One Among Many

Harnessing spirituality

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:40:15 +0000

For many people with a scientific mindset, spirituality is a dirty word. Look at the semantic space of the term. Religion-organized or otherwise-comes to mind, along with Mesmerism, the Ouija board, reincarnation, angels, and belief in a benign and caring universe. All of these semantic associates are either based on untestable ideas or ideas that have been tested and refuted. If you call yourself spiritual you must be dim or naïve.

For spirituality to be rescued from such devastation, it must be redefined. I thought this was impossible until I read George Vaillant's book "Spiritual evolution: A scientific defense of faith" (2008). Though I still cringe at the book's subtitle, I endorse Vaillant's project. Vaillant searches for spirituality in a part of the mammalian brain called the limbic system. The limbic system is a collection of brain structures regulating emotional experience. There is a lot of recent neuroscience that literally illuminates, by way of fMRI, what's going on these parts of the brain. Admittedly, the term ‘limbic system' is a bit of shortcut because the structures it comprises are phenomenally diverse. Yet, they share in common the task of giving rise to distinctive experiences that have evolved among mammals, and that are most refined and differentiated in human beings.

Traditionally, research has focused on negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and sadness. These emotions are basic and can be found in many non-human animals. Other negative emotions, such as guilt, shame, or disgust are more social and more sophisticated. These emotions are highly specialized and discrete. For a long time, it seemed that there was no equivalent degree of differentiation among the positive emotions. This is where recent research and Vaillant's project come in. There is a range of positive emotions that goes far beyond ‘feeling good' or ‘being happy.' Vaillant distinguishes between happiness, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion, among others. For each, he reviews relevant neuroscientific research and makes a case for a distinct evolutionary pathway.

The core of Vaillant's argument is that it is the experience of positive emotions that deserves to be called spiritual. A spiritual person is someone who is capable of experiencing joy in play, forgiveness after having been wronged, compassion with others who have been derailed, awe when in communion with others or the splendor of nature.

You may ask ‘Why do we need the notion of spirituality when the experience and the study of these positive emotional states is quite enough?' And ‘Would one not have to include negative emotions, which are as-if not more-differentiated than positive emotions under the umbrella of spirituality?'

Here, Vaillant does not give us much guidance, so I will attempt an answer. It seems to me that negative emotions don't require a spiritual portfolio because they are so closely bound to the ego or self-consciousness. Often, we know why we feel fearful, angry, disgusted, or, perhaps to a lesser extent, sad. These states are about us; they are aversive, and we seek to end them. In contrast, positive emotions-excepting perhaps pride-tend to transcend the ego. In joy, forgiveness, compassion, and awe, the ego's boundaries temporarily crumble. Spirituality happens when we get over ourselves, if only for a moment. This may be why many people consider belief in a ‘higher power' essential to spirituality. On strict cognitive terms, a literal belief in a higher power may be ‘hoke,' to use a term Vaillant relishes. With a more liberal definition, though, it does make sense. The ‘higher power' may just be a placeholder for anything beyond the confines of conscious egocentric self-awareness. On the inside, these out-of-ego forces include all the massive work being done by our brains that we, by necessity, will never be able to articulate. On the outside, these forces include our social embeddedness among other humans.

So I think Vaillant has found a way to make the idea of spirituality scientifically respectable-just when I had given up hope that it could be done.

A little science on positive energy

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:45:44 +0000

‘Positive energy' is one of those buzz words bandied about at the fringes of psychology. The term is not well-defined and used in a number of different ways. In its simplest usage, positive energy is a bundle of desirable attributes. A person who is enthusiastic, empathic, cheerful, optimistic, courteous, generous, or kind would fit the bill. For scientific purposes, the phrase ‘positive energy' is just two broad and fuzzy. Depending on their theoretical orientation, scientists would rather ignore the term or recast it using concepts familiar to them. Friends of the Big-Five taxonomy might say a person with positive energy is someone who is extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to new experience. Again, ‘positive energy' is simply shorthand for ‘good person.'

Now, there is of course another, deeper and more mystical, usage of the term. Some people believe there literally is a psychic energy, which could be positive or negative. It can't be measured with conventional methods, and that makes it all the more exciting and real to those who believe in it. One attempt to give respectability to the idea of positive energy that I recently came across involves a reference to Wilhelm Reich's orgone energy. Remember that Reich thought that orgone energy was a sort of pervasive life force, the kind of force that encompasses Freud's notion of the libido, the physiology of orgasm, and the experience of God. Unlike modern mystics, Reich craved scientific respectability. He built an orgone accumulator to demonstrate the energy's existence, but he failed to convince other scientists that his results were real.

Although I am tempted to regard talk of ‘positive energy' as superstitious mumbo-jumbo, I do have some sympathy for those who use the term. Psychological research has shown that we can verbally articulate only a fraction of what we experience. A radical response to the articulation gap would be just to refuse to talk about anything we can't put in concrete operational terms. As Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." [Note: I always wondered if this remark might be a self-referential paradox.] Perhaps a more temperate response is to allow ourselves to invoke-at least from time to time-immeasurable metaphysical concepts. If you come home from a party you hated and just say there was tremendous negative energy, perhaps that is ‘nuff said. Let others fill in the content to the satisfaction of their imagination. You, at least, pointed them in the right direction. Let's not forget that scientists routinely postulate immeasurable concepts or entities to summarize or even explain phenomena. For some of these, there is hope that they might be measured some day, as for example the dark matter than physicists talk about. For others, there is no such hope, as in the case of the ‘self' that psychologists talk about.

I think it is safe to say that most people would rather project positive than negative energy onto others. How to do it? Well, how about acquiring all the positive personality attributes listed above? Just become the perfect person, and you will be regarded as someone with positive energy. Ok, that's too hard. Luckily, psychological research done in the trenches of experimentation gives us some pointers, and I want to present one of them today.

In the September 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Gawronski and Walther demonstrate the TAR (Transfer of Attitudes Recursively) effect. The effect is simple. People tend to like a person who expresses liking of a third person. This is interesting because a logical argument could be made that this should not happen. If A learns that B likes C, A has reason to also like C barring any information suggesting that B is not credible. The TAR effect refers to the recursive effect benefitting the communicator B. Why does this happen? Gawronski and Walther suggest that people make the reasonable, if not logical, assumption that someone who likes another has an overall higher baseline of liking people than someone who dislikes another. [One could make a Bayesian argument for this sort of inductive inference, but this is not the place to go into that.]

So far so good. The reader of this research may conclude that one way to project positive energy is to express liking of third parties. This is clever and strategically subtle. If Frank wants Fiona to like him, he can flatter her directly (hint: comment on her hair, not her figure), or he can express liking for someone else, hoping that Fiona will see him as a positive person.

Gawronski's and Wather's experiments are beautifully designed. They isolate the TAR effect, show its boundary conditions, and illuminate some of the psychological processes that underlie it. Their work illustrates how good psychological science does not necessarily boil down to simplistic recommendations for how to behave. Frank is in a pickle. Before he can make the TAR effect work for him, he needs to know some of the things that Fiona knows. If she already dislikes Freddy, the target, hearing that Frank likes Freddy will probably sour her attitude toward Frank (as explained by Fritz Heider's balance theory). What Frank needs to do is find a person or thing that Fiona has no pre-conceptions about, and to say how wonderful he, she, or it is. In real life this should work even better than under stringent experimental conditions because Frank can express his approval with enthusiasm, a broad smile, and reasons for why he feels the way he does. Fiona ought to be impressed by his positive energy and feel no suspicion that Frank might be acting strategically.

Self-affirmation and the limits of common-sense psychology

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:04:36 +0000

A few weeks ago, my colleague John Jost of New York University circulated an email saying that he needed someone to be interviewed by a local television station. The task was to discuss and dispute claims made in two books about the futility of social psychology as a field of study. John couldn't do the interview himself because of other commitments, and I didn't volunteer because, well, I hadn't read the books. One of these books was "The rise and fall of social psychology: The use and misuse of the experimental method," by Augustine Brannigan (de Gruyter, 2004). I was intrigued by social psychology sounding like the Roman Empire or the Third Reich; so I bought the book.

Dr. Brannigan is a sociologist and he pulls no punches. He targets some of the most famous experiments conducted during the so-called "golden age" of social psychology. Many of his complaints are valid. Sherif's study on the formation of social norms was highly artificial; Milgram did not have a theory to explain obedient behavior until after he completed his studies; Zimbardo's prison study was not a true experiment at all.

Brannigan writes well and he has studied the original sources carefully. Yet, he is a zealot. The force of his conclusion is out of proportion to the strength of the evidence. His conclusion is that experimental social psychology has failed and must be abandoned [Note that this demand sets up any experimental social psychologist, who wants to defend the field, to be accused of bias. The defending social psychologist obviously does not want to be unemployed.]

The evidence is a critical review of certain "classic" studies. The criticism takes several forms: Lack of internal validity, lack of external validity, lack of theory, intrusion of moral judgments into scientific ones. Here's the rub. Brannigan's own argument is an evidence-based conclusion. If the evidence is bad, the conclusion is invalid. Brannigan does not consider the possibility that the studies he chooses to criticize may be a biased sample. His tactic is to imply that if the classic studies are bad, the rest has to be even worse. This conclusion may not be true. Classic studies are remembered because they were the original and most vivid demonstrations of a phenomenon (Brannigan agrees in most cases). Classic studies stimulate further research, which is often superior by methodological standards but less well remembered because it is considered ‘mop-up' work. Milgram's and Zimbardo's studies are exceptions because they are not being replicated. But then, the call to dissolve the discipline is moot if the discipline is not doing this sort of work any more anyway.

Brannigan protests too much. He notes correctly that social psychology has a built-in moral context. As ordinary people view their own behavior and the behavior of others primarily in moral (even moralistic) terms, a science studying this behavior must confront this context. By suggesting that we should retire to the disciplines of sociology and biology, Brannigan seems to say that moral questions are irrelevant on their turfs. Come again? Sociology [in particular] is disinterested in the moral implications of its subject? Refuting this claim by re-reading Plato or Marx would be too easy. Let's read Comte, Durkheim, and Weber again, shall we? The moral-contamination argument would require that we disband all social sciences that have anything interesting to say. What would be left is the kind of bean counting done in, say, certain demographical studies.

Another one of Brannigan's arguments is that social psychology is boring, trite, and redundant because all it does is replicate the insights of common-sense psychology. If folk psychology has already mapped out an understanding of self and social behavior, why do experiments?

The idea that folk psychology contains all we need to know about ourselves is seductive. The argument is twofold: (1) People do pretty well, by and large, navigating through a complex social world, thank you very much. (2) When experimental results are revealed, we often feel that the findings are obvious. Now, this is not enough to push experimental social psychology aside. In response to (1), we can note that people also often stumble, fail, and mess up (e.g., by trusting Bernie Madoff, or by having their racial attitudes polarized after hearing about the Gates/Crowley incident). In response to (2), we can note that the post-hoc sense of "this result is obvious" does not validate anything. The question is whether folk psychology can predict experimental results. Often it cannot, which brings me to the self-affirmation section of this post.

Folk psychology and some of its off-shoots (e.g., the so-called "self-esteem movement") assume that you can psyc yourself out of a funk and into a blessed state of high self-esteem by telling yourself good things about yourself. Whether this is auto-suggestion, self-hypnosis, self-persuasion, or simply perceptual priming is not the point here. The question is, does it work? According to Brannigan, there is no need to do a study because we already know that it works, thank you very much indeed!

But how do we know that we (meaning "most of us" presumably) already know? And how do we know that we know that we know? At this point, you need to imagine the sound of gnashing teeth (Brannigan's, that is). If you don't want an infinitely regressing argument, you must do empirical research.

In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Joanne Wood and her collaborators found that folk psychology only reaches a tentative consensus on the utility of positive self-statements. On a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 8 (strongly agree), the mean was 5.36 and the standard deviation was 1.68. This result means that 3 out of 10 participants did NOT believe positive self-statements are helpful. Wood's second preliminary finding was that a participant's own level of self-esteem predicted the strength of the belief in the efficacy of positive self-statements. This should give you pause.

The finding that self-esteem and belief in self-affirmation are correlated suggests two possibilities. One possibility is that self-affirmation works so fantastically well that people who use it end up with the highest self-esteem. The other possibility is that people who already have high self-esteem are more likely to use self-affirmation or that it is more likely to work for them than for people who start out with low self-esteem. Notice that folk psychology does not offer any answers here. You must do the experiment.

Wood and her collaborators did. They first measured participants' pre-study level of self-esteem. Then, they instructed them to say the phrase "I am a lovable person" 16 times over a 4-minute period. Then they measured participants' mood and momentary (state-like) level of self-esteem. Participants in the control condition did not self-affirm.

An armchair scholar who thinks he has a grip on folk psychology might predict that in the self-affirmation condition everyone's mood would improve and self-esteem would rise. A slightly more sophisticated armchair theoretician might predict that the positive effect of self-affirmation would be stronger for participants with low self-esteem than for participants with high self-esteem. The reason for this differential impact of self-affirmation could be a so-called "regression effect." When scores are low to begin with (low self-esteem), they have more room to grow.

Both these folksy ideas turned out to be wrong. Wood and her team found that participants who already had high self-esteem benefitted from self-affirmation, whereas participants who had low self-esteem were hurt by it. Self-affirmation, in other words, had a polarizing effect. Importantly, Wood and her team were able to argue that their results made good scientific sense. The point is, for experimental results to be credible, it is more important that they cohere with other theory and research than that they confirm common sense. In brief, Wood suggested that people with low self-esteem are harmed by self-affirmation because they just don't believe themselves to be lovable persons. Open declarative statements often trigger automatic counter-arguing. Someone who is overly self-critical and who says to herself "I am a lovable person," might spontaneously sneer at her clumsy attempt at self-indoctrination. As a result, self-esteem goes down even further. Instead of pulling the person's self-concept up, the positive self-statement now highlights the difference between the actual and the ideal self.

Folk psychology does not speak with a unified voice. There is something for everybody (and that's why it is of little scientific value). Now that Wood's results are in, we may remember that Al Franken predicted them on Saturday Night Live. As his character Stuart Smalley was fond of saying, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!" In each show, Smalley, the "caring nurturer," got his fragile ego punctured and his self-esteem went south.

Brannigan's claim that the entire field of social psychological research be abandoned says more about the claimant than about the field. It shows where chutzpah ends and overconfidence begins. Social psychology may ultimately fade and disappear, but not because an angry professor demands it. It may disappear if it can no longer generate interesting and important results. Wood and her colleagues give us hope that it may be a long time hence.

Henry Louis Gates and the limits of post-hoc psychology

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:39:39 +0000

Though I am not a news junkie, I could not avoid seeing and hearing some of the footage on Henry Louis Gates's arrest at his Cambridge Home. From what I saw I concluded that psychologists should not weigh in with opinions about what the event "really" meant. So far, I haven't seen any blog posts on Psychology Today, but I doubt that the silence will last much longer (ironically, I am breaking it right now).

What is clear to me is that many of those who are deeply concerned with the existence of racism and discrimination will interpret Gates's experience as another example of how ubiquitous racism is. They will point out that this case is particularly poignant because Professor Gates is a prominent person affiliated with an elite institution of higher learning. The inference is "If this happens to someone like him, it only proves how great the risk of a false arrest is for members of the greater minority community."

It is equally clear to me that many of those who worry that charges of racism, like any other accusation, may sometimes be overstated or misapplied will interpret the aftermath of the Gates episode as another example of unreflected propaganda.

As a psychologist, I am sympathetic to both views. What little information the media have presented, the episode has more resemblance with a Rorschach test than with a detailed, disinterested account of "the facts." In other words, what we experience as our perception of the episode is highly projective. In social perception, it is notoriously difficult to separate the effects of prior belief from the effects of the stimulus.
Because of these difficulties, we do experiments. In an experiment, we understand the stimulus very well, and we can vary it over conditions. Most importantly, we recruit multiple observers because we know that each observer's perception is prone to error.

A single event, only witnessed by individuals with a vested interest in protecting their reputation and dignity, does not afford the kinds of conclusion that can be drawn from an experiment. The police and the law do not have the luxury of simulating individual events in an experiment. They must rely on the evidence at hand and the reports of fallible witnesses.

Given the uncertainties inherent in situations involving great stress, it is wise to remember the principle of "in dubio pro reo." I am relieved that the charges of disorderly conduct were swiftly dropped. What I don't understand is why Mr. Gates's mugshot was allowed to be circulated on the web. That I find undignified.

Likewise, I don't think one should be hasty to accuse the police officers for misconduct. I assume that their report will be carefully scrutinized. Perhaps this is the most one can hope for. With its requirement of multiple persons in multiple situations, psychological research can show (and has shown) that in this country people of color are statistically more vulnerable to false accusations and arrests. This is important to know as part of the national conversation about race and justice. The poverty of psychological research lies in its inability to help us see much deeper into the nature of an individual case. Research is just not designed-and perhaps cannot be designed-to do that.

Conspiracy theory: Nachschlag

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:17:16 +0000

In a comment on my recent post on "Conspiracy theories: Epistemology and entertainment" a certain "Dr. T." suggested that science is replete with conspiracy theories. As an example, she suggested that "Evolution, as absurd as it is, can also be considered apart [sic] of the ‘conspiracy group'." I could not detect any specific argument in her comment as to how and why the theory of evolution is a matter of conspiracy. So I see no need to respond to this claim. Nonetheless, Dr. T. raises the issue of demarcation. How do conspiracy theories differ from theories that can claim scientific status? In my post, I suggested three criteria. Theories are scientific to the extent that they can make testable predictions regarding future events, specify lawful mechanisms connecting observed data, and favor probable explanations over improbable ones. Grand conspiracy theories (to wit, presumed schemes of world domination by a hidden elite) fail with regard to these explicit criteria.

None of this implies that real conspiracies do not exist. It does not take much to imagine that the smaller and more circumscribed a presumed conspiracy is, the greater is the probability that it actually exists. Likewise, small and circumscribed conspiracies are most accessible to empirical testing. There are historical examples of conspiracy. Cassius and Brutus conspired to kill Caesar, Stauffenberg and von Tresckow conspired to kill Hitler, and some religious fanatics conspired to blow up American installations on September 11, 2001. The common denominator is that there is a relatively small group of individuals that needs to prepare a coordinated effort against an unsuspecting target. The conspiracy has a timeline. At some point, the strike must occur and the conspiracy be revealed. Grand conspiracies of the type I explored in my previous post lack this feature of mundane conspiracies. In its most extreme form, the grand theory holds that a secret elite has conspired to enslave humankind for thousands of years. This begs the question of why they haven't succeeded yet [or have they?] if they are so powerful and have been at it for so long.

Science acknowledges that some things cannot be proven to exist or not to exist. There is little point in trying to prove that the grand theory is bogus. But it is rational to say that it is not bloody likely.

The theory of evolution offers some pointers as to why some people are susceptible to conspiracy theorizing. As I noted above, conspiracies do exist. They are, I believe, an integral part of the human ability to form coalitions with group members against outsiders and to reason strategically about how to deceive others. In other words, a successful conspirator should score high on social intelligence. As people know that conspiracies against them are possible, they need to be wary and monitor their social environment for signals of such threats. This sort of vigilance can also be an evolved feature of social intelligence. Some tyrants died because they relaxed their vigilance.

It has been difficult for evolution (and I suspect it would be an impossible task for ‘intelligent design') to come up with an organism that engages in just the right amount of conspiracy making and conspiracy detecting. Indeed, evolution cannot optimize both faculties simultaneously because one is contingent on the other.

The tendency to give credence to a grand conspiracy theory may then be understood in terms of ‘error management.' Believing that there is a grand conspiracy when there isn't, is a false positive. The believer is biased to detect conspiracy because he or she finds it far scarier to disbelieve and then be proven wrong (i.e., to score a false negative).

Conspiracy theories: Epistemology and entertainment

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:43:43 +0000

The idea of the enlightenment was to advance science and rationality as sustainable sources of human knowledge. Nature, including human nature, was supposed to become gradually demystified. As science cannot claim to arrive at final answers, its value lies in offering a rational process in which ideas and evidence perpetually interact. Ideas, such as hypotheses, beliefs, or inferences are perpetually challenged, refined, or even abandoned and replaced. The lack of ultimate certainty and the openness to new ideas allows rational individuals to disagree on the facts and what they mean. Yet, it is hoped that such individuals agree on the processes by which knowledge may be advanced. In other words, a rational scientific outlook assumes a greater willingness to tolerate dissent regarding the contents of beliefs than to tolerate dissent regarding how beliefs evolve towards a more accurate view of the world. Granted, even questions of method, that is, questions of how knowledge changes, are debated. There are many different philosophies of science with different ideas on what to do if one wants to know.

Ideally, laypeople, that is, everyone who is not an expert on a specific topic of theory and research, can gather and appreciate the gist of what a field of study has to say. Education of the citizenry is-or should be-unthinkable without a grounding in science. Today, internet sources, including the blogs at Psychology Today, offer a wide range of opportunities for life-long learning.

Measured against its original promise, the enlightenment project has failed. There is no discernable mega-trend for society at large to become increasingly rational and for collective beliefs to become increasingly based on the best evidence of the day. There are many reasons for this failure. All too often, scientific opinion is not available in a format or language not requiring specialized knowledge. Even when such opinion is communicated clearly, the interested public can't help but notice disagreements among experts and their sometimes rapidly changing views. Such diversity of opinion violates fundamental needs for stability, finality, and certainty. When, for example, some experts claim that exercise increases happiness, whereas others claim that happiness increases the willingness to exercise, the public may be befuddled. At least one claim would seem to be false (but which?). Or worse, both claims could be false or both could be correct. Without a proper understanding of how science works, any disagreements among those who should know best fuel the temptation to discard the entire enterprise and look elsewhere for epistemological satisfaction and entertainment.

Dogmatic religion has been pronounced dead many times, only to stubbornly survive. This may not be surprising. When faith trumps evidence-based belief, falsification is not only not the goal, it is impossible a priori. To the devoted mind, everything that happens makes sense, at least after the fact, because it is an expression of divine will. In its benign form, such faith is Panglossian. Everything happens for a good reason and all ultimate outcomes will be good, that is, pleasing to the individual. Human suffering is only temporary. We may not understand its purpose now, but that purpose will eventually be revealed to the faithful.

A less sanguine variety of metaphysical certainty assumes an epic struggle between good and evil. The divine principle is pitted against the satanic principle. While it may appear that the battle hangs in the balance, the ultimate victory of the divine is commonly assumed. Hence, the dialectical version of metaphysics reduces to the Panglossian one.

In today's society, the personification of evil in the semi-divine figure of Satan does not enjoy the credibility it once had. In a nod to rationality, a believer in an almighty benign deity cannot at the same time endorse a belief in an equally almighty but malevolent opponent.

The belief that a secret, almost all-powerful human elite conspires to subdue the human masses for the sake of own profit is a variation on the theme of Satanic corruption. Imagine that all, or most, of the terrible things happening in the world are part of a grand oppressive design. Do not only assume that someone profits now from war, famine, or mere economic recession, but assume that such tribulations are secretly engineered for the ultimate goal of world domination. Events that could also be interpreted in a positive light, such as the civil unrest in Iran, must also be part of the grand scheme. Even with a rudimentary understanding of the scientific way of thinking, such ideas are suspect. First, there is no prediction other than "some terrible things will eventually happen," but only after-the-fact "explanation" of the "We-know-who-is-behind-this" type. Second, there is no model connecting distal causes (e.g., the plot to dominate the world) to the effects via proximal causes (e.g., plausible machinations that could actually cause complex societal events to come about in exactly the way they do). Third, there is no positive linkage between the imaginability or credibility of the causes and the observed events. Instead-and this is, I believe, the most astonishing psychological feature of conspiracy theories-it is assumed that the most improbable claims are taken to be the most persuasive ones. For example, three assassinations are taken as stronger corroboration of the grand-conspiracy idea than one. Indeed, if a grand conspiracy existed, it would be plausible that it claims the lives of many rather than a few of its opponents. But this reasoning begs the question of whether there is such a conspiracy. Perhaps there is none, or perhaps there are one or two or three unrelated mini-conspiracies-which are less exciting possibilities.

The third feature of conspiracy theories has a significant psychological corollary. Not only does the theory slake the thirst for certainty, it also brings the satisfaction of privileged knowledge. Believing what is conventionally deemed improbable allows conspiracy theorists to see themselves as an embattled epistemological elite. Those who have read the right sources have looked more deeply into the true fabric of life and the ultimate causes of human affairs. This is, I believe, a fundamentally narcissistic mindset, not unlike what Matthew (22:14) offered when announcing that "Many are called, but few are chosen." In true form, a conspiracy theory includes the eschatological idea that at some point-usually assumed to be within the lifetime of its proponents, the whole scheme will be evident to everyone. The theorists will then be exalted for their foresight and the rest of us will be humbled.

Science, we should remind ourselves, is never eschatological. It will just grind on as long we have the will to think boldly and the courage to take the risk of being proven wrong.

Russell on happiness

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:31:25 +0000

With the current interest in happiness studies, it is worthwhile taking a look back. Our concern with our own happiness, with how we can get it, how we can keep it, and how we can give it to and take it away from others, is nothing new. For millennia, philosophers have thought and argued about the nature of happiness. Research psychologists have only recently begun to address this topic, in part, in an attempt to make the discipline overall more “positive.”

A couple of years ago, I stumbled on Bertrand Russell’s “The conquest of happiness,” published in 1930. Being a Russell fan, I looked forward to reading it, hoping that the old Brit had anticipated some of the things that make the science digest these days.

I was not disappointed. I now offer a brief summary of Russell’s ideas relying mainly on quotes from his book (page numbers are in parentheses). See for yourself how you respond to his ideas. I hope you will find them inspiring, but perhaps you will find them trite, reactionary (e.g., note the gendered language of the day), or undone by modern empirical research.

Russell’s key concept is zest. Zest is an “appetite for possible things, upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends.” (5) “What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.” (111) As hunger does not automatically lead to satiation, zest does not automatically lead to happiness. Nor can happiness come from gratification obtained without effort. “Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate circumstances. That is why I have called this book The conquest of happiness.” (162-163) “The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life [and] the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. [. . .] He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” (15) The things we want need to be difficult, but not too difficult, to obtain. “Pleasures of achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved.” (101)

Having zest is the natural human condition. It is destroyed by “mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life.” (5) One enemy of zest is boredom. The desire for excitement runs deep, says Russell, and it should be honored. In ancestral society, men (and perhaps women), found excitement in hunting and courtship. Agriculture changed that. Farming is boring. Sitting in an office is boring. Living in the suburbs is boring. During “happy family time [. . .] paterfamilias went to sleep, his wife knitted, and the daughters wished they were dead or in Timbuktu.” (36)

Anxiety—Russell calls it “fatigue”—is a kind of excitement that is incompatible with zest. Contemporary humans often feel overwhelmed and overworried. To stop worrying and start living, Russell advises that “when you have looked for some time steadily at the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction, ‘Well, after all, that would not matter so very much’, you will find that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent.” (50)

For those who find that even “the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome,” (147) Russell has a remedy that anticipates the smart unconscious. “I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time to give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.” (49-50)

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to happiness is “the disease of self-absorption.” (173)
Russell offers that his own conquest of happiness was due “very largely [. . . ] to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.” (6) A happy person knows that “one’s ego is no very large part of the world.” (48) “One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so little variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion.” (172)

To the self-absorbed person, other people primarily serve as objects of comparison. “What people fear [. . .] is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” (27) Russell warns that “the habit of thinking in terms of comparisons is a fatal one.” (57) To overcome it, “teach yourself that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and intelligence.” (173) “You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.” (58-59)

Likewise, Russell advises not to worry too much about what others think of you. On the one hand, he suspects that “if we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be that almost all friendships would be dissolved.” (76) On the other hand, he doubts that “most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.” (79) This is a nice example of regression to the mean: Chances are you overestimate the love of your friends and the disdain of your foes.

Once you start retreating from self-absorption, you need not entirely ignore what others think. “One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.” (92) Here Russell anticipates an underappreciated danger of conformity. A conformist society is not necessarily evil (though it may be vulnerable to evil influence), but it is certainly boring. “A society composed of men and women who do not bow too much to the conventions is a far more interesting society than one in which all behave alike.” (93)

Russell knows that “a civilized society is impossible without a very considerable restraint upon spontaneous impulse.” (120) Yet, societies that extract conformity by instilling a sense of sin create unhappiness on a large scale. “There is in the sense of sin something abject, something lacking in self-respect.” (70) The emotion underlying the sense of sin is guilt, which, in turn, is driven by fear. “The man who entirely accepts the morality of the herd while acting against it suffers great unhappiness when losing caste.” (64) In contrast, “the ideally virtuous man [. . .] permits the enjoyment of all good things whenever there is no evil consequence to outweigh the enjoyment.” (66) Russell rejects categorical morality as “sickly nonsense” (70) because it entails the idea of sin. A rational person weighs the pros and cons of each decision. Unlike Moses and Kant, who proscribed lying categorically, Russell chooses to lie when it leads to more good than evil. He tells how he encountered a wounded fox and later lied to the hunters to save the animal. Once a rational choice is made, it is absurd to feel remorse.

Russell is a hedonist. To him, a theory of happiness that is mute on love and sex is unthinkable. “To be unable to inspire sex love is a grave misfortune to any man or woman, since it deprives him or her of the greatest joys that life has to offer.” (126) If you love, love with abandon, for “of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” (129) How do you find love? On this question, Russell wisely counsels to take the indirect approach. “Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.” (122) And, “the man who receives affection is, broadly speaking, the man who gives it.” (172)

Reference:

Russell, B. (1930). The conquest of happiness. London, England: Allen and Unwin.

I used a Routledge Classics paperback.

The Germans and their water

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:19:26 +0000

You don't need to be a hydrologist to recognize the importance of water. All life depends on it. One does not need to be an anthropologist to recognize the importance of cultural differences in food and drink preferences. The Chinese eat dog, the Italians horse, and the French rabbit, among other things. The Russian love their vodka and the Mexicans their tequila. But water: don't we all love water? Yes we do, but what kind of water? Americans take it for granted that they will receive a limitless amount of tap water to go along with the meal. Germans don't. Germans care about their water, but with a difference. Germans adore their Sprudel, most of which comes from certified mineral springs and is heavily fortified with carbonic acid, so much so that the term Rülpswasser (burp water) comes to mind. If you doubt this claim, ask a German friend (or better yet, a stranger) to open the trunk of his or her car. You will find a case of 1-liter bottles of Rülpswasser. Sprudel is not expensive, but it is not cheap either. The rational German mind demands a justification of why Wagnerian quantities of a moderately costly good should be consumed when comparatively inexpensive and wholesome tap water is at hand. It's easy. One can attribute medicinal qualities to Sprudel, pointing to the presence of numerous little-known trace elements, or one can denigrate tap water by raising suspicions about natural or government contamination. Lab tests do not offer much support for these views, though.

What can Americans expect when they ask for tap water in a German eatery? The typical response is not unlike what one would see after ordering a flank steak of horse in Baltimore: a mix of incredulity and resistance. Sure, there is variation. Before giving up and returning to ordering beer, I sampled about 20 experiences with ordering water for my family and me. On a couple of occasions, we were stoically served. On all other occasions, there were raised eyebrows, loud repetitions of the request as if it had been barely audible, attempts to persuade us to order "real" drinking water (i.e., the burping kind), creative ad hoc charges for the precious liquid, and stubborn delivery of Sprudel. We found our toughest opponent in a faux Caribbean place in Marburg. After ordering dinner for four and requesting "Leitungswasser," the waiter explained that he would bring it only with orders of coffee or wine. He'd be happy to supply us with expensive designer mineral water, though. When we insisted on tap, he promised to ask the boss for permission. The boss confirmed the policy, and the waiter explained why. If they provided water anyone could walk in, just sit there and sip free water (as if, and never mind the dinner for four). El Caribe proposed an ultimatum. Either we order the expensive stuff or go thirsty. We countered with an ultimatum of our own. Either you water us, or we leave. We left.

Let us linger on this episode, prop it up with a few reasonable assumptions, and explore its surprising psychology. It is safe to assume, I believe, that drinks yield a higher profit than meals. I also assume that the rate of profit for meals is not negative. Hence, it is better to serve a meal without drinks than to serve no meal at all. I also assume that the cost for Leitungswasser is low. And by the way, customers consume water no matter what. Compared with the gallons of water rushing down the low-flow urinal, the amount of tap water running down the gullet is negligible. El Caribe's ultimatum was a variation of the famous game played by behavioral economists. In the standard game, a proposer has $10 and offers some of it to the responder. If the responder accepts the offer, the money is distributed as proposed. If the responder declines because the offer is low (e.g., $8 vs. $2), no one gets anything. In the water game, the proposer asked for a higher profit and the responder to pay for it. Let's take the purchase of a meal as a starting point. Suppose it is a fair trade, leaving both parties with 10 units pleasure. Adding a profitable but undesired item would add 4 units to the host's account and subtract 1 from the guest's. Why would the guest choose 14/9 (host/guest) over 10/10? (I will return to this question.) The guest's counter ultimatum reverses the ratio. Getting tap water subtracts 1 unit from the host's account and adds 4 to the guests. Hence, the host's choice is between 9/14 and 0/0 (the guests leaves).

Why would the host decline the offer? Is he being completely irrational? Well yes, from a narrow economic point of view. From a broader cultural point of view, he probably thought we would cave in to his original demand. Why? I drew my conclusions after several conversations with patient friends willing to listen to this tale and a good amount of introspection. My first hypothesis is that it hardly ever comes to the ultimatum because Germans love their Sprudel, and for that reason alone would not consider asking for tap water in the first place. More critically, my second hypothesis is that Germans, even if they believe the designer drinks to be overpriced, also believe that restaurants have a right to overcharge them. They really would go bankrupt if they served tap water with the meals. If you believe that, you have to order Evian even if you're not thirsty at all. This is a remarkable feat of persuasion on a grand scale. To buy something you don't need or want because the seller has instilled a sense of obligation in you. It is remarkable because it reverses the effective tactic of throwing in a low-cost item to sweeten the deal. Other food entrepreneurs know this and do well. In Europe, the Greeks serve up an oily yet tasty digestif called Ouzo at no extra charge. They let you know they appreciate your business and that they want you to come back. I will do just that, have my souvlaki and drink my Ouzo too.

Beyond freedom (but not responsibility)

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:58:13 +0000

This blog is supposed to be about self-perception and related social psychological topics. Since I started writing, though, I found myself drawn to issues of freedom vs. determinism. The attentive reader may have noticed that I am leaning toward the determinist camp, although I agree that there are some kinds of freedom worth having (e.g., not to be told by a university suit which courses to teach). After I disputed some free-willing ideas championed by my colleague Roy Baumeister (see my post "Free will! Can I have one?"), I finished reading a book he co-edited ("Are we free? Psychology and free will"). I go on record saying that this book is superb. The editors assembled a team of eminent contributors representing all perspectives on the sticky problem of problems. Reading this book will give you a comprehensive overview of the scholarly landscape of compatibilism, incompatibilism, strict and weak determinism, libertarianism and what have you. By the time you get to the end of the book, you are free (in the weak sense) to make up your own mind.

One recurring argument bugged me, though, and that's why I am writing today. Several authors with sympathies for the free-will position claimed that we need free will, for if we didn't have it, we would lose the concept of personal responsibility. If we lost the concept of personal responsibility, we would lose all justification to hold people accountable for their actions. Once we stop rewarding and especially if we stop punishing miscreants, everyone will begin to rape, pillage, and burn (ironically, one gets the sense that they would "freely" choose that piratical life-style).

What's wrong with this picture?

First, the sequence of deductions is illogical in the most basic, syllogistic sense. Suppose it is true that "If people are free, they are responsible for their actions." It is then also true that "If people are not responsible for their actions, they are not free" (modus tollens). It does not follow, however, that "If people are responsible for their actions, they are free" (this is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, or what one could flippantly call modus nonsense).

The logical error is compounded by magical reasoning. As a rule, you cannot let your belief in the truth of an idea depend on how much you desire its consequences. If living for 200 years were your greatest desire, that desire alone would not make it so. Our desire to punish evil-doers and our fear of what might happen if we couldn't punish them, does not set the will free.

Third, the primary deduction is empirically baseless. We reward and punish others all the time without necessarily imputing intentions, volition, or free will to them (consider animal training!). These rewards and punishments may be weaker than those given when free will is assumed, but that does not mean that they are too weak. Indeed, they may be just right. Arguably, our reactions, and the reactions of the penal system, to those whom we regard as premeditators, may be too strong. Vicious punishment may do more to satisfy the punisher's need for vengeance than to shape the target's behavior for the better.

And by the way, who is to say that humans would automatically stop rewarding and punishing one another if the idea of free will were refuted to everyone's (even Baumeister and Searle's) satisfaction? I suppose we would just go on behaving as we have behaved before, in good deterministic fashion. You see, a determinist can have his cake (laws of nature) and eat is too (say "bad dog!" or "good dog!" depending on what the little fellow did).

Free will! Can I have one?

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:21:04 +0000

The notion of free will has haunted psychology since the beginning, and great efforts have been made to banish its specter. If psychology was to be a science like any other, it could not afford to invest explanatory power in a cause that is itself uncaused. Most psychologists therefore favored determinism or the idea that nothing happens without a reason. Experimental psychology and behaviorism in particular had no use for the notion of free will. The current incarnation of behaviorism is the automaticity paradigm. John Bargh of Yale University and his colleagues have made a sport out of showing that whatever behavior you might think depends on conscious reasoning and free will, they can produce in the lab under minimalist, deterministic conditions.

Despite this flight from free will, psychology has been plagued by a bad collective conscience. If free will is banished, something uniquely human seems to be lost. William James, Carl Rogers, and some of the some of the early social psychologists were among those who did not want to give up on freedom and dignity. The current champion of free will is Roy Baumeister of Florida State University. My interpretation of Baumeister's argument (e.g., Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008) is that the automaticity school is mistaken in its attempt to overcome the two-system theory of mind. This theory assumes that behavior is generated by two different systems: one that is fast, reflexive, and automatic, and another that is slow, reflective, and controlled. If every imaginable behavior can be shown to arise from the automatic system, what is left for the controlled system to do?

I think that Baumeister has a good case for the claim that the automaticity school has overreached. Many psychological processes are slow, effortful, and infused with a subjective sense that we are doing something in our minds. But then his thesis gets murky. A defense of the two-system model of mind does not amount to a justification of free will. Let us consider three of his arguments.

First, Baumeister suggests that folk beliefs are evidence for the existence of free will. "If freedom and choice are completely illusions-if the outcome of every choice were inevitable all along-why must people agonize so over decisions?" (p. 14). Why should this argument be convincing? Often people do not agonize over their choices and yet perceive them to be free. Suppose you have a choice between fresh and spoiled food. You choose the fresh and fancy yourself to be free, although your choice was determined by the quality of the food and your preference for freshness that your ancestors have bequeathed on you. Conversely, experiencing agony over a decision does not imply free will. The agony is greatest in an avoidance-avoidance conflict. If you have to sacrifice one of your children, which one is it going to be? The choice given to Sophie in William Styron's novel is sadistic because she cannot set aside her belief in free will. She suffers because she cannot bring herself to think that whichever choice she makes is determined by forces predating her conscious experience of choosing.

It is generally a bad idea to justify scientific concepts on folk psychological grounds. Folk psychology can yield hypotheses, but it does not count as evidence. Anyone wanting to argue that collectively held beliefs are likely to be true should also respect the belief that the world was created by intelligent design, that souls are immortal, and that Sasquatch roams the woods of the Pacific Northwest. A more modest version of respect for folk beliefs is the idea that such beliefs can be considered true if their consequences are desirable. Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler (Psychological Science, 2008) showed that research participants who were induced (deterministically, by the way) to believe in free will were, when given the chance, less likely to cheat on an exam than participants induced to believe in determinism. Vohs and Schooler themselves, however, were careful to note that their finding says nothing about the existence of free will. The idea that the truth of a belief can be judged by its consequences is the hallmark of pragmatism. But even William James, the consummate pragmatist, justified free will only tongue in cheek. "My first act of free will," he declared, " is to believe in it."

Second, Baumeister notes that "the deterministic hypothesis-that every event is fully and inevitably caused by prior events and nothing else than what happened was ever possible-is itself unproven and even unprovable" (p. 15). This is true, but then, no scientific theory-let alone-meta-theory, is provable. Should we abandon hope and take Feyerabend's anarchistic "anything goes" attitude? Of course not. There are important asymmetries between the doctrines of determinism and free will that favor the former.

One asymmetry lies in the role of time. Experiments designed in a deterministic frame set up conditions (causes) to explore their outcomes (effects). Experimentation only moves forward in time, but determinism is bidirectional. While experiments tell us how one thing leads to another, they also suggest ways in which the first things arose to begin with. In contrast, the notion of free will is unidirectional. A free mind makes itself up and moves toward the future. The mind is free because there are no prior conditions that constrain how the mind makes itself up.

Another asymmetry is that determinism excludes the possibility of free will, whereas free will does not fully negate determinism. There is supposed to be a privileged domain in which the will is free. But how did this precious free zone open up? How did it emerge from an otherwise deterministic universe? And what are its boundaries? The self-congratulatory answer is that free will is uniquely human. Upon reflection, however, we are "determined" to realize that the boundaries are fuzzy. The behaviors of infants, senile or autistic humans show clear evidence of will, but that will does not appear to be free in the folk psychological sense. There is little reasoning, deliberation, or rationality.

I think that Baumeister's approach to the boundary problem lies in the role he accords perceptions of responsibility. This is his argument number three. The proposition is that if people have free will, then they are personally responsible for their actions. I do not argue with this proposition, but with its inverse. The fact that people hold humans (mostly others) to be responsible does not mean that there is free will; it does not even mean that they think there is free will. In fact, people hold others responsible even if they agree that the behaviors in question (e.g., heinous crimes) are determined by causes outside the person (Nichols & Knobe, 2007). If the allocation of rewards and punishments is an indication of perceived responsibility, people treat many animals as if they think these animals have free will. A similar argument can be made for power. Finding that many people pursue "the right to make decisions that may affect others" (Baumeister, p. 16) says nothing about the presumed freedom of those decisions. Many non-human animals are concerned about power, rank, and status, and they struggle to get it. Yet, they are widely regarded as automatons.

Baumeister does not seem to worry about such problems. His evidence for free will is that many healthy adults manage to self-regulate. The will is thought to be free if a person manages to overcome a short-term temptation for the sake of a greater, but later, value. Self-regulation raises a final asymmetry. Suppose you have a choice between slapping a misbehaving child and patiently discussing her behavior. Will you get free-will credit only for patient self-regulation? The answer appears to be no. If the will were free you could have chosen to yield to the impulse. If you yielded to the impulse, you could have achieved self-control had you tried harder. Hence, you are held responsible either way. But if you are rewarded for being patient and reprimanded for being impulsive, the mere availability of a self-regulatory option is no evidence for freedom of the will. It is only evidence for your a priori belief in it.

Baumeister's experiments on self-regulation and Bargh's experiments on automatic activation of behavior are fascinating. However, the former make it no more likely that free will exists, and the latter make it no more likely that it does not exist. Both research paradigms fit very well within a common deterministic framework. If pragmatism endorses the belief in free will because it generally increases happiness and kindness to others, realism suggests that this effect deterministically depends on specific conditions. For someone in Sophie's shoes, pragmatism is catastrophic. Empirically working scientists may want to leave pragmatism to laypeople and to those philosophers whose temperament inclines them to it.

Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Free will in scientific psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(1), 14-19.

Nichols, S., & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral responsibility and determinism: The cognitive science of folk intuitions. Nous, 41(4), 663-665.

Vohs, K. D., & Schooler, J. W. (2008). The value of believing in free will. Psychological Science, 19(1), 49-54.