Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series.
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies. A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain...  I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made (L-to-R) a ceramic Weeping Angel, Dugga Doo, Dalek, Beep the Meep, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertain years following had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.

The heartening results are there hasn't been a weakening of our bonds to our friends, but our bonds have strengthened to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The events of the last few years have forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the brilliant and fearless Captain Adelaide Brooke in the last minutes of the episode "The Waters of Mars:"

Dammit, Russell.  She (and her entire crew) deserved better.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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

Siding with the tribe

Springboarding off yesterday's post, about our unfortunate tendency to believe false claims if we hear them repeated often enough, today we have another kind of discouraging bit of psychological research; our behavior is strongly influenced by group membership -- even if we know from the start that the group we're in is arbitrary, randomly chosen, and entirely meaningless.

Psychologists Marcel Montrey and Thomas Shultz of McGill University set up a fascinating experiment in which volunteers were assigned at random to one of two groups, then instructed to play a simple computer game called "Where's the Rabbit?" in which a simulated rabbit is choosing between two different nest sites.  The participant gets five points if (s)he correctly guesses where the rabbit is going.  In each subsequent round, the rabbit has a 90% chance of picking the same nest again, and a 10% chance of switching to the other.

The twist comes when in mid-game, the participants are offered the option of seeing the guesses of three members from either group (or a mix of the two).  They can also pay two points to use a "rabbit-finding machine" which is set up to be unreliable -- it has a two-thirds chance of getting it right, and a one-third chance of getting it wrong (and the participants know this).  Given that this is (1) expensive, points-wise, and (2) already a lower likelihood of success than simply working on your own and basing your guess on what the rabbit did in the previous round, you'd think no one would choose this option, right?

Wrong.  It turns out that when you looked at how people chose, they were way more likely to do the same thing as the people who belonged to their own group.  Next in likelihood is the wonky, inaccurate rabbit-finding machine.  Dead last was copying what was done by members of the other group.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sara 506, Group people icon, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Remember what I started with -- these groups were entirely arbitrary.  Group affiliation was assigned at the beginning of the experiment by the researchers, and had nothing to do with the participants' intelligence, or even with their previous success at the game.  But the volunteers were still more likely to side with the members of their own tribe.  In fact, when choosing whose decisions to observe, the test subjects decided by a two-to-one margin to consult in-group members and not even consider the decisions made by the out-group.

How much more powerful would this effect be if the group membership wasn't arbitrary, but involved an identity that we're deeply invested in?

"Researchers have known for some time that people prefer to copy members of their own social group (e.g., political affiliation, race, religion, etc.), but have often assumed that this is because group members are more familiar with or similar to each other," said study co-author Marcel Montrey, in an interview in PsyPost.  "However, our research suggests that people are more likely to copy members of their own group even when they have nothing in common.  Simply belonging to the same random group seems to be enough.  Surprisingly, we found that even people who rated their own group as less competent still preferred to copy its members."

It's easy to see how this tendency can be exploited by advertisers and politicians.  "Human social learning is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, where many factors other than group membership play a role," Montrey said.  "For example, we know that people also prefer to copy successful, popular, or prestigious individuals, which is why companies advertise through endorsements.  How do people’s various learning biases interact, and which ones are most important?  Because these questions have only recently begun to be explored, the real-world relevance of our findings is still up in the air."

This also undoubtedly plays a role in the echo-chamber effect, about which I've written here more than once -- and which is routinely amplified by social media platforms.  "By offering such fine-grained control over whom users observe," Montrey said, "these platforms may spur the creation of homogeneous social networks, in which individuals are more inclined to copy others because they belong to the same social group."

We like to think of ourselves as modern and knowledgeable and savvy, but the truth is that we still retain a core of tribalism that it's awfully hard to overcome.  Consider how often you hear people say things like, "I'll only vote for a person if they belong to the _____ Party."  I've sometimes asked, in some bewilderment, "Even if the person in question is known to be dishonest and corrupt, and their opponent isn't?"  Appallingly, the response is often, "Yes.  I just don't trust people of the other party."

And of course, a great many of the politicians themselves encourage this kind of thinking.  If you can get a voter to eliminate out of hand half of the candidates for no other reason than party affiliation, it raises the likelihood you'll be the one who gets elected.  So the benefits are obvious.

Unfortunately, once you look at the Montrey and Shultz study, the downsides of this sort of thinking should also be frighteningly obvious.

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

Sweet synchrony

I really am extraordinarily lucky.

Following the breakup of my (all things considered) disaster of a first marriage, I had pretty much figured that was it for romantic entanglements.  Then in November of 1999, a mutual friend introduced me to a woman named Carol who loved travel, dogs, birdwatching, music, the outdoors, and red wine, saying that there was no way two people so similar shouldn't get together.  With some hesitation -- both due to my earlier decision to avoid dating, and a hefty dose of social awkwardness -- I asked her out.

It soon became obvious we were soulmates.  We'd only been dating for six weeks when I said, just making a joke, "I'm going to take a trip to Iceland -- want to come with me?"  I was fully expecting her to say, "Iceland?  Why the hell would anyone go to Iceland?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

Our courtship was, in many ways, a comedy of errors, appropriate enough in retrospect given the screwball comedy our life together has turned out to be.  Our second trip overseas, to Belize, was great fun -- till we (and everyone else in the camp where we were staying) simultaneously got food poisoning.  It only lasted twelve hours, but was absolutely the sickest I've ever felt.  I won't go into gruesome details, but I'll just say that after we recovered, Carol remarked that if two people can coexist in a small cabin while elbowing each other out of the way every fifteen minutes to make it to the bathroom in time, without one of them killing the other, it has to be a match made in heaven.

I agreed.  After two more years of wild adventures (and no repeats of the Belize incident, fortunately), in July of 2002, we decided to make that match permanent.

Kind of amazing how well I clean up, honestly.

Now, almost twenty years later, we've only discovered more and more ways we're similar.  I can't tell you the number of times one of us has said something completely random, and the other has looked shocked and said, "I was just about to say exactly the same thing."  We are alike in good ways and bad -- we've also frequently remarked about how our less-praiseworthy habits reinforce each other.  This is particularly obvious when it comes to tidiness.  We've been told that our décor style is called "shabby chic."  I don't know about the "chic" part, but we've got "shabby" locked up.  Our approach to housekeeping can best be described as "There appears to have been a struggle."

But along the way we've had a huge amount of fun, even if finding out visitors are coming induces a panicked frenzy of vacuuming, mopping, sweeping away cobwebs, and putting away piles of books, art work, pottery, dog toys, and weird assorted souvenirs from various trips that have been strewn about for months.  But you can only do so much.  Even afterward, our house looks like a poorly-maintained museum.

On a trip to Canada a couple of years ago, while visiting an antique store.  The cobbler's bench in front of us is now our coffee table.

The adventures have never stopped.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Mevagissey, Cornwall, England

I still periodically find it baffling that she puts up with my rather squirrelly personality, navigating my yo-yoing moods with apparent aplomb.  All I know is what I started out with: I am damn lucky.

And I found out just day before yesterday that our rapport forecasts a long and happy future.  According to a study of 154 couples published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, couples who have the kind of spark Carol and I have tend to gain both in satisfaction and longevity.

"Couples in the study varied greatly in... measures of positivity resonance, with some couples showing dozens of moments of emotional and physiological synchrony and others showing few or none," said psychologist Robert Levenson, of the University of California - Berkeley, who co-authored the study.  "We focused on those fleeting moments when you light up together and experience sudden joy, closeness and intimacy.  What we found is that having these brief shared moments, known as ‘positivity resonance,’ is a powerful predictor of how healthy we’re going to be in the future and how long we’ll live."

Which is cheering.  Even more fascinating is that that resonance goes all the way down to the physiological level -- couples who scored high on the assessment not only synchronized such obvious social cues as smiling and laughing, their heartbeats and breathing synchronized, as did their blood levels of such powerful (positive) mood regulators as serotonin and oxytocin.

So this all bodes well for Carol and me.  That said, I have to say that there are ways we're not alike; for example, our approach to shopping.

Carol will comparison-shop for paper towels.  I, on the other hand, am so impulsive I'm flat-out dangerous to have by your side when there's a big purchase.  Part of it is that I loathe shopping so much that I'll do damn near anything, including paying twice as much as I should, just to get it over with.  I really related to the anecdote that humor writer Dave Barry tells, when he and his wife were looking for a house to buy:

Dave Barry:  This is just perfect!  I love it!  I think this is ideal, don't you, dear?

His wife:  We're still in the real estate office.

In any case, the similarities vastly outweigh the differences, and even our unfortunate shared tendencies, not to mention our differences, are ameliorated by the fact that we're both pretty accepting of each other's foibles.  So the Levenson et al. study is really immensely cheering.  I'm looking forward to many more years together, traveling, playing with dogs, drinking wine, and navigating our way through the chaos of our shabby chic lives.

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

Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series. 
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies.  A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain... I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made a ceramic Dalek, Weeping Angel, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.  

The heartening results are that the pandemic hasn't weakened our bonds to our friends, but there has been a strengthening of bonds to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The pandemic has forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the beloved companion Donna Noble in the last minutes of the episode "Journey's End:"

That was just not fair.  I can't even look at a still shot of this scene without choking up.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

A beautiful noise

For ten years, I was part of a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence.  The name, if you're curious, comes from an English children's rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.
He had a crooked cat and it caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Finding a "crooked sixpence" (a bent silver coin) was considered lucky, and we thought that was a good moniker for our group.

Playing for contradances and English country dances was brilliant fun, and I attribute my getting over the awful stage fright I suffered from when I was younger to being a part of this wonderful trio.

Crooked Sixpence at our last gig -- January 2019 [left to right: Kathy Selby, me, John Wobus]

Sadly, we disbanded when our fiddler, Kathy, moved back to Ireland.  Of course, shortly thereafter the pandemic hit and all the public performances were cancelled, pretty much for the rest of the year, so I doubt we'd have done much playing anyhow.

Since our breakup, all my music has been alone in my house -- I haven't had any jam sessions with friends for a year and a half.  While I do love playing, whether by myself or with others, there is something about making music together that is qualitatively different than playing solo.

This was the subject of a fascinating study at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Chicago that came out in the journal American Psychologist last week.  The team, led by David Greenberg, looked at five measures of five key functions in the brain: empathy, the levels of three hormones (dopamine, oxytocin, and cortisol), and language structures, before and after having an experience of playing music in a group.

What they found wouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has made music with others.  Levels of empathy, as measured by psychological assessment, went up.  Dopamine and oxytocin levels, both connected with reward, pleasure, and pair bonding, both went up as well.  Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, went down.  The neurological systems involved in language -- both listening and producing -- both spiked in activity, especially when the playing or singing was done in harmony, not in unison.

"Music connects us to our humanity," Greenberg said, in a press release from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  "Through social neuroscience, we can discover that our sense of social connection isn't just subjective, but that it is rooted in important brain mechanisms.  Especially in a time when there is so much social division around the world, we need to find new ways to to bridge cultures in conflict.  Music is one of those ways.  We hope our research will lead to more grass-roots programs like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which bring people from differing cultures together through music."

Which brings home once again how much I miss making music with friends.  We've all felt pretty isolated during the last year and a half, and now that we're slowly and hesitantly coming out of isolation, maybe it's time to start making a beautiful noise together again.

The world as a whole sure could use something positive.  And, I suspect, so could most of us as individuals... and small groups of friends together.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Shooting the bull

There's a folk truism that goes, "Don't try to bullshit a bullshitter."

The implication is that people who exaggerate and/or lie routinely, either to get away with things or to create an overblown image of themselves, know the technique so well that they can always spot it in others.  This makes bullshitting a doubly attractive game; not only does it make you slick, impressing the gullible and allowing you to avoid responsibility, it makes you savvy and less likely to be suckered yourself.

Well, a study published this week in The British Journal of Social Psychology, conducted by Shane Littrell, Evan Risko, and Jonathan Fugelsang, has shown that like many folk truisms, this isn't true at all.

In fact, the research supports the opposite conclusion.  At least one variety of regular bullshitting leads to more likelihood of falling for bullshit from others.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Inkscape by Anynobody, composing work: Mabdul ., Bullshit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers identified two main kinds of bullshitting, persuasive and evasive.  Persuasive bullshitters exaggerate or embellish their own accomplishments to impress others or fit in with their social group; evasive ones dance around the truth to avoid damaging their own reputations or the reputations of their friends.

Because of the positive shine bullshitting has with many, the researchers figured most people who engage either type wouldn't be shy about admitting it, so they used self-reporting to assess the bullshit levels and styles of the eight hundred participants.  They then gave each a more formal measure of cognitive ability, metacognitive insight, intellectual overconfidence, and reflective thinking, then a series of pseudo-profound and pseudoscientific statements mixed in with real profound and truthful statements, to see if they could tell them apart.

The surprising result was that the people who were self-reported persuasive bullshitters were significantly worse at detecting pseudo-profundity than the habitually honest; the evasive bullshitters were better than average.

"We found that the more frequently someone engages in persuasive bullshitting, the more likely they are to be duped by various types of misleading information regardless of their cognitive ability, engagement in reflective thinking, or metacognitive skills," said study lead author Shane Littrell, of the University of Waterloo.  "Persuasive BSers seem to mistake superficial profoundness for actual profoundness.  So, if something simply sounds profound, truthful, or accurate to them that means it really is.  But evasive bullshitters were much better at making this distinction."

Which supports a contention that I've had for years; if you lie for long enough, you eventually lose touch with what the truth is.  The interesting fact that persuasive and evasive bullshitting aren't the same in this respect might be because evasive bullshitters engage in this behavior because they're highly sensitive to people's opinions, both of themselves and of others.  This would have the effect of making them more aware of what others are saying and doing, and becoming better at sussing out what people's real motives are -- and whether they're being truthful or not.  But persuasive bullshitters are so self-focused that they aren't paying much attention to what others say, so any subtleties that might clue them in to the fact they they're being bullshitted slip right by.

I don't know whether this is encouraging or not.  I'm not sure if the fact that it's easier to lie successfully to a liar is a point to celebrate by those of us who care about the truth.  But it does illustrate the fact that our common sense about our own behavior sometimes isn't very accurate.  As usual, approaching questions from a skeptical scientific angle is the best.

After all, no form of bullshit can withstand that.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

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

Rewarding the daredevil

There were three magic words that used to be able to induce me to do almost anything, regardless how catastrophically stupid it was: "I dare you."

It's how I ended up walking the ridgeline of a friend's house when I was in eighth grade:

Friend: My house has such a steep roof.  I don't know how anyone could keep his balance up there.

Me:  I bet I could. 

Friend (dubiously):  You think? 

Me;  Yeah. 

Friend:  I dare you. 

Me:  Get me a ladder.

That I didn't break my neck was as much due to luck as skill, although it must be said that back then I did have a hell of a sense of balance, even if I didn't have much of any other kind of sense.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Øyvind Holmstad, A yellow house with a sheltering roof, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Research by neuroscientists Lei Zhang (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf) and Jan Gläscher (University of Vienna) has given us some insight into why I was prone to doing that sort of thing (beyond my parent's explanation, which boiled down to "you sure are an idiot").  Apparently the whole thing has to do with something called "reward prediction error" -- and they've identified the part of the brain where it occurs.

Reward prediction error occurs when there is a mismatch between the expected reward and the actual reward.  If expected reward occurs, prediction error is low, and you get some reinforcement via neurochemical release in the putamen and right temporoparietal junction, which form an important part of the brain's reward circuit.  A prediction error can go two ways: (1) the reward can be lower than the expectation, in which case you learn by changing your expectations; or (2) the reward can be higher than the expectation, in which case you get treated to a flood of endorphins.

Which explains my stupid roof-climbing behavior, and loads of other activities that begin with the words "hold my beer."  I wasn't nearly as fearless as I was acting; I fully expected to lose my balance and go tumbling down the roof.  When that didn't happen, and I came ambling back down the ladder afterward to the awed appreciation of my friend, I got a neurochemical bonus that nearly guaranteed that next time I heard "I dare you," I'd do the same thing again.

The structure of the researchers' experiment was interesting.  Here's how it was described in a press release in EurekAlert:

[The] researchers... placed groups of five volunteers in the same computer-based decision-making experiment, where each of them was presented with two abstract symbols.  Their objective was to find out which symbol would lead to more monetary rewards in the long run.  In each round of the experiment, every person first made a choice between the two symbols, and then they observed which symbols the other four people had selected; next, every person could decide to stick with their initial choice or switch to the alternative symbol.  Finally, a monetary outcome, either a win or a loss, was delivered to every one according to their second decision...  In fact, which symbol was related to more reward was always changing.  At the beginning of the experiment, one of the two symbols returned monetary rewards 70% of the time, and after a few rounds, it provided rewards only 30% of the time.  These changes took place multiple times throughout the experiment...  Expectedly, the volunteers switched more often when they were confronted with opposing choices from the others, but interestingly, the second choice (after considering social information) reflected the reward structure better than the first choice.

So social learning -- making your decisions according to your friends' behaviors and expectations -- is actually not a bad strategy.  "Direct learning is efficient in stable situations," said study co-author Jan Gläscher, "and when situations are changing and uncertain, social learning may play an important role together with direct learning to adapt to novel situations, such as deciding on the lunch menu at a new company."

Or deciding whether or not it's worth it to climb the roof of a friend's house.

We're social primates, so it's no surprise we rely a great deal on the members of our tribe for information about what we should and should not do.  This works well when we're looking to older and wiser individuals, and not so well when the other members of our tribe are just as dumb as we are.  (This latter bit explains a lot of the behavior we're currently seeing in the United States Senate.)  But our brains are built that way, for better or for worse.

Although for what it's worth, I no longer do ridiculous stunts when someone says "I dare you."  So if you were planning on trying it, don't get your hopes up.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

Arguing to learn

That we live in contentious times is so blatantly obvious it's kind of silly even to point it out.

Politics.  Immigration.  LGBTQ rights.  Climate change.  Religion, and its influence on public policy.  Discrimination.  Gun laws.  Poverty and homelessness.  The list of topics to argue about seems endless, as does the vitriol they engender.  A number of people I know look upon the holidays with dread, because of the potential to bring together family members with diametrically opposite opinions -- making the conditions right for turning Thanksgiving dinner into a conflagration.

Avoiding the topics, of course, strikes a lot of people as cowardly, especially when the topics themselves are of such critical importance.  We're not talking goofy arguments about trivia, like the time a friend of mine and I got in a heated debate over which Olympic sport was silliest, short-track speed skating or curling.  (The answer, obviously, is curling.  Not that I could get him to admit that.  Unfortunately, the most our argument accomplished was getting long-suffering eyerolls from both of our wives, and some sotto voce discussion between the two of them about how they ended up paired with the likes of us.)

But here, the stakes are much higher.  We argue because we feel strongly that the outcome is vitally important.  And because of this, we often adopt an argue-to-win stance -- feet planted firmly, unwilling to give an inch or accede to any suggestion that our opponents might have some points on their side.

The problem is -- and I think most people could affirm that anecdotally from their own experience -- this approach has a very poor success rate.  How often has the fight on Christmas Eve between liberal, tree-hugging Cousin Sally and conservative, Trump-supporting, Fox-News-watching Uncle Jake actually resulted in either of them changing their views?  About anything?  Yes, I think it's important to stand your ground and fight for what you believe in, but maybe it's time to admit that the approach most people take isn't working.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hector Alejandro, Two boys engaged in arm wrestling, CC BY 2.0]

That's the gist of some research published this week in Cognitive Science.  In "The Influence of Social Interaction on Intuitions of Objectivity and Subjectivity," by Matthew Fisher, Joshua Knobe, and Frank C. Keil (of Yale University), and Brent Strickland (of the École Normale Supérieure), we learn that a lot more could be accomplished if instead of an argue-to-win strategy, we adopted an argue-to-learn approach.

The researchers paired people up based on their having opposing opinions about a variety of controversial topics.  The members of one group of pairs were instructed to interact with their partners with an argue-to-win approach -- to justify their own position and to try to argue their points as objectively and convincingly as they could, and were told they would be graded on their success at convincing their partners of the error of their ways.  The members of the other group of pairs were instructed to use an argue-to-learn approach -- they were told they'd be paired with people of opposing viewpoints, but the task was to learn as much as they could about the reasoning behind their partner's opinions, and to be able to then articulate it coherently afterward.

Neither group of participants knew that the mode of argument was going to be different between different pairs -- they only knew what their own task was.  And in order to make sure that the experiment was controlled, the researchers took the extra step of having independent raters evaluate the pairs on how well they'd fulfilled the requirements of their tasks, to make certain that by random chance the argue-to-win group wasn't populated with combative types and the argue-to-learn group with peaceniks.

Afterward, test subjects were given a set of questions to determine their attitudes about there being an objective correct answer to every dilemma.  The questions included, "Given that most issues have more than one side, it is inevitable that one must be correct and the others wrong," and "Even if someone disagrees with me, (s)he has rational reasons for doing so."

Interestingly, just the task of being forced for four minutes into adopting either a no-quarter-given approach or a let's-listen-to-each-other approach created a marked difference between how participants answered the questionnaire.  The argue-to-win group were much more likely to agree with statements suggesting there was one objective correct answer, and that anyone not believing that answer were simply wrong; the argue-to-learn group were more likely to agree with statements implying that truth was nuanced, and that people of opposing opinions aren't necessarily ignorant or irrational.

So if you want to sway people, the way to do it is not through verbal fisticuffs; it's through listening to the other side's reasons and making it clear you want to learn more about their arguments, not batter them down with your own.

Now, understand that I'm not trying to say -- and neither were the researchers -- that there aren't objective truths and moral absolutes out there, or that everything is on that mushy ground of subjectivity.  Climate change deniers and young-Earth creationists are simply factually wrong.  People who support discrimination on the basis of race or sexual orientation are espousing an inherently immoral stance.  But there are a lot of ways even to approach these topics without a knock-down-drag-out fight.  Even if climate change itself is undeniable, what (if anything) we can or should do about it is certainly up for discussion.  And perhaps it might be more successful to tackle the issues of racism and misogyny and homophobia not by wavering in our own conviction to do what is right and moral, but to find out why our opponents believe what they do.  When someone shouts, "All liberals are America-haters who want to destroy our country," it might be better to say, "I'm a liberal and I don't think that.  Why do you say all liberals think that way?" rather than "Oh, yeah?  Well, you're an ignorant hate-monger!"

Not that the latter is necessarily false, just that pointing it out doesn't accomplish anything.

So that's the latest on how to keep arguments from going thermonuclear, and maybe even convincing some folks to rethink their views at the same time.  Heaven knows with the increasing polarization in the world, and the news media and pundits feeding into that every chance they get, we need to stop and listen to each other more often.

And even if the two of you leave with your views substantially unchanged, who knows?  Maybe both of you will have learned something.

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I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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

Going to the source

One of the hardest things for skeptics to fight is the tendency by some people to swallow any damnfool thing they happen to see online.

I had credited this tendency to gullibility.  If you see a catchy meme implying that if you drink a liter of vinegar a day, your arthritis will be cured ("Doctors hate this!  Get well with this ONE WEIRD TRICK!"), and think it sounds plausible, it's just because you don't have the background in science (or logic) to sift fact from fiction.

It turns out, the truth is apparently more complex than this.

According to a trio of psychologists working at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the problem isn't that silly ideas sound plausible to some people; it's that their mindset causes them to weight all information sources equally -- that one guy's blog is just as reliable as a scientific paper written by experts in the field.

(And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of One Guy writing that in his blog.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karen Thibaut, Belmans in labo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The paper, "Using Power as a Negative Cue: How Conspiracy Mentality Affects Epistemic Trust in Sources of Historical Knowledge," was written by Roland Imhoff, Pia Lamberty, and Olivier Klein, and appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin a couple of months ago.  The authors write:

Classical theories of attitude change point to the positive effect of source expertise on perceived source credibility persuasion, but there is an ongoing societal debate on the increase in anti-elitist sentiments and conspiracy theories regarding the allegedly untrustworthy power elite.  In one correlational and three experimental studies, we tested the novel idea that people who endorse a conspiratorial mind-set (conspiracy mentality) indeed exhibit markedly different reactions to cues of epistemic authoritativeness than those who do not: Whereas the perceived credibility of powerful sources decreased with the recipients’ conspiracy mentality, that of powerless sources increased independent of and incremental to other biases, such as the need to see the ingroup in particularly positive light.  The discussion raises the question whether a certain extent of source-based bias is necessary for the social fabric of a highly complex society.

So people with a "conspiracy mentality" fall for conspiracies not because they're ignorant or gullible, but because their innate distrust of authority figures causes them to trust everyone equally -- they often frame it as being "open-minded" or "unbiased" -- regardless of what the credentials, background, expertise, or (even) sanity of the source.

In an interview in PsyPost, study co-author Roland Imhoff explained the angle they took on this perplexing social issue:

The very idea for the study was born in a joint discussion with my co-author Olivier Klein at a conference of social psychological representations of history.  We were listening to talks about all kinds of construals, biases and narratives about what happened in the ancient or not so ancient past.   Having the public debate about ‘alternative facts’ from after Trump’s inauguration still in the back of our minds, we wondered: how do we even know what we know, how do we know who to trust when it comes to events we all have not experienced in first person? 

While previous research had insisted that this is predominantly a question of trusting ingroup sources (i.e., my government, my national education institutions), we had a lingering suspicion that people who endorse conspiracy theories might have a different system of epistemic trust: not trusting those who are in power (and allegedly corrupt).

Which points out a problem I'd always found baffling -- why, to many people, is "being an intellectual elite" a bad thing?  It was one of the (many) epithets I heard hurled at Barack Obama -- that being Harvard-educated, he couldn't possibly care about, or even be aware, of the problems of ordinary middle-class America.  Conversely, this card was played the other way by George W. Bush.  He was a "regular guy," the type of fellow you could enjoy having a beer with on Saturday night and discussing the latest sports statistics.

And my thought was: don't you want our leaders to be smarter than you are?  I mean, seriously.  I know that I and the guys I have a beer with on Saturday night aren't qualified to run the country.  (And to my bar buddies, no disrespect intended.)  There's no way in hell I'm smart enough to be president.  One of the things I want in the people we elect to office is that they are smart -- smart enough to make good decisions based on actual factual knowledge.

That, apparently, is not the norm, which the election of Donald Trump -- clearly one of the least-qualified people ever to hold the highest office in the land -- illustrated with painful clarity.  But it wasn't only a flip of the middle finger at the Coastal Elites that got him there.  The study by Imhoff et al. suggests that it was because of a pervasive tendency to treat all sources of information as if they were equal.

"[T]he data consistently suggests [people with a conspiracy mentality] just ignore source characteristics," Imhoff said.  "To them a web blog is as trustworthy as an Oxford scholar.  As we have formulated, they have terminated the social contract of epistemic trust, that we should believe official sources more than unofficial ones."

I blame part of this on people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and (of course) Alex Jones, who have gone out of their way for years to convince everyone that the powers-that-be are lying to you about everything.  Now, the powers-that-be do lie sometimes.  Also, being an Oxford scholar is no guarantee against being wrong.  But if you cherry-pick your examples, and then act as if those instances of error or dishonesty are not only universal, but are deliberate attempts to hoodwink the public for nefarious purposes -- you've set up a vicious cycle where the more facts and evidence you throw at people, the less they trust you.

As I've pointed out before: if you can teach people to disbelieve the hard data, it's Game Over.  After that, you can convince them of anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

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

Attractive paranoia

I know two people who are major conspiracy theorists.

One of them believes he's being persecuted by the folks at his place of employment, that they're getting together and deliberately making his life difficult because "they all" disagree with his political and religious beliefs.  He seriously believes that the ordinary, average folks he works with are meeting in secret to try to find new and devious ways to make him miserable.

"Why would they do that?" I ask.  

"Because of who I am," he answers, with no apparent trace of irony.

The other one is more of a global conspiracy type -- there's this Shadow Government run by the CEOs of the Big Corporations, and they have Big Secret Plans for World Domination. (This guy always speaks in Capital Letters.)  He's a major fan of Zeitgeist, believes there are secret plans for a One World Government, thinks that the CIA is putting mind-control chemicals into jet fuel so we get zombified whenever there's a jet contrail, and thinks that there are Men in Black who make dissenters disappear.  Say the words "New World Order" in his presence, and he gets really serious, and looks around to see if anyone overheard.  And of course, when you point out that there's no evidence whatsoever for a Global Conspiracy, he just raises his eyebrow coyly and smiles, as if to say, "Of course there's no evidence.  You don't think they'd just leave evidence hanging around, do you?  These guys are good."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm willing to believe that the second guy has just watched too many episodes of The X Files, but it does make me wonder why conspiracy theories are so appealing.  As strange as it sounds, there's a certain attraction to paranoia.  People want there to be a huge master plan behind everything -- sinister or otherwise -- because, I think, it's more satisfying and reassuring that there is a plan.  It's a little disconcerting to think that the universe is just kinda random, that things happen because they happen, and most people are just helpless dorks with no more intentionality than billiard balls bouncing off each other.

I mean, I like The X Files as much as the next guy, but honestly I think the universe is much more like a cosmic Mr. Magoo episode.

In a recent interview in Vox, social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, agrees.  "[Conspiracy theories are] a tool to explain reality," van Prooijen said.  "We can’t always know or understand everything that happens to us. When people are uncertain about change — when they lose their jobs, or when a terrorist strike or a natural disaster has occurred — then people have a tendency to want to understand what happened, and also a tendency to assume the worst. It’s a self-protective mechanism people have.  This combination of trying to make sense and assuming the worst often leads to conspiracy theories."

This means, van Prooijen said, that during unstable times, we should expect conspiracy theories to sprout up like mushroom after a rainstorm.  "They’re particularly likely to flourish in times of collective uncertainty in society. Particularly after high-profile incidents that imply a sudden change in society or a sudden change in reality in a threatening way.  Think 9/11, but also think of disease outbreaks [or] long-term threats like an economic crisis or climate change."

This means, too, that they're remarkably resistant to correction.  When the emotional piece is added, it makes people much more likely to dig their heels in than admit they were wrong.  And that's despite that fact that in general, most conspiracy theories are very likely to be wrong.

Robert Heinlein said, "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be equally well explained by stupidity."   I'd add to that that most people don't have the time or interest to conspire.  Conspiracy, after all, takes so much effort.  The first guy I mentioned -- the one thinks that his coworkers are out to get him -- would probably be appalled if he knew how little time and energy his coworkers actually spend thinking about him.  Sorry, buddy, you're not the victim of a conspiracy -- "who you are" is just not that important.  Most of your coworkers spend more time daily thinking about what to have for dinner that night than they do thinking about ways to make your life miserable.

Also, there's just the practical aspect of it.   Conspiracies are hard to manage, because face it, people like to gossip.  Plus, my own version of Murphy's Law is that the overall IQ and efficiency of a group is inversely proportional to the number of people in the group.  Our government isn't so much evil as it is ridiculous -- Congress as 535 Keystone Kops running about while "Yakety Sax" plays in the background, banging into each other, falling down, and having the occasional sex scandal and collusion with Russia, all overseen by President Magoo, whose job is to keep people believing the pleasant myth that his administration has got a handle on everything.

It's not that the government, or corporations, don't do bad things. They do -- sometimes really bad ones. But there's nothing more behind it than simple human greed and power-hungriness and dumbassery, with the occasional plot that is usually about as successful as Watergate. The rest of the world just keeps going on, doing what people do, and rolling our eyes at how absurd it all is.