The power of identity

It's a strange thing, identity.  How we see ourselves, how others see us -- and the parts of us we deny, sometimes even to ourselves.

I'm a writer.  I'm a musician.  I'm a white man of western European descent.  I'm a Louisianian by birth, a New Yorker by choice.  I'm a dog lover.  I'm left of center politically.  I'm a tattoo enthusiast.  I'm a runner even though I've been benched for the last few months from a back injury. I'm a teacher even though I'm soon to retire.  I'm a Francophone even though I haven't spoken French in years and am pretty rusty.

I am bisexual.

This last one might come as a surprise to anyone who knows me.  I have been happily married, in a cis/hetero relationship, for almost seventeen years.  I have only had cis/hetero relationships my entire life, in fact, but that's probably due to my being so shy it's a wonder I've had any romantic liaisons at all.

Nevertheless, I'm bisexual and always have been, and always will be.  I first realized it when I was a teenager, and when I went to the public swimming pool I would look at swimsuit-clad girls and go, "Whoa."  And then... had the same reaction when I looked at swimsuit-clad guys.

But I was raised in a traditional, conservative, strictly Roman Catholic family.  At that point, I didn't know the word "bisexual" existed.  Even if I had, I probably would never have admitted it.  I still recall being herded into a room in the church at age fourteen or so -- separated by gender, of course -- and being given "the talk" about sexual morality, wherein I learned that lust was a sin, sex outside of marriage was a sin, and masturbation was a sin.  (At that last statement, the guy next to me leaned over and said, sotto voce, "We're all fucked, aren't we?")

But being turned on by another guy, or worse still, acting on that impulse?  That was a mortal sin.  That was one that you might not get absolution for even if you asked for it.

That was fiery furnace material, dude.

So I squelched that side of me.  Squelched it so completely, in fact, that even when I moved to a much more liberal part of the country (Seattle, Washington), I didn't come out, and would have heatedly denied my orientation had anyone asked.

But in the last few years a few things have cracked my determination to keep that part of me hidden.  First, a few years ago I had a student tell me (apropos of the International Day of Silence), "I guess I can understand homosexuals, but I don't believe anyone can be bisexual.  How can you be attracted to both men and women?"  I did my usual fallback on the science -- bisexuality is well established as a real phenomenon, and isn't just a case of someone not being able to make up his/her mind -- but the kid still said, "I just don't believe it."

And I thought, "She's talking about me.  She's denying that people like me even exist. "

Pride Months came and went.  Coming Out Days came and went.  I still vociferously argued for LGBTQ rights and equality, and still stayed silent about myself.  A few years ago, I came out to a few folks, including my wife (who is a completely amazing person and was entirely cool with it.).  A few selected responses, which should cheer you up about the potential for goodness in humanity:

"C'mon, I live in Ithaca.  Half the people I know are LGBTQ.  Rock on." 

"No questions, no comments.  Only love." 

"Thank you so much for trusting me enough to say this to me.  I know it must have been hard." 

"I have no idea why anyone would look at you differently because of this.  You are who you are, and you're a beautiful person.  Kudos for having the courage to speak your truth aloud." 

"Really?  So am I." 

"You have my love and support no matter what.  Nothing has changed that, and nothing will change that."

The funniest one, though, was my dear friend and writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs (whose recently-released novel Back Then is a must-read), who smiled and said in her Okie drawl, "Honey, you think I didn't know that?  Every one of your novels has a scene with a gorgeous shirtless man in it."

It took me a good five minutes to stop laughing.  That'll teach me to take myself so damn seriously.

This year, the clamor I've seen about Pride Month has left me feeling angry and hurt -- the demands for a "Straight Pride Parade," the claims that heterosexuals are a persecuted minority, Tomi Lahren's bizarre comment that it's "open season on straight white men."  And the feeling has been rising in me that I couldn't continue to strike back against this sort of bigoted nonsense while still being afraid to admit who I am.

So that has brought me here.

Let me clarify a few things, which (in a sensible world) I shouldn't have to clarify.

First, my coming out as bisexual does not mean anything is going to change between myself and my wife.  This announcement is not a prelude to anything else, merely a statement of what is.

Second, it doesn't mean that I'm looking for a relationship with a guy on the side.  "Bisexual" doesn't mean "unfaithful" or "disloyal."  I'm deeply in love with my wife and would never, will never, betray that.

Third -- it doesn't mean anything else about me.  I did not become an ally and advocate for LGBTQ issues because I'm bisexual, but because I am a caring, moral person who believes that your rights should not depend on who you're attracted to.  I would still be an ally and advocate if I was 100% straight.

Last, and listen closely if you have any doubt on this point: this was not a choice I made.  I did not sit back at age fourteen and think, "Let's see... guys, girls?  Guys, girls?  How about... both?"  Wherever sexual orientation comes from, I was built this way.  And as a trans student of mine put it to me, "Why would anyone think that I would choose this?  To face prejudice, ridicule, denial of who I am, on a daily basis?  Who in their right mind would choose that?"

So there you have it.  My only wish is that I'd come out sooner (like, when I realized it as a teenager), rather than denying such a fundamental part of me for decades.  I wish that, not only because of what it would have done for me personally, but because of the role model I would have been for students -- "Look, here's who I am.  You can be who you are, too.  I understand."

But you can't reverse time, nor undo decisions you made in the past; all you can do is act now.  As Maya Angelou put it, "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

Birdwalking through life

I was once asked in an interview if I could describe my life in one sentence.  What I came up with was, "Viewed from above, my life would look like a pinball game."

My path through life has been governed largely by u-turns, unexpected outcomes, and sheer chaos.  I got a bachelor's degree in physics, then changed gears and went to graduate school in oceanography, but didn't complete my M.S. before deciding that research science just wasn't for me.  I decided on teaching, got my teaching license -- and ended up teaching biology, a subject that I have neither a bachelor's nor a master's degree in.  When I moved to New York, I learned that to keep my license I had to get a master's degree, so I did... in linguistics, of all things.  Even my literal, physical path was a long series of meanders.  I'm a military brat, so in my first eight years I lived in four different states -- Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and (finally) Louisiana, where my family originates.  From there I went to Washington state, and then to upstate New York, where I moved in 1992 knowing absolutely no one, arriving three days before school started.

At least since then, I've pretty much stayed put.

Even the good things have been random and unexpected.  My fiction writing career was launched when a dear friend (the brilliant author K. D. McCrite), who was in an online writers' group with me, steered me in the direction of Oghma Creative Media, saying she'd talked to the company owner about me and I needed to get the manuscript for my novel Kill Switch to him ASAP.  I did... and three weeks later had a contract in hand, feeling elated and a little bit like someone had walloped me upside the head with a sandbag.

I've often wondered a couple of things about all this.  First, are other people's lives this convoluted?  I've always felt like everyone else has a much more straightforward pathway through life, instead of being yanked around in unexpected directions at every turn, but maybe that's just my faulty perception.  Second, how has this lifelong birdwalk affected my personality, how I see the world?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, abdallahh, Défilé du Mardis Gras, Montréal Bird Walk, CC BY 2.0]

I ran into a paper that came out in the journal Clinical Psychological Science that considers this latter question just a couple of days ago.  Called, "Depression and Derailment: A Cyclical Model of Mental Illness and Perceived Identity Change," by Kaylin Ratner, Jane Mendle, Anthony Burrow, and Felix Thoemmes, of Cornell University, the researchers found this kind of path, with its random twists and turns, shows a rather peculiar set of correlations with depression.  The authors write:

We investigated reciprocity between depressive symptoms and a novel construct called derailment, which indexes perceived changes in identity and self-direction.  People who are “derailed” have trouble reconciling how their life course has unfolded over time and, as a result, do not easily identify with their former self.  College students (N = 939) participated in a preregistered, four-wave longitudinal study over one academic year.  Depression positively predicted subsequent derailment across all components of the model, suggesting that perceived disruptions in life course may occur in response to elevated depressive symptoms.  Contrary to predictions, derailment negatively predicted later depression across most waves, indicating that felt changes in identity and self-direction could buffer against downstream mood deteriorations.  Although our findings did not support reciprocity, prospective evidence that perceived instability of identity and self-direction relate to an increase in depressive symptoms positions derailment as a new and potentially important facet of the depressive phenotype.

So put more simply, depressives are more likely to experience derailment, but people in general who get derailed have no higher overall likelihood of developing depression.

What's interesting about this in my case is that even upon reflection, I don't feel like I was derailed because I was depressed.  Most of the derailment I've experienced occurred for one of two reasons -- chance and coincidence (such as my fortuitous friendship with K. D. that led to my getting a book contract), or a sudden realization that I wasn't happy with the path I was on (such as my switch from research science into teaching).  Depression has had a big effect on my life, but in my experience, it has far more often induced me to stay on the same trajectory despite my being unhappy -- it's led to inertia, resignation, a feeling like "it doesn't matter if I switch gears, nothing's going to get better anyhow."

Maybe that's why the researchers found that derailment preceded a decrease in depressive symptoms -- in some cases, changing pathways is a good thing, requiring making a proactive choice not to settle for the status quo. 

Still, the whole thing is an interesting new way to look at depression.  "Although derailment is a novel construct and one that is still in the process of being mapped," the authors write, "researchers and practitioners would be keen to take note of derailment being a feature of depression’s landscape and continue to observe how such perceived changes in identity and self-direction could take shape and act within clinical presentations."

In any case, I kind of hope my life has settled down.  I'm glad that my pathway, however tortuous it was, has led me to where I am, because I'm pretty happy with my current situation.  So I'm really not keen on future u-turns.  I'm getting too old for that kind of nonsense.

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As will be obvious to any long-time readers of Skeptophilia, I have a positive fascination with things that are big and scary and can kill you.

It's why I tell my students, in complete seriousness, if I hadn't become a teacher I'd have been a tornado chaser.  There's something awe-inspiring about the sheer magnitude of destruction they're capable of.  Likewise earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires...

But as sheer destructive power goes, there's nothing like the ones that are produced off-Earth.  These are the subject of Phil Plait's brilliant, funny, and highly entertaining Death From the Skies.  Plait is best known for his wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, which simultaneously skewers pseudoscience and teaches us about all sorts of fascinating stellar phenomena.  Here, he gives us the scoop on all the dangerous ones -- supernovas, asteroid collisions, gamma-ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, black holes, you name it.  So if you have a morbid fascination with all the ways the universe is trying to kill you, presented in such a way that you'll be laughing as much as shivering, check out Plait's book.

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

The true self

I don't know about you, but I'm confronted on a nearly daily basis with finding out that people have done things that seem entirely baffling.  I frequently find myself saying, "Who would do something like that?"  Or, more directly and simply, "What the fuck?"  Sometimes explaining human behavior seems like a losing proposition.

New research by Princeton University cognitive psychologist Simon Cullen has given us an interesting window into these moments, and a guardedly heartening view of how we see each other; humans in general tend to attribute good behavior to a person's "inner self" and true identity, and bad behavior to circumstance.

In other words, when we're good, it's agency, a reflection of who we are.  When we're bad... well, anyone in that situation might have responded that way.

Giacinto Gimignani, An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child (ca. 1640) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In his paper, "When Do Circumstances Excuse?  Moral Prejudices and Beliefs about the True Self Drive Preferences for Agency-Minimizing Explanation," which was published last week in the journal Cognition, Cullen writes:

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes.  What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others?  The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor’s environment...  Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves.  Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self.  There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative.

He demonstrated this using five studies that took a variety of angles on the question:

• Study 1 looked at the attitudes of "high-prejudice" individuals toward a man having a single erotic same-sex encounter -- and tended to accept situational explanations (such as that he had just had a stressful experience earlier and was "not himself").
• Study 2 asked participants to evaluate a number of fictional events, varying what they were told about the character's environment and situation.  In this one, Cullen found that pre-existing beliefs about the effect of environment on behavior had little effect -- most people still attributed good behavior to the core self and bad behavior (or at least, behavior that the participant considered bad) to circumstance. 
• Study 3 found the same pattern existed regarding a woman's decision to have an abortion and a person's decision to convert to Islam.
• Study 4 showed that people are more inclined to attribute bad outcomes to luck than good ones, once again suggesting that good decisions are because of who we are and bad ones because of where we find ourselves.
• Study 5 found that both liberals and conservatives explain the beliefs of people in the opposite party using arguments of circumstance ("Of course he's liberal, he was raised by California Democrats!") and beliefs of the people in their own party to agency ("He's a liberal because he's thought everything out clearly and understands the facts.").

These results are both encouraging and discouraging.  Encouraging because we're not nearly as cynical about humanity as we often appear to be -- we honestly expect most humans to be good most of the time, when they are acting out of their core identity.  Discouraging, though, because it means that we're once again not evaluating behavior rationally, but making assumptions that everyone would act like we do if only they were in better circumstances.  (What Kathryn Schulz calls the tendency to believe that people we disagree with "don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team.")

"It’s a way to confuse how you believe the world should be with how the world is," Cullen said about this sort of assumption.  "That’s usually a bad thing to do.  It’s much better to figure out how the world is."

Which is it exactly, and not just in the realm of psychology.  It'd be nice if we could set aside our preconceived notions and evaluate the facts, both about each other and about the world.

But since Cullen's study shows that's what we already think we're doing, I'm not sure how we could begin to fix this.

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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!]

Analyzing the backfire

One of the most frustrating phenomena for us skeptics is the backfire effect.

The backfire effect is the documented tendency that people, when confronted with logic or evidence against their beliefs, actually hold those beliefs more strongly afterwards.  Being presented with a good argument, apparently, often has exactly the opposite effect from what we'd want.

This is understandably difficult for people like me, whose writing centers around getting people to reconsider their understanding of the universe using the tools of rationality and critical thinking.  But some recently released research has given us at least some comprehension of why the backfire effect occurs.

Entitled "Identity and Epistemic Emotions during Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect," by Gregory J. Trevors, Krista R. Muis, Reinhard Pekrun, Gale M. Sinatra, and Philip H. Winne, the research was published a couple of months ago in the journal Discourse Processes.  The researchers designed an intriguing test to demonstrate not only that the backfire effect occurs (something that has, after all, been known for years) but to give us some understanding of what causes it.

Prior research had suggested that the resistance we have to changing our understanding comes from the fact that being challenged brings up the whole network of why we had those beliefs in the first place.  In effect, it reminds us of why we think what we do instead of triggering us to reconsider.  The result is a mental arms race -- a contest between what we already believed and the new information.  Given that the new information is usually understood more weakly, the old framework usually wins, and the fact of its having been considered and retained gives it the sense of being even more strongly correct than it was before.

The new research by Trevors et al. focuses on a different facet of this frustrating tendency.  What their study shows is that it is the emotion elicited by being challenged that triggers the backfire effect.  When we feel that our beliefs, and therefore (on some level) our core identity, is being attacked, the negative emotions that arise cause us to shy away and cling to our prior understanding.

Specifically, what the team did was to look at people's attitudes toward GMOs, a subject rife with misinformation and sensationalistic appeals to fear.  They first assessed the participants' attitudes toward GMOs, then gave them an assessment to gauge how strongly they felt about the issue of dietary purity.  They then gave the participants a passage to read that argued against the anti-GMO position, and afterwards asked them questions designed to measure not only how (or if) their ideas had changed, but how they responded emotionally while reading the passage.

[image courtesy of photographer Rosalee Yagihara and the Wikimedia Commons]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the anti-GMOers who ranked dietary purity as a strong motivator were the most angered by reading the passage -- and they experienced the backfire effect the most strongly.  The weaker the emotional response, even if the participant was anti-GMO to begin with, the smaller the backfire.

I'm not sure that this is heartening.  So many of the ideas that we skeptics fight are deeply ingrained in people's idea about how the world works -- and therefore, on some level, entangled with their core identity.  To quote the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society, which reviewed the study:

If persuasion is most at risk of backfire when identity is threatened, we may wish to frame arguments so they don’t strongly activate that identity concept, but rather others.  And if, as this research suggests, the identity threat causes problems through agitating emotion, we may want to put off this disruption until later: Rather than telling someone (to paraphrase the example in the study) "you are wrong to think that GMOs are only made in labs because…", arguments could firstly describe cross-pollination and other natural processes, giving time for this raw information to be assimilated, before drawing attention to how this is incompatible with the person's raw belief – a stealth bomber rather than a whizz-bang, so to speak.

Which is hard to do when the emotional charge on both sides is strong, as is so often the case.  The bottom line, though, is that we humans are fundamentally not particularly rational creatures -- something worth remembering when we are trying to change minds.