Can you get self-esteem by trying to convince yourself that you have it? Apparently not, according to a new study reported by the BBC:
Canadian researchers found those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves.
They said phrases such as "I am a lovable person" only helped people with high self-esteem.
The study appears in the journal Psychological Science.
Geoffrey Miller has just published a new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior. I haven't read it yet, but I am now ordering it, based on Miller's terrific prior work (see here, for example). In the meantime, I did enjoy this NYT blog review of Spent, which includes this provocative question:
List the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness. Count how many items appear on both lists.
If you're looking for simplistic answers, you won't get them from Miller. I won't spoil the answers he obtained or his analysis of those answers, but you'll find them here. [addendum] I found this one item refreshingly honest. Refreshingly, because I know a lot of parents, I see their faces, I hear their complaints (and their exhultations). I know that it's PC to say that having children is a continuous wonderful joy and that all parents are glad they did had children. Miller's research suggests that the answer is not this simple:[Here's an answer that appears [much more on the ‘expensive’ than on the ‘happy’ lists [includes] Children, including child care, school fees, child support, fertility treatments. Costly, often disappointing, usually ungrateful. Yet, the whole point of life, from a Darwinian perspective. Parental instincts trump consumer pleasure-seeking.
I’ve previously written about a fascinating marshmallow experiment here and here. To set the stage, keep in mind that marshmallows are the equivalent of crack cocaine for young children. In the experiment, numerous four-year olds were each left alone with a marshmallow and told that they could eat it if they wanted. They were also told that if they could wait until the experimenter returned (which would happen 15 minutes later), they could have two marshmallows. Only about 30% of the children had the discipline to wait for the experimenter to return. When the psychologists followed up on these children fourteen years later, they found some startling things. Those four-year-olds who exerted the willpower to wait for two marshmallows scored an average of more than 200 points higher on the SAT than those who couldn’t wait. Those who could wait also show themselves to be more cooperative, more able to work under pressure and more self-reliant. In sum, they were dramatically more able to achieve their goals than those who couldn’t wait. Which leads me to this thought: Are Internet social sites the cyber-equivalent of marshmallow dispensers? Since reading of the marshmallow experiment, I have repeatedly thought of inability of many people to resist spending hours on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I also think of those who burn long hours on MySpace and those who are non-stop texters. Perhaps Internet news junkies belong in the same category. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there are numerous folks who aren’t getting nearly enough important things done in their lives (things THEY consider to be important) who are spending immense numbers of hours chatting and gossiping. I personally know some of these people. If these were retired people without any daily obligations, it would be one thing. Many of them, however, are blowing countless chances to make significant progress on goals that they themselves have set.
A group of scientists has now suggested that laughing can be detected in mammalian species as simple as rats. This discussion of laughing animals is discussed at Alan Boyle's blog at MSNBC:
How do you graph the evolution of a laugh? Researchers tickled babies and six different kinds of apes, quantified their giggles, and found that the patterns fit a classic evolutionary tree.
Those patterns hint at the ancient origins of human hilarity and suggest that other social species - including apes, dogs and rats - really, truly laugh as well.
Or check out a laughing gorilla here. Why do we laugh? Mostly, we laugh at things that are not funny. See here, for more information on the psychology of laughing.We are in the middle of a huge economic crisis. Should we listen to the experts? Of course we should, because the economy and the financial sector are horrifically complicated. What happens when the experts disagree, however? To which experts should we listen? I took a stab at that question recently, but I remain unconvinced that any of the economics experts can be trusted. Yes, there are people like George Soros who have made a phenomenal amount of money during the crisis, but this makes me wonder whether he (and all of the other recent success stories) are smart or whether they are lucky. Today, Nicholas Kristof (in the NYT) reminds us that many experts (at least political experts) have a terrible track record. His opening sentence: "Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff?" He warns us of the “Dr. Fox effect,” named for a "pioneering series of psychology experiments in which an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators." Despite the fact that the lectures consisted of gibberish, they were well received. He mentions a study showing that "clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses." He also mentions a study by Philip Tetlock which determined that "The [82,000] predictions of [284] experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board." Those experts who were the most impressive to most people "provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites." I'm reminded of Alan Sokal's intentionally nonsensical article that he submitted to the postmodern journal, Social Text. See here for more of the details. BTW, if you want to generate your own postmodern bullshit, use this postmodernist bullshit generator (every time you hit the link, more impressive-sounding bullshit will be assembled automatically into an article). How far astray are we led by "experts"? Consider investment "experts." There are none worse. Entire industries are built on the thoroughly disproved notion that a stock-picker can consistently beat the market. Dan Smolin has made a career of proving that stock-picker experts are thoroughly and demonstrably terrible at what they claim to be. But many of us still run to these financial "experts" to help us pick the "right" stocks. Just think of the hundreds of political military experts who were similarly awful at their recommendations and predictions regarding the invasion of Iraq. They appeared hundreds of time on network TV during the few weeks prior to the invasion, all of them confident in their assessments and advice. Consider, also that fewer than 1% of them took anti-war stances. Consider, also, that many of these "experts" were secretly in positions to financially benefit from an invasion of Iraq. Consider the thousands of religious experts, from coast to coast, who loudly and confidently tell their religious followers that there is a heaven and that they will go there, without the tiniest big of evidence in support. The followers of fundamentalist preachers continue to listen to these guys even when they attack evolutionary biologists, even though these religious leaders have no training in science and no basic understanding of the principles of evolutionary biology. Everyone loves weather forecasters, right? These guys are wrong so incredibly often that no station dares to post their track records for those five-day forecasts they confidently present night after night. The list goes on and on. We insist on listening to the experts, medical experts, beauty experts, psychologists, their track records be damned. That's because they are the best that we've got, no matter how wrong they are how often. The bottom line is that we crave experts because we crave certainty, even where there isn't any. The confirmation bias causes us to rely heavily on experts hawking our own opinions, even when there is no evidence in support, as long as the expert dishes out those opinions with a loud confident voice. And a fancy business suit doesn't hurt either.