Another well-deserved attack on rationality

Why do we do the things we do? Why did you propose that woman, for instance? Or why did you accept a job offer from that man? The January 29, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) takes a look at this question in an article by Mark Buchanan titled "Secret Signals: Are People's Interactions Driven by a Primitive, Not Linguistic Type of Communication?" Scientists have determined that there is a second channel of human communication that (often) acts in parallel with our rational thinking and verbal communication. It's difficult to pin down power and scope of this non-linguistic ability, however. Recently, computer scientist Alex Pentland has started using wearable electronic devices in order to study our ability to communicate using non-linguistic behavior. It is Pentland's aim to try to assist organizations to make better use of their personnel based upon this ubiquitous and powerful hidden communication. Many people resist the idea that many of our choices are not determined by "conscious intentions and deliberate choices." It's time to stop resisting, however. For example, our behavior is highly determined by our social context rather than our innate "character." On this topic I've often recommended an excellent book titled The Person and the Situation, by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett. See also, this earlier DI post titled "Laughing at not funny things, and the limits of introspection."

Continue ReadingAnother well-deserved attack on rationality

An appeal to practical moral wisdom

Barry Schwartz recently delivered a sensational 20-minute talk on the importance of practical wisdom. He began his talk by describing the obvious: we now live in a highly dysfunctional rule-bound society. What should we do about it? We need to make sure that kindness, care and empathy are a part of every job, whether or not these responsibilities are contained in the official job description. All of us need to have both moral will and moral skill, the two essential components of Aristotle's conception of "moral wisdom." Luckily for us, we now have a President who is willing to take the risk of reminding Americans of their duties to pursue moral wisdom. Schwartz deserved that standing ovation he received after delivering this talk at TED. Much of his talk concerned our obsessions with rules. Yes, rules are oftentimes hopeful. They often help us avoid the mistakes of the past. On the other hand, wise people know that they sometimes need to improvise. They know when to break the rules in order to remedy situations. They know that they are never excused from being kind and decent, regardless of the "rules." Schwartz gives several salient examples, an especially good one involving a janitor. Wise people know that they need to use rules not simply to "follow the rules" but to serve the needs of other people.

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The sacred places of people who are not religious

I've been reading more of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled "Divinity With or Without God." Haidt's travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include "food, body products, animal's, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene." Haidt found that people recruit disgust "to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves." (Page 186). To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that "cleanliness is next to godliness." If you don't perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob's Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven--or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow "up."

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine.  Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is "divine," and we justify it in various ways.  He cites Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that "sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior." He specifically cites Eliade's conclusion that even a person who is committed to a "profane existence" has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

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Boy monkeys prefer boy toys

There's no gender socialization in monkeys, right? Then why are the boy monkeys (vervets and rhesus) preferring "boy" toys to "girl" toys? The two sets of experiments have been reported by Psychology Today:

In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys.

I wish they had reported the actual results in this short article. They did report that the boy rhesus monkey preference for "boy" toys was "strong and significant." See also, this related post: Boys' Toys

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Stephen Colbert tries to understand how we decide

Stephen Colbert mixes it up with Jonah Lehrer, author of "How We Decide." The disjointed conversation does have its serious moments, with the focus being the emotional self versus the rational self. Sometimes I wonder whether Colbert is tempted to drop his character for ten minutes and just have a good conversation with a thoughtful guest. This might have been one of those times.

Continue ReadingStephen Colbert tries to understand how we decide