Todd Kashdan at The Huffington Post
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Psychology Today Blog - Curious? Discovering and creating a life that matters.
Don't Be Fooled by Scientists, Data, Statistics, and Sexy Women
Being a scientist means coming up with questions about human behavior and formally testing them. It also means that in my social circles, you are officially a geek or a nerd. In childhood, unusual things happen. Have you ever had someone climb a telephone poll and take a sentry position until school ended to jump on your back and beat you into submission? I didn't think so. As you get wiser, you embrace and relish this geekiness.
When I promote science to the public, I am serious about carefully interpreting the data. This is why I am commenting on my fellow blogger's posts which seem to be obsessed with women's breasts for the sake of talking about women's breasts. Nothing wrong with that if this was pornub, penthouse, or maxim, but this is psychology today. Also, nothing wrong with talking about sex if the focus is on good science with a reasonable take-home message.
Here was the question being asked, "Do women with bigger breasts get picked up more frequently by hitchhikers?" Personally, using limited scientific resources to study this kind of question is a waste of taxpayer dollars- but it does make for good conversation when you are snorting ketamine on the rooftop of an ice cream truck with your friends. According to the research study itself and the blog post, lo and behold, common sense wins. Women with bigger breasts appear to be more likely to be picked up by strange men than women with smaller breasts (p < .03).
Why Are We Afraid of Having Regrets?
As scientists, we have learned a lot about regret. The Butthole Surfers, a punk rock band in the 80's, captured the findings best in their lyrics to "Sweet Loaf" off their album Locust Abortion Technician:
Daddy, what does regret mean?
Well son, the funny thing about regret is,
It's better to regret something you have done,
Than to regret something you haven't done.
While I do listen to the Butthole Surfers on occasion, you might be surprised to know that they are not the definitive authority on the subject. I define regret as what we feel when we realize that our current situation might be better if we decided to act differently. It's a backward looking, unpleasant feeling where you blame yourself and wish you could undo the past. Perhaps you felt regret when you shared the good news with co-workers that your heroin problem last year should have little impact on your pregnancy. Or when you told your kids to shut the $%# up after listening to them whine for four hours on a car trip.
Why Does Religion Persist? A Look at Bizarre Ideas, Hypocrisy, and God's Obsession with Sex
As a psychologist, the most interesting questions have nothing to do about whether or not God exists. An idea that cannot be proved or disproved and thus is trite, contrived, and appallingly boring. Instead, I am interested in the benefits, costs, and struggles of people grappling with the confusion and randomness of the human condition. Why do some people turn to religion while others do not? What function does religion serve? What happens when religious convictions are challenged? How well integrated is a person's religion in their everyday life?
Consider the widely held idea that supernatural forces intervene to provide benefits to believers. People regularly pray or strive to be virtuous in hopes of getting a piece of the action. If you follow sacred texts literally, attempts to be completely virtuous are doomed from the start. In the only document ever written by the supernatural creator for a human audience, the author felt that a full 20% of rules should focus on sex. Not only should you avoid adultery but you should not even have a single lustful thought about your neighbor's wife. Should we ignore the fact that our supernatural author held sexist views that were no different than other people living around 1500 BC? Should we ignore the fact that our supernatural author failed to consider the cruel irony of these commandments? That is, the more you try to conceal thoughts about the sexy, curvaceous body of your neighbor, the more frequent and intense those unwanted cravings are going to be. Scientists have discovered that willpower operates like a muscle. If you exert too much energy trying to control your thoughts, you are going to exhaust your limited energy supply. When your energy supply is limited, you are less able to delay gratification, resist sexual temptations, or do much of anything that requires self-control. Think about it, the inherent limitations of willpower ensure that you will defy the so-called creator of the universe. Be mindful of the commandments and try to resist coveting your neighbor and in turn, you are going to fail miserably and feverishly fantasize about them. There are four ways to think about this:
1. There is now a built-in mechanism to excuse the so-called creator when things don't go the way that believers want. How many rape victims prayed right before a perpetrator violated them? How many Haitians die daily from diphtheria and infectious diseases while talking to their supernatural friend? What parent of a missing child does not pray? Are we to believe that a benevolent supernatural entity feels that some parents deserve to have their prayers answered, with their child returning home, while others deserve to be ignored? Your prayers weren't answered because you just weren't virtuous enough....
Does Money Influence Happiness? Depends on How You Spend Your Cash
Science cannot prove anything. The word "proven" is a clear sign that you are no longer in the province of science, rather you are in the province of people with an agenda. Be wary! But we can find evidence strongly in favor of one idea compared with another. The idea that money leads to happiness or unhappiness is a soundbite. Perfect for a radio advertisement. Ridiculous if you are trying to describe decades of research on the topic. You want a soundbite? Whether money leads to happiness or unhappiness depends on how you spend your money.
Want to dive into the research? If you live in a household that earns more than $40,000 per year, increases in income have a miniscule impact on happiness. You can afford taking your child to the emergency room when the knife misses the bagel and slices through the soft tendons in their fingers. Unlike families with less income, you are not required to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether taking your child to the hospital is worth living on bologna and water for the next week. This leads to my first commonsense point.
The value of money depends on how much money is at your disposal.
Imagine a Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing Where Senators Show Strengths & Cojones
Similar to most Americans, I want to see a change in how we decide who gets a lifetime contract to uphold laws in this country. Let me state from the onset, I am less interested in Kagan and more interested in the confirmation process. There are two sides to the process- what Kagan brings to the table and what a slew of senators will say and do.
Who has not been amazed that over the past 20 years, Supreme Court nominees can essentially evade questions about any value or belief they hold. Clarence Thomas, in his confirmation hearing, stated that he never thought about Roe v Wade. Since then, every nominee has cribbed this game-winning strategy. To reveal your thoughts is to lose votes from one side of the aisle. Is it possible to modify how confirmation hearings are conducted so that a nominee can inform the public about their value system? If a nominee is punished for disclosure they are going to express as little as possible. To me, there is nothing more important than getting the best person confirmed. Period.
I have been trying to think of ways that senators can unleash their intelligence, creativity, and independent thinking that made them want to get into government in the first place. What if senators had to field questions about their upcoming vote while outside of the spotlight? What if they were videotaped while answering? What if these videos could be shared with the general public? Imagine senators were asked questions such as the following:
What Republicans, Democrats, and Everyone Else Need to Know About Morality
Billions of hours and government dollars have been devoted to protecting the nuclear family with one mother, one father, and 1.86 kids. Why? Because several prestigious people and agencies carefully evaluated the evidence to reach the conclusion that the welfare of children must come first (and anything other than a heterosexual household is corrosive). Right?
There is an antiquated idea that human beings are incredibly rational when it comes to moral decisions. Let me point out that more often than not, it is the reverse. We experience an automatic, immediate "gut feeling" that drives our moral judgments. Not unlike a doctor that smacks a rubber sledge hammer to your knee. Regardless of the mental willpower deployed, your leg jerks. We have intuitions that lead to moral judgments and then after the fact, we start deliberating on reasons for our conclusions.
Let me give you an example from the research of Dr. Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia. Someone asks you to sign the following form.
We Need Psychologists in Government and the White House Inner Circle
I could care less if someone paid their dues with decades of government experience. In fact, this often works against people's ability to improve the welfare of the country. Because they are inside the system, they often fail to pay attention to what works outside of the system.
I want someone who can critically analyze information, consider alternative perspectives before reaching a formal decision, communicate in an emotionally intelligent and persuasive manner, and form good relationships with people. Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can't reach decisions. Being open to alternative perspectives is insufficient if you can't critically assess what information is helpful, unhelpful, and tangential. Forming good relationships is insufficient if you are unable to critically assess other people's biases and take this into account when working with them. Being able to reach a decision is insufficient if you can't communicate in a clear, persuasive manner why it is the best possible option of many available.
We need people that are experts in problem solving, decision making, communication, human behavior, and social relationships to create the conditions for a government to function optimally. This is the province of people trained in psychology- the science of human mental functioning and behavior.
Science Shows You Can Die of Boredom, Literally
Monthly magazines from Reader's Digest to Cosmopolitan are inundated with tips on how to sleep better, find happiness, and weave seriously sexy hair. Taking nothing away from being happy and blowing your romantic partner's mind on valentine's day, there are few things as valuable as staying alive.
Sometimes we fail to take life and death seriously. Think back to those painful days of calculus class in high school. Like the sounds of a banshee ripping out its entrails, you and your classmates probably screamed the same screams heard year after year - "I'm so bored, I could die!" And yet, did your calculus teacher care? Did they offer a hug or show the slightest empathy? Probably not. And what about the desperate pleas of innocent children on long, monotonous car rides. All children want is a life free from boredom's jaws of death and yet, parents often ignore them. With this in mind, try to withhold your skepticism for a moment as I share a brand new scientific discovery:
The more bored you are, the more likely you are to die prematurely
Can Two Tylenol a Day Keep Rejection and Heartbreak Away?
Across multiple languages and cultures, people use injury-related terms such as hurt, heartbreak, and "emotional pain" to describe what it feels like to be rejected by other people. The notion of being hurt by other people might appear to be nothing more than a metaphor. But getting your feelings hurt actually hurts. Researchers discovered this after scanning people's brains while playing videogames. On the computer, they tossed around a ball with two other people who supposedly logged on from another part of the world. In reality, the program was rigged so that people were heavily involved (getting the ball for half the throws) or excluded (getting the ball less than a handful of times over 5 minutes). The results were astounding. Here you have people playing a game with a ball that didn't actually exist with a group of people whom they didn't know and never expected to meet, and they really cared about the extent they were included. After the game was over, those who were excluded witnessed a plummet in their self-esteem and they viewed their life as less satisfying and meaningful. I can't stress enough, all that happened was that they didn't get the ball thrown to them as often as they liked. Clearly, little is necessary to make us feel rejected and devalued as a person. We simply cannot underestimate the power of feeling cared for, valued, and connected to other people.
But let's up the ante. What if you openly despised the people who played catch with you in a videogame? Jews being told the other players thought the holocaust was a hoax, Black people told the other players were members of the KKK, and Christian fundamentalists told the other players were atheists. In this situation, who would possibly care about getting the ball? The ball might even be viewed as contaminated after touching the mitts of these rival group members. Guess what? It didn't matter. Failing to get the ball thrown to you, even by people you despise, still led to anxious, depressed, and lonely feelings. And in these studies, when ostracized, the parts of the brain that lit up happened to be the same brain regions that light up when you get a migraine or slice through fleshy fingers while cutting bagels. What this means is that overlap exists between the brain systems that control physical and social pain!
Now, if emotional pain is processed in the same way as physical pain, then perhaps the same strategies to diminish physical pain might be equally effective when we feel excluded, rejected, or ostracized. Think analgesic drugs. Think Tylenol or Excedrin (actually, the active ingredient called acetaminophen). To test this idea, a few of my colleagues randomly assigned people to take a dose of acetaminophen (2,000mg) or a placebo each day for 3 weeks and provide daily reports on what happened to them and what they felt. By day 15, those taking acetaminophen reported feeling less painful reactions to being rejected on a daily basis than those taking placebo. The ability of acetaminophen to ease hurt feelings, enhance self-esteem, and reduce anxiety, sadness, and hostility grew stronger each day until the end of the study. Mad science at its best.
State of the Union, Haiti, Prison Rape, and More
What if we could be guided instead of governed by our brains? What if we could be open and receptive as we listen to people with views that differ from our own? What if we decided to think for ourselves instead of falling prey to political party allegiances? What if our leaders and elected officials could do the same?
For a few minutes, let me ask for your open, receptive attitude. There are a number of major issues facing the world right now, and too many people are reacting with automatic, reflexive political views. When did our society start assuming that our leaders would solve all of our woes in one year or less? When did our society start assuming that our leaders can do everything on their own, against any obstacle? There are no easy answers to complex problems and sometimes we have to tolerate some discomfort in the short term until solutions unfold. In a climate where the answers to most questions are a mouse-click away, I think we often forget that sometimes solutions take time. How long does it take to deal with an economic recession? Who the %$#@ knows? How long does it take to end a war and stabilize a country such as Iraq or Afghanistan? Who the %$#@ knows? I do know that everyone on the opposing side of the political party in power has an answer, but that doesn't mean they know. If there is one thing that social scientists have discovered, its that human beings are horrible at making accurate assessments about themselves, other people and the future. Knowledge of these flawed assessments is a starting point. Working together with people with diverging perspectives is another starting point. Increasing mindful thinking is another starting point.
With this in mind, I thought we would play a game of "would you rather..." Essentially, I am going to pit ideas against each other to see what you would do. There are no right or wrong answers. The goal is to discover what matters to us. The goal is to explore the motives behind our movements. The goal is increase tolerance of complex, ambiguous situations.