Giving bad news to Pollyanna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swear, I spent the next three days shaking.

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

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

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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!]

Dots, threats, and illegal immigrants

Something that has continued to baffle me about the arguments over illegal immigration is how little of it tends to be based in fact.

Just in the last six months, four separate studies have found that the number of undocumented immigrants in an area has no correlation to the crime rate, either violent or non-violent.  This, of course, runs counter to the Trump administration's narrative that "our borders are being overrun by millions of illegals" and that all of those millions, immediately after crossing the border, sign a blood oath to MS-13.

Then there's the claim that the illegals are bankrupting us by stealing our benefits -- again, fostered by Trump's repeated claims that undocumented immigrants are immediately granted "welfare and free medical care."  According to EconoFact, here are benefits that illegal immigrants are explicitly prohibited from receiving:

• Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP)
• Disability, aka Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Food stamps, aka The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Health insurance, aka insurance via the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Medicaid
• Medicare
• Social Security
• Welfare

EconoFact states further:

Despite scapegoating in public discourse, the drain that undocumented immigrants place on government benefit programs is small.  The number of low-income undocumented immigrants is small relative to the size of the overall low-income population, and federal law restricts their participation in most programs.  Because so little federal assistance is available, some states and localities bear a disproportionate burden.  As enforcement efforts become more aggressive, it is expected that undocumented immigrants will be less likely to access public programs on behalf of their children who, as citizens, are legally eligible for these benefits.

Before I go any further, let me forestall any hate mail over this by stating up front that I am not saying we should do nothing about illegal immigration.  However, wouldn't it be nice if the discussion was based on reality rather than on the fevered imagination of the frightened?

The reason this comes up has to do with a study out of Harvard University by psychologist David Levari et al.  Called "Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment," the study looks at why we are so resistant to relaxing once a problem is being dealt with -- why we so seldom say, "My work here is done."

Levari's team did three separate, but related, experiments:

1. Show volunteers a series of dots colored in a range of colors from blue to red, and asked them whether the dots were blue, purple, or red.
2. Show volunteers a series of written requests, and ask them whether they were ethical, unethical, or somewhere in the middle.
3. Show volunteers a set of photographs of human faces, which had been carefully evaluated beforehand to determine how threatening the person looked, and asked them to rate the faces for threat level.

In each of the trials, the experimenters decreased the frequency of one of the types as the test went on -- in the first, blue dots; in the second, unethical requests; and in the third, threatening faces.  What happened was remarkably consistent.  In the first experiment, test subjects responded by identifying more purple dots as blue -- even ones that were shades of purple that they'd previously seen and identified as purple.  Similarly, requests analogous to those labeled as ethical were identified as unethical later in the experiment -- once truly unethical requests had become less frequent.  In the third, more neutral faces were identified as threatening once actually threatening faces were less commonly seen.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, when we are made aware of something -- even something as innocuous as whether a dot is blue, purple, or red -- when the thing we're looking for decreases in frequency, we broaden the parameters of what we'll accept as fitting the description.

As Levari writes, in a discussion of his team's research in ScienceAlert:

Why can't people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information – we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context. 

Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. 

This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.

Which may explain some of the furor over illegal immigration.  Not only is most crime in the United States not committed by undocumented immigrants, illegal immigration itself has decreased -- it's been steadily dropping for about twenty years.  So, as the problem gets better, we respond not by breathing a sigh of relief, but by looking around us even more frantically for problems connected with immigrants that we might have overlooked.

Of course, the whole thing isn't helped by Donald Trump and his proxies over at Fox News screeching about it on a daily basis, whipping up the fear and anger -- largely, I believe, because frightened people will vote for the folks who are saying they know how to fix the problem, not for the ones who say the problem isn't as bad as it seems.

What the study by Levari et al. doesn't address, unfortunately, is what to do about all this.  How do you counteract what seems to be a natural tendency to see threats where there are none?  Knowing about the effect might help -- if you are aware of a perceptual bias, you might be able to compensate for it.  But other than that, it looks like we might be stuck with calling purple dots blue -- and seeing neutral faces as dangerous.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

A chocolate war

I spend a lot of time on this blog railing at the internet as being a conduit for nonsense.  But today, I have a positive story, a wonderful story, about a Norwegian skeptic, some woo-woo chocolate makers, and an unsuccessful attempt by the latter to bully the former into silence.  [Source] [Source]

Xoçai is an American chocolate company.  Besides having a brand name that sounds like a Klingon death threat, they have a seriously New Age/alternative health slant on their marketing, and make a variety of wild claims about what their product can do for you.  The following advertisement was widely distributed in Norway:

Here's the translation:

DO YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE?
Millions of people all over the world eat chocolate every day. Unfortunately not all chocolate is healthy, but a healthy alternative does actually exist. Xoçai chocolate products don’t just taste nice; they’re also very healthy because of the high antioxidant-content.
XOCAI HEALTH CHOCOLATE:
- Three bites cover your daily need of antioxidants
- No preservatives
- No added wax or fillers
- No artificial coloring
- No artificial sweeteners
- No refined sugar
- Caffeine and sugar free
- Beneficial for diabetics
- Gluten and lactose free
- ORAC and Kosher certified
ANTIOXIDANTS:
- Strengthen the immune system
- Help against fatigue and give extra energy
- Improve memory and concentration
- The antioxidants catechin and phenols, as well as the vegetable antioxidants flavonoids, can prevent different forms of cancer, heart disease and the formation of blood clots
- Balances blood glucose levels and are beneficial for diabetics
- Can help against skin disease, e.g. psoriasis.
- Cleanse the body of toxins and improve digestion
- Can help against osteoporosis and calcium deficiency
- Can help against depression and early aging
- Prevent inflammation of blood vessel walls
- Prevent infections
- Can stabilize blood pressure

Yes, Xoçai is actually claiming that eating their chocolate is "beneficial for diabetics" and "can prevent cancer."  I suppose that at least we should be thankful that at least they didn't include "helps to remedy the aftereffects of Dementor attacks."

Anyhow, a Norwegian blogger, who (for reasons that will become obvious) has preferred to remain anonymous, challenged these claims.  (My sources, links posted above, gave him the pseudonym "Morten" and I will stick with that to avoid confusion in case you are interested in reading further about this.)  Morten questioned not only the unsupported medical claims but also Xoçai's sales model, which is an Amway-style MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) approach.  Shortly after he wrote his piece, he received the following email:

Hello,

As an association for over 9 000 Norwegian Xoçai-members, we have over the last year received over a hundred complaints from our members concerning your blog www.[anonymous].no

Most of our members seem to think enough is enough when it comes to your defamatory claims about the product and brand name Xoçai, the company MXI Corp. and the representatives of the company – thus everything you have written on your blog for some time now has been sent to the company’s lawyers in the USA – where these are currently preparing a lawsuit on the grounds of your untrue claims that have damaged the brand name and product Xoçai, the company MXI Corp. in the USA and the company’s representatives.

From the signals we have received it will be a seven digit lawsuit, and that’s not in Norwegian «kroner». This because the company now wishes to make an example once and for all, and such create precedence for other countries in Scandinavia and Europe.
We have also been asked on numerous occasions to account for your blog and person on our website, which we now have done on the grounds of information sent by our members. You can read more on: www.sjokoservice.no

We are of course aware that the company [anonymous company] doesn’t have any responsibility for your blog – but as it can be documented that a lot of your activity on the blogpage has been during work hours, we assume it is with your employer’s [anonymous company] knowledge and blessing in accordance with your terms of employment.

In the light of your cynical activities it must be admitted that this isn’t the best advertisement for the company [anonymous company] and your co-workers, neither now nor when the process starts.

Best regards

Foreningen Sjokoservice Norge

The email was also sent to his employer and various coworkers.

Sjokoservice Norge, the Norwegian legal arm of Xoçai, followed this up by a post on their own website that included Morten's name, place of employment, telephone number, and address, and a sly suggestion that Xoçai employees might want to "contact (him) directly."

Then it got worse.  Sjokoservice Norge sent Morten a second email, with an attachment that included Morten's address, the names of his parents, siblings, and wife, and a direct statement that the information was being sent out to nine thousand Xoçai employees!

Morten contacted Xoçai's representatives, asking them to elaborate on which claims he had made that they considered incorrect, and saying that if they could prove that he had misspoken, he'd amend or remove the post.  Sjokoservice Norge said that it was too late, that they had already initiated a lawsuit, but hinted that they might be willing to stop pursuing legal action if Morten deleted his posts and removed all mention of the company from his blog.  Morten caved, and removed the posts.

So far, I guess the message is: "don't make a woo-woo mad."  And at this point in reading the source material on this story, I'm remembering all of the snarky posts I've done in the past about various weird claims, and wondering if maybe I should change my name and move to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique.  But then, I continued reading, and found that a wonderful thing happened.

Have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect?  It occurs when someone attempts to censor or suppress a story on the internet, and as a result causes the story to become viral.  (The name comes from a 2003 lawsuit by Barbra Streisand that attempted to force photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove an aerial photograph of her California mansion from an online photograph collection; the photograph was viewed six times before the lawsuit was filed, and 420,000 times afterwards.)  Well, in their heavy-handed, mafia-style bullying of a blogger who asked too many questions, Xoçai may have triggered the same thing.  Morten's original posts, which he removed when Xoçai threatened him, have been translated and posted on a mirror site (read them here and here).  As far as Sjokoservice Norge, which was acting as Xoçai's brass-knuckles organization in Norway, chairman Terje Babsvik and his brother, Jon-Atle Babsvik, have denied any knowledge of the threatening emails to Morten, and Roger Meyer, Sjokoservice Norge's spokesperson, has "gone on vacation" and "is impossible to get a hold of."  The whole thing has bounced into the skeptics network worldwide, and has been featured on The Baloney Detective, Letting Off Steam (you should definitely check this one out and read the responses by Xoçai drones; they come off sounding like scary Scientologists), and Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, among many.

Of course, a rich corporation like Xoçai is probably not going to be seriously harmed by this -- although it'd certainly be nice if they stopped making unsubstantiated (and almost certainly false) medical claims in their advertisements.  And Xoçai has attempted to put the quietus on the story by flooding Google with stories that use the keywords "Xoçai," "threatens," and "blogger," but lead you to links that basically state how wonderful their product is, and how it "threatens" rival and inferior chocolate brands, so much so that many "bloggers" mention it.  Thus far, I'd have to call this Chocolate War a draw.  But even if it doesn't knock them back as hard as I'd like, it does lead me to one cheering conclusion; given the chance, the internet can be a force for rationality.

Oh, and also: don't piss skeptics off.  We generally know how to do research, and we're pretty good at arguing from a factual basis.