Can you tolerate NAMBLA?

image courtesty of the Federal Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons You think you're open-minded? What if the North American Man-Boy Love Association wanted to distribute a newsletter in your town? What if they wanted to hold a local parade celebrating pederasty? I am currently studying social psychology in graduate school, and I'm particularly interested in political psychology. One of my present research interests is political tolerance. "Political tolerance" refers to individuals' willingness to extend equal civil liberties to unpopular groups. When political scientists and psychologists measure political tolerance, they often probe individuals for their ability to withstand the most offensive, outlandish groups and speech possible. For example, a liberal-minded person may be asked whether they would be willing to allow a rally for the Klu Klux Klan or some extremist, militaristic group. Paradoxically, a truly tolerant person must be willing to allow racially intolerant speech. Political tolerance plays a cornerstone role in functioning democracies (at least, we think so). If voters can strip away the civil liberties of disliked political groups, those liberties lay on precarious ground indeed. If we cannot tolerate the words of anarchists or members of the Westboro Baptist Church, then we do not really believe in the boundlessness of speech at all. Academics say as much. In reality, voters are not so tolerant.

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Whence Yellow Pages?

A friend mentioned the "yellow pages" to me today, and it occurred to me that I haven't used "The Yellow Pages" for at least five years. I can't remember when I last even saw a copy of the Yellow Pages (until today when I dug out a copy from under a desk). For many years, whenever I've needed a phone number or other information regarding a business, I've used Internet tools. It didn't happen all at once that I stopped relying on Yellow Pages, so I didn't notice any particular date when when it happened. Imagine that the phone companies announced five years ago that there wouldn't be any more Yellow Pages--we might have noticed our discontinued use. But human cognition is often blind to incremental changes. I posted on this topic earlier, using the example of tigers. There are very few tigers living in the wild. Almost all of the tigers of the world are now living in captivity. Very few people were conscious of this change, because it was gradual, but it undeniably happened. If it had happened all at once (with a headline screaming "95% of the wild tigers are gone!") we would have noticed and perhaps reacted. This reminds me of a book by Howard Kurtz (Media Circus), where he suggested that the biggest story of the 20th Century was that millions of African Americans were moving from the rural South to the Urban North, but no one noticed because no one faxed a press release to the news media. In fact, studies show that we are not even able to notice relatively fast moving gradual changes. Because of this human cognitive limitation, important things constantly fall beneath our human attentional radar. Yes, we do notice when an airplane crashes and kills 100 people because headlines are blasted at us and we can perceive the crash site from a single vantage point. But we don't react to drawn out disasters of much greater magnitude. For instance, where are the headlines announcing that 40,000 Americans needlessly die of colon cancer every year because they don't get colonoscopies? That's 110 people who die every day. But they don't die at the same place and there is no crash site to provide dramatic video for news shows. How much else of importance gets entirely ignored because there aren't dramatic photos? Trends are often invisible, whether they are good trends or bad trends. Whether there is a decrease in the standard of living or whether many of us dramatically increase the amounts of corn fructose we eat, many trends are difficult to notice without mathematics and graphs. Most important trends are invisible unless we are vigilant and comfortable with mathematics. Perhaps this should be a word of caution for a society that is heavily afflicted with innumeracy; bad things can happen on our watch yet we might be oblivious. Things like the deterioration of our education system, the increase in xenophobia, the fact that many of us seem to operate burdened with attention deficits, the skyrocketing rate of diabetes, stagnation of wages for several decades, and who knows what else. We face many huge challenges as individuals and as a society. Are we trying to shake a bad personal habit such as overeating? Are we trying to lessen our dependence on oil? Being cognizant of our obliviousness to incremental change can help us by reminding us that we shouldn't be discouraged with tiny sporadic steps of progress when that is all we can muster. It doesn't necessarily take a sprinter to make significant progress. as long as we're going in the right direction. We should keep up our efforts even when it seems like we're not getting much of anywhere, because small steps in the right direction always eventually prevail, even though our progress is often invisible until we've almost arrived.

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Ashleigh Banfield’s story of wartime censorship

Ashleigh Banfield has finally gotten hired back to work at a major network, after losing her job at MSNBC in 2003 for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here's what she had to say back in 2003, which caused her to lose her job. She is speaking of what you are not shown by the news media when the nation is at war:

What didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.
Banfield also has some critically important things to say about the "Fox News effect" (the patriotizing and glorification of war). Reading this Huffpo post about Banfield reminds me of this post featuring similar comments by Amy Goodman. It also reminds me how Phil Donahue also lost his job at MSNBC for being critical of the Iraq invasion (more about Donahue's views here). These sorts of firings are actually predictable. The documentary "War Made Easy" reminds us that hawks close ranks around Presidents who start wars and they also put tremendous pressure on networks to do the same. Banfield's story reminds us that we need to strive to keep dissenting voices prominent during times of war because something about war makes us insanely fearful and even less able to reason than in times of peace. It is during times of war that we become collectively willing to let ourselves run amok wrapped in the flag.

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Halloween: Whence the pursuit of horror?

Some of the neighborhoods near my house in St. Louis have already celebrated Halloween. For instance, my street celebrates Halloween on the Sunday afternoon prior to Halloween. Celebrating in the daylight makes it easier for us to visit with little neighborhood children and their parents. The nearby Compton Heights neighborhood celebrates Halloween on the Saturday night prior to Halloween. Our family was invited to venture over to Compton Heights a few nights ago, and we weren’t disappointed. head Amidst all of the traditional candy-giving, we stumbled upon one particular house where the family had put together its own haunted house. The family owns a big old house, but also owns a separate large two-story carriage house in the back. They hired an electrician to wire up the carriage house with sophisticated lighting and they assembled a team of 20 friends and family to pose as various types of dead people inside the house. Not typical dead people, mind you. Dead people who stand still in the dim lighting and come alive just when you are convinced that they are mannequins (and there were quite a few mannequins too, some of them dismembered). When selected dead people came alive, they yelped, or they screamed; some of them reached out and grabbed you. There were ghouls and ghosts, a vampire, a mummy, floating bones, a guy with a “chainsaw,” and a beheaded guy who suddenly moaned, all of this horror looking rather real and all of these characters lurking carefully amidst the dim lighting as we toured this incredible house. front-of-haunted-houseEach of the photos in this post is from this house. Note that it’s not always easy to take photos in a darkly lit haunted house. While I was taking a photo of a decapitated head on a table, for instance, a dead man reached out and tugged on my sleeve, smudging the long exposure. How good was it? I stood outside for 30 minutes after I toured the haunted house, and every ten minutes or so, I saw a panicky grown child running from the haunted house crying. Bravo! I then learned that the haunted house family has been putting on this magnificent show, for free, for 15 years. Double Bravo! But as I walked away from the haunted house, I wondered two things.

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Is living in a city damaging your brain?

If we are to believe the results of a new study from Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, the answer is "yes". These finding come at an interesting crossroads-- for the first time ever, more humans live in cities than in rural settings. The findings argue that the brain becomes confused and tired as it is forced to respond to the massive amounts of stimulii that are present in cities. The brain is constantly searching its surroundings, trying to anticipate threats. Not only does one have to negotiate traffic and constantly re-assess the changing visual landscape, but this is often done while carrying on a conversation or mentally planning a route through the city. Quoting from Boston.com:

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Interestingly, the researchers found that just showing people a picture of an urban environment was enough to cause substantial impairment to the test subject's levels of attention and working memory. Similarly, a different study quoted in the article shows that even very small amounts of exposure to nature were enough to confer significant improvement on subjects' cognitive abilities and sense of well-being. Additionally, the research indicates that living in cities may also have a harmful effect on one's level of self-control.

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