Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question, despite being one myself and at the same time happily married to a wonderful woman.  The reason I didn't question it is that said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me.  You'd think, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunities for romance, but the truth is I'm so completely oblivious that I wouldn't know it if someone of either gender was flirting with me unless they were holding up a sign saying "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."  And possibly not even then.

But despite my raising social awkwardness to the level of performance art, Carol was successful in her efforts.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Galadriel and Celeborn, Eowyn and Faramir, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Freakin' Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress that looks like it's being held up by a combination of prayers and Superglue, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Thrustington and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic either, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard.  Between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us, male or female, are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

****************************************

A tangle of beliefs

I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.

The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way.  Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do?  Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.

On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense).  No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.

So, respect people?  Of course, always.  But respect claims?  Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others.  My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."

This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements."  By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ReligijneSymbole.svg: Dariusofthedark]

I find this kind of mind-boggling.  I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true!  Here's what everyone else should believe!"  Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.

But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude.  And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre.  You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all.  Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:

• Chen Tao, founded in 1993 in Taiwan by Hon-Ming Chen.  He later upped stakes and moved his community to Garland, Texas, because "Garland" sounds a little like "God's land."  This one mixes Buddhism, Christian End-Times stuff, and... UFOs.  Chen became infamous for stating that on March 31, 1998, God would be visible nationwide on Channel 18, and would have an important message for us (because, of course, what other kind of message could God have?).  When God failed to show, Chen (showing remarkable contrition for a cult leader) said, "I must have misunderstood," and offered to be crucified or stoned as penance, but no one took him up on it.
• The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.
• The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, founded in 2009 by Jim Humble and self-styled "QAnon prophet" Jordan Sather, which seems to have been mostly a way of selling something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" as a cure for everything from COVID-19 to cancer, but which turned out to be a solution of chlorine dioxide (bleach).  The "miracle" is that anyone survives after drinking it.  Some people, unfortunately, did not.
• The Church of Light, founded in 1932 by C. C. Zain, which melds astrology, occultism, hermeticism, and Christianity.  This one, though, has been torn apart by internal schisms and rifts, to the point that there now seem to be more sects and sub-sects of the Church of Light than there are actual members.
• The Amica Temple of Radiance, founded in 1959 by Roland Hunt and Dorothy Bailey, based on the teachings of spiritualist Ivah Bergh Whitten.  The idea here is apparently that colors have a sacred significance, and you can heal yourself (both physically and spiritually) by figuring out what your color is and then exposing yourself to that frequency of light.  Seems to me that "... but this doesn't actually work" would pretty much puncture a hole in the claim, but I guess the placebo effect can be awfully powerful.
• The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, founded in 1922 by May Otis Blackburn, who told her devotees she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the secrets of heaven and earth to the masses.  Some of her "secrets" had to do with resurrecting the dead, once again resulting in the objection "... but this doesn't actually work" (as you'll see, this will become a recurring theme here).  The whole thing fell apart when Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing forty thousand dollars from one of her followers.
• Adonism, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler.  The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as Bel, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure Adonis, the worship of whom involved having lots of sex with whatever gender(s) you like.  So I guess I can understand why devotees thought Adonism was pretty cool.  Sättler, though, ran afoul of the anti-decadency drive of the Nazis, ended up in jail, and is thought to have died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
• People Unlimited, founded in 1982 by Charles Paul Brown, which teaches that humans can be immortal.  The claim ran into an unfortunate snag in 2014 when Brown died, but (astonishingly) the group didn't lose members, who transferred their allegiance (and hopes of eternal life) to Brown's widow Bernadeane.
• The Missionary Church of Kopimism, founded in Uppsala, Sweden in 2010 by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe.  The main tenet of this movement is that information is sacred, and therefore copyright law is inherently immoral.  The internet is "holy," they say, because it is a conduit of communication, and file sharing is a sacrament.  Their logo -- I swear I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."
• "Love Has Won," founded by Amy Carlson, who claimed to be a nineteen-billion-year-old being who had birthed all of creation.  Not content with that, she was reincarnated 534 times, including incarnations as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe, finally ending up as a 32-year-old manager of a Dallas, Texas McDonalds before founding her cult in 2007.  Among her odder claims were that Donald Trump had been her father in a previous incarnation, Robin Williams was an archangel, and the remnants of the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria live beneath Mount Shasta.  She said that she was going to "lead 144,000 souls into the fifth dimension," but died in 2021 under mysterious circumstances before she had the chance.

And this is just a very short sampler from a very long list.

It's not that I'm perplexed about the founders, for the most part.  Some (like Humble and Sather, the ones hawking the Miracle Mineral Supplement) are almost certainly in it for the money.  Others are motivated by having power and influence over their followers, or (like Franz Sättler) because free sex with whoever you want is a nifty perk.  Yet others (like Amy Carlson) probably are just mentally ill.

But what honestly puzzles me is how so many people can look at these sorts of cults and say, "Yes!  Of course!  That makes perfect sense!"  And, even stranger, continue to believe even after circumstances (or hard evidence) show that what the leaders are claiming can't be true.

To return to my initial point -- it's hardly that I'm sure of everything myself, or am somehow convinced I have a direct pipeline to the Eternal Truths.  But to fall for some of these (tens of thousands!) of "new religious movements," you have to entangle yourself in belief systems that honestly make no sense whatsoever.

In conclusion -- if you belong to any of these groups, please don't come after me with a machete.  I'm not saying you can't belong to the Missionary Church of Kopimism and do a Gregorian chant every time you cut-and-paste, or immerse yourself in a beam of orange light to try to cure your acne. 

But at least allow me my incredulity, okay?

****************************************

Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question despite being one myself, and happily married to a wonderful woman.  Of course, truth be told, said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me, because I'm just that clueless when someone is flirting with me.  But still.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm kind of clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs. Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J. R. R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Celeborn and Galadriel, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress from the Merciful-Heavens-How-Does-That-Stay-Up school of haute couture, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Trevor Hotbody and Lady Viola de Cleevauge they're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Subarus.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

And being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic, either.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard; between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the news from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

****************************************

Giving bad news to Pollyanna

Two months ago my younger son moved to Houston, Texas for a new job, and although he's 27, this of course elicited all the usual parental worries from Carol and me.  But we submerged our nervousness, not to mention our awareness that this means we'll only see him once or twice a year at best, and helped him pack up and get on his way.

He spent his last night in New York at our house, and left on a sunny Sunday morning with hugs and good lucks and farewells.  Five hours later I got a telephone call from him that is something no parent would want to hear.

"Dad?  I need some help.  I was in an accident.  The wheel fell off my truck."

After I got past the say-whats and what-the-fucks, and returned my heart rate to as near normal as I could manage, I asked him for details.  The bare facts are as follows.

He was heading down I-90 at the obligatory seventy miles per hour, out in the hinterlands of Ohio, when there was a loud bang and his truck skidded to the right.  What apparently had happened is that three weeks earlier, when he was having the tires replaced, the mechanic had overtightened one of the bolts and cracked it.  At some point, the pressure made it give way, and the torque sheared off all four of the other bolts.

As luck would have it -- and believe me, there's a lot to credit luck with in this story -- the wheel went under his truck and got lodged, so he was skidding with the wheel and tire as padding.  He maneuvered his truck to the shoulder, miraculously without hitting anything or anyone, and without putting a scratch on his truck -- or himself.  But there he was, alongside the freeway ten miles from Ashtabula, wondering what the hell he was going to do.

The story ends happily enough; I called a tow truck and had him towed to a place where they botched a second repair job, but he figured that out before he'd gotten very far (believe me, now he's aware of every stray shudder or wobble), and we had him towed a second time to the Mazda dealership in Erie, Pennsylvania, where they completed the repair the right way.  The remainder of his journey to Houston was uneventful.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Dual Freq, I-72 North of Seymour Illinois, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This all comes up because there's been a new study from University College, London, about our reactions to bad news, and how those reactions change when we're under stress.  The research team was made up of experimental psychologists Neil Garrett, Ana María González-Garzón, Lucy Foulkes, Liat Levita, and Tali Sharot (regular readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Sharot's name; she was part of a team that investigated why people find lying progressively less shame-inducing the more we do it, a study that I wrote about last year).

The Garrett et al. team's paper, "Updating Beliefs Under Perceived Threat," looked at why we are better at accepting positive news than negative.  It isn't, apparently, just wishful thinking, or resisting believing bad news.  The authors write:

Humans are better at integrating desirable information into their beliefs than undesirable.  This asymmetry poses an evolutionary puzzle, as it can lead to an underestimation of risk and thus failure to take precautionary action.  Here, we suggest a mechanism that can speak to this conundrum.  In particular, we show that the bias vanishes in response to perceived threat in the environment.  We report that an improvement in participants' tendency to incorporate bad news into their beliefs is associated with physiological arousal in response to threat indexed by galvanic skin response and self-reported anxiety.  This pattern of results was observed in a controlled laboratory setting (Experiment I), where perceived threat was manipulated, and in firefighters on duty (Experiment II), where it naturally varied.  Such flexibility in how individuals integrate information may enhance the likelihood of responding to warnings with caution in environments rife with threat, while maintaining a positivity bias otherwise, a strategy that can increase well-being.

In practice what they did was to induce anxiety in one group of their test subjects by telling them that as part of the experiment, they were going to have to give a public speech to a room full of listeners, and then asked them to estimate their risk of falling victim to a variety of dangers -- automobile accident, heart attack, homicide, and so on.  A second group (as the paragraph above explains) was simply exposed to anxiety-inducing situations naturally because of their job as firefighters, and then given the same questions.  Each of those two groups were again split into two groups; one was given bad news (that the chance of their experiencing the negative events was higher than they thought), and the other good news (that the chance was lower than they thought).

The volunteers were then asked to re-estimate their odds of each of the occurrences.

And what they found was that the subjects who had experienced anxiety had no Pollyanna bias -- they were much more realistic about estimating their odds, and revised their estimates either upward or downward (depending on which response they'd been given).

More interesting were the people who were in a control group, and had not experienced anxiety.  The ones who were given good news readily revised their estimates of bad outcomes downward, but the ones given bad news barely budged.  It's as if they thought, "Hey, I'm feeling pretty good, I can't believe I was really that far off in estimating my risk."

My question is whether this might be the origin of anxiety disorders, which are a little hard to explain evolutionarily otherwise.  They're terribly common, and can be debilitating.  Could this be some kind of evolutionary misfire -- that in the risk-filled environments our ancestors inhabited, keeping some background level of anxiety made us more realistic about our likelihood of harm?  And now that the world is a far safer place for many of us, that anxiety loses its benefit, and spirals out of control?

All of that is just speculation, of course.  But as far as what happened to my son, you'd be correct in surmising that it was not easy for me to hear.  My anxiety blew a hole through the roof, even though (1) he was fine, (2) his truck was fine, and (3) once we got him towed and the truck repaired, everything was likely to be fine.

I swear, I spent the next three days shaking.

Which, I guess, constitutes "integrating undesirable information."

In any case, the research by Garrett et al. gives us an interesting window into how induced anxiety alters our ability to modify our worldviews.  Myself, I'm just glad my son is settled in Houston and loves his new job.  It's not like this means I won't be anxious any more, but having one less thing to fret about is definitely a good thing.

*****************************

I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question despite being one myself, and being happily married to a wonderful woman.  Of course, truth be told, said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me, because I'm just that clueless when someone is flirting with me.  But still.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts last month, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm kind of clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Celeborn and Galadriel, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations. I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress from the Merciful-Heavens-How-Does-That-Stay-Up school of haute couture, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Hotbody and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard; between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

************************************

This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Leaving the echo chamber

It is natural, I suppose, to surround oneself with people whose political, religious, and philosophical beliefs we share.  We tend to get along best with people whose values are aligned with our own, and having the same opinions makes conflict less likely.  So what I'm going to suggest runs completely counter to this tribal tendency that all humans have.

Anyone who aspires to a skeptical view of the world should seek out interactions with people of opposing stances.

I won't say this isn't frustrating at times.  Hearing our most cherished viewpoints criticized, sometimes stridently, brings up some pretty strong emotions.  But there are two outstanding reasons to strive for diversity in our social circles, and I think that both of these make a cogent argument for overcoming our knee-jerk reactions to having our baseline assumptions called into question.

First, being exposed to a wide range of opinions keeps us honest.  It is an all-too-human failing not to question things when everyone around us is in agreement.  This can lead not only to our making mistakes, but not realizing them -- sometimes for a long time -- because we've surrounded ourselves with a Greek chorus of supporters, and no one who is willing to say, "Wait a minute... are you sure that's right?"

Second, it becomes less easy to demonize those who disagree with us when they have faces.  You can slide quickly into "those awful conservatives" or "those evil atheists" -- until you meet one, and spend some time chatting, and find out that the people you've derided turn out to be friendly and smart and... human.  Just like you.

How to build an echo chamber [adapted from Jasny, Fisher, et al.]

The danger of living in an echo chamber was illustrated vividly by a new peer-reviewed study led by Dana Fisher, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.  Fisher et al. looked at how attitudes about climate change in particular are affected by being surrounded by others who agree with you.  They found that networks of people who are already in agreement, sharing information that supports what they already believed, create a context of certainty so powerful that even overwhelming scientific evidence can't overcome it.

"Our research shows how the echo chamber can block progress toward a political resolution on climate change," Fisher said in an interview.  "Individuals who get their information from the same sources with the same perspective may be under the impression that theirs is the dominant perspective, regardless of what the science says...  Information has become a partisan choice, and those choices bias toward sources that reinforce beliefs rather than challenge them, regardless of the source’s legitimacy."

Lorien Jasny, a lead author of the paper, emphasized how important it was to venture outside of the echo chamber.  "Our research underscores how important it is for people on both sides of the climate debate to be careful about where they get their information.  If their sources are limited to those that repeat and amplify a single perspective, they can’t be certain about the reliability or objectivity of their information."

While the study by Fisher et al. was specifically about attitudes regarding climate change, I would argue that their conclusions could be applied in a much wider context.  We need to hear opposing viewpoints about everything, because otherwise we fall prey to the worst part of tribalism -- the attitude that only the members of the tribe are worth listening to.  It's why liberals should occasionally tune in to Fox News and conservatives to MSNBC.  It's why the religious shouldn't unfriend their atheist Facebook friends -- and vice versa.  It's why my friend and coworker who tends to vote for the opposite political party than I do is someone whose views I make myself listen to and consider carefully.

Now, don't mistake me.  This doesn't mean you should put up with assholes.  The social conventions still apply, and disagreeing philosophically doesn't mean you call the people on the other side idiots.  I have chosen to disconnect from people who were rude and disagreeable -- but I hope I'd do that even if they shared my political views.

Put simply, we need to be pushed sometimes to overcome our natural bent toward surrounding ourselves with the like-minded.  When we do, we become less likely to fall prey to our own biases, and less likely to pass unfair judgment on those who disagree with us.  The work by Fisher et al. shows us how powerful the echo chamber effect can be -- and why it's critical that we get ourselves out of it on occasion, however comforting the illusion of certainty can be at times.