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!]

Beneath the mask

All my life I've had a fascination for masks and tattoos.

I think the reason is that both of them simultaneously adorn and hide the body.  They're both revealing and concealing.  You can use them to express yourself -- but at the same time, they cover up some part of you, make it secret, inaccessible.

I've collected masks for years, and whenever I travel, I try to bring home a new one.  The result is that a number of the walls in our house are festooned with masks of various origins -- Ecuador, Iceland, Spain, Belize, Alaska, Thailand...  My oldest one is from Côte d'Ivoire, made in around 1880, that my parents got me for my 30th birthday.  It's pretty unusual, not only for its age, but its design -- from the front, it's a human face, and from the side, it's a lizard.

Lately I've taken advantage of the recent purchase of a kiln by making masks out of clay.  We've only had the kiln for a couple of months, so I have a lot in process, but (thus far) only two finished.

Broken Face, March 2019, white stoneware with copper glaze

This all comes up because of the recent discovery of ceremonial masks in England that are eleven thousand years old.  So the human fascination with masks goes back a ways.  Discovered at the Star Carr Mesolithic Site, eight kilometers south of Scarborough in North Yorkshire, the masks -- thirty-three of them in all -- are made from red deer skulls with drilled eyeholes.  Here's one of them:

"It’s here that archaeologists have found the remains of the oldest house in Britain, exotic jewelry and mysterious headdresses," says exhibition curator Dr. Jody Joy.  "This was a time before farming, before pottery, before metalworking – but the people who made their homes there returned to the same place for hundreds of years."

The exact use of the masks is, of course, lost in the shadows of prehistory.  The guess is that based upon cultures that still make such artifacts, they're ceremonial in nature, probably used by priests to represent gods or tutelary animal spirits, but there's no way to confirm or refute that.

One wall of my office

What's certain is that they're haunting and evocative.  Having any relics of humanity from eleven millennia ago is remarkable; finding ones that were worn, and were evidently a significant part of the culture at the time, is nothing short of amazing.  It leaves me wondering what drive humans have to make such objects, to create adornments that in some ways hide what the wearer is in favor of an alternate identity.  Wherever it comes from -- the Star Carr discoveries show that we've been doing this for a very, very long time.

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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!]

Boo.

It is not, perhaps, particularly insightful to state that Halloween is a weird holiday.  However, in this case I don't mean "weird" in the sense of "spooky," but in the sense of "why the hell do people actually enjoy this?"

That said, it's not that I don't enjoy participating myself.  Last year, for example, I spent the entire school day wearing a vampire costume, complete with fake blood, a cape, and white stage makeup.  The only downside was that I couldn't wear the plastic teeth during class because they had a regrettable tendency to make me drool, something that I bet never happens to real vampires.

So far today at my school, I've seen a variety of witches, several clowns, a few butterflies, a pink inflatable pig, a Viking, and Barack Obama.  I found Obama the scariest, and I don't mean that as some kind of sly political statement.  It's odd, but I've always found rubber masks of all kinds - even the ones intended to be funny - to be seriously creepy.  I think it's the fact that they look human (the best ones look really human) but even while the person inside the mask talks, the expression never changes.  I, and I suspect a lot of people, react viscerally to facial expressions, or lack thereof; we're wired to pick up cues from people's faces, and when there are none there to pick up, it's disconcerting, even if you know that the mask is just rubber and that there's a real (and friendly) person underneath. It's no coincidence that we describe the affect-less faces of the insane "mask-like."  The whole thing is reminiscent of the concept of the "uncanny valley," about which I wrote last year (you can read the post here if you're interested).

Even so, I should perhaps mention that I collect masks.  I have brought home masks from most of our many overseas travel adventures, and they are hung all over our walls (usually in places that take you by surprise and so elicit a bigger reaction when you come around the corner or close the door).  I also really enjoy costumes, especially well-done or clever ones.  (At a Halloween party years ago, a biology teacher friend of mine and his wife, who was a physician's assistant, came dressed in an odd fashion.  He was wearing the pants from a set of military camouflage, and nothing else.  She was wearing the top half (with very short shorts).  When I asked what they were, he replied, "Guess. We're a human body part."  After some questioning, I discovered that they were the upper and lower G.I.)

But I do love being scared, and also being scary.  My mask collection is one of my most prized possessions, even though -- or perhaps because -- it's kind of creepy.  I thoroughly enjoy a good horror movie, and in my fiction writing I frequently make a valiant attempt to scare the absolute bejeezus out of you.  This tendency, which if not universal, is at least very common, begs an explanation.  Why do we like to be scared?

It probably varies from person to person, but I can say that for myself, it's kind of a reassurance that I'm safe and sound.  I don't gravitate toward slasher films -- to me, those are too close to the kind of thing that actually happens, and I have no real desire to watch people, even if they are actors, getting gruesomely massacred.  But a really atmospheric, spooky film about the supernatural is a wonderful experience, largely because after it's over (whew) I can look around at my comfortable house, and think, "thank god this house isn't haunted by ghouls."  And if, later that night, there are some bumps and creaks, and I get scared again, I still know that when I wake up the next morning the sun will be shining (well, okay, this is upstate New York; at least the sun will be rising) and I will still be safe.  I'm alive and unhaunted, and I can get a cup of coffee and revel in the fact that my disbelief in evil spirits has been once again supported by events.

In my opinion, the best exploration of this need to be absolutely terrified was The X Files.  I'm not referring to the movies, both of which (to me) were disappointing, but the television series.  Like any series, they had a few dogs, but the best of them rank right up there with the scariest things I've ever seen.  If you're an aficionado, you might remember the episode "Patience" -- about the batlike creature who waits for twenty years to avenge its murdered mate, and goes around killing all the people who had anything to do with its death.  At the end - when the only remaining survivor is in his cabin in the woods, and hears a noise in the fireplace, and goes to investigate - there's nothing's there, but then he turns around, and OH MY GOD THE BAT THING IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM.  Quite possibly the single scariest moment in the history of television.  Even if you knew it was going to happen, it was the quintessence of all of those childhood fears of the monster under the bed, or what might be looking in the window if you pulled the curtains apart just a crack in the middle of the night.  I don't know about you, but I had a hard time opening the back door to let my dogs in after watching that.  I love my dogs dearly, but it was a sore temptation to let them fend for themselves outside that night.

Then again, we have the added benefit that watching horror films burns calories.  A study just released by some researchers at the University of Westminster found that you can burn a good 200 calories just sitting there shivering.  The best burn, they found, came from watching The Shining (which I would agree is a damn scary film), followed by Jaws and The Exorcist.  Of course, this is probably offset by the tendency of most movie watchers to nosh on pizza, popcorn, and beer while watching, but still, it bears mention as one benefit of indulging in a scary movie every so often.  And there's also, of course, the fact that if you're watching the movie with your significant other, the inevitable huddling together on the couch that these movies usually cause could result in some further, um, calorie-burning activity after the movie ends.

So you can see that there are a multitude of benefits that come from being frightened.  It's only human -- the evidence is that we've been telling scary stories for a very, very long time, and in virtually every culture studied.  Still, it may be that some of you don't share this need to periodically be scared to the point of pants-wetting.  If so, you may find this post nothing more than mildly mystifying.  To the rest of you, I will only wish you a happy Halloween, and sweet dreams tonight.