hunting tactic prior to execution. These labels must have been words of some kind. We suspect that Neandertal words were always embedded in a rich social and environmental context that included gesturing (e.g., pointing) and emotionally laden tones of voice, much as most human vocal communication is similarly embedded, a feature of communication probably inherited from Homo heidelbergensis.

At the risk of crawling even further out on a limb than the two of us usually go, we make the following suggestions about Neandertal communication:

1)  Neandertals had speech. Their expanded Broca’s area in the brain, and their possession of a human FOXP2 gene both suggest this. Neandertal speech was probably based on a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary – words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. We have shown that Neandertal expertise was largely based on long-term memory. Much of this store of information was in the form of procedures, but we suspect an equally large part of this ‘how to’ information existed as verbal knowledge in the form of terms.

2)  Many of these words also existed in stock sayings, also held in long-term memory, much like the idioms and adages in modern language (the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” variety).

3)  Speech depended heavily on environmental and social information to disambiguate word clusters. Clues from context can be very effective. U.S. readers may remember a television commercial in which four young men riding in a car each used only a single word, “dude”, and yet managed to have an intelligible conversation (for themselves and the listener).

4)  Neandertal speech regularly used questions, commands, exclamations, and perhaps directional reference (indicatives). The differences may have been marked via ‘aspect’ words, or morphological rules, or even grammatical rules. But the difference might also have been delivered through context or change in tone of voice, or even gesture.

5)  Neandertal speech was capable of describing new situations, as when they juxtaposed terms for animals and places that they had not combined before. So at least in this sense, their speech must have been able to express new thoughts, the linguists’ productivity. But given its likely heavy reliance on long-term memory, their productivity was probably limited to reshuffling a very large body of lexical elements and phrases.

This communication system would have been capable of delivering a very large amount of information in context, but would have been less capable than modern language of long range reference in the absence of appropriate cues. Neandertal language was direct and task relevant. It was capable of referring to events in the past, or future, or at distant places, but only in ways connected to a context shared with the listener. There is no reason to think that Neandertals created elaborate stories or myths. Recall that Neandertals appear not to have used fire in the same social way that modern humans do. Moreover, they had few interactions with neighboring territorial communities, and therefore no reason to have modes of speech that could be used to interact with strangers, or even acquaintances.

The picture of Neandertal speech we have just presented is a minimal one based on what we know about Neandertal life from the paleoanthropological record. Neandertal speech may have been more powerful and subtle than this picture suggests. It may have included features quite foreign to modern language that evolved in the Neandertal lineage since the time of Homo heidelbergensis. There just is no evidence that requires anything beyond the features we have presented.

The above post is an excerpt from the recently published How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge. Thomas Wynn is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Frederick L. Coolidge is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Wynn and Coolidge are co-authors of The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking and co-editors (with Sophie A. de Beaune) of Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution.

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Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. There is at least one capital campaign to raise $25 million or more underway in virtually every major population center in North America. Smaller capital campaigns are even more numerous, with phone-a-thons, door-to-door drives, and mail solicitations increasing in popularity. Despite the ubiquity of fund-raising, we still have an imperfect understanding of the motivations for giving and the welfare implications for the giver. One may wonder: what moves all of these people to donate? Is such generosity necessarily welfare-enhancing for the giver?

We argue that there are two types of motivation for giving: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure from the solicitor. The two motivations have very different welfare implications. The altruism (or warm glow) model (Becker 1974; Andreoni 1989, 1990) posits that giving is mostly supply-driven, and that it is utility-maximizing for the giver to give. Under this model, donations unambiguously enhance the giver’s utility as well as societal welfare. The social pressure model (Akerlof and Kranton 2000) posits that giving is mostly demand-driven, and that giving may be utility-reducing for the giver.

We tested for these two types of motivations in the context of in-person, unsolicited donation requests. We designed a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. Building on a theoretical model, we designed a field experiment that allows us to test whether giving is welfare-enhancing or welfare-reducing for the giver.

THE EXPERIMENT

Our field experiment revolves around a door-to-door fundraising drive for two charities, a local children’s hospital, which has a reputation as a premier hospital for children, and an out-of-state charity, unfamiliar to most solicitees. Between April and October 2008, we approached 7, 668 households in the towns surrounding Chicago. The crucial aspect of the experimental design is to allow individuals to sort, that is, to either seek or avoid the solicitor. In our first treatment, a flyer on the doorknob notifies households one day in advance about the one-hour time interval in which a solicitor will arrive at their homes the next day. In the second treatment, Opt-out, the flyer also includes a box to be checked if the household does not want to be disturbed.

This design allows for a simple test of altruism versus social pressure in door-to-door giving. If altruism is the main driver of giving, the flyer should increase both the presence at home and giving. Because giving is utility-enhancing, givers should choose to stay at home. In addition, givers who would like to give in response to the flyer but who find it too costly to be at home should give to the charity via other means, such as mailing a check. Conversely, if social pressure is the main driver of giving, the flyer should lower both the frequency of opening the door and the frequency of giving.

THE FINDINGS

We report four main results, which are similar across the two charities. First, we find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Second, the simple flyer does not reduce giving. However, the flyer with an opt-out checkbox decreases giving significantly. Third, the decrease in giving in the opt-out treatment is driven by small donations up to $10; donations above $10, instead, increase slightly. Fourth, there is no effect on donations via mail or Internet.

Overall, the reduced-form estimates indicate that both altruism and social pressure are important determinants of giving in this setting, with stronger evidence for the role of social pressure. The lower frequency of households opening the door after receiving a flyer indicates that households are, on average, trying to avoid solicitors, consistent with social pressure. The social pressure interpretation is also consistent with the lack of donations via mail or Internet.

FIGURE IV
Frequency of (A) Answering the Door, (B) (Unconditional) Giving, and (C) Giving Conditional on Answering the Door Panel A presents the percent of households that answer the door under different treatment. The third set of bars (Opt-out treatment) also shows the percent opting out (shaded colors on top). Panel B displays the percent that give to the charity out of all the households in the treatment group (including those not answering the door). Panel C shows giving conditioned on answering the door, which equals the ratio of the estimated shares of unconditional giving (Figure IVB) and of households answering the door (Figure IVA). All estimates are obtained from regressions that control for randomization fixed effects.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

We find evidence that both altruism and social pressure affect door-to-door charitable giving. We estimate that about half of donors would prefer not to be contacted by the fund-raiser either because they would prefer not to donate, or because they would prefer to donate less. As a result, the estimated average welfare effect of the door-to-door campaigns in our sample is negative. Although this could be used as an argument to introduce a do-not-solicit or do-not-call list for charities, our findings suggest a simple alternative: to provide an opportunity to the households to sort or, even better, to opt out.

We conjecture that our results are likely to extend to other high-pressure approaches to raise money, such as phone-a-thons, charity banquets, auctions, lotteries, and so on, but likely have less explanatory power with lower-pressure approaches, such as mail solicitations. We hope that future research builds on this strategy to provide more evidence on behavioral phenomena.

To read the full article “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving” by Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, and Ulrike Malmendier in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, please visit: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/4446/1.

James Boswell was talking here about his friend Samuel Johnson’s melancholia, a condition we now consider to be similar to, if not the same as, modern-day depression. Boswell’s Life of Johnson in 1791 set the modern trend for biographies to reveal the realities of their subjects’ lives, warts and all: Johnson’s mental and physical maladies provided plenty of grist to the biographer’s mill, not least because Boswell himself was a sufferer of Johnson’s illness. The general nature of depression, and the question of whether its causes are physical or psychological, still “eludes minute enquiry” today despite the medical and psychological advances made since the eighteenth century. Yet that “general sensation of gloomy wretchedness” is unmistakable as a marker of something, whether it be termed depression, melancholy, spleen, vapours, acedia, neurasthenia or one of the plethora of other names given to depressive conditions through the ages.

But how can authors, literary or medical, imagine something as unimaginable, or represent something as unrepresentable, as depression? Is there a common thread that links the way we think about depression over time, or are the images we conjure for depression conditioned by our own particular historical moment?

The answer, perhaps annoyingly, is yes and no. Throughout all periods, images of darkness, fog, and gloom seem to feature consistently. Johnson referred, as Winston Churchill did later, to his “black dog” of melancholy. In ancient times, melancholia was a “black sun”, while the melancholy poet and priest John Donne complained: “But what have I done, either to breed, or to breathe these vapors? They tell me it is my Melancholy”. (John Donne: The Major Works). Even in the fashionable melancholy of the Renaissance, both on stage and in real life, the Hamlet-esque young men would wander around dressed in black, gazing downwards like the Goths and Emos of present-day pop culture. Romantic poet John Keats described “Veil’d Melancholy” in his Ode on Melancholy (Major Works). And even in the East, the early modern Japanese character for depression (‘utsusho’) resembles a dense, dark and seemingly impenetrable thicket of strokes that symbolise the barrier between depressives and their grasp of hope and happiness: 鬱.

Beyond the commonalities in representations of depression over the centuries, there are also key cultural shifts which intervene to frame a very different basic understanding of depression. Take Elizabeth’s Wurtzel’s period-defining memoir of depression, Prozac Nation (1994). Wurtzel is intelligent enough to see beyond the ‘magic bullet’ solution to mental illness and its complexities, and instead uses the computer age as a metaphor for depression: “Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable.” Only secondary to this, later in the same paragraph, does Wurtzel invoke the older imagery of darkness: “one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence.”

Wurtzel’s modern metaphor juxtaposes strongly with the rationale and imagery of times past: Galen’s classical explanation (AD 30-90) of the malfunctioning humour of the black bile, burning in the spleen and sending black vapours up to the brain, persisted in the popular imagination for a very long time indeed. As late as the increasingly mechanistic eighteenth century, Dr Johnson recommended distraction to dispel “the black fumes which rise in your mind”. In his poem Know Yourself, written just after he had completed the monumental Dictionary, he described how “Care grows on care, and o’er my aching brain / Black melancholy pours her morbid train” (Samuel Johnson: The Major Works). Yet again we have the imagery of darkness, but an entirely different understanding of how depression is caused. In fact, Johnson was using imagery based on outdated humoural theories as, by the age of the Enlightenment, depression had come to be thought of as a disease of the mechanical body which could be seen as a system of pipes through which blood circulated. By this time, it was thought that if the necessary blood flows were blocked for some reason, then stagnant blood could affect the brain and bring on depression, or the “English Malady”, as society doctor George Cheyne called it. Popular images of the body (or old wives’ tales as we might call them) have a tendency to persist for a long time after the demise of the theories which underpin them.

As we can glean from the myriad of fluid depictions of depression in literature throughout the ages, depression is not the stable entity we might conjure up from the contemporary image projected by the drug companies peddling Prozac as an instant cure – not that I am saying drugs are useless, of course. But history shows us how different societies generate diseases in their own image: especially psychological maladies, and especially depression.

Clark Lawlor is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University, and is especially interested in the cultural history of disease. He has been publishing work on the history and representation of depression recently, partly as a result of his co-Directorship of Before Depression, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the nature of depression in the eighteenth century. His latest work, From Melancholia to Prozac: a history of depression, which publishes next month. He previously published Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006).

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Everybody knows that smoking is bad for you. Yet quitting smoking is a challenging endeavour – insurmountable for some. Even smokers who get the best help available still have a 50% chance of relapsing. Clearly, the more options we have to help with cessation, the better. Recent research suggests that meditation and mindfulness may be beneficial for smokers looking to extinguish the habit.

Mindfulness is a concept stemming from ancient Buddhist philosophy, comprising nonjudgmental attention to present-moment emotions and experiences. Mindfulness and meditation-based practices have shown remarkable benefit for a variety of ailments, from depression to chronic pain. This year, the first randomised, controlled trial of a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program found that it worked better than a standard behavioral paradigm in helping smokers quit and avoid relapse.

Mindfulness seems to be beneficial by helping smokers cope with craving. Cigarette craving can be a powerful motivator, and one of the major reasons for relapse. But mindfulness is effective at helping people cope with strong emotions, such as those experienced with depression, anxiety, and pain. A small handful of studies have examined the relationship between mindfulness, craving, and smoking, and have lent some support to this hypothesis. However, the findings from those studies are inconsistent, and not terribly conclusive.

Wanting to examine this link further, we conducted research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We trained smokers in mindful attention and had them deploy it while looking at smoking-related images, which are known to induce strong craving in smokers. While they did so, we scanned their brains to learn more about what mechanisms might underlie the effects of mindful attention on cigarette craving.

We wanted our training to be quick and easy, so it would mimic what a smoking counselor might really teach her clients. The training took about fifteen minutes, and was based around a simple principle: focus your attention on whatever feelings or sensations arise, and then accept those without judgment. Secondly, we had them rate their craving right after viewing a picture. We didn’t tell them that mindful attention was supposed to make them crave less, so they didn’t have any expectations about what would happen. For all they knew, their craving might increase. Finally, we also included a control condition, where we asked them just to ‘passively view’ pictures—in other words, to view them as they normally would.

Our findings had some interesting implications for mindfulness in general, and for its application to smoking cessation.

First, we found that mindfully attending to smoking images caused people’s self-reported craving to decrease. In other words, when people ‘passively viewed’ a smoking-related image, their craving increased, but if they practiced mindful attention, they craved less. Their cravings weren’t completely eliminated, but were significantly decreased.

Second, we found that mindful attention affected a specific part of the brain, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC). SgACC is known to be important in regulation of emotions, and it is overactive in depression and other mood disorders. During passive viewing of smoking pictures, when participants were craving, they had increased activation in this region. However, mindful viewing decreased activation in this region back to levels seen for neutral pictures. In addition, we found a decrease in functional connectivity between various brain regions known to underlie the sensation of craving, including insula, premotor cortex, and ventral striatum. This suggests that during mindful attention, the network underlying cigarette craving may not be as strongly coupled.

In addition to the findings themselves, there was one surprising aspect. Prior research suggested that mindful attention was associated with prefrontal cortex—areas involved in cognitive control and skills like attention and working memory. However, we didn’t find activation in that region. This suggests that mindful attention works through a more ‘bottom-up’ mechanism, where instead of directly suppressing craving, you instead mentally disengage from it. This may seem like a fine point, but it suggests that mindful attention works differently from the kinds of cognitive skills we usually teach smokers, which involve things like re-thinking a craving, distracting yourself, or actively suppressing it. Therefore, mindful attention might be a new kind of skill, useful for different people or different situations in which cognitive strategies don’t work as well.

Overall, our work has some implications for how mindfulness relates to cigarette craving. Based on our work, we think mindful attention can be taught relatively quickly, and is effective at decreasing a cigarette craving in the moment—when it’s most important to a smoker. Therefore, we think this approach has clinical usefulness in the real world, and this is part of why it seems to help smokers quit. And finally, since it seems to work in a manner differently from the types of cognitive skills currently taught by counselors, it could represent a new kind of tool to add to the tool-kit. And of course the more tools we have to help people quit, the better.

So if you’re trying to quit, consider learning mindfulness techniques to help you cope when you’re craving. It might be just the tool you need!

Cecilia Westbrook is an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her interests include affective neuroscience, behavioral regulation, and mindfulness. Her paper has been made publicly available by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN). You can read it in full and for free here.

In Developing Destinies, Barbara Rogoff illuminates how individuals worldwide build on cultural heritage from prior generations and at the same time create new ways of living. Throughout Chona’s lifetime, her Guatemalan town has continued to use longstanding Mayan cultural practices, such as including children in a range of community activities and encouraging them to learn by observing and contributing. But the town has also transformed dramatically since the days of Chona’s own childhood. For instance, although Chona’s upbringing included no formal schooling, some of her grandchildren have gone on to attend university and earn scholarly degrees. The lives of Chona and her town provide extraordinary examples of how cultural practices are preserved even as they are adapted and modified.

In the video below, Barbara Rogoff talks about the themes in her book, and shows incredible rare photographs and footage from 1941 to the present day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Barbara Rogoff is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Kellogg Fellow, and Editor of Human Development.

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In a contrapuntal coincidence, November 13—World Kindness Day—coincided with the publication of Pathological Altruism.  Even pre-publication, this seemingly mild-mannered edited volume has served outsize duty in rattling the very foundations of our national culture of caring.

Mark Twain House and Museum controller Donna Gregor, for example, recently hit the news in a big way because she admitted to embezzling $1 million over eight years from one of Hartford, Connecticut’s major cultural institutions, where Twain had lived after the Civil War.  Gregor’s lawyer and her psychologist cited pathological altruism as a reason that Gregor, a 54-year old grandmother, should be spared prison.  Gregor was compelled to steal, they argue, by her obsession to help her deeply troubled, extended family.

Pathological altruism is, in a great sense, the study of the onramps to the well-intentioned road to hell. That is, it is the study of truly well-meaning behavior that worsens instead of improves a situation, or creates more problems than it solves.  Does the concept of pathological altruism then provide a license to steal—as long as it was done for a good cause?  Not so fast.  If Gregor personally profited from the embezzlement, instead of or in addition to, serving as a sort of nepotistic Robin Hood, she’s very probably a con artist.  Pathological altruism distinguishes such obviously self-serving behavior—and in any case, does not excuse it.

In fact, the new research area of pathological altruism provides a valuable new scientifically-based framework for understanding—albeit not justifying—some of the most important recent events now dominating the news.  Public union members protest that their salaries aren’t high enough?  On the face of it, their arguments sound reasonable—who could be against reasonable wages for teachers and police?  But by the time you add up all the “reasonable” wages, from hundreds of different unions, ignoring the union’s well-meaning attempts to protect their members, which block meaningful reform and allow for a wide range of incompetence and malfeasance, a state could become bankrupt.  In fact, by focusing on the individual “obviously” beneficial outcomes for each of the public unions, the much bigger, far worse outcome—a bankrupt state—is missed.  It’s rather like saying yes to every request for cookies from a small child—and ending up with an obese adult.  In just such a fashion, underpinned with many similar pathologically altruistic financial choices, the European Union is falling into disarray.

The concept of pathological altruism even explains why the concept of pathological altruism has itself been attacked.  Who, you might ask, could assail the common sense idea that self-righteous individuals can get carried away by their own convictions, losing sight of the harm they might cause through their efforts to help others?  Why, precisely those self-righteous sorts who form one aspect of pathological altruism!   These happy helpers are certain, at the deepest core of their being, that they are helping—the idea of objective analysis of the results of their efforts leaves them a queasy feeling.  In this sense, altruism has become a central dogma of a new stealth religion—religions, remember, are often based on dogma that is not to be questioned.

Modern psychology has made much hay of the fact that altruistic acts increase our own happiness in a profound way.  But psychologists ignore the corollary to this idea—that in today’s increasingly narcissistic world, many are focused on “altruism” that makes them feel good, and that allows them to ostentatiously flaunt their do-gooder status.  Such altruism isn’t really altruism at all—it is simply self-serving ego stroking.  True altruism often involves making those tough choices which include saying no to seemingly benign choices.  This, indeed, should be a major topic of conversation around World Kindness Day.

Barbara Oakley is an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between social behavior and neuroscience. Along with Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Wilson, she is the editor of Pathological Altruism.

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Dr. Allen Weg, a licensed psychologist, has perfected the art of storytelling and metaphor use as a way of explaining and employing ERP to his clients in therapy. He utilizes this same technique to train other therapists in the use of ERP for OCD. In this brief, entertaining video, Dr. Weg walks you through 3 of those stories, and introduces you to his book entitled, OCD Treatment Through Storytelling: A strategy for successful therapy, a collection of more than 50 such stories that he has developed over the last 25 years in his work with OCD.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The senses are a vital source of knowledge about the objects and events in the world, as well as for insights into our private sensations and feelings. Below is an excerpt from Art and the Senses, edited by Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, in which Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar, and Heston Blumenthal look at the ways in which environmental sounds can affect the perceived flavour of food.

Charles Spence and Heston Blumenthal conducted two experiments together with the members of the audience who attended the opening session of the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference held in October of 2006 that were designed to examine whether (and/or to demonstrate that) environmental sounds would influence people’s perceptions of the foods that they were eating. In the first experiment, 40 audience members were asked to taste two samples of ‘bacon and egg’ ice cream, one after the other, and to rate the flavour of each scoop. They were instructed to rate the relative strength of the bacon and egg flavours by making a mark on a scale provided on a sheet of paper. A different soundtrack was played in the background while the members of the audience consumed each of the ice creams: one soundtrack consisted of what sounded like bacon sizzling in a frying pan, while the other consisted of the clucking sounds of farmyard chickens. The ice cream was served with the farmyard soundtrack and a yellow plastic spoon (e.g. consistent with the colour of eggs) while the other sample was presented with a blue spoon.

The results showed that the audience rated the ice cream tasted in the presence of the sizzling bacon soundtrack as having a significantly more bacony flavour than the ice cream sample that was tasted in the presence of the farmyard chicken sounds. Interestingly, however, both scoops of ice-cream had come from the same batch—that is, the flavours were actually identical. These results show that auditory cues can be used to bias people’s perception of the relative strength of two competing flavours in a food.

More generally, it should be noted that the disambiguation of the flavour of a food dish can be achieved by a number of means: either visually, by changing the colour of the food, verbally by means of labelling, by presenting pictures or other cues on the packaging, and/or by the presentation of auditory cues, as described in the present study. Furthermore, even saying the word ‘cinnamon’ has been shown to activate the olfactory cortex (i.e. the part of the brain that processes smells; see Gonzalez et al. 2006). Playing the sizzling bacon soundtrack at the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference may therefore have influenced the audience’s perception of the bacon flavour in the ice cream simply by making them think of bacon. All provide putative explanations of how listening to the sound of frying bacon might make bacon and egg ice-cream taste more bacony! It is at present an open question as to whether simply writing the word bacon on the screen in the front of the auditorium would have had the same effect. The soundtracks were presented at a clearly audible level in this study and some of the audience members could feel that their flavour perception was being changed by the soundtrack; a few even tried to override this form of auditory manipulation by repeating the word ‘bacon, bacon, bacon. . .’ to themselves like a mantra when listening to the farmyard chickens clucking away, but to little avail. One suggestion is that environmental auditory stimuli may activate superordinate knowledge structures and hence prime related stimuli.

In a second study, 33 members of the audience were asked to taste and rate two oysters in terms of their pleasantness and intensity of their flavours. One oyster was served in the shell from a wooden basket (of the type that one commonly sees at the seaside). The other oyster had been removed from the shell and was served in a petri dish instead. The first oyster was served while the audience listened to the ‘sounds of the sea’ soundtrack in the background (this consisted of the sound of seagulls squawking and waves crashing gently on the beach), the second while they listened to the ‘farmyard noises’ used in our first experiment. The results revealed that the audience rated the oyster that they had consumed while listening to the ‘sound of the sea’ as tasting significantly more pleasant than the oyster that had been tasted while they listened to the farmyard noises instead. Interestingly, however, no such effect was found for the intensity ratings. That is, changing the sound had no effect on people’s perception of the intensity of the flavour of the oysters.

Taken together, the results of these two experiments, conducted at the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference, highlight just how dramatically environmental sounds can influence (or bias) people’s perception of the foods they consume. Interestingly, these results led directly to the introduction of the ‘Sound of the Sea’ seafood dish on the tasting menu of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray. With this dish, diners are presented with a plate of food that is reminiscent of a beach (with foam, seaweed, and sand all visible on their plate). The diners are also presented with a mini iPod hidden inside a sea-shell, with only the earphones poking out. The diners are encouraged to put on the headphones (whereupon they hear the ‘sounds of the sea’ soundtrack) before starting to eat the dish placed in front of them. The response of diners on the tasting menu has been very positive. The diners appear to really enjoy the dish. In fact, it has become a signature dish at the restaurant. The dish appears to work at several levels: by getting the diners to think about the role of hearing in eating and by helping to illustrate the importance of sound to the appreciation of food. Second, we believe, on the basis of the evidence reported here, that the dish is so successful because the soundtrack serves to intensify the flavour of the dish. That is, it heightens the flavour. It is also worth noting that wearing the headphones has the originally unanticipated additional effect of concentrating the diners’ attention on the dish since it becomes difficult to converse with one’s dinner partners while listening to the seaside sounds.

Professor Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University. Maya U. Shankar is also in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Heston Blumenthal is a well-known chef and owns The Fat Duck Restaurant in Bray, which holds three Michelin stars and was voted the best restaurant in the world in 2005.

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Sharon is a 53-year-old white woman who is unmarried and lives alone in a multi-family home in a northeastern suburb. Sharon recently lost her job due to her multiple mental and physical health disabilities.  Because of her job loss, Sharon is unable to afford her rent. She is now 3 months arrears and her landlord is demanding payment.  He recently stopped by to talk with Sharon.  She was home but did not answer the door.

Sharon struggled with gathering free things and saving too many objects for most of her life.   Her home contains tens of thousands of pieces of clothing, paper, and miscellaneous objects ranging from empty food containers to small appliances and collections of tea pots, dolls, and cuckoo clocks.  Sharon owns every issue of Newsweek and Time magazine dating back to the early 1980’s.  Her hoarding behaviors have led to a life of social isolation; Sharon never has friends to her home because she’s embarrassed by how it looks and worries about what other people will think.

Sharon is certain that she will be evicted if the landlord learns of her hoarding problem and the ways in which the amassed clutter has taken a toll on the house.  Sharon’s refrigerator hasn’t worked in over 2 years and the floorboards seem to be giving way beneath the stacks of magazines and paper.  The ceiling in the dining room leaks during rainstorms and is covered with mold in one corner. The window in the back bedroom is broken and squirrels and other rodents began entering the home some time ago. Sharon didn’t know what to do, so she closed the bedroom door.  It’s been over 9 months since Sharon entered that room.

While Sharon’s is not the most sensational or egregious case of hoarding, it absolutely highlights the more common scenario and the fact that hoarding is a mental health disorder which often results in situations that compromise a person’s physical health and housing stability. In addition, hoarding may create circumstances that put family, friends, animals and the surrounding community at risk of neglect, fire or infestations.  In Sharon’s case, being one of three residents in a multi-family home means that there is risk for Sharon and her immediate neighbors.

Many domains of human service are touched by the problem of hoarding.  In approximately 80 communities throughout the U.S.—large and small, urban and rural—human service professionals are joining networks where there is coordination and support for cases of hoarding with which they’re involved—cases like Sharon’s.  Recognizing that hoarding is not the primary domain of any one discipline (protective services, animal control, mental health or first responders) alone, there is an ever-increasing prevalence of community-level hoarding response mechanisms.

Brave and devoted human service professionals from disciplines such as public health, housing, nursing, occupational therapy and many others are coming together to form hoarding task forces, where they can problem solve, discuss and intervene with hoarding cases.

While attending a hoarding task force meeting on the West Coast, I observed first-hand this unique cross-disciplinary collaboration.  As the meeting was winding down, I noticed that a visiting nurse and an environmental health officer were gathering their things to leave together.  Through the task force, they realized that they were both working with the same person with a hoarding problem in a nearby town.  They decided that if they went together to the client’s home, they could more easily communicate both what needed to be done so the client could come into compliance with housing regulations and what supports could be offered to the person in order to help them achieve the goals.  When I asked the environmental health officer about this decision, her response both surprised and delighted me.  “Well, we know that we need both the big stick and the carrot.  I’m the stick and I can’t do my job effectively without a carrot.  I know because for 20 years I tried and got nowhere with people who hoard.  I need to do something differently and this seems to work.”

These human service workers do this not because hoarding is sexy or because there is fame or fortune promised to them but because they are deeply devoted to finding compassionate, effective and timely solutions to assist those, like Sharon, who struggle mightily with hoarding.

Inspired by the commitment of the human service professionals that volunteer time to lead and participate on community hoarding task forces, The Hoarding Handbook was conceptualized and written to assist diverse disciplines in understanding their role and the role of others in hoarding intervention.  Through the book’s case studies and practical tips and strategies, my co-authors and I sincerely hope that we are promoting movement from individual human service silos to collective community hoarding solutions where clients like Sharon are assisted effectively and empathically.

Christiana Bratiotis, Ph.D., LICSW, is a post-doctoral fellow at the Boston University School of Social Work. She is author, with Cristina Sorrentino Schmalisch and Gail Steketee, of The Hoarding Handbook: A Guide for Human Service Professionals.

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It was with some excitement that I read the article on men and grief in the July 25th edition of the New York Times. It mentioned Widower: When Men Are Left Alone, which I had written with Scott Campbell, a text that is now 20 years old and still very relevant. I was pleased for another reason that took me a while to recognize. The article was basically about grieving men seeking help, describing several programs directed to their needs. The common and important theme was how they came together to help each other.

My own professional history comes into play here. I began to appreciate that this reflects the success of my early work. In 1965, at the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, I directed a project that focused on the needs of the widowed. The project came to be called The Widow-to-Widow Program. We found that the most helpful person to someone newly widowed was another widowed person. Women who had been widowed for 2-3 years reached out to every newly widowed woman in a neighborhood of Boston. Over three years we reached out to approximately 400 women. This was a time when programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous were earning a good deal of attention for their success in their members, recovering from alcoholism and keeping people with alcoholic problems sober. Another program, Compassionate Friends, was growing in the United States offering help to parents whose child had died. The helpers were other grieving parents. Mutual help or self help was becoming recognized as a meaningful way of helping people at times of loss and change in their lives and we were part of that movement. The American Association of Retired People developed a Widowed Persons Service that took the widow-to- widow program to the National Level. (My work is described in the book Widow to Widow, 2nd edition.)

As I read the article in the Times I realized that the ideas that we developed in the Widow to Widow Program are very much alive. In reading about what men are doing for each other in addition to reaching out to new widowers, I did feel very proud of what we had done many years ago. These grieving men are working with professionals as collaborators, not as patients. The widowed are developing programs for themselves. They are taking the initiative. We see the power of learning from peers who bring to the table experiential knowledge. Our professional knowledge is finally catching up with what we’ve learned over the years from the widowed I talked with. We need to appreciate experiential knowledge as a critical source of information as we try to understand grief and what help is appropriate for the bereaved. What are the gains gained from mutual help activities? It legitimates the pain; it normalizes it given the circumstances. It provides opportunity to learn new ways to cope. Personal experience is valued. The individual is not a client but an informed consumer. There is no sense of uniqueness; members don’t feel alone in their grief. And your helper is another bereaved person.

As I try to summarize what I have been saying, I think that as professionals our best teachers are the people we are trying to help. We can be their partners, we can collaborate, but we need to appreciate their building on their own experience. We too will be bereaved and we need to use what we learn from this experience as well.

Phyllis R. Silverman has received many awards for her work and is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of bereavement. Her most recent book is A Parent’s Guide to Raising Grieving Children.

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Imagine this scenario: You’re on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and you decide to “phone a friend” for help with that million-dollar question. Only you can’t remember the number. You look helplessly into the camera, shrug, and say, “I call him every day, but he’s on my contacts so I just click the link, and I guess I never bothered to memorize his number, haha.” “That’s some expensive haha,” says the host, waving his cigar, followed by, “O.K., George, who’s our next contestant?”

Now a research report in the journal Science suggests that smartphones, along with computers, tablets, and the internet, are weakening our memories. This has implications not just for the future of quiz shows–most of us can’t compete against computers on Jeopardy–but also for the way we deal with information: instead of remembering something, we remember how to look it up. Good luck with that when the internet is down.

Psychologists call this the “Google effect”: we don’t bother to memorize what we can find online with a couple of clicks. The article, which is only available online, puts this in more academic language:

Since search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up. . . . When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. [Betsy Sparrow, Jennie Liu, and David Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science, July 14, 2011]

Sparrow, et al., found that students who were told that their answers to a battery of questions would be saved on a computer so they could access them before a retest remembered fewer of their answers on the retest than students who were told that the computer would erase their answers.

More and more we’re saying to ourselves, “Why bother memorizing the names of the Oscar-nominated movies for 1939 when I can just look them up on IMDb?” Or, as the psychologists put it, “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

But this is not surprising. Relying on an external database is nothing new: before digitized contacts files there were address books; before IMDb there were Leonard Maltin books. Before Wikipedia there were analog encyclopedias. And before Google there were librarians. As the experimenters acknowledge, humans have always recognized the role of individual expertise: we quickly learn who to ask for the best recipe, the most-accurate directions, the conversion from Fahrenheit to centigrade. That way we don’t have to remember everything.

Only now, it seems, we never have to remember anything. Because we can look it up. We don’t even have to remember how to spell, because Google asks, “did you mean blahblahblah?” when it doesn’t recognize our keystrokes.

The Greek philosopher Plato conducted similar experiments in ancient Athens. Back then it wasn’t computers weakening human memory, it was another new technology called writing.

In his famous experiment with the inclined plane, which preceded Galileo’s better-known experiment by a thousand years, Plato proved that the more we write down, the less we remember. Plato says, in the Phaedrus (also available online),

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

To prove this, Plato got student volunteers in his Intro to Philosophy course (though the word psychology comes from the Greek, it hadn’t been invented yet), divided them into two groups, and asked each to write down the answers to a series of factual questions (How many Greeks can fit inside a Trojan horse?) and mathematical problems (What is the Pythagorean theorem?). They were then given a short writing prompt:

I am a Greek. All Greeks are liars. Explain.

Students were told they’d be retested on their answers a week later. One group of students was told that their answer papyri would be burned as offerings to the gods, while the other group was told that theirs would be stored in stone jars that they could access any time before the retest. (The few students who asked to see their stored papyri so they could refresh their memories were told they had accidentally been burned as offerings to the gods).

After a week had passed, Plato gathered his students in the agora and repeated the test. In their experiments with computers, Sparrow, et al., found that on a similar retest, “those who believed that the computer erased what they typed had the best recall.” But they were replicating what Plato had already found: that the students who were told that their papyri would be burned remembered much more of what they had written than those who had been told their writings would be archived (P < 0.5).

Plato also found that his students didn’t mind that writing was weakening their memories. “Dude,” they told him, “we can always look it up. Is this going to be on the final?”

That’s why Plato called it his experiment with an inclined plane: writing to him was a slippery slope which would lead, not to knowledge, but to paper repositories—libraries, he called them—where knowledge would be stored offline, not in our heads, where it belonged. Plato thought that the impact of writing on memory would be negative. We remember this because one of his students wrote it down.

And now three psychologists from Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin have shown that, since the internet is always on and information is never more than a click away, we’ll be depending even less on memory than we did before. Books were a good repository for our memories, but they are so last year. In the future, all we’ll have to remember is where the computer is. And the password.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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By Helen Small

Pathological lying, the philosopher Sissela Bok tells us, ‘is to all the rest of lying what kleptomania is to stealing’. In its most extreme form, the liar (or ‘pseudologue’) ‘tells involved stories about life circumstances, both present and past’.¹ Their compulsion to do so has no obvious rationale, and since the falsehoods are often easily detectable, even blatant, it is not clear that moral rebuke is a relevant response. We seem, from at least 1891 when the term ‘pathological lying’ was coined by the German physiologist Anton Delbrueck, to be dealing rather with a psychological aberration. But having said this much, it is far from evident even now what the psychological drivers to such behaviour may be.  In the words of psychiatrists who have reflected on high profile recent cases such as those of Joseph J.Ellis, Jeffrey Archer, and Laurens Van der Post: ‘material reward or social advantage does not appear to be the primary motivating force’; rather, ‘the lying is an end in itself’. ‘Pathological lying is falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, and may manifest over a period of years or even a lifetime.’²

Up to a point, one can speculate, Anthony Trollope would have agreed. Lizzie Eustace, the anti-heroine of his  novel The Eustace Diamonds (1872) has all the hallmarks of a compulsive liar: she lies freely, outrageously, and oddly unnecessarily. Her extravagant falsehoods gain her a kind of perverse celebrity: ‘She is the greatest liar about London’ (ch. 9). As those lies start to embroil her more and more unhappily with the police, and in romantic complications that bring her remarkably little pleasure, the compulsion becomes all the stranger. And yet Trollope also insists that we recognize a kind of general social collusion in Lizzie Eustace’s dishonesty. On the one hand, her society is perversely unwilling to call a lie a lie—ranking the rudeness of such a face to face challenge above telling the truth. The real heroine of the book, Lucy Morris, reflects at one point that it is an acknowledged fact in private that Lizzie is an inveterate liar, ‘but to have told Lady Eustace that any word spoken by her was a lie, would have been a worse crime than the lie itself’ (ch. 29). Lest we think this is a curiosity of Victorian manners, it is worth reflecting even now that anyone who publicly calls a liar a liar would do well to guard themselves against counter-claims of slander or libel. And on the other hand, there are plenty of people willing to admire Lizzie’s bravado and give reasons for doing so—from the respectable head of the Eustace family who sees in her a great loss to the legal profession, through to the book’s main protagonist, Frank Greystock, who finds in his cousin a welcome relief from the implausible and flattening standards of purity and integrity set for women in his day: ‘He knew that his cousin Lizzie was a little liar,—that she was, as Lucy had said, a pretty animal that would turn and bite;—and yet he liked his cousin Lizzie. He did not want women to be perfect, …’ (ch. 13).

Trollope’s interest in the subject was partly a matter of social curiosity: it allowed him to probe some of the odder and more entrenched hypocrisies in our ideas of sociability. It was also continuous with a wider fascination with the difference between lying and ‘untruth’. ‘In truth’ was one of his most habitual or default locutions (it occurs twenty-one times in his Autobiography alone). Sometimes it is impersonally summative (Thackeray’s Pendinnis ‘was not in truth a very worthy man’ [ch. 7]), but very often it is more revealing of himself. Like its now more common equivalent ‘to be honest’, it can be a dubiously helpful modifier: part bid for sympathy (‘In truth, I was wretched’ he writes of his first 26 years [ch. 4]), part phatic communion, part a means of playing for time. It weakens rather than intensifies, raising the immediate suspicion that one’s honesty is in question. And Trollope did indeed have a recurrent worry over his own claims to ‘truthfulness’, going well beyond the standard novelist’s worry about the status of fiction. He knew, having had it often enough pointed out to him by reviewers and correspondents, that accuracy was not his primary virtue. Indeed, so inaccurate were some of his historical, geographical and other statements in the course of his fiction that he was compelled to write a defence of himself at the end of his life:

‘There are two kinds of confidence which a reader may have in his author … There is a confidence in facts and a confidence in vision. The one man tells you accurately what has been. The other suggests to you what may, or perhaps what must have been, or what ought to have been. The former require simple faith. The latter calls upon you to judge for yourself, and form your own conclusions. …  Research is the weapon used by the former; observation by the latter. Either may be false,—wilfully false; as also may either be steadfastly true. As to that, the reader must judge for himself. But the man who writes currente calamo [with a running pen], who works with a rapidity which will not admit of accuracy, may be as true, and in one sense as trustworthy, as he who bases every word upon a rock of facts. I have written very much as I have, travelled about; and though I have been very inaccurate, I have always written the exact truth as I saw it ;—and I have, I think, drawn my pictures correctly.’ (Autobiography, ch. 7)

Correctness, then, rather than accuracy, as the Trollopean standard for the novel. Writing The Eustace Diamonds just one year before Nietzsche composed ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense’—his first major reflection on the merely conventional status of moral truths—Trollope is, of course, no Nietzschean iconoclast. But there are few English novels of the nineteenth century that so vividly open up the question of why lies should be of more than moral interest to us, and what they might have to tell us about the compromises we all of us make, every day, with the ideal of truth telling.

Helen Small is Tutor and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow in English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Long Life, which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2008, and the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Eustace Diamonds.

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NOTES
———————————————————————

[1] Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (London: Vintage, 1999), xxii
[2] Charles C. Dike, Madelon Baranoski, and Ezra E. H. Griffith,  ‘Pathological Lying Revisited’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law 33 (2005), 342-9 (343).

I’d like to take this moment and introduce you all to Frannie Laughner, this summer’s intern extraordinaire. She and I were discussing William Todd Schultz’s Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers, and the conversation somehow collided with The Oracle of Bacon. An idea was born. Frannie seemed up to the challenge, so I told her I would pick three public figures at random and she had to connect them to Truman Capote in seven degrees or less.

First, stop scrolling. Try to take the challenge yourself. The three public figures are: actor Jack Nicholson, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II.

Were you successful? This is how Frannie did it:

1. Jack Nicholson portrayed playwright Eugene O’Neill in the movie Reds à Eugene was the father of Oona O’Neill –> Oona is a possible inspiration for the character “Holly Golightly” –>“Holly” was a character played by film icon Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s –> the movie was based on the book, which was written by Truman Capote

2. FDR appointed 3-time Olympic gold-medalist Jack Kelly U.S. National Director of Physical Fitness during WWII –> Jack was the father of actress and Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly –> Grace starred opposite actor Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window –> Jimmy was in the same WWII bombardment group, the 445^th, as actor Walter Matthau –> Walter’s wife, Carol Matthau, was roasted in the unfinished manuscript of the roman –> clef Answered Prayers à Answered Prayers was written by Truman Capote

3. Queen of England, Elizabeth II was friends with PM Winston Churchill, who had known her since she was a child –> Churchill cooperated closely with the United States during WWII, though he did not get on especially well with Dwight D. Eisenhower –> General Eisenhower was the head of the Office of War Information during the war, and future CBS CEO William S. Paley served under Eisenhower in the psychological warfare branch –> Paley was a lifetime womanizer, but his last and longest marriage was to Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer –> Babe Paley was a very close friend of Truman Capote, who is quoted as saying of her, “Babe Paley had only one fault. She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.”

You’ve impressed me yet again, Frannie. Until next time…
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By Dario Salvucci

If the mind is a society, as philosopher-scientist Marvin Minsky has argued, then multitasking has become its persona non grata.

In polite company, mere mention of “multitasking” can evoke a disparaging frown and a wagging finger. We shouldn’t multitask, they say – our brains can’t handle multiple tasks, and multitasking drains us of cognitive resources and makes us unable to focus on the critical tasks around us. Multitasking makes us, in a word, stupid.

Unfortunately, this view of multitasking is misguided and undermines a deeper understanding of multitasking’s role in our daily lives and the challenges that it presents.

The latest scientific work suggests that our brains are indeed built to efficiently process multiple tasks. According to our own theory of multitasking called threaded cognition, our brains rapidly interleave small cognitive steps for different tasks – so rapidly (up to 20 times per second) that, for many everyday situations, the resulting task behaviors look simultaneous. (Computers similarly interleave small steps of processing to achieve multitasking between applications, like displaying a new web page while a video plays in the background.) In fact, under certain conditions, people can even exhibit almost perfect time-sharing – doing two tasks concurrently with little to no performance degradation for either task.

The brain’s ability to multitask is readily apparent when watching a short-order cook, a symphony conductor, or a stay-at-home mom in action. But our brains also multitask in much subtler ways: listening to others while forming our own thoughts, walking around town while avoiding obstacles and window-shopping, thinking about the day while washing dishes, singing while showering, and so on.

Multitasking is not only pervasive in our daily activities, it actually enables activities that would otherwise be impossible with a monotasking brain. For example, a driver must steer the vehicle, keep track of nearby vehicles, make decisions about when to turn or change lanes, and plan the best route given current traffic patterns. Driving is only possible because our brains can efficiently interleave these tasks. (Imagine the futility of only being able to steer, or plan a route.)

So how has multitasking earned such a negative reputation? In large part, this reputation stems from unrealistic expectations. The brain’s multitasking abilities – like all our abilities – come with limitations: when performing one task, the addition of another task generally interferes with the first task. For many everyday tasks, the interference is negligible or unimportant: your singing may affect your showering, or thinking about your day may affect your dish-washing, but likely not so much that you notice or care.

Other tasks, though, require every ounce of attention and can push past the limits of our multitasking abilities. In driving, the essential subtasks are demanding enough; additional subtasks – texting, dialing, even talking on a phone – increase these demands, and when controlling a 3000-pound vehicle at 65 miles per hour, even these minimal additional demands may lead to unacceptable risks.

Still other tasks do not have safety implications per se, yet most would consider them important enough that multitasking in those contexts is undesirable. A student in class is already multitasking in listening to the teacher, processing ideas, and taking notes. If this student is checking Facebook at the same time, this extra subtask drains mental effort away from the more critical subtasks and dilutes the learning experience.

The problem with multitasking thus lies not in our brain’s inability to multitask efficiently, but in our own priorities and decision-making. When we choose to multitask, we are deciding – consciously or not – to accept degraded performance on one or more of tasks involved. And when we still choose to multitask when it is undesirable (as in the classroom) or unacceptable (as in driving), we should hold ourselves accountable for these decisions. So if you walk into a pole or wreck your car while texting, don’t blame your brain; blame yourself.

Dario Salvucci is a professor of computer science and psychology at Drexel University, and author with Niels Taatgen of The Multitasking Mind. Dr. Salvucci has written extensively in the areas of cognitive science, human factors, and human-computer interaction, and has received several honors including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

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By Paul Strohm

Among ethical concepts, conscience is a remarkable survivor.  During the 2000 years of its existence it has had ups and downs, but has never gone away.  Originating as Roman conscientia, it was adopted by the Catholic Church, redefined and competitively claimed by Luther and the Protestants during the Reformation, adapted to secular philosophy during the Enlightenment, and is still actively abroad in the world today.  Yet the last few decades have been cloudy ones for conscience, a unique time of trial.

The problem for conscience has always been its precarious authorization.   It is both a uniquely personal impulse and a matter of institutional consensus, a strongly felt personal view and a shared norm upon which all reasonable or ethical people are expected to agree.   As a result of its mixed mandate, conscience performs in differing and even contradictory ways.   It lends support to the dissenting individual or exponent of unpopular or even aberrant claims.  But it is also summoned in support of the norm, and broadly accepted ethical standards.

Each of these authorizations—the personal and the institutional—has its pitfalls.  The fervent individual, summoned by burning personal conviction about the rightness of his or her cause, lies open to suspicions of solipsism or arrogance. But, on the other hand, institutionally or state-sponsored conscience, or conscience speaking for settled public opinion, risk complacency or ethically stunted orthodoxy.  One recalls the predicament of Huckleberry Finn, who suffers what he identifies as conscience pangs for his decision to assist Jim to escape from enslavement, when this bourgeois or ‘churchified’ conscience is obviously a false friend and enemy to his superior ethical intuitions.

Despite such issues, conscience remains a force for much good in the world.  Its most crucial function, and perhaps the one most in need of support, is its encouragement to the private  individual struggling with institutional tyrannies—most dramatically, with various forms of state tyranny.  We have witnessed the incarceration and continued surveillance of China’s Ai Weiwei.  Ai has recently been called ‘China’s conscience’, but his more urgent need might be less public and more personal, the need to enjoy his own conscience undisturbed by governmental or other external intervention.  Remarkable individuals like Ai have proven willing to endure sacrifice for conscientious belief–and sacrifice they have.   Recently Lasantha Wickramatunge, a courageous Sri Lankan journalist, gave his life to expose corruption.  He wrote a farewell dispatch, which amounted to his own obituary letter, which concluded, ‘There is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security.  It is the call of conscience.’ Salman Taseer, governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, declared in a 1 Jaunary 2011 television interview that ‘If I do not stand by my conscience, then who will?’—three days before his assassination. Less dramatically, but still tellingly, one may consider some of the smaller cases of conscience that people confront daily.  Explaining his break with his political party to support a faltering gay marriage bill, Fred W. Thiele Jr, a  New York state Assemblyman, explained, ‘There’s that little voice inside of you that tells you when you’ve done something right, and when you’ve done something wrong. . .  That little voice kept gnawing away at me.’ Anh Cao, the sole Republican congressman to vote in support of an embattled American healthcare bill and marked for defeat in last year’s elections, explained, ‘I had to make a decision of conscience.’   Such figures become exemplars of conscience exactly by articulating positions that their larger social group or sponsorship does not encourage.

Conscience’s voice is a stern one.  Its mode is to ‘prick’ or ‘nag’, and its vistations are rarely welcome.  Those who follow it have no guarantee or reward or success, or even of conscience’s own infallibility.   Thomas Aquinas treated it as a form of applied knowledge which intends the good but is prone to err in its particular applications.   Still, with Thomas, we can agree that intending the good is better than intending nothing at all—that hard choices must be made in the world and seeking to make good ones is our only option.   Additionally in conscience’s favour is the fact that it not only seeks to do good, but demands that we stir ourselves; that, having heard conscience’s voice, we do something in consequence.   The only way to silence a nagging conscience is by choices and deeds.  As a spur and stimulant to act upon our views and beliefs, conscience remains an urgently needed clarion in the world.

Paul Strohm is the Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was formerly J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he continues as Research Fellow of St Anne’s College. His new book is Conscience: A Very Short Introduction.

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The media are full of news items featuring colour photographs of the brain, showing us the precise location in which a certain thought or emotion, or even love itself, occurs. This leads us to believe that we can directly observe the brain at work, and we have ultimately been seduced into believing that any article accompanied by a brain image or two is more reliable and more scientific than one featuring more mundane images. The below excerpt from Neuromania: On the limits of brain science by Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umlitá (and translated by Frances Anderson), explains.

Increasingly often, the press offers explanations of human behaviour by drawings, photographs, and graphic descriptions of sections of the brain which show that part of our grey matter that is activated when we think about something or plan an action. We are told that how we behave depends on the functioning of certain neurons. We hear about new disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, neuroethics, neuropolitics, neuromarketing, and even neurotheology (over 20,000 results on Google!).

In our opinion this is not a transitory fashion. On the contrary, it may well be just the tip of an iceberg, of which it would be wise to judge the dimensions to avoid a collision and, more specifically, to avoid it opening a huge hole in our boat. The heart of the iceberg was formed long ago, in the eighteenth century, but, as we shall soon see, at that time it was a breath of fresh air.

In the 1950s, it started to assume significant dimensions. In those days, physics dominated the scientific panorama, or at least the imagination of the educated. The discoveries made by physicists revealed that matter is constituted of relatively few elementary particles which combine in many different ways, liberating previously unimaginable sources of energy. It was then that the other sciences, attracted by a paradigm that reduced the complex to the very simple, attempted to find the lowest possible common denominator applicable to their discipline. At the same time, again following the lead of physics, there was a general attempt to compress knowledge into mathematical models. This meant introducing formal analyses, starting from stylized descriptions of each and every phenomenon. Mathematical models were constructed to represent human behaviour as well as the development of natural events.

When we consider the actions of individuals, whether performed in groups or alone – which is in fact the object of psychology – we have a low-level description of what happens, a level we could almost define as material. This is not the level we normally use when considering everyday life – goals, emotions, actions, thoughts – but it is the simplest, as it corresponds to the functioning of our organism, our body.

Looking at the question from this point of view, man (in the sense of human bodies) is without doubt part of nature. This gives substance to the hope that if in the future we are able to conduct a detailed analysis of every part of the human body, we will have a match between the discoveries of experimental psychologists and the results of our investigations of elementary biological mechanisms. Then we will be able to demolish the complexities of daily life behind its myriad appearances, reducing it to an underlying biological reality (whether dealing with heredity, genetics, or the functioning of the brain).

And so the dream from the past would come true: psychology would become part of that mixture of physics and biology which in the modern world provides an explanation of the human body and its natural history. In this light psychology, and probably the social disciplines as well, would at best be ‘provisional’ sciences. The lexicon of everyday life would be quite another matter altogether; probably we will never be completely rid of that ingenuous psychology formed from descriptions of thoughts, wishes, needs. After all, this is also the language adopted by ‘psychological scientists’ outside the walls of their laboratories.

The old dream cherished by a number of psychologists of rescuing the mind from the dominion of the scientific lexicon is a very attractive simplification, and is extremely powerful in its general organization. Today, with the evolution of novel sophisticated technologies and the consequent advances made in the realm of mind-brain relationships, it seems within reach once more, so we should not be surprised that it has managed to invade the media and show business in various ways (for example, the recent rash of films about robots).

Summing up, a single-language, physics-chemistry and biology, will form the key to revealing the mechanisms of all known phenomena, from the movement of the heavenly bodies to the elementary particles, from the world of nature to the social whirl.

Although this is very attractive in its elegance and simplicity, it is in fact an illusion. It just doesn’t work. Why?

Nowadays when everyone has a mobile phone or a computer, or one of these hybrids that are so much the fashion, there is no dearth of examples that explain why reductionism doesn’t work.

You need to make a call from a mobile phone. Unfortunately you don’t have the instruction manual to hand. You try to conjure up a detailed description of how all the elements that make up the mobile phone function, keeping in mind that they are mostly sand, metals, and plastics (i.e. oil). Would this help you to make that phone call? The fact is that there are various levels of description applicable to machines, artefacts, and organisms, some of which are appropriate for certain purposes but not for others.

If you want to make mobile phones you have to know every single detail of the composite parts of the products parts of the product. However, if you just want to make a call from the telephone which is already assembled and ready for use, then all you need to know are the basics of its software, which are explained in the instruction manual. This is the level that psychology is now able to explain after a century of study of the ‘software’ supplied by the process of natural evolution. This software has been laboriously reconstructed, step by step, inventing experiments to supply clues as to how the human mind works. It was, and is, a complex task.

There is of course a significant difference between mobile phones and humans. Man designs and produces mobile phones but he did not design himself. We build robots, claiming that they run on software similar to the human mind, and that we can interact with them through the same programs that determine thoughts and emotions. However, the robotic hardware was constructed by man, manipulating the inert substances of a computer’s component parts. Man, on the contrary, is the product of natural evolution, developing almost imperceptibly over millions of years, a fact which makes it difficult to reconstruct his natural history a priori as this would require working backwards. Having said that, however, amazing steps forward (or should we say backwards?) have been made in recent years using biological techniques. It is like trying to understand what has happened in an epic movie from the final scenes. The beginning and the central part of the plot are lost. Have you seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a forerunner of the cyberpunk genre, or Steven Spielberg’s ET (1982), a film that established a box-office record? The success of these films ought to have facilitated the assimilation of the concept that the ‘software’ of life is independent of the material of which the living body is composed, but actually they probably produced the opposite effect. In fact, the idea of man as a machine has taken root in the social imagination, based on the concept that even bodies constructed in the most diverse ways can love and be loved.

Paolo Legranzi is Profesor of Cognitive Psychology at Ca’Foscari University, Venice, Italy. Carlo Umlitá teachs neuropsychology at the University of Padua, Italy, where he directs the Galilean School of Higher Studies.

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By Joshua Knobe

Imagine that tomorrow’s newspaper comes with a surprising headline: ‘Scientists Discover that Human Behavior is Entirely Determined.’ Reading through the article, you learn more about precisely what this determinism entails. It turns out that everything you do – every behavior, thought and decision – is completely caused by prior events, which are in turn caused by earlier events… and so forth, stretching back in a long chain all the way to the beginning of the universe.

A discovery like this one would naturally bring up a difficult philosophical question. If your actions are completely determined, can you ever be morally responsible for anything you do? This question has been a perennial source of debate in philosophy, with some philosophers saying yes, others saying no, and millennia of discussion that leave us no closer to a resolution.

As a recent New York Times article explains, experimental philosophers have been seeking to locate the source of this conundrum in the nature of the human mind. The key suggestion is that the sense of puzzlement we feel in response to this issue arises from a conflict between two different psychological processes. Our capacity for abstract, theoretical reasoning tells us: ‘Well, if you think about it rationally, no one can be responsible for an act that is completely determined.’ But our capacity for immediate emotional responses gives us just the opposite answer: ‘Wait! No matter how determined people might be, they just have to be responsible for the terrible things they do…’

To put this hypothesis to the test, the philosopher Shaun Nichols and I conducted a simple experiment. All participants were asked to imagine a completely deterministic universe (‘Universe A’). Then different participants were given different questions that encouraged different modes of thought. Some were given a question that encouraged more abstract theoretical reasoning:

In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?

Meanwhile, other participants were given a question that encouraged a more emotional response:

In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.

Is Bill fully morally responsible for killing his wife and children?

The results showed a striking difference between the two conditions. Participants in the abstract reasoning condition overwhelmingly answered that no one could ever be morally responsible for anything in Universe A. But participants in the more emotional condition had a very different reaction. Even though Bill was described as living in Universe A, they said that he was fully morally responsible for what he had done. (Clearly, this involves a kind of contradiction: it can’t be that no one in Universe A is morally responsible for anything but, at the same time, this one man in Universe A actually is morally responsible for killing his family.)

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that experiments like this one can somehow solve the problem of free will all by themselves. Still, it does appear that a close look at the empirical data can afford us a certain kind of insight. The results help us to get at the roots of our sense that there is a puzzle here and, thereby, to open up new avenues of inquiry that might not otherwise have been possible.

Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher affiliated both with the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is editor with Shaun Nichols of Experimental Philosophy. Watch a video introduction featuring the comedian Eugene Mirman here.

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By Ervin Staub

In difficult times like today, people need a vision or ideology that gives them hope for the future. Unfortunately, groups often adopt destructive visions, which identify other groups as enemies who supposedly stand in the way of creating a better future. A constructive, shared vision, which joins groups, reduces the chance of hostility and violence in a society.

A serious failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer, and help people embrace, such a vision. Policies by themselves, such as health care and limited regulation of the financial system, even if beneficial, don’t necessarily do this. A constructive vision or ideology must combine an inspiring vision of social arrangements, of the relations between individuals and groups and the nature of society, and actions that aim to fulfill the vision. A community that includes all groups, recreating a moral America, and rebuilding connections to the rest of the world could be elements of such a vision.

In difficult times, people need security, connection to each other, a feeling of effectiveness, and an understanding of the world and their place in it.  Being part of a community can help fulfill  these needs. The work programs of the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression provided people with livelihood. But they also gave them dignity and told them that they were part of the national community.

Community means accepting and embracing differences among us. Especially important among the influences that lead groups of people to turn against each other is drawing a line between us and them, and seeing the other in a negative light. The words and actions of Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln propagated acceptance of the other even after extreme violence. The U.S. is a hugely varied country, and for every one of us, there can be many of “them.” But others’ differentness can enrich us. People travel to distant places just to glimpse at other people and their lives. As much research shows, real contact, deep engagement, working for shared goals across races, religions, classes, and political beliefs helps to overcome prejudice, helps us to see our shared humanity. Engaging with each other’s differentness here at home can connect us to each other–and increase our satisfaction in life.

Creating a vision—and reality—of community also requires addressing the huge financial inequality in America. Research shows that during periods of greater inequality in income, people are less satisfied. This is true of liberals; perhaps surprisingly, to a lesser degree, it is also true of conservatives. Inequality presumably reduces people’s feeling of community. The financial crisis provided an opportunity to begin to address inequality, to use laws, policies, and public opinion to limit compensation in financial institutions and corporations. Roosevelt had to fight for his programs. This time there has not been enough “political will,” that is, commitment and courage, to do this

Good connection to the rest of the world also increases our experience of community—and our security. For many decades, the United States was greatly respected and admired. Now, as I travel around the world in the course of my work on preventing violence between groups and promoting reconciliation, most of the people I talk to are highly critical of us. But my sense is that many yearn to again trust and respect us.

In his Cairo speech, as President Obama reached out to the Muslim world, he offered an image of connection between countries and peoples. But words alone are not enough, and there has been little follow up. He also continued with policies of the Bush administration, such as extraordinary rendition, handing over suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation using torture. We Americans believe we are a moral people; both for our own sake and for our connections to others, we need a vision of moral community and policies and practices that fulfill this vision.  This can recreate our moral leadership in the world in these complex and difficult times.

The visions and practices of community, connection, and morality can create greater unity at home, and better connection to the rest of the world. But they—as well as increasing our security– also require that we deal differently with our wars, and those who threaten us and intend to attack and harm us. I will address that in another blog.

Ervin Staub is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Founding Director of the Ph.D. concentration in the Psychology of Peace and the Prevention of Violence, Emeritus. He is the author of Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism.

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By Anthony Scioli

Recently Japan’s 77 year old Emperor Akihito implored his people “not to abandon hope”.  This may have struck some Westerners as odd since Japan is an Eastern country largely dominated by Buddhism and Shinto, faith traditions that many associate with mindfulness, acceptance and renunciation rather than hope for the future, transformation, or worldly pursuits.  In fact, it is not uncommon to find Westerners who believe that “hope” does not even exist in the East.  For many American intellectuals, particularly psychologists, hope is associated with the pursuit of specific, concrete goals.  Surely the emperor did not have this kind of hope in mind when he made his appeal?

Hope is not an exclusively western, Judeo-Christian virtue.  There are words for hope in Apache (ndahondii) and Swahili (matumaini) as well as Persian (omid), to name just a few examples.  The largest lab within the International Space Station is called “Kibou”, which means “hope” in Japanese.  But what is hope?  Is it one thing or many things?  What can we learn about hope from the Japanese experience?  In turn, what can the Japanese learn from “hope”?   Can these lessons be combined to form a better psycho-social-spiritual disaster kit?

The kanji for hope

What can we learn about hope from the Japanese?

It is true that hope is partly about goals and mastery.  However, while academic psychologists have tended to conceptualize hope in terms of goal expectancies and narrow-focused probability estimates, the hopes of the common man or woman tend to be more transcendent, more global, and value-laden.  A hope is not a wish.  Unlike optimism, hope is not ego-centered but collaborative, rooted in empowerment and focused on a higher plane of success.   Ironically, the well-known “secondary” or “indirect” control processes (sometimes called “soft power” in business circles) favored in the East are more line with the nature of hopeful mastery than academic psychology’s goal-centered view of hope.   In Japan, the story of the “Fukushima Fifty” has provided a good example of collaborative mastery oriented around a higher goal.  These are the fifty employees of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power company that agreed to continue in the effort to stabilize the plant despite the inevitable exposure to toxic levels of radiation.

Hope is about attachment.  In fact, attachments are probably the most important wellspring for the development of hope. However, if you peruse mainstream psychology, you will find little on hope and attachment.  The one exception is Erik Erikson who believed that trust was the root of basic hopefulness.   The philosopher Gabriel Marcel agreed with Erikson but added openness to the attachment portion of the hope equation. Again, it is curious that this dimension of hope is brought into bolder relief through contact with Japan, albeit a collectivist society, but one not typically associated with this presumably “Christian virtue”.

During a crisis, levels of civility, trust, and openness can quickly plummet.  This is unfortunate because these attachment-related aspects of hope can function as literal life-savers during an earthquake, flood, or other major disaster.   In Japan, we have seen the value of a cohesive, tight-knit culture in the way the young and the capable have assisted the old and the vulnerable, the manner in which locals have reached out to assist foreigners, and the willingness to restrict personal use of limited resources to benefit the group as a whole.

Hope is also about survival.  For too long psychology approached human nature as if it was only rooted in the survival instinct.  Now with the advent of “positive psychology”, the field seems to have forgotten that hope for survival remains fundamental.  Paradigms come and go, but humankind is still made of vulnerable flesh and blood as well as large frontal lobes that anticipate danger and foresee death.  To be direct, this means that the current focus on growth, feed-forward loops, happiness, etc. must continue to be balanced with an appreciation of the self-regulatory struggles that dominate the everyday experience of millions who must weather strife and trauma.   Hopeful survival is linked to self-regulation through salvation beliefs and perceived options.   The Japanese are masters of self-restraint and many observers have noted the relatively lack of mass panic, and their continued acceptance and orderliness in the face of food, water, and energy shortages.

Long accustomed to working in “confined spaces” and negotiating life in the face of obstacles, it is not surprising that when fuel was limited and it became difficult to reach elderly survivors, members of the Japanese Red Cross Society resorted to bicycles.  A second example of Japanese flexibility is evidenced in their adoption of multiple faith traditions, predominately Buddhism and Shinto. But for some, there is also a bit of Confucianism added to the mix, and even elements of Christianity.

Hope is indeed spiritual. Again, you will find little spirituality in the academic psychology of hope.  But for most people, today, yesterday, and undoubtedly tomorrow, hope tends to go hand in hand with faith.  This faith often includes a large component of religious belief but can include faith in oneself, others, various institutions, nature, or technology.  However, what makes it effectively “spiritual” is not the source or domain but the depth of belief.  In modern parlance, it must be intrinsic to the self.   The spirituality of the Japanese has been a great help to them during this crisis precisely because their faith traditions (i.e., belief in the group, one’s ancestors, or various deities) are so strongly embedded in their culture, and are not, as is the case for many westerners, composed of layers of experience that are above, and apart from, everyday life.

What can the Japanese learn from hope?

Mastery.  The Japanese Proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”, reinforces the collectivist, self-sacrificing ethic that can make it difficult to cultivate inspiration through heroic role models. This is not a time to ignore heroes or minimize individual acts of courage, creativity or commitment.  The faceless Fukushima fifty ought to be recognized in a more public fashion. I understand the risks and possible stigma that might come with making public their names, particularly in light of what happened with the “hibakusha” during WWII.  Nevertheless, the benefits will outweigh the costs, in terms of providing both young and old with concrete role models. Fifty heroes with fifty stories will produce a far richer yield of hopeful mastery to inspire the Japanese people than a nameless cohort.

Attachment. While strong in horizontal trust, the Japanese must be careful not to repeat the sins of WWII, when after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those exposed to radiation became known as the “hibakusha”, the feared, the isolated and the abandoned. Perhaps even more important for Japan, we know that groups and organizations function best when there is a high level of vertical trust that binds leaders and followers.   Historians have contrasted the success of the Roman legions (marvels of planned vertical cohesiveness) with the failures of the Confederacy during American Civil War (weak vertical cohesion).  The longer the Japanese must go before they begin to see improvements, and the more people hear the government issue reports that do not square with their actual experience, the more difficult it will be to sustain that vertical trust.

Survival. Junko Ooigawa, whose husband continued to work at the Fukushima plant, was featured in an MSNBC report. She lamented, “I cannot imagine the future at this moment.”  For the Japanese, grounded in Buddhism and Shinto, being mindful of the present moment should not pose a problem.  But coping in the here and now without recourse to the past for guidance is like venturing into the wilderness without a roadmap or compass. Japan has survived many crises, most notably, the WWII atomic bombings that killed more than 250,000 and ruined the lives of countless others who suffered radiation poisoning.  The old who have lived through these and other disasters can teach the young how to reclaim the vision of a better future, and restore the belief that the sun will again rise in the East.  In this regard, Japan is fortunate, having the largest percentage of elderly in the world, at nearly 23 percent.  Emperor Akihito was a particularly appropriate elder spokesman. He was eleven when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the leader of Japan was none other than Hirohito, Akihito’s father.

Spirituality.  The spiritual dimensions of hope can include feelings of empowerment, connection, and liberation as well as the belief in a benign universe and a sense of symbolic immortality. A significant number of Japanese rely on their Shinto beliefs to deal with major life events while utilizing their Buddhist beliefs to process death and the “after-life”.  In the present moment, they might do well to capitalize on both of these traditions.   Buddhism is best for seeking liberation and sustaining faith in a universe that is fair, if not caring.  Shinto is better equipped to address the needs of those seeking empowerment and connection as well as offering a portal to a more eternal continuum.

Anthony Scioli, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Keene State College. He is author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety and The Power of Hope.  His website is www.gainhope.com

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By Michelle Rafferty

As most of you probably know by now, there’s a new stage in life – emerging adulthood, or for the purposes of this post, the unmarried young adult. Marriage is getting pushed off (26 is now the average age for women, 28 for men) which means…more premarital sex than ever!

According to sociologists, emerging adults are all part of a sexual market in which the “cost” of sex for men and women in heterosexual relationships is pretty different. Out of this disparity has risen the theory of “sexual economics,” which I recently read up on in Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. At first glance women appeared to be the clear losers in this market. See this passage:

Sexual economics theory would argue that sex is about acquiring valued “resources” at least as much as it is about seeking pleasure. When most people think of women trading sex for resources, they think of prostitution and money as the terms of exchange. But this theory encourages us to think far more broadly about the resources that the average woman values and attempts to acquire in return for sex – things like love, attention, status, self-esteem, affection, commitment, and feelings of emotional union. Within many emerging adults’ relationships, orgasms are not often traded equally.

Basically, the sexual economics theory says that while women and men are doing the same thing during sex, socially they are doing two different things. Women can and do enjoy sex, but they also have an agenda, while men…just want to have sex. Which to me just seemed, well, sad. Hadn’t women all finally agreed that a man can’t ever make you happy, only you can? But the more I read up on the theory of sexual economics, the less cut-and-dry it became. Women might use sex to get commitment, but they’re also getting things like advanced degrees and independent financial stability  - which also play a role in this new sexual economy. This led me to ask: are men really the clear winners in this game? I scoured the countless studies and interviews in Premartial Sex in America and came up with the following chart to sort all the data out.

Wins in the Emerging Adult Sexual Market by Gender

Tally:
Women – 3 wins
Men – 3 wins
5 washes

By my calculations men and women are breaking even.  But I realize this conclusion is partly due to the fact that I’ve categorized the financial advances of women as part of a tradeoff, rather than a clear win for the other side. Ironically, the more power they get in terms of knowledge and jobs, the less they seem to have in terms of sex. I’ll also concede that “possible antidepressant qualities of semen” is a weak win. So, when it comes to sex amongst heterosexual emerging adults, men do seem to have the advantage.

Now. Given some of the reasons behind this win, I’m still feeling optimistic for womenkind. But that’s just me. Ladies, gentlemen, emerging boys and girls, take what you want from this, and good luck out there.

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By Ervin Staub

A few hours after the 9/11 attacks, speaking on our local public radio station in Western Massachusetts, struggling with my tears and my voice, I said that this horrible attack can help us understand people’s suffering around the world, and be a tool for us to unite with others to create a better world. Others also said similar things. But that is not how events progressed.

Our response to that attack led to three wars we are still fighting, including the war on terror. How we fight these wars and what we do to bring them to an end will shape our sense of ourselves as a moral people, our connections to the rest of the world, our wealth and power as a nation, and our physical security.  What can we do to reduce hostility toward us, strengthen our alliances, and regain our moral leadership in the world?

One of the basic principles of human conduct is reciprocity. As one party strikes out at another,  the other, if it can, usually responds with force. Often the response is more than what is required for self-defense. It is punitive, taking revenge, teaching the other a lesson. But the first party  takes this as aggression, and responds with more violence. Israelis and Palestinians for many years engaged in mutual and often escalating retaliation, sometimes reciprocating immediately, sometimes, the Palestinians especially, the weaker party, waiting for the right opportunity.

Many young Muslims, and even non-Muslims converting to Islam, have been “radicalized” by our drone attacks, and our forces killing civilians in the course of fighting. The would-be Times Square bomber has talked to people about his distress and anger about such violence against Muslims. While we kill some who plan to attack us, especially as we harm innocent others, more turn against us.

Of course, we must protect ourselves. But positive actions are also reciprocated—not always, but often, especially if the intention for the action is perceived as positive. Non-violent reactions and practices must be part of effective self-defense. Respect is one of them. Many Muslims were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and we should have specifically included them in our public mourning. Many Arab and Muslim countries reached out to us afterwards, even Iran, and we should have responded more than we did to their sympathy and support. Effective reaching out is more challenging now, and after the mid-term elections the world might see reaching out by President Obama as acting out of weakness. But the U.S. is still the great power, and both the administration and members of Congress ought to reach out to the Muslim world.

But even as we show respect and work on good connections, we ought to stop supporting repressive Muslim regimes. That has been one of the grievances against us. An important source of Al-Qaeda has been Egyptian terrorists, who fought against a secular repressive Egyptian regime. Then as Al-Qaeda was organized by the Mujahideen, who fought against and defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they turned from such “near enemies” against the far enemy, the United States, which supported these repressive regimes.

Another important matter is dialogue between parties. Dialogue can be abused, used simply to gain time, or as a show to pacify third parties, or can even be a fraud as in Afghanistan where an “impostor” played the role of a Taliban leader in dialogue with the government . The Bush administration strongly opposed dialogue with terrorists—but then with money and other inducements got Sunnis in Iraq, who have been attacking us, to work with us. In persistent dialogue, in contrast to the very occasional negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the parties can develop relationships, gain trust, and then become ready to resolve practical matters.

To resolve our wars, we cannot simply bomb and shoot. We must also develop relationships. The less we harm innocent bystanders and the populations where we fight wars, the more moral our actions, the greater is the chance for peace.

Ervin Staub is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Founding Director of the Ph.D. concentration in the Psychology of Peace and the Prevention of Violence, Emeritus. He is the author of Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism.

By Michelle Rafferty

The announcement of another zombie tv show, exhibits our intensifying zombie love, but why do we dig this monster so much? He’s everywhere: in our novels, on television, and even the stage, but why? I decided to investigate and narrowed it down to the following:

1.) Monsters are now highbrow.

Steve Asma, author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears, told me over e-mail:

High culture aficionados have always looked down their noses at the genre – in part because kids (who generally have no taste whatsoever) are so enviably thrilled by monster stories. And also, truth be told, there have been so many bad monster stories, movies, and television shows, that intellectual and critical dismissal is almost justifiable.

Good monster stories, however, are proliferating of late. Zombie stories, for example, have taken on a whole new level of sophistication – and not just because they’re suddenly cropping up in Jane Austen novels. Good monster stories are only partly about exotic and frightening creatures. Successful monster stories are, of course, about us. They explore aspects of the human condition that cannot be seen or examined straight on, but must be glimpsed obliquely. Lust, fear, rage, vulnerability, craving, alienation, regret; these are the emotional territories that monster stories can explore beautifully.

2.) Zombies are less scary than our own families.
Soho Press  just announced it will publish J. Ross Angelella’s Zombie, the story of a 14-year-old boy who deals with all-boys Catholic school and father issues through both women’s magazines and zombie movies.

I asked Justin Hargett, Director of Publicity at Soho Press, why this book is so special. He said:

In the end – this has always been true of good fiction that deals with monsters – it’s got to be about the human characters, as well as offering some window onto society. In the case of Zombie, the kid’s obsession with Zombie movies offers him life lessons and strategies for coping with his family situation, which can be confusing and alienating to a kid.

3.) Zombies make good prime-time after school specials.
On a special Sunday Glee, Coach Beiste and Mr. Schuester cooked up a scheme to bring together McKinley’s divided football team right before their championship game: Zombie camp! After hours of lurch training and zombie make-up sessions the football players really did begin to understand what glee is all about. Brittany put it best:

Zombie camp was funner than I expected. And the glee club together with the football team, it’s like a double rainbow. A zombie double rainbow.

A slushie run-in with the hockey team nearly ended the glee/jock alliance, but the football players come through for the Thriller/Heads Will Roll mash-up half time performance. And then. The team won the big game by staying in zombie costume and growling “brraaaaaaiiiinssss” at the opposing team.

It makes sense the zombie was behind this momentary peace at McKinley High. According to Asma’s On Monsters, zombies classify as liminal (from the Latin word limen meaning “threshold”) because they are neither living or dead. They are difficult to define (like other “monsters” in history including hermaphrodites, the Minotaur, and Frankenstein’s creature), but Asma argues, so are we all:

Of course, the extraordinary and the ordinary are often just different by degree rather than kind. So the extent to which everyone is a little hard to categorize is the extent to which we are all liminal.

I imagine a sage Puck voice-over: Everyone, even the Puckster, is kind of weird. Who better than the monster to help us embrace that fact?

By Ervin Staub

In difficult times people need a vision of a better future to give them hope. The U.S. is experiencing difficult times. The majority of people are poorer and many are out of work, the political system is frozen and corrupted by lobbyists and institutions that have gone awry, and there are constant changes in the world that create uncertainty. We are also at war, and face the danger of attack. While pluralism – the openness and public space to express varied ideas, and for all groups in society to have access to the public domain – is important for a free society, the cacophony of shrill voices creates confusion and makes it difficult for constructive visions and policies to emerge.

In times like these, subgroups of a society – racial, ethnic, religious or political – often turn against other groups. Members of one group, often the largest or dominant group, blame others for the difficulties of life. Often, their ideology is destructive. Instead of addressing the source of societal problems, such visions frequently focus on enhanced national power, racial superiority, or a utopian degree of social equality in the society or in the world. They identify enemies that supposedly stand in the way of the fulfillment of the vision. The group turns against and engages in increasingly harmful, and eventually violent, actions against this enemy.

In response to intensely difficult conditions, destructive ideologies and movements have shaped life in many nations. In Germany the ideology stressed racial superiority, expansion, and submission to a leader. Jews and gypsies were regarded as racially inferior, Slavs both inferior and in the way of expansion. In Cambodia the vision was of total social equality, with everyone judged incapable of contributing to or living in such a society, whether the former elite, educated people or minorities as enemies. In the former Yugoslavia, for the Serbs, it was renewed nationalism, with other groups, especially Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo as enemies. In Argentina, people stood against communism and in defense of faith and order. Everyone considered left-leaning – even people working to improve the lives of poor people – became enemies. In Rwanda “Hutu power” over the Tutsi minority, became the guiding ideology. While significant societal change is usually shaped by a number of influences, such ideologies had important roles in creating hostility and violence, ending in mass killing or genocide.

In the U.S. so far, in spite of our increasingly dysfunctional political life and shrill political rhetoric, there is no comparable destructive ideology. While we have many divisions, and ignore the harm to civilians outside the country in the wars we fight, the rights of different groups inside the country have increasingly come to be respected, especially in the last half century. However, many have turned against the current administration, and to some extent, against government in general. They affirm core American values of freedom and individuality, but in the service of tearing down, without a vision of what to create. This is one half of an ideology, the against part, without a clear aim, a for part.

Such rebellion seems to be supported, and perhaps instigated, by people in the background who finance it, and by politicized media. It thrives on people’s genuine and understandable distress, the result of the frustration of material needs, but even more, the frustration of a variety of psychological needs, uncertainty, and fear. Joining ideological groups and movements helps fulfill needs for security, community, and a feeling of effectiveness at a time when people feel powerless.

We need a constructive vision, words joined with actions that embrace all groups in society. A grave failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer such a vision. While the laws passed and policies pursued in the last two years seem mostly constructive, – I will note exceptions and limitations in my next blog post – people don’t see them as part of a larger vision that can give them hope in their continuing difficulties. The administration ought to develop a vision and accompanying policies that can unite and inspire people, for the sake of the country and its own political future. While others can come forward with such a vision, it will only take hold if it comes from those who have the power to turn it into reality.

Ervin Staub is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Founding Director of the Ph.D. concentration in the Psychology of Peace and the Prevention of Violence, Emeritus. He is the author of Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism.

By Susan Pick and Jenna T. Sirkin

In September, our world leaders met in New York for the Summit on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. They congratulated one another for lower child mortality rates, the increase in women’s empowerment and a reduction in the number of new HIV/AIDS cases; they lamented how far we are from reaching the eight goals we established ten years ago. But are they missing the point?

One of the Millennium Development Goals is particularly complex: achievement of universal primary education. We measure the progress made toward this goal with net enrollment ratios, the proportion of pupils who finish primary school, and literacy rates. We know that according to the UN’s 2010 report, “enrollment in primary education has continued to rise… But the pace of progress is insufficient to ensure that, by 2015, all girls and boys complete a full course of primary schooling.” Should we be encouraged? Should we be disheartened? Or should we question how telling these numbers even are? While enrollment is a crucial step toward the country’s overall social development, we have to look past the statistics and ask ourselves about the education itself.

With the numbers we are given, it is easy to speak of success when the graphs rise, and failures when the graph drops. It is critically important to see a rise in the number of boys and girls receiving primary education in the poorest countries. But what is this education we are providing them? Is it what our children need to succeed as productive adults and what a country needs to form responsible, competent and ambitious citizens?

Great thinkers have pondered this question. Brazilian educator and theorist Paolo Freire classified teaching methods as dictatorial or facilitative, the former depending on a hierarchical structure in which the teacher imparts knowledge to the student through memorization.  Where obedience is valued over analytical thinking. The facilitative method, on the other hand, values empowerment and intrinsic motivation. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen writes that the opportunities created by an education system which reinforces freedoms and personal agency gives individuals the capabilities necessary to exercise their political rights and guarantees structural and psychological access to social services. It is this facilitative education that has been shown to make a powerful difference in poverty reduction and opportunity for people in developing nations.

Let’s take the case of Mexico, where there are various barriers to facilitative education. Government programs like Oportunidades have greatly increased school attendance with cash transfers to impoverished families, yet Mexicans still score below average on reading and math. A report from the Programme for International Student Assessment has documented Mexican students’ difficulty in analyzing data and experiments. And this despite the fact that the Mexican government has vastly increased its investment in education. Yet students’ poor performance is understandable given that two in three teachers in Mexico mainly use memorization to teach skills. The mere reproduction of knowledge and skills limits Mexicans in terms of their productivity in the job market and in other areas of their lives.

Training teachers in psychosocial life skills is the key to moving away from the authoritarian, didactic methods in Mexico. Educators must themselves have a strong sense of personal agency in order to then empower their students, and they must recognize the value of their students having such agency. And this must be the case in the home as well. At home, children are confronted with paternalistic cultural norms, meaning that blind obedience is encouraged and autonomy is discouraged. Research on family values indicates that many Mexican parents raise their children to expect discipline in the name of respect for authority figures. Therefore, shift in the exercise of control and communication within both the family and with educators is essential in sustaining a positive and participatory learning environment.

We have until 2015 to meet our deadline. As we consider our strategies for the decisive upcoming five years, yes, we must change the way we see change. We will strive for every child in every country to receive primary education. And we also need to ensure that the way in which we are shaping these children while they sit in school each day is giving them the skills to break out of the poverty cycle, and in doing so bring their countries in line with all eight Millennium Development Goal targets.

Susan Pick is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. She is author and coauthor of over 270 works, has received numerous awards, holds the highest level in the National System of Researchers, and is also the former president of the Interamerican Society of Psychology. She is author with Jenna T. Sirkin of Breaking the Poverty Cycle: The Human Basis for Sustainable Development.

Jenna T. Sirkin is currently a health services researcher and a doctoral student at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University; and is also an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Doctoral Training Fellow. She has been employed and conducted research in the fields of public health, health services research and international development.

Clayton P. Alderfer

Undercover Boss, one of reality TV’s newest additions, is based on a truth that many thoughtful CEOs grasp: they do not have a thorough understanding of what goes on at the middle and bottom of their organizations.  There are multiple reasons why.  Immediate subordinates do not know either.  Middle and lower ranking managers withhold their understanding from those above them.  First level managers cut deals with hourly workers that permit the employees to do well enough financially while not working too hard – lest the employees act disruptively.  CEOs hired from outside have even less of an idea about what goes on, as insiders feel resentful about being subject to outsider rule and choose not to tell what they know.  The reasons why CEOs face this predicament are thus far reaching.  The question for CEOs who grasp this tough reality is whether they can do anything about it.

Undercover Boss provides one solution to the top boss’s dilemma: Change clothing; create a new identity; become a temporary hourly employee; expose one’s shortcomings as a worker; [eventually] reveal one’s identity to those who helped; provide high profile rewards (and an occasional punishment) to employees who were encountered; hold a public meeting to reveal the charade; and, finally, go back to work as an apparently enlightened CEO armed with the knowledge acquired.  Here the TV episode ends.  But is this the whole story?

As someone who has spent several decades studying organizations, serving as a middle manager in universities, and working as an organizational consultant to numerous systems, I believe the findings that undercover bosses turn up are, for the most part, valid.  The problems are with the procedures the CEOs use.  Most critical is the rationale built on deception.  The show operates from the premise (shared with social scientists who conduct experiments using deception) that one can establish laws of human behavior by employing methods that include lying to the people who provide data.  In short, one lies to learn the truth.

In social psychology over the years, students to whom the experimenters lied later told other students, who then became what was termed “experiment-wise.”  Beyond that, lead investigators carried out studies demonstrating that experimenters (perhaps inadvertently) communicated experimental hypotheses to the people providing data, thus possibly invalidating the findings produced.   To compensate for these two problems, researchers introduced a second order of lying.  Investigators began to lie not just to their “subjects,” as respondents in these studies were called, but also to the experimenters who executed experimental treatments.  Among researchers who used deceptive practices, this later development ushered in a new order of experiments based on “double deception.”  Viewed in organizational terms, these practices emanated from temporary organizations in which top managers (professors) lied to middle managers (graduate students), who in turn lied to subordinates (undergraduates or innocent citizens).

Undercover Boss appears not yet to have reached the second stage of employing deceptive practices.  Shows currently close with an apparently happy gathering of employees smiling as their CEO reveals the deception after having returned to his actual role.  The implied explanation for the observed employee satisfaction is that the people feel pleased, because the top boss has taken the trouble to find out what organizational life is really like at the middle and bottom of the system.  One wonders, however, just how long the initial reactions will last.  Might there be resentment toward the employees who assisted (some wittingly, some unwittingly) the boss in his deception and were generously rewarded for their actions?  Might some people outside the penumbra of the boss’s interaction wonder, “What will be the next trick this guy has up his sleeve?  How can we protect ourselves?  Might I gain by telling my boss or the CEO what really goes on in our work area?”  If employees begin ‘ratting on one another,’ what will happen to working relations among peers, to subsequent feelings about the CEO, and to long term relations among bosses and subordinates throughout the organization?

Overall, might a short term increase in empathy between a CEO and his employees be paid for with a long run increase in mistrust, as members of the organizations talk with one another about what occurred?  It is possible.  In fact, I think it is likely—especially given that bosses, who are willing to work at the task, can learn what actually goes on in their organizations without deception by competently employing non-deceptive organizational diagnosis methods.

Clayton P. Alderfer is widely recognized for his formulation of two influential theories that have influenced education and practice in the field of management, the Existence, Relatedness, and Growth theory, and the embedded inter-group relations theory. Dr. Alderfer held senior faculty appointments at Yale University’s School of Organization and Management and Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology before forming the consulting firm Alderfer & Associates in 2006. He is the author of The Practice of Organizational Diagnosis.