Ringing the changes

I find human behavior absolutely baffling a lot of the time.

I've spent a significant fraction of my life thinking, "Why did (s)he do/say that?"  One positive result of this is that it's turned me into a dedicated observer of the other members of my species.  Even so, I have to say that my efforts have, on the whole, been a failure.  After 64 years on this planet I'm no closer to figuring out why people act the way they do than I was on day one.

Mind you, I'm not saying all the behavior is bad.  It's just that a lot of it is weird.  Take, for example, the English practice of change ringing, one subset of a larger topic called campanology -- the study of bells.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keichwa at German Wikipedia., Poppenreuth-glocke-1695, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"Ringing the changes" involves taking a sequence of tuned bells and using them to ring a series of patterned mathematical permutations.  So with six bells -- numbered from 1 (the highest-pitched) to 6 (the lowest) -- it might start with a straight cadence down the scale, 1-2-3-4-5-6.  But from there?

One possibility is called a "Plain Bob Minor" (being England, all of the patterns have extremely creative and quirky names), in which each bell takes a turn working its way down the sequence and then back up, and the rules are (1) no sequence can happen twice, and (2) each bell can only switch on each subsequent sequence by a single position.  Here's a part of the Plain Bob Minor pattern, following the positions of the #1 and #2 bells with blue and red lines, respectively:

As you can see, the pattern is mathematical; in fact, whole books have been written analyzing the math of change ringing.  And let me tell you, it's complex.

I first ran into change ringing in the wonderful mystery novel The Nine Tailors by the brilliant British author Dorothy Sayers.  The whole story revolves around it; even the chapters are named after change-ringing patterns, often involving clever puns (Sayers is at her sparkling, intellectual best in this book).  Despite being fairly good at math, how the patterns work (on the larger scale) escapes me; but -- amazingly -- practicing change-ringers have entire sequences memorized.

This is even more astonishing when you consider that a "Full Peal of Seven" -- seven tuned bells -- has 7! (seven factorial, or 5,040) different permutations, each of which has to be rung in its proper place. 

Ringing a Full Peal of Seven takes over three hours.

Here's a group of people doing a sequence called "Jump Changes," which requires twelve bells.  Fear not, this is only a small part of the sequence.  A Full Peal of Twelve would (literally) take years to ring.

What strikes me about change ringing is that although it's mathematically and historically interesting, it's not very interesting to listen to.  At least not for me.  Because a Full Peal goes through all possible permutations, it includes some that sound pretty random.  And long sequences just kind of go on and on.  And on.

In the case of Full Peals of Twelve, AND ON AND ON AND ON.

So it seems like kind of an odd hobby.  Don't get me wrong; I'm glad people are keeping it up.  For one thing, if you watched that video, you probably noticed that change ringing would be really good for building upper-body strength.  For another, it's a piece of English culture that goes back centuries, and it would be sad if it died out.  But more than that, I love that people are so devoted to something so purely weird.

I might not get why this pastime appeals to you, but more power to you if it does.  Hell, if I can spend my time making ceramic Doctor Who figurines, you can be deeply invested in memorizing mathematical patterns of bell ringing.

Maybe I don't understand all the strange side alleys of human behavior, but I definitely encourage them.  The world would be a far happier place if more people devoted their energy into odd and pointless, but entirely harmless, hobbies, rather than using it to figure out how to make groups of people they don't like as miserable as possible.

So hooray for weirdness.  Be proud of what you love, even if other people don't approve.  I was told over and over when I was a child, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about stuff I was interested in.  The experience left me with a lifelong reluctance to talk to people about what I love most.

And how sad is that?

So let your freak flag fly.  You collect bottle caps?  Cool!  You're a geocacher?  Awesome!  You carve little statues out of bars of soap?  Amazing!  We need more of that kind of thing, and less of... *gestures around vaguely at everything*

Time to ring the changes on your own individuality.  Proudly.

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Start your day with kindness

When I was in my twenties, my parents got into watching the television series Cops.

Me, I never could see the draw.  The plot was the same every time:

• Bad guys do bad stuff.
• Cops get involved.
• Bad guys get arrested or shot.  Or both.
• Repeat x100.

I like my entertainment to have a few more in the way of unexpected twists.  But that's just me, apparently.

Anyhow, there came a point that Cops went into syndication, and on one station, it played every single night.  And my parents had it on.

Every single night.

At this point, I should explain that my parents, especially my mother, had a tremendous suspicion of the unknown.  If there's a word that means the opposite of "adventurous," that was my mom.  As an example, when I made my first trip overseas -- a one-month cross-country hike of England, from Blackpool to Whitby -- her last words to me on the night before I left were, "Don't trust anyone."

I know about correlation not implying causation and all, but I can't help but wonder how much her view of the world as a scary, unsafe place was reinforced by watching a television show that every single night showed the worst of humanity.  I'm guessing the causation probably went both ways -- she gravitated toward the series because she already had that attitude, and the series acted to reinforce the attitude, and round and round it went.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom, 101 Non-Emergency Number - Cops and Robbers (8264612462), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Whatever the cause, her lack of comprehension of how I could possibly want to travel to Dangerous Foreign Countries Inhabited By Dangerous Foreign People (like the English, for fuck's sake) only got worse as she got older.  When we took our first trip to Ecuador back in 2001, not only going to (gasp!) South America, but (1) doing so three months after 9/11, and (2) bringing along both of our sons, at that point ages 11 and 13, she was aghast, but at least knew by then that it'd be futile to try to talk me out of it.

This all comes up because of a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology called, "Rude-Colored Glasses: The Contaminating Effects of Witnessed Morning Rudeness on Perceptions and Behaviors Throughout the Workday."  While on first glance, the study may not seem to have much to do with an overall perception of the world as dangerous, the two are connected.  The study shows pretty clearly that the behavior we are exposed to (or expose ourselves to) colors how we see everything -- and that the effect can last far beyond the time immediately after the incident in question.  The authors write:

Using an experimental experience sampling design, we investigate how witnessing morning rudeness influences workers’ subsequent perceptions and behaviors throughout the workday.  We posit that a single exposure to rudeness in the morning can contaminate employees’ perceptions of subsequent social interactions leading them to perceive greater workplace rudeness throughout their workday.  We expect that these contaminated perceptions will have important ramifications for employees’ work behaviors.  In a 10-day study of 81 professional and managerial employees, we find that witnessed morning rudeness leads to greater perceptions of workplace rudeness throughout the workday and that those perceptions, in turn, predict lower task performance and goal progress and greater interaction avoidance and psychological withdrawal.

I can vouch for this from my own personal experience.  When the first thing I'm faced with in the morning is a news story about how horrible people are, or -- worse -- someone online being awful to me or to a friend, I'm set up to be grouchy and irritable for the rest of the day.

However. I've found that the reverse is also true.  When I'm in a sour mood and something unexpectedly good happens, my frame of mind can flip just as quickly.  All of which is yet another indication that we should strive to be as polite and kind as we can; you never know whose life you may be touching.

And I think the same thing applies more globally to the people, media, and general context we're exposed to every day.  If you allow yourself to be constantly bombarded by rudeness, negativity, and bad news, it's kind of inevitable that you'll eventually get swallowed up by it.

I'm not trying to turn us into some modern-day version of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide -- smiling blandly and chanting, "Everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  We shouldn't blind ourselves to the ills of society.  (Witness yesterday's post about the urgency with which we should be addressing climate change.)  But this is no excuse for meanness and cynicism.  Looking at the world honestly, and keeping in mind that the vast majority of people are kind, compassionate, and friendly, are equally important.  You certainly aren't going to do yourself or the world any favors by allowing yourself to be driven to the conclusion that humanity is irredeemably evil.

As author Ken Keyes put it, "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

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The smell of friendship

A topic I covered in my intro to biology classes was the phenomenon of pheromones.

A pheromone is a chemical secreted by one individual that causes a behavioral change in another member of the same species.  There's a great variety -- sex pheromones (which causes the behavior you see in male dogs when a female dog goes into heat), alarm pheromones (such as the "attack" chemical released by killer bees that causes swarming), territorial pheromones (such as urine marking in wolves), and so on.  They're biochemical signals; much the way hormones signal between organs, pheromones signal between organisms.

This inevitably led to the question, "Do humans have pheromones?"  The answer is, "Probably, but it's hard to demonstrate conclusively."  Certainly, the "pheromonal" perfumes and colognes you've probably seen ads for are ripoffs; there is no evidence that there's anything you could add to a perfume that would act as an aphrodisiac.  (For some reason, I've mostly seen ads for this stuff in science magazines.  Maybe they think we nerds need all the help we can get in the romance department, I dunno.)

One of my AP Biology students years ago got interested in the topic of attractant pheromones, and designed a clever experiment to see if he could detect an effect in humans.  He had a bunch of volunteers agree to the following protocol: (1) shower first thing in the morning; (2) use odorless soap, shampoo, and deodorant, and don't put on any scented products; (3) don't eat any food that could change your body odor, such as garlic, curry, or asparagus; and (4) wear a plain white t-shirt (provided by the researcher) for an entire day, then seal it in a ziplock bag at the end of the day.  He then took the collected t-shirts (I think there were about twenty in all) and got a bunch of students to smell them, and rank them best-to-worst for odor.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lateiner, T-shirt-2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The results were pretty interesting.  There was a tendency for people to rank higher t-shirts that had been worn by volunteers of their preferred gender.  (There weren't any bisexuals in the test sample; maybe we think everyone smells good, I dunno.)  The most interesting part was that between the t-shirt wearing group and the t-shirt smelling group, there were a couple of pairs of siblings -- and they ranked their siblings as smelling terrible!

Curious results, which I was immediately reminded of when I stumbled on some research out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel which showed there might be a pheromonal aspect not only of sexual attraction, but of friendship.

The procedure they followed was remarkably similar to my student's, if considerably more rigorous and technical.  They recruited twenty pairs of people who reported that they were friends, and further, had "clicked immediately" -- a phenomenon I think we can all relate to.  (It's equally common to meet someone you dislike immediately -- but that'd have been a lot harder to study.)  They then did a similar t-shirt wearing protocol, but at the end of the day, instead of having someone smell it, they used an electronic volatile chemical analyzer to determine what odor-carrying substances there might be in the shirts.

What they found was that the chemistry of the sweat left behind in the t-shirts was remarkably similar between people who were friends.  Further -- and even wilder -- they then had the volunteers pair up with same-sex strangers from the research group, eventually testing all possible same-sex pairings, and had them stand in close proximity for two minutes (in silence).  They then were asked to rank the person from 1 to 100 in terms of how comfortable they were, whether they felt a connection, and whether they'd be interested in meeting the person again.

Across the board, the more similar the pair's sweat chemistry, the higher the rankings were.  "The finding that it could predict clicking by body odor similarity alone—this was really cool," said study co-author Inval Ravreby.  "We were really excited to find this."

The researchers did admit that the effect was small (although statistically significant) and there was a lot of overlap in the data, but the fact that there's a trend at all is pretty amazing.  Human behavior is complex and multifaceted, and it's amazing how much of it is due to subliminal cues.  Despite our generally high opinions of our species, we're still animals -- and we interact with each other not only in human-specific ways but in the more instinctual ways other animals use.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you should try to find friends by walking up and sniffing people.  But maybe that feeling of an instant connection we sometimes have is more due to our sense of smell than it is any kind of cognitive assessment.

Think of that the next time you're having lunch with your best friend.

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The heart has its reasons

Valentine's Day was a couple of days ago, and over a nice dinner I fixed for my sweetheart, we were talking about the perplexing question of why she had fallen for me in the first place, much less stayed with me for twenty years.

I'm not trying to be self-deprecating here, nor fishing for compliments.  I'm not the easiest person to be around.  I'm kind of a walking morass of anxiety and neurosis most of the time.  I mean, I think I'm interesting enough, but you have to wonder how it makes up for the other stuff.  And the initial attraction is also a bit of a puzzle, because to put it bluntly, my continuous social anxiety has the effect of making me a gigantic awkward dork.

To say I'm romance-challenged is kind of an understatement.  I've never understood the ease with which so many seem to navigate the whole dating and hookup scene.  You'd think that, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunity to get dates, but all my life I have seemed to be completely unable to tell when someone is attracted to me.  The only way I'd be able to tell if someone of either gender was flirting with me is if they were holding up a large sign saying, "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."

And possibly not even then.  

I do mean well most of the time, but I could write a textbook about social awkwardness.  Not just in romantic situations, either.  I had a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago that started out as follows:

Me: Hi, how are you today?

Other person:  I'm fine, how are you?

Me:  I'm doing okay, how are you?

Other person: ....

Me: *vows to become a Trappist monk and never speak to anyone again*

So smooth, I'm not.  The fact that I'm married to a truly lovely person is mostly due to the fact that Carol fell for me pretty much on first sight -- mystifying though that is to me -- and spent the next few months talking quietly and moving slowly, as one would with a timid and easily-startled woodland animal, until she finally convinced me it was safe to eat out of her hand.

And here I am, twenty years later, completely cognizant of how incredibly lucky I am.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Johntex, Valentinesdaytree, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The topic comes up not only because of Valentine's Day but because of some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara that I read about in a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review last Friday (the timing of which was undoubtedly deliberate).  In "Couple Simulation: A Novel Approach for Evaluating Models of Human Mate Choice," psychologist Daniel Conroy-Beam looked at the complex question of why people choose the partners they do.  He developed a computer simulation for the process of "playing the field" by taking the characteristics of dozens of real-life couples, setting them up in the simulation to interact with each other as singles, and used various models of choice-reasoning to see if they would re-assemble into the pairs that had come about in reality.

There are, Conroy-Beam reasoned, a few possible drivers for mate choice in the real world.  Presented with a variety of options, it could be that people at first pair up with someone because for a lot of people, some mate is better than no mate, then "trade up" if someone better comes along.  It could be driven by physical attraction, with the best-looking people pairing with the best-looking of their preferred gender, and on down the scale.  It could be some sort of subconscious cost-benefit analysis -- that was Conroy-Beam's conjecture -- where each person takes the "limited resources" of their investment into a relationship, and evaluates it based upon where the biggest payoff would come with the least drawbacks.  (E.g., a person might trade off shared interests if the attraction was that the other person was really amazing in bed.)

Once he set the characteristics of his virtual bachelors and bachelorettes, he threw them together and had them interact, each simulation using a different model of criteria for who would pair with whom, and recorded what happened.  Out of all the possibilities he tested, Conroy-Beam's own model, that pair-bonding was used to achieve the most favorable cost-benefit ratio, succeeded the best.

"It's thinking about mate choice in terms of investment of limited resources," he said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "So you've only got so much time and so much money and so much energy that you can dedicate to potential partners.  And so your question as the person who's looking for a partner is 'who deserves most of these limited resources?'...  There are a number of differences between RAM [Conroy-Beam's Resource Allocation Model] and the other models.  The other models treat attraction like an on/off switch, but RAM allows for gradients of attraction.  It also incorporates reciprocity: the more a potential mate pursues you, the more you pursue them in return."

What's interesting that even Conroy-Beam's Resource Allocation Model only correctly paired the actual real-life couples 45% of the time.  So that still leaves over half of the couples in the real world whose reason for pairing up left the computer model shrugging and saying, "Who the hell knows?"

All of which illustrates something that shouldn't really be a surprise; the psychology of emotional connectedness is complex.  Why people pair up, and then stay together (or not), is often not easy to parse.  Not only is there the initial attraction to account for, but how the relationship changes as the people in it inevitably change themselves over the years; what started out as an intense bond might weaken if one or both changes in their emotional needs and priorities, or (more happily) the bond could strengthen over time into a true lifelong commitment.

So we're back to the whole subject of love and mate choice, both in general and in my own case in particular, as being a mystery.  I suppose I shouldn't question it, but just revel in how lucky I am.  I'll end with a quote from French philosopher Blaise Pascal, which seems fitting: "Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point."

"The heart has its reasons, about which reason knows nothing."

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Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Content creation mania

While I don't want to excuse mental laziness, I think it's understandable sometimes if laypeople come to the conclusion that for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.

I ran into a good example of this over at Science Daily yesterday, when I read an article about the modern penchant for "creating content" wherever we go -- by which they mean things like taking photos and posting them on social media, tweeting or Facebook posting during experiences like concerts, sports events, and political rallies, and just in general never doing anything without letting the world know about it.

I'm not a social media addict by any stretch of the imagination, but I know I have that tendency sometimes myself.  I've tried to avoid Twitter ever since the presidential race really heated up, because I very quickly got sick of all the posturing and snarling and TWEETS IN ALL CAPS from people who should know better but apparently have the decorum and propriety of Attila the Hun.  I find Instagram a lot more fun because it's all photographs, and there's less opportunity for vitriol.  Even so, I still post on both pretty regularly, even if I don't reach the level of Continuous Live-Stream Commentary some people do.  (For what it's worth, I'm on Twitter @TalesOfWhoa and Instagram @skygazer227.  You're welcome to follow me on either or both.  Be forewarned if you follow me on Instagram, however, you'll mostly see pics of my dogs, gardens, pottery projects, and various running-related stuff.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The content-creation study, which appeared in the Journal of Marketing and was a team effort between researchers at Rutgers and New York Universities, found that contrary to the usual conventional wisdom that if you want to really enjoy something you should put away your phone, enjoyment and appreciation of experience increases when people are allowed to do things like tweet, Facebook post, or take and post photographs.  "In contrast to popular press advice," said study co-author Gabriela Tonietto, "this research uncovers an important benefit of technology's role in our daily lives... by generating content relevant to ongoing experiences, people can use technology in a way that complements, rather than interferes with, their experiences."

The problem is, this runs afoul of other studies that have shown social media engagement to be directly proportional to depression, anxiety, and disconnection from face-to-face contact with others.  A quick search will give you as many links as you like, to peer-reviewed research -- not just quick-takes in popular magazines -- warning of the dangers of spending time on social media.  Pick any one of these and you'll come away with the impression that whatever facet of social media the study looked at was the root of all modern psychiatric disorders.

Humans, though, are complex.  We don't categorize easily.  Social media might well create a sense of isolation in some and foster connectedness in others.  One person might derive real enjoyment from posting her vacation photos on Instagram; another might berate himself for how few "likes" he'd gotten.  There's also the problem of mistaking correlation for causation in all of these studies.  The people who report social media boosting their enjoyment might well be those who were well-adjusted to start with, for whom social media was simply another fun way to connect with friends and acquaintances; the people for whom it generates depression, anxiety, or addictive behavior could have had those tendencies beforehand, and the all-too-common desperation for "likes" simply made it all worse.  A paper in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking back in 2014 admitted this up front:

During the past decade, online social networking has caused profound changes in the way people communicate and interact.  It is unclear, however, whether some of these changes may affect certain normal aspects of human behavior and cause psychiatric disorders.  Several studies have indicated that the prolonged use of social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, may be related to signs and symptoms of depression.  In addition, some authors have indicated that certain SNS activities might be associated with low self-esteem, especially in children and adolescents.  Other studies have presented opposite results in terms of positive impact of social networking on self-esteem.  The relationship between SNS use and mental problems to this day remains controversial, and research on this issue is faced with numerous challenges.

So I'm always inclined to view research on social and psychological trends with a bit of a weather eye.  Well-conducted research into the workings of our own psychology and sociology can be fascinating, but humans are complicated beasts and confounding factors are legion.  The upshot of the social media studies for me can be summarized in a Marie Kondo-ism: "does it spark joy?"  If posting photos of your pets' latest antics on Instagram boosts your enjoyment, have at it.  If you like pretending to be a color commentator on Twitter while watching your favorite team play, go for it.  If it all makes you feel depressed, anxious, or alone, maybe it is time to put away the phone.

In any case, I'm going to wind this up, because I need to share the link to today's post on Facebook and Twitter.  My public awaits.  And if I don't post on time, my like-total for the day will be low, and we can't have that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tribal tactics

Given the right context, people tend to be cooperative.

That's the gist of a study out of the University of Texas - Austin this week, called, "Prosocial Modeling: A Meta-analytic Review and Synthesis," by Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone Henderson, and Erika Patall.  If behavior is characterized as helpful to others -- such as wearing a mask during a pandemic -- it triggers similar prosocial behavior in those who witness it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wereskowa, Wearing FFP mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Khmelnytskyi, April 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Just like the deadly virus, cooperative behavior can also be transmitted across people,” said Haesung Jung, lead author of the study, in a press release.  "These findings remind the public that their behavior can impact what others around do; and the more individuals cooperate to stop the spread of the disease, the more likely others nearby will do the same...  We found that people can readily improvise new forms of prosocial actions.  They engaged in behaviors that were different from what they witnessed and extended help to different targets in need than those helped by the prosocial model."

It's unsurprising, given that we're social primates, that we're influenced by the behavior of those around us.  Not only do we learn by imitation, there's the tendency -- often nicknamed "peer pressure" -- to pick up behaviors, good or bad, from our friends and acquaintances, usually for reasons of group acceptance and fitting in.  I vividly remember being a graduate student at the University of Washington, where my classmates were some of the most foul-mouthed, snarky, hard-drinking folks I've ever been around.  They weren't bad people, mind you; but it definitely was the intellectual version of a "rough crowd."  It took very little time for me to adopt those behaviors myself.  We tend to conform to the norm for the group we belong to.

(Yes, I know, I still swear a lot.  I swore even more then, hard though that may be to imagine.  Like I said -- rough crowd.)

So the results of the Jung et al. study make sense.  Get the ball rolling, she suggests, and the influence we have over the people we associate with can cause an increase in the overall prosocial behavior of the group.

But.

The example the paper focuses on -- the wearing of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic -- isn't as simple as that.  This isn't simply a case of enlightened people who understand risks wearing masks and waking up the uninformed, or at least encouraging them to behave in a socially responsible manner.  Simultaneously we have a group of people who are consciously and deliberately using the same tribal tendencies to stop people from wearing masks.  From the very beginning of the pandemic, we have had Fox News bombarding their listeners with the following messages:

• COVID is a hoax.
• Even if it's not a hoax, it's China's fault.
• It's really just seasonal flu, so it's nothing to worry about.
• Okay, it's worse than the flu, but the numbers being reported, especially from blue states, are wild exaggerations made to disparage the Trump administration.
• Which, by the way, has been doing an absolutely stellar job of managing the pandemic.
• Wearing masks is giving in to the Democrats' alarmist propaganda.
• All this is just the "deep state" trying to get you to give up your liberties, so it's nobler and braver to defy them and not wear a mask.

Just this morning I saw a post on social media of the "Meh, why worry?" variety, to the effect that Woodstock happened right in the middle of the Hong Kong flu epidemic, and that didn't stop people from partying.

Which may well be true, but doesn't make it smart.

So we've got a "news" outlet deliberately downplaying the danger, and worse, making it look like a conspiracy to bring down Dear Leader.  The result is that wearing masks isn't seen as prosocial, at least amongst Fox viewers; it's seen as falling for the lies of the Democrats, and thus betraying Donald Trump and everything the GOP stands for.

This kind of thinking is remarkably hard to counteract, because the Fox mouthpieces -- people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham -- started out by training their listeners to disbelieve the facts.  The administration quickly picked up on this strategy, starting with Kellyanne Conway's infamous "alternative facts" comment, and it has proven wildly successful, if you can characterize getting a significant slice of the American public to trust nothing but the party line as "success."

As I've pointed out before, once you get people to mistrust the hard evidence itself, you can convince them of anything.

So the problem with mask-wearing in the United States is that it isn't universally being seen as a compassionate protective measure, it's seen as being a dupe.  Besides the "how others are seeing our actions" factor that Jung et al. focused on, there's "how we see ourselves" -- and if we've been trained that a behavior is going to make us look like a gullible sucker, that's going to counteract the positive forces of prosocial modeling.  (Especially if the training has included a message that the risk the behavior is supposed to protect us from doesn't exist in the first place.)

Yes, we're motivated to be compassionate and protect the people around us.  But the ugly side of tribalism is equally powerful, and we now have a group of people in charge who are callously choosing their tactics to exploit those tendencies, with the end of gaining power and money.

Until we can stop the disinformation and propaganda, the kind of prosocial modeling Jung et al. describe is unlikely to have much effect.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The risk of knowing

One of the hallmarks of the human condition is curiosity.  We spend a lot of our early years learning by exploring, by trial-and-error, so it makes sense that curiosity should be built into our brains.

Still, it comes at a cost.  "Curiosity killed the cat" isn't a cliché for nothing.  The number of deaths in horror movies alone from someone saying, "I hear a noise in that abandoned house, I think I'll go investigate" is staggering.  People will take amazing risks out of nothing but sheer inquisitiveness -- so the gain in knowledge must be worth the cost.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The funny thing is that we'll pay the cost even when what we gain isn't worth anything.  This was demonstrated by a clever experiment described in a paper by Johnny King Lau and Kou Murayama (of the University of Reading (U.K.)), Hiroko Ozono (of Kagoshima University) and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University) that came out two days ago.  Entitled "Shared Striatal Activity in Decisions to Satisfy Curiosity and Hunger at the Risk of Electric Shocks," we hear about a set of experiments showing that humans will risk a painful shock to find out entirely useless information (in this case, how a card trick was performed).  The cleverest part of the experiments, though, is that they told test subjects ahead of time how much of a chance there was of being shocked -- so they had a chance to decide, "how much is this information worth?"

What they found was that even when told that there was a higher than 50% of being shocked, most subjects were still curious enough to take the risk.  The authors write:

Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty.  However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations.  Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity.  We consistently demonstrate that across different samples, people are indeed willing to gamble, subjecting themselves to electric shocks to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental value.

The researchers added another neat twist -- they used neuroimaging techniques to see what was going on in the curiosity-driven brain, and they found a fascinating overlap with another major driver of human behavior:

[T]his influence of curiosity shares common neural mechanisms with that of hunger for food.  In particular, we show that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity-driven or incentive-driven gambles is accompanied by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum when curiosity or hunger was elicited, which extends into the dorsal striatum when participants made a decision.

So curiosity, then, is -- in nearly a literal sense -- a hunger.  The satisfaction we feel at taking a big bite of our favorite food when we're really hungry causes the same reaction in the brain as having a curiosity satisfied.  And like hunger, we're willing to take significant risks to satisfy our curiosity.  Even if -- to re-reiterate it -- the person in question knows ahead of time that the information they're curious about is technically useless.

I can definitely relate to this.  In me, it mostly takes the form of wasting inordinate amounts of time going down a rabbit hole online because some weird question came my way.  The result is that my brain is completely cluttered up with worthless trivia.  For example, I can tell you the scientific name of the bird you're looking at or why microbursts are common in the American Midwest or the etymology of the word "juggernaut," but went to the grocery store yesterday to buy three things and came back with only two of them.  (And didn't realize I'd forgotten 1/3 of the grocery order until I walked into the kitchen and started putting away what I'd bought.)

Our curiosity is definitely a double-edged sword.  I'm honestly fine with it, because often, knowing something is all the reward I need.  As physicist Richard Feynman put it, "The chief prize (of science) is the pleasure of finding things out."

So I suspect I'd have been one of the folks taking a high risk of getting shocked to see how the card trick was performed.  Don't forget that the corollary to the quote we started with -- "Curiosity killed the cat" -- is "...but satisfaction brought him back."

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In the midst of a pandemic, it's easy to fall into one of two errors -- to lose focus on the other problems we're facing, and to decide it's all hopeless and give up.  Both are dangerous mistakes.  We have a great many issues to deal with besides stemming the spread and impact of COVID-19, but humanity will weather this and the other hurdles we have ahead.  This is no time for pessimism, much less nihilism.

That's one of the main gists in Yuval Noah Harari's recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  He takes a good hard look at some of our biggest concerns -- terrorism, climate change, privacy, homelessness/poverty, even the development of artificial intelligence and how that might impact our lives -- and while he's not such a Pollyanna that he proposes instant solutions for any of them, he looks at how each might be managed, both in terms of combatting the problem itself and changing our own posture toward it.

It's a fascinating book, and worth reading to brace us up against the naysayers who would have you believe it's all hopeless.  While I don't think anyone would call Harari's book a panacea, at least it's the start of a discussion we should be having at all levels, not only in our personal lives, but in the highest offices of government.

Windows of the soul

Yesterday I ran into a study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that strikes me as being substantially correct even though I have some misgivings about the general methodology.

The paper is called "Your Soul Spills Out: The Creative Act Feels Self-Disclosing," by Jack A. Goncalo and Joshua H. Katz, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The researchers were looking into whether creative ideas would reveal the "true personality" (whatever that actually means), and if so, might clue in the listener/reader in ways that were never intended.

The study consisted of five separate experiments, with a total of over twelve hundred test subjects.  The first three experiments focused on whether a person asked to generate creative ideas (one of the ones used was "come up with five new scents for candles") felt afterward as if the researchers had a better lens into the person's core personality than they did before.  The fourth experiment looked at whether narrowing the range of choices (e.g., "name five new fruit scents for candles" rather than "name five new scents of any type for candles"), and the fifth asked the participants to rank their ideas on a scale of "creative" to "conventional," and looked at whether there was a correlation between that and the degree to which they felt they'd revealed themselves.

The authors write:

Breaking from the typical focus on the antecedents of creativity, we investigate the psychological and interpersonal consequences of being creative.  Across five experiments, we find that generating creative ideas is revealing of the self and thus prompts the perception of self-disclosure.  Individuals respond to the expectation to be creative with greater self-focus—adopting their own idiosyncratic perspective on the task and thinking about their own personal preferences and experiences in connection to the problem.  Because creative ideas derived from self-focused attention are uniquely personal, the act of sharing a creative idea is, in turn, perceived to be revealing of the self.  Finally, an interactive dyad study shows that sharing creative ideas makes partners more confident in the accuracy of judgments they made about each other’s personality.

On the one hand, this strikes me as kind of a "duh."  A person who comes up with candle scents like "vanilla chai" and "ocean breeze" is not the same type as someone who would come up with "dog farts" and "zombie breath."  Thinking outside the box (in this case way outside the box) does tell you something about a person's personality.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LaurMG, Glass creativity finalrevis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

However, there's the notoriously difficult factor of weighing how close a person's self-assessment is to reality.  We don't see ourselves very accurately, most of the time, which is why Robert Burns quipped, "O, would some power the giftie gi'e us. to see ourselves as others see us; it would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion."

So a person saying she thinks her creative ideas revealed her soul, and those ideas actually telling us something about her we didn't already know, aren't the same thing at all.  Even when we're being creative, we show the parts of us we choose to, and suppress other parts that we'd rather people not see.

But.  I have more than once stated, "If you want to know me, read my fiction."  I've mentioned before how shy I am in person, which is why there are people I've known for years who don't really have much of a clue what I'm really like.  But a lot of my fiction embodies the things I think are deeply meaningful in life -- relationships, compassion, trust, loyalty, humor, perseverance, respect.  I think if you read a couple of my novels, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I am.

And I know you can sometimes reveal things you didn't intend to.  I related a few months ago how my writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs, was entirely unsurprised by my revelation that I was bisexual.  "Every novel you've written," she told me, "has at least one scene with a gorgeous shirtless guy."  And I still remember the student who read my novella House of Mirrors and came up to me with a grin after he'd finished it and said, "You know, you play the unemotional, plain-spoken, pragmatic science teacher at your day job, but deep down you are a complete romantic sap."

What could I do?  I laughed and said, "You figured me out."

So in some ways I agree with the results Goncalo and Katz found.  "The instruction to be creative is very common in organizations but it is not benign," Goncalo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "In the process of being creative, you rely on your own idiosyncratic point of view and unique preferences, thus making the ideas you share revealing of your true self.  More importantly, other people listen to your ideas and make judgments about you.  We found that when people heard another individual’s creative ideas, they became more confident that their judgments about their personality were accurate.  People are not just judging your ideas, they are making personal judgments about you based on your ideas."

Creativity is a means for self-expression, and as such of course it reveals something about a person.  And also of course, people who see your creative ideas are going to judge them -- and you.  But I seriously doubt that an analysis of a person's creativity would tell you anything you couldn't have found out in other ways, and it's hard to see how it gives you a bead on the "true self" when there isn't even a good working definition of what that phrase means.

So (anecdotally) I'd say they're right, but I'm not really sure where it gets us.  Personality is complex, and our behaviors combine both conscious and unconscious efforts to show some features and hide others.  But we already kind of knew that.

Anyway, I'm off to work on my work-in-progress, which is a Lovecraftian sort of story about a guy trying to rescue his missing twin brother from a subterranean death-cult.  Make of it what you will.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A lens on bias

It's astonishing and humbling how hard it is to see bias when you're inside it.

This comes up in matters of privilege.  As a middle-class American white male, I have had conferred upon me privilege so deep that it's a struggle for me even to know it exists.  I have instant, unquestioned entrée to places and situations that would be difficult, if not blocked entirely, if I were a different ethnicity, gender, or nationality.

It's even more unpleasant when you realize how bias colors science.  Because science is supposed to be above that kind of stuff, isn't it?  Objective, rational, logical, and even-handed.  But I ran into an interview in Science a couple of days ago, conducted and written by Kai Kupferschmidt, of German psychologist Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which referenced a paper Haun and others wrote nine years ago about the bias in psychological studies introduced by the fact that the majority of the test subjects were WEIRD -- Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.  (The last word is -- hopefully obviously -- being used in its broader sense of "from a country with democratically-elected leaders," not in the sense of belonging to the American Democratic Party.)

This bias colors everything psychological studies have turned up about human behavior, because it takes as a given what's normal, common, and acceptable as "what is normal, common, and acceptable in WEIRD societies."  Haun starts out with an example having to do with ownership -- something most of us pretty much take for granted as obvious to everyone.

"In the #Akhoe Hai//om community in Namibia," Haun says, "who were hunter-gatherers until three generations ago, everything that is shareable in principle belongs as much to you as it belongs to me. I could tell you to give me 'my' shoes, and the fact that you're currently wearing them does not matter.  The natural consequence is that everybody has about similar amounts of everything."

Namibian child [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mosmas at http://www.retas.de/thomas/travel/namibia2008/index.html, Namibia Child 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These "givens," of course, turn out to be not so given when you look at other societies. 

He follows up with another example from the #Akhoe Hai//om (whom Haun has studied extensively).  "We assume that concepts true in our own cultural context are true generally," he said.  "For example, Marie Schaefer, a former member of my group, led a study on fairness norms. Let's say a friend and I go to the beach and look for shells.  I spend a lot of time searching and find a lot.  He spends his time laying on the beach.  If we divide up the shells, I get a lot more than he will, and that's fair, right?  That's what German children mostly do.  But #Akhoe Hai//om children distribute the goods equally most of the time, no matter who contributed how much.  Everybody has this emotional gut response to being treated 'unfairly.'  But depending on where you grew up, the gut feeling you develop might be completely different."

I recall being in a cultural anthropology class in college and running into this idea the first time.  The professor recounted the interactions between northeastern Native American tribes and Europeans in the early colonial period.  When the Europeans staked out land and said, "This is my land," the Native Americans couldn't even make sense of what they were trying to say.  The concept of land ownership simply didn't exist for them.  The idea you could draw an arbitrary line around a piece of something that had been there long before you arrived and would still be there long after you were dead, and call that piece "mine" in the same sense that you said "this shirt is mine," was so ludicrous as to be laughable.

It wasn't long, of course, before they found out what the implications of the concept of land ownership were -- to their own undoing.

Haun is well aware that studies like his might have the opposite effect of what he intends -- not that cultures (including our own) must be studied on their own terms, but that some cultures are literally better than others.  (And guess whose would probably come out on top?)  Haun says this specter of cultural superiority should not be ignored.  "[It must be dealt with] by confronting it head on," Haun said.  "Scientists can be careful in interpreting their data and engage in the debate.  I don't think racism goes away if we avoid the fact that there is variation as well as similarity across humans.  And the drivers of variation might give us some answers about fundamental questions of who we are and how we work."

I've always thought that the best way to eradicate prejudice is to have people interact with others of different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, and nationalities -- that it's hard to remain prejudiced against someone who is smiling and chatting with you over a cup of coffee.  Our country's current determination to pull the cloak of insularity around us will have the opposite effect, further demonizing what the phenomenal science fiction writer Nisi Shawl calls "the other" and making us even blinder to our own biases.  Instead of holing up in our little towns, where everyone thinks and looks like ourselves, we should be going to other countries, seeing our common humanity despite our very real differences.

It puts me in mind of a quote from Mark Twain that seems like as good a place as any to conclude.  "Travel is fatal -- it is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.