The conservative rewriting of U.S. history

McClatchy has published a video and a written summary of conservatives' recent efforts to rewrite history. This evidence-free approach to history is surreal. How can this possibly be happening? It is apparent that these rewrites of history are evidence of the confirmation bias running at full throttle. I recently came across this vivid description of this phenomenon in a book called A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives (2006), by Cordelia Fine:

Reasoning is the vain brain's of . . . powerful protectorate. This might seem a little odd. Isn't reasoning supposed to be the compass that guides us toward the truth, not saves us from it? It seems not--particularly when our ego is under attack. In fact, the best we can say for our gift of thinking in these circumstances is that we do at least recognize that conclusions cannot be drawn out of thin air: we need a bit of evidence to support our case. The problem is that we behave like a smart lawyer searching for evidence to bolster his client's case, rather than a jury searching for the truth. As we've seen, memory is often the overzealous secretary who assists in this process by hiding or destroying files that harbor unwanted information. Only when enough of the objectionable stuff has been shredded dare we take a look. Evidence that supports your case is quickly accepted, and the legal assistants are sent out to find more of the same. However, evidence that threatens reason's most important client--you--is subjected to grueling cross-examination. Accuracy, validity, and plausibility all come under attack on the witness stand. The case is soon won. A victory for justice and truth, you think, conveniently ignoring the fact that yours was the only lawyer in the courtroom.

(Page 13) Fine adds this additional description toward the end of her book:

Evidence that fits with our beliefs is quickly waved through the mental border control. Counter-evidence, on the other hand, must submit to close interrogation and even then will probably not be allowed in. As a result, people can wind up holding their beliefs even more strongly after seeing counter-evidence. It's as if we think, "Well, if that's the best that the other side can come up with then I really must be right." This phenomenon, called "belief polarization," may help to explain why attempting to disillusion people of their perverse misconceptions is so often futile.

(Page 108)

Continue ReadingThe conservative rewriting of U.S. history

The magic and the power of music

Back in the 1970’s, when I was 17, I assumed the role of co-leader of a St. Louis 8-piece jazz-rock bank we called “Ego.” It was great fun (you’ll find a photo here). We learned a lot about performing music and we learned even more about people. I loved playing music back then—it unleashed something in me, something ineffable. Five years later, though, I was fully absorbed with law school, because I had come to the conclusion that I needed to have a stable career. I made this choice assuming that I could always play music on the side. But then I became a lawyer, a career that is a demanding mistress. Over the years, there was always something else that had to get done, much of it law-related, so I haven’t played much music for the past few decades, not until this past year. During the past year, I’ve been working hard at becoming a better guitarist, and there’s no better way to do that than by practicing an hour every day. That’s what I used to tell hundreds of guitar students during the nine years that I taught lessons. I told them to practice every day and that they would see dramatic results, guaranteed. It’s absolutely true. I’ve also worked hard to improve my singing over the past year. I never considered myself to be a singer, though I occasionally sang. Over the past six months, I’ve received a few voice lessons from local musician Leslie Sanazaro, and more recently a lesson from Charles Glenn, the other co-leader of Ego, whose talents are well-recognized in Saint Louis. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the result of putting time into music again. My guitar chops have improved dramatically. I am now a better jazz player than ever before. My voice is now something that no longer embarrasses me; I now see my voice as an instrument that has the ability to command at least as much attention as my guitar playing, and I’ve worked hard to shape my voice to mesh with various types of tunes. [caption id="attachment_11977" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by clearviewstock at Dreamstime.com (with permission)"]Image by clearviewstock at Dreamstime.com (with permission)[/caption] Last week was a benchmark of sorts. I performed at the Culinaria, a downtown grocery store for three hours. I was joined for thirty-minutes by an excellent violinist named Stephanie To, but the remainder of the three-hour session consisted of me playing the guitar and singing (pop, jazz and folk). Since that performance, I was invited to sign up to perform two additional gigs, and there are several others in the works at local Saint Louis establishments. I am now feeling that once again I can honestly and proudly claim that I am a “musician.” It was ironic that after making music a significant part of my life again, I came across Yusuf Islam’s DVD, Yusuf’s Café. Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, is an extraordinary musician (songwriter, guitarist, pianist and vocalist) who rebelled against the pace, the superficiality and the artificiality of life (his lyrics were autobiographical in these regards). As a result of this mismatch back in the late 70’s, he jumped from his then-hectic world into a much simpler world permeated by the Islamic faith, a world where his family and his God were priorities. For almost thirty years, Yusuf Islam had been under the belief that the Islamic faith did not allow the performance of his type of music, so he totally gave it up. He didn’t even own a guitar.

Continue ReadingThe magic and the power of music

More on the complexity of happiness: New TED lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate who has spent his long life making dozens of startling discoveries regarding judgment and decision-making. More recently, he has done considerable work in hedonic psychology. He recently appeared at TED to discuss the "The riddle of experience vs. memory." [caption id="attachment_11875" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)"]Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)[/caption] There is no person better qualified than Kahneman to describe how the human psyche is rife with "cognitive traps." In this TED talk Kahneman explains that these traps "make it difficult to think about happiness." One foundational problem is that humans tend to resist admitting complexity; happiness is a monolithic term for most of us. Kahneman states, however, that "happiness is no longer a useful word, in that it applies to many things. We need to completely give up the simple word "happiness" in order to effectively communicate. One of the biggest problems is that there is a huge confusion between experience and memory when it comes to determining happiness. The distinction is with A) happiness IN your life versus B) happiness ABOUT your life (or WITH your life). The problem with trying to determine one's own happiness is exacerbated by the "focusing illusion." The effect of this illusion is that "we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance." Kahneman gave an example of a friend who claimed that a scratching sound at the very end of a music recording ruins the entire experience. This is utter nonsense, since the scratching sound occurred only at the end of the recording. It didn't ruin the entire experience. Rather, it ruined "the memory of the experience." Human beings consist of two selves: the experiencing self (who lives in the moment) and the remembering self (who keeps score and maintains the story of our lives, selecting and maintaining our memories. For the remembering self, a critical part of any story is how it ends. If it ends badly, the memory of the entire experience is contaminated (In this video, Kahneman describes earlier studies regarding colonoscopies which dramatically illustrated this point). Time is a funny thing for human beings. For our experiencing self, a two-week vacation is twice as good as a one-week vacation. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation might not be any better than a one-week vacation--"time has very little impact on the story" for the remembering self. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingMore on the complexity of happiness: New TED lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Milgram redux

There's a new French documentary based upon a faked French television show ("The Game of Death"). The "show" was based on the experiments Stanley Milgram conducted at Yale in the 1960's.

On the TV show, the game consisted of one participant asking questions to another player locked inside a booth with an electrode hooked up to his or her wrist. Any wrong answer meant the first player had to push a lever that subjected the victim in the booth to electrical charges up to 460 volts as punishment. The audience applauded and chanted "Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!" when the contestant inside the booth answered wrong.
The results were startling, just as they were in Milgram's study: 80% of the contestants administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks. BTW, it's not clear whether the audience consisted entirely of stooges--I assume that all audience members were stooges and that they had been instructed to encourage the reckless behavior of the contestants (if not, the consistently terrible audience reaction was phenomenally more interesting to me than the behavior of the contestants). The CNN reporter reporting on this French "show" was perplexed by the behavior of the contestants on this "show." She was flummoxed by the contestant's willingness to administer (what they believed to be) painful and apparently deadly shocks to innocent people. She quoted the show's French producer: "People were willing to act against their own morals, their own principles when they were ordered to do something extreme by a source they they trust is legitimate." According to the CNN reporter, the lesson is that "even the most well-adjusted person can be swayed to act in horrendous ways if the situation leads them to it--that anyone is vulnerable to this." The host of the CNN news show, Campbell Brown added, "I hope that's not the case." But the evidence is ubiquitous that people will happily allow entire communities of other people to needlessly suffer and die. We tolerate mass death of millions of innocent people, including children, through starvation and malaria right here on planet Earth, even though we could substantially alleviate those disasters if we only acted. We tolerate and even cheer on wars that have no purpose relating to "freedom," even though we know that using our terrifying weapons often takes the lives of numerous innocent human beings. We fail to guarantee a minimum safety net of health care for those who can't afford it, resulting in more deaths. We tolerate thousands of institutions that are "schools" only in name rather than insisting on paying a bit more for first rate teachers--we know that these sad public "schools" are ruining lives, but most of us couldn't care less (if we cared, would we be doing something about the situation? Consider too, these eight other ways to kill 3,000 people. How is it that we tolerate any of this? But we do tolerate needless suffering every day, most of it through our inaction. "The Game of Death" demonstrates (just as Milgram had earlier demonstrated) that people are also willing to hurt and kill through their one actions, not merely inactions. For the most part, however, I find this action/inaction distinction to be legalistic and distracting. Highly moral people don't make this distinction when lives are on the line. How can people on the "show" be so cruel? In my opinion, the Milgram study is a finding that relates to limited human attentional capacity. Our limited and rickety working memory can easily be filled with things (such as audience encouragement and the "authority figure" of a show host) which leaves little room for moral processing. Simply fill up our heads with TV, "the threat of terrorism," or whatever, and we are willing to not attend to everything else. We are incredibly fallible beings. I would also suggest that Hannah Arendt's concept of banality of evil illustrates this human vulnerability to attentional distraction. I explain my reasoning regarding human attention capacity in the context of Arendt's work here. Back to the "Game of Death". . . Some of the contestants purportedly explained that the power of television made them do those horrendous things, but this claim confuses me. I suspect that the live audience served as a proxy for that "television audience" (there actually wasn't any such audience, at least until the documentary came out). But assume that the live audience boo'd and hissed when shocks were administered, thereby working at cross-purposes with the show host. In such as case, I would assume that far fewer "lethal" shocks would have been administered. My belief, then, is that the fact that there was a television audience (even an imagined one) didn't cause the contestants to act in any particular way. Rather, the effect of that audience depends on how that audience reacts. No research needs to be cited for the fact that we are social animals and that we feel immense pressure to do the things that are approved by others around us (though I will cite this famous study by Solomon Asch). Some might find this sort of "show" bizarre, but I find it valuable, and I hope that the documentary reaches a wide audience. Humans cognition is a complex and conflicting bag of tricks, many of which work counter to others. That is one reason I have repeatedly stressed at this site that we should first and foremost think of humans as human animals, not the demigods . We desperately need the humility and the skepticism that usually comes with the acknowledgment that we are frail and fallible. Consider that when when humans are thinking least clearly, we are nonetheless capable of feeling certain that we are correct. We are a lot less competent than we'd like to believe. The French "show" is dramatic evidence that merely presenting an audience and an "authority figure" can severely inflict moral blindness. These two things blinded the contestants to the most basic rule morality: don't needlessly hurt and kill others. The more likely that human animals become consciously aware of their gaping cognitive and moral vulnerabilities (I consider these part and parcel), they are less likely to do great damage to other humans. Perhaps this show will remind us that we regularly need to exercise social skepticism and put on the moral brakes, even when those around us seem certain.

Continue ReadingMilgram redux

Primer on positive psychology by Martin Seligman

Tonight I viewed Martin Seligman's excellent 2004 TED lecture on positive psychology. Seligman introduced his talk by bemoaning the many decades during which psychology utilized only the "disease model," which he described as "Spot the loon." Some good things came of it, of course. Sullivan mentions that we can now treat many psychological illnesses (admitted only a small percentage all of them) and we can sometimes make miserable people less miserable. The disease model ignored normal people and high talent people, however. It also failed to help normal functioning people to become happier. Seligman carefully made the point that the skill set for avoiding dysfunction is dramatically different than the skills necessary for improving happiness. The concerns of positive psychology take over where the disease model left off. Positive psychology concerns both human strengths and human weaknesses. It includes building up the best things in life as well as preparing the worst. It includes helping to make the lives of normal people more fulfilling and nurturing talent (including genius). Positive psychology seeks to do all these things, to complement psychology's traditional aim of healing pathology. But what is happiness? Based on Seligman's research, happiness comes in three flavors (the following is from Seligman's website, Authentic Happiness, where you can take various self-tests at this site to determine your level of happiness):

First The Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible and having the skills to amplify the pleasures. This is, of course, the only true kind of happiness on the Hollywood view. Second, The Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life. Third, The Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.
For another basic outline of these approaches, see here. Traditionally, the first of these three forms of happiness, Pleasant Life (also called "pleasant emotion") was considered to be the entirety of happiness. Examples include social relationships, backrubs, a full stomach, orgasms, hobbies and entertainment. Pleasant Life activities invoke a form of happiness that consists of a "raw feeling" that is obvious--you know when it's happening. Pleasant Life feelings can be generated by spending time with others. Those who like to spend considerable time alone (I know one of them) have often been perceived as less happy. That characterization is not necessarily accurate, though, once we consider the two other basic forms of happiness. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingPrimer on positive psychology by Martin Seligman