Mental Health and Extrinsic Goals

Are you looking for psychological research that you can immediately and directly use to improve your own life? Jonathan Hari has described important research by Tim Kasser. The article in the LA Times is "We know junk food makes us sick. Are ‘junk values’ making us depressed?" The research explored what happens when we are primarily motivated by extrinsic goals rather than intrinsic goals.

Imagine you play the piano. If you play it in the morning because it gives you joy, that is an intrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it to get anything else out of it; you are doing it simply because that experience is worth doing, in and of itself. Now imagine you play the piano to impress your parents, or in a dive bar you hate to pay the rent, or to seduce somebody into sleeping with you. That would be an extrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it because you think the experience is worthwhile; you are doing it to get something out of it.

Kasser found that people who are motivated primarily by intrinsic goals are much happier than those motivated by extrinsic goals.

People who achieved their extrinsic goals didn’t experience any increase in day-to-day happiness. None. Your promotion? Your fancy car? The new iPhone? The expensive necklace? They won’t improve your happiness at all.

But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. As they worked at it and felt they became, say, a better friend, they became more satisfied with life. Being a better dad? Dancing for the sheer joy of it? Helping another person, just because it’s the right thing to do? They do significantly boost your happiness.

Kasser discovered that people whose lives were dominated by extrinsic values had a worse time in almost every respect. They felt sicker, and they were angrier. They experienced less joy, and more despair. They had worse relationships, and they were more insecure. [T]he more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be. . . .

Junk food looks like food, but it doesn’t meet our underlying nutritional needs. In a similar way, junk values don’t meet our underlying psychological needs — to have meaning and connection in our lives. Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically.

Hari discussed Kasser's research with Joe Rogan in 2018:

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“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

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How Serious are you about “Follow the Science”?

Sometimes science hurts. Are you really willing to follow the science? Here is a bellwether test from Geoffrey Miller:

Here's the evidence for the blank slate crowd: "Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences," Molecular Psychiatry, February 2021.

Twin and family studies report that genetic differences are associated with individual differences in intelligence test scores (Box 2). If studies from all ages are taken together, genetic differences account for about 50% (standard error [SE] about 2%) of the variation in intelligence [24]. Higher heritability (see Glossary) estimates are found in samples of adults (where it can be 70% or slightly more) than in children (where estimates as low as 20–30% have been reported) [24,25,26,27]. The finding that intelligence is heritable has been replicated across multiple data sets sourced from different countries and times [28]. Our emphasis herein is on results from the newer, DNA-based studies rather than on traditional twin and family studies.

DNA-based studies have shown that a pattern of hierarchical variance is evident at the genetic as well as the phenotypic level. Using genomic structural equation modelling [29] it was found that a genetic general factor explained, on average, 58.4% (SE = 4.8%, ranging from 9 to 95% for individual tests) of the genetic variance across seven cognitive tests in people with European ancestry. This provides some support for the idea that the phenotypic structure of intelligence is in part due to genetic effects that act on a general factor of intelligence and also at more specific cognitive levels.

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Jonathan Haidt: “We Were Fooled in the 1990s into Thinking that Democracy was Easy.”

What happened to progress in the US? It seemed like we had a plan and a good track record for progress back in the 1990s. A lot of things happened, of course. That is the topic of this discussion involving Jonathan Haidt and John Wood Jr and April Lawson. Here's how Haidt set the table for the longer discussion:

We can go back to some of the ideas in The Righteous Mind, because that's the summary of my own work as a social psychologist who studies morality. What I've always tried to do in my work is look at evolution. What is human nature. How did it evolve. [What is the] interplay of human nature with culture? And of course, everything can change over the course of just a few decades, too. We're very dynamic species.

What I'd like to put on the put on the table here first: let's really lower our expectations for humanity. Okay. Now, this sounds depressing. But let's be serious here. What kind of creatures, are we? We are primates who evolved to live in small groups that dominate territory, in competition with other groups were really, really good at coming together to fight those other groups. Part of our preparation for doing that, I believe, is the psychology of religion, sacredness, tribal rituals. We have all this really complicated stuff we do that binds us to each other. This is a human universal. Every group has rituals. I'm a big fan of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

And so from that kind of perspective we ought to still be pre-civilization times with very high rates of murder. And somehow we escaped that. Somehow we've had this incredible ascent. This unbelievably rapid ascent, in which we've gotten wealthier, smarter, healthier. We've made extraordinary progress on women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, the concern about the environment. So let's start by appreciating our lowly origins as really violent tribal creatures, and the way that we've rocketed up from

Okay, now, in the last 10 or so, years, 10 to 20 years, we've had a little bit of a come-down. I really want to put this not just in an evolutionary perspective, but in a recent historical perspective, because this, I think, is the key to understanding what is happening to us now. It is that we were fooled in the 1990s into thinking that democracy was easy. The founding fathers were under no such illusion. They knew that democracy is prone to faction. That's what Madison wrote about, especially in Federalist 10. They knew that democracy is generally self-destructed, so they gave us all kinds of safeguards, They tried to create a system that would not be so prone, a system in which these tribal, irrational emotional creatures might actually live together. And it worked. It worked pretty well. And it worked badly at times.

But by the 1990s, we had the the mistaken view, that if we just wait for Iran, and Russia and North Korea to develop market economies, they'll get prosperous, their people will demand rights. And this was true for China too. That people will demand rights. Liberal democracies will break out everywhere. Liberal democracies are the endpoint, the end of history.

And so that's the way those of us who live through--I'm older than you guys--but the late 20th century was an incredibly dangerous and an exciting time in which there was a victor and it was liberal democracy. Okay, but like in a lot of movies where it seems like there's an early denouement and everything's great? Well, we still have a lot of stuff to go and in the 21st century, things have really come down from there. So that's the backstory.

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The Rate at which Children Learn New Words

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar notes that by age 3 an average child can use about 1,000 words (double Kanzi’s bonobo world record); by age 6, around 13,000; and by age 18, some 60,000: ‘that means it has been learning an average of 10 new words a day since its first birthday, the equivalent of a new word every 90 minutes of its waking life.

FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, Timothy Garton Ash (2017)

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