The science of how to get along

Civilpolitics.org has a mission to use rigorous science to help others, including politicians, to get along. The mission is "to help you find academic scholarship that illuminates the causes and consequences of political civility and incivility." And here's more, from the "Moral Psychology" page:

At CivilPolitics, most (but not all) of us believe that direct appeals to people to behave civilly will have very limited effects. We take a more social-psychological approach to the problem of intergroup conflict. We are more interested in legal, systemic, and policy changes that will, for example, change the ways that the "teams" are drawn up (e.g., in elections), and supported (e.g., financially). We want to change the playing field and the rules of the game, in the hopes that players in the future (citizens as well as politicians) will be less likely to demonize each other, mischaracterize each others' motives, and refuse (on moral grounds) to engage in negotiations, interactions, and cooperative enterprises that would serve the nation's interests.
Check out the "Social Psychology" page, which contains this advice (with lots of explanatory links).

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Preparing for temptation by setting our own limits

When it comes to temptations, we often fail. I'm referring to over-eating, over-drinking, procrastinating, losing one's temper, speaking out in ignorance, and many other types of temptations--there are certainly hundreds of them. Maybe we don't immediately fail, but eventually, when we are faced with an easy opportunities to fail, we tend to succumb. Removing the opportunity ahead of time tends to remove much of the temptation. That is why a good strategy for avoiding obesity is to avoid bringing sugary/fatty/salty food into the house in the first place. This strategy of not allowing such food into the house is much more effective than bringing junk food into the house, then trying to ignore its easy accessibility and trying to just say no. Richard Thaler is known as the “Father of Behavioral Economics.” At Edge.org, Thaler warns that we are not better off to have more alternatives to choose from. His reason runs parallel to the reasoning of Barry Schwartz, who warned of the “paradox of choice.” According to Thaler, “there are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.” Thaler mentions the example of Odysseus, who instructed his crew to tie him to the mast and the decision of Cortés to burn his ships upon arriving in Mexico, thus removing retreat as an option. He then offers this general principle:

Many of society's thorniest problems, from climate change to Middle East peace could be solved if the relevant parties could only find a way to commit themselves to some future course of action.

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Of course I knew how things would turn out back then: The Illusion of Inevitability

In his new book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman notes that human beings constantly claim that they understood the past much better than they actually did at the time. Referring to Nissam Taleb's concept of “narrative fallacy,” Kahneman details how we employ flawed stories from the past to shape our current views of the world. This is not a good thing (though it often feels good while we engage in over-confident reasoning, as pointed out by Robert Burton); the narrative fallacy is a pernicious problem often a dangerous one.

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories of people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on countless events that failed to happen. Any recent civilian event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing that they are true.
[Page 199]. Human beings strive to create and embrace simple stories that give simple causal accounts based upon general propensities and personality traits. The “halo effect” contributes to this coherence--we tend to assign a generalized valence to other humans, and to assume that those people always act in accordance with our generalized positive or negative characterization of them. In this world, handsome people are also smart, moral and athletic. The halo effect keeps our narratives simple and it leaves little room for true statements such as the following shocker: “Hitler loved dogs and little children.” Our simplistic stories don’t leave room for outlier qualities. We resist the fact that obtuse people are sometimes correct and that the people we admire sometimes act foolishly.

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Excellence honed by self-criticism: the insights of Daniel Kahneman

"Think of, and look at, your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost." - Samuel Butler "The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month." - Fyodor Dostoevsky At Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis celebrates the distinguished career of Daniel Kahneman, whose most recent book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, comes to mind at least several times every day, ever since I started reading it (I've posted several times on the book already, and it is so filled with challenging and often counter-intuitive observations that I will likely mention it dozens more times. Here's one snippet from Lewis' article. The topic is the unrelenting intensity of Kahneman's self-criticism, a technique Kahneman employs to a borderline-sadistic extent, though it has admittedly served him well:

He was working on a book, he said. It would be both intellectual memoir and an attempt to teach people how to think. As he was the world’s leading authority on his subject, and a lot of people would pay hard cash to learn how to think, this sounded promising enough to me. He disagreed: he was certain his book would end in miserable failure. He wasn’t even sure that he should be writing a book, and it was probably just a vanity project for a washed-up old man, an unfinished task he would use to convince himself that he still had something to do, right up until the moment he died. Twenty minutes into meeting the world’s most distinguished living psychologist I found myself in the strange position of trying to buck up his spirits. But there was no point: his spirits did not want bucking up. Having spent maybe 15 minutes discussing just how bad his book was going to be, we moved on to a more depressing subject. He was working, equally unhappily, on a paper about human intuition—when people should trust their gut and when they should not—with a fellow scholar of human decision-making named Gary Klein. Klein, as it happened, was the leader of a school of thought that stressed the power of human intuition, and disagreed with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman said that he did this as often as he could: seek out people who had attacked or criticized him and persuade them to collaborate with him. He not only tortured himself, in other words, but invited his enemies to help him to do it. “Most people after they win the Nobel Prize just want to go play golf,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton and a disciple of Amos Tversky’s. “Danny’s busy trying to disprove his own theories that led to the prize. It’s beautiful, really.” . . .
Now, if you think the above is extreme, read on. If only I would be so determined to see my own thought-process like an outsider sees it, to this extent:
Then, after I left him, he sat down and reviewed his own work. The mere fact that he had abandoned it probably raised the likelihood that he would now embrace it: after all, finding merit in the thing would now prove him wrong, and he seemed to take pleasure in doing that. Sure enough, when he looked at his manuscript his feelings about it changed again. That’s when he did the thing that I find not just peculiar and unusual but possibly unique in the history of human literary suffering. He called a young psychologist he knew well and asked him to find four experts in the field of judgment and decision-making, and offer them $2,000 each to read his book and tell him if he should quit writing it. “I wanted to know, basically, whether it would destroy my reputation,” he says. He wanted his reviewers to remain anonymous, so they might trash his book without fear of retribution. The endlessly self-questioning author was now paying people to write nasty reviews of his work. The reviews came in, but they were glowing. “By this time it got so ridiculous to quit again,” he says, “I just finished it.”
I urge you to visit Lewis' fine article. More importantly, if you haven't done so yet, I urge you to invest the time to read Thinking, Fast and Slow.. Michael Lewis is spot on when he describes Kahneman's work and persona (I haven't met Kahneman, but his gentle manner and his stunning ability to get to the point and then to offer real-world applications, shine through, chapter after chapter. I've rarely read a book so bursting with useful ideas for understanding one's self and others, for learning to really understand those things we think we are certain about. And Kahneman's book is far more than this too--it is a book with ideas for helping you to avoid many types of cognitive traps that would cost you dearly. It is a book for all of those who are students of the human mind, even on their off-hours.

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Fighting singers

Who wants to see a bunch of good singers performing? Not so many hands. Who wants to see a bunch of good singers competing, with the losers sent home and the winner crowned as champion? I see lots of hands, and you people might be big fans of a TV show called The Voice, which just completed it's finale for this season. A man named Jermaine Paul was the overall winner, and everyone else from a huge field of singers, was not the winner. The stage from one of the earlier shows says it all. The singers were competing against each other in a boxing ring. They are hitting each other with notes. This is the art of war. The image at the right was from one of the early shows this year. I saw a few of the shows, and my family kept me posted about the shows I missed. Although this post is about singing, it could have been about most anything in America. We are a country that insists that we rank things from bad to good and that we need to have a best, a winner. To have a winner, we'll need some dejected competitors, some sad tears. [caption id="attachment_22546" align="alignleft" width="218" caption="Image from The Voice"][/caption] I thought of The Voice two weeks ago, when I attended a poetry reading by 50 seventh graders chosen by their schools to present their work. No, they didn't compete against each other at the reading. They merely stood up (many of them nervously) and read their work. We in the audience applauded them all because they were all admirable. To keep most people interested in anything, however, you need a good overall story. World class art hanging in a museum doesn't get loud applause. It turns out that conflict provides its own story. All you need is two people struggling over something, even something stupid, and you've diverted attention toward the struggle from every angle, like laser beams. While at work today, I glanced at the TV in the lunch room--it's always on and it forces me to see what corporate garbage (not always, but often enough) is pouring out. I glanced at the tube in time to see the beginning of the Wolf Blitzer "news" show called "The Situation Room." The opening graphics appeared to a series of images from around the world viewed through a gun site from a fighter jet. I suppose this isn't too surprising, given that the show airs in a country that is always at war, and would lose any sense of identity were it not at war. Our national anthem fits us well. Just keep giving us enemies or else we'll create them. If we weren't currently obsessed about the Middle East, we'd be demonizing China (actually we already are demonizing and provoking China). Would a TV show that simply featured excellent singers singing get good ratings? Not likely, but this is true even if the performances were much the same as one would see on The Voice. That is my assumption, and I based it on the powerful and highly addictive effect of gratuitous conflict, of conflict pornography.

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