Defending the indefensible

I'm a pretty forgiving guy.  I recognize we all have failings, and heaven knows I've led a far from blameless life myself.  But there are two things that I find it hard to fathom, and nearly impossible to forgive.

Those two things are rape and pedophilia.

Victimizing the less powerful turns my stomach.  I can barely stand even reading news stories that involve those two acts, which is why I felt actual nausea at a trio of disgusting articles about the recent revelation of a massive coverup by the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania involving the rape of 1,200 (possibly more) children by priests.

Let's start with the response to the scandal by Dr. Taylor Marshall, Catholic theologian, who at least acknowledged the problem -- more than a lot of church leaders have done -- but then proceeded to deflect the blame in a way that is as maddening as it is baffling.  Here's what Marshall had to say:

Three reasons for sexual scandals:

1. Denial of Christian faith. These clerics are secretly atheists, agnostics, or Satanists who see the Church as a social justice network that pays well and provides a lifestyle of insurance, income, retirement and unquestioned access to compromised men and vulnerable children.
2. Homosexuality. The 2004 John Jay Report publicized that 80% of priest abuse victims are male.  The orientation of abuse was overwhelming homosexual According to James Martin and Larry Stammer, 15–58% of American Catholic priests are homosexual in orientation.  Father Dariusz Oko of Poland has suggested that 50% of the bishops in the United States are homosexual.
3. Evolution of the mega-diocese. Since 1900, the concept of the Catholic diocese has morphed into something that would not be recognized by Christians of the medieval period, and certainly not by the Church Fathers.

So the reason priests have molested children is not because they're sick, predatory, and in a position of power, and are being overseen by men more concerned about the church's image than they are about protecting children.

No, the reasons are atheists, gays, and big churches.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons license Samuli Lintula, Altar of Helsinki Catholic Cathedral, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who said that Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is "anti-Catholic" and "salacious" for going after pedophile priests.  Donohue, who is known for his vitriolic, combative Catholicism-Is-Never-Wrong stance, had the following to say:

Shapiro said that "Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate contact. It was none of those things."  He said it was "rape." 

Similarly, the New York Times quoted from the report saying that Church officials used such terms as "horseplay" and "inappropriate contact" as part of their "playbook for concealing the truth." 

Fact: This is an obscene lie.  Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word "rape" means.  This is not a defense — it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

First of all, how does Donohue know that "most of the alleged victims were not raped?"  That certainly contradicts a lot of the information that's been released (see the next article for more information about that).  And instead of defending the church and the priests, how about a little compassion for the children that were hurt?

Worst of all, there's the piece by Hemant Mehta that I would not recommend you read unless you have a far stronger stomach than I have, that gives details about a number of the cases being investigated.  I read it with an increasing sense of horror, not only because of the disgusting nature of the crimes committed, but because of the sheer number.  Mehta's list goes on and on -- but it bears mention that these are only cases that are being prosecuted in one state in one country.  Multiply that by the size of the Catholic community worldwide, and the imagination boggles.

And besides the scale, the other thing that will jump out at you is the lengths to which church leaders will go to protect not the victims, but the priests and the church.  Consider, for example, a letter from the bishop to Father Thomas Skotek, after it was revealed that he'd raped an underage girl, who became pregnant, and then paid for her to have an abortion.

"This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are," the bishop's letter said.  "I too share your grief."

This letter was written to Father Skotek, not to his victim.

The whole thing leaves me reeling.  It bears mention that I knew one of the first pedophile priests to be prosecuted and jailed for his crimes -- Father Gilbert Gauthé, who in the late 1960s and 1970s raped over a hundred boys in southern Louisiana.  At first, instead of turning Gauthé in for his crimes, the two bishops who supervised him, first Bishop Maurice Schexnayder and then Bishop Gerald Frey, moved him from one parish to another an effort to hide the scandal.  All that did, of course, was simply to give Gauthé a new batch of children to molest, and the crimes themselves didn't come to light until 1983.  (Despite my being a child when I knew him, Gauthé never acted inappropriately toward me, probably because he knew my grandmother, with whom I was living at the time, would have strangled him with her bare hands if he had.)

The most horrifying thing of all is that these kinds of crimes are not, as they have often been characterized, the sole provenance of the Catholic Church.  They can occur any time you have two ingredients -- a power structure that puts the leaders in a position of absolute authority over their followers, and people running the whole thing who are more bent on protecting themselves and their institution than they are on protecting innocent victims.  (If you want to read a novel that shows a similar thing in a different setting, read Ava Norwood's book If I Make My Bed In Hell, which is simultaneously one of the most beautifully written, and most disturbing, works of fiction I've ever read.)

As horrifying as it is, I hope the cases in Pennsylvania will uncover the similar instances of pedophilia that must exist in equal numbers in other places.  The victims have a right to have their voices heard, and their wrongs redressed, insofar as that is possible.  The perpetrators need to face justice for what they have done.

And the people like Taylor Marshall and Bill Donohue who are still making excuses and defending the church leaders rather than showing the slightest compassion to the victims need to shut the fuck up.

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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!]

Selflessness, sociality, and bullshit

About two and a half years ago, a team of researchers released a landmark paper entitled "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."  The gist of the paper, which I wrote about in Skeptophilia, is that people with lower cognitive ability and vocabulary are more prone to getting taken in by meaningless intellecto-babble -- statements that sound profound but actually don't mean anything.

This is the sort of thing that Deepak Chopra has become famous for, which led to the creation of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator.  (My latest visit to it produced "The unexplainable embraces new life, and our consciousness constructs an expression of balance."  I've read some real Chopra, and I can say with certainty that it's damned hard to tell the difference.)

Now, a followup paper, authored by Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, Gustav Tinghög, and Daniel Västfjäll of the University of Linköping (Sweden) -- interestingly, none of whom were involved in the earlier study -- has shown that not only does poor bullshit detection correlate with low cognition (which is hardly surprising), it correlates with high selfishness and low capacity for compassion.

In "Bullshit-Sensitivity Predicts Prosocial Behavior," which came out in the online journal PLoS One two weeks ago, the authors write:

Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior.  We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity)...  [L]ogistic regression analyses showed that... bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior.  These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity.  The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

"To our knowledge, we are the first study that links reactions to bullshit to an actual behavior rather than to self-reported measures. We also measure prosociality in two different ways, which makes the findings more robust and generalizable," said Arvid Erlandsson, who co-authored the study, in an interview in PsyPost.  "We see this finding as a small but interesting contribution to a fun and quickly emerging field of research rather than something groundbreaking or conclusive.  We are open with the fact that the results were found in exploratory analyses, and we cannot currently say much about the underlying mechanisms...  Future studies could potentially test causality (e.g. see whether courses in critical thinking could make people better at distinguishing the actually profound from the pseudo-profound and whether this also influences their prosociality compared to a control group)."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons -- This vector image was created with Inkscape by Anynobody, composing work: Mabdul., Bullshit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As you might expect, I find all of this fascinating.  I'm not sure it's all that encouraging, however; what this implies is that bullshit will tend to sucker stupid mean people (sorry, I'm not a researcher in psychology, and I just can't keep writing "low-cognition, low-prosocial individuals" without rolling my eyes).  And if you add that to the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the well-studied tendency of people with low ability to overestimate how good they are at something -- you've got a perfect storm of unpleasant behavior.

Stupid mean people who think they're better than the rest of us, and who will not only fall for nonsense, but will be unwilling to budge thereafter regardless of the facts.

Sound like some people in red hats we keep seeing on the news?

So my chortles of delight over the Erlandsson et al. paper were tempered by my knowledge that we here in the United States are currently watching the results play out for real, and it's scaring the hell out of a good many of us.

I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this.  Promote critical thinking in schools is a good place to start, but education budgets are being slashed pretty much everywhere, which certainly isn't conducive to adding new and innovative programs.  Other than that, we just have to keep coming back to facts, evidence, and logic, and hoping that someone -- anyone -- will listen.

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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!]

The true self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

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

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!]

Looking for LTR with a guy who is sexy, handsome, athletic, and dead

A loyal reader sent me an email yesterday that said, "Dude.  You think it's weird that there are people who want to get hot & heavy with Bigfoot.  Check this out."

The reference, of course, was last week's post about Bigfoot erotica, which, tolerant guy though I am, left me feeling a little incredulous.  So as you might imagine, I could barely wait to click on the link, which brought me to an article by Paul Seaburn over at Mysterious Universe...

... about a woman who is trying to have a baby with a ghost.

I am not making this up, although she clearly is.  I mean, no one would be happier than me to find out we get to have sex in the afterlife, but realistically speaking it seems pretty unlikely.  If there's an afterlife at all, and at the moment I'm even a little dubious about that.

The woman's name is Amethyst Realm (I'm still not making this up), and she lives in Bristol, England.  Last year she apparently gave up trying to hook up with flesh-and-blood guys, and put an ad on OKCupid, specifying her preference for a lover as "deceased."  At least that's what I'm assuming she did, because last year she claims she had sex with twenty different ghostly men.

The first time kind of caught her by surprise.  After ditching her previous (live) boyfriend for being away too much, Amethyst Realm decided to go for a long walk.  "One day, while I was walking through the bush, enjoying nature, I suddenly felt this incredible energy," she says.  "I knew a lover had arrived."

What happened then is what any of us would do, provided we had a screw loose; she got naked right there in the underbrush and did the horizontal tango with her invisible friend.  She had repeated hookups with this particular ghost -- and then did some comparison shopping.  I guess there's no chance of catching an STD from a ghost since they're already dead, so if spectral sex rings her bell, more power to her.

But then she decided it was so good that she had to take the next step -- namely, getting pregnant.

"It’s pretty serious," Amethyst Realm says.  "In fact, we’ve even been thinking about having a ghost baby.  I know that sounds crazy but I’ve been looking into it and I don’t think it’s totally out of the question."

It should be a relief, I guess, that at least she knows it sounds crazy.

This does bring up some questions, however.

1. Is the baby going to be half dead?  If so, which half?
2. What happens if Amethyst Realm and her lover argue after the baby's born, and he wants split custody?
3. Would it work the other way -- for a live guy to impregnate a female ghost?
4. If you can get pregnant from ghostly sex, why didn't she get pregnant any of the other dozens of times she did it?  Did she make her lover stop at the Rite-Aid and pick up some condoms beforehand?  If so, you have to wonder what the counter clerk thought about selling birth control to a ghost.  Although honestly, I guess it's no more awkward than selling it to embarrassed teenage boys.
5. Why am I spending my time wondering about all of this?

Of course, it bears mention that the idea isn't new.  The tradition of incubi and succubi goes back to the Middle Ages -- the former are male demons who take advantage of sleeping women (the name comes from the Latin verb incubare, "to lie on top of"), and the latter female demons who do the same to sleeping men (from succubare, "to lie underneath").  (Being visited by a succubus was one explanation given to young male adults getting wet dreams, when the actual explanation is that young male adults are so perpetually horny that they can go from zero to orgasm in ten seconds flat even when they are technically unconscious.)

Incubus by Charles Walker (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So Amethyst Realm didn't come up with the concept, but there's no doubt that she's enjoying it.  Which, I suppose, puts it into the "If It Makes You Happy" department.

However, I hope this is the last time I get sent a link about people having paranormal sexual experiences.  I guess chacun à son goût and all that sorta stuff, but myself, I prefer that my lovers are (1) human, and (2) alive.  If that makes me narrow-minded, I guess that's the way it is.

Oh, one more thing.  Amethyst Realm might want to consider adopting a different name if she's serious about finding a nice ghost to settle down with, because her current one sounds like one of the worlds from Super Mario Brothers.  If I was a ghost looking for a LTR, I don't think I could take someone named "Amethyst Realm" seriously, however determined she was to get into my, um, shroud.

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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!]

Alien vs. moose vs. cameraman

Some friends of mine went on a long backpacking excursion in the Grand Tetons a few years ago.  This couple was (at that point) in their forties, and both strong, fit, and energetic.  They were seasoned hikers who had twenty years' worth of wilderness experience.

Still, they were finding the Tetons a challenge.  Steep, rocky terrain and the desert heat were taking their toll.  And one day they were trudging wearily uphill, each wearing 35-pound packs, legs aching, when they heard a sound.

Both turned.  And running -- no, sprinting -- up the trail was an elderly man of perhaps 75.  Going all out, legs pumping, arms swinging.

And my buddy thought, "Criminy.  Look at that old dude.  Here we are, plodding along like senior citizens, and this guy is running up the trail like it's nothing."

His bemusement turned to mystification when the old guy caught up to them, grabbed them both by the shirt sleeves, and pulled them off the trail and behind a rock outcropping.

My friend said, "What the fuck?"

The old man, gasping for breath, jerked a thumb back toward the trail, so my friend peered around the rock outcropping.  And running full-tilt up the trail was...

... a moose.

Have you ever seen a moose?  They're huge.  No, not huge.  Humongous.  An average full-grown bull moose weighs 1,200 pounds.  That's an average one.  There was one shot by a hunter in the Yukon that weighed 1,800 pounds.  They can stand seven feet high at the shoulder, with a rack of antlers six feet across.

And they're aggressive.  Given (very little) provocation, moose will charge you, then take one of those enormous hooves and attempt to pound you into hamburger.

As the old guy found out.  My friend whispered, "All right, what did you do to piss off the moose?"

The old guy said, "I just took his picture."

The camera went "click," and the moose charged.

It all ended happily enough.  Once they hid behind the rocks, the moose promptly forgot about them, and wandered off to look for other humans to vent its rage at, or failing that, helpless bunnies and squirrels to stomp.  As for the old dude, he probably regretted ever coming on this hike.  I'll bet he never again got more than five feet from his La-Z-Boy.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all comes up because of a video that popped up on YouTube last week.  It was filmed in Gaspésie, Québec, and the claim is that some tourists stopped to video a moose, and ended up capturing a bipedal humanoid... something.  Take a look:

What strikes me about this video -- besides the fact that it has the obligatory out-of-focusness that all alleged paranormal videos have -- is the fact that here's this gray, skeletal, hollow-eyed guy dancing around next to a moose, and the moose doesn't respond.  "Ho hum," the moose seems to be saying.  "I'll ignore the flailing alien ten feet away from me, and focus on this nice grass by the side of the road."

This is definitely not typical moose behavior.  Typical moose behavior would be to scream, "Teleport this, motherfucker!" immediately before converting the alien into an alien pancake, then to turn toward the people in the car and shout, "Hey!  You!  Whadda you starin' at?  You want a piece of this?  Do you?"

So based on the moose's behavior, I'm thinking there's nothing there, and that it's some sort of video artifact... or possibly (gasp!) a hoax.

This didn't stop Sequoyah Kennedy, over at Mysterious Universe, from speculating that the thing might have been a Wendigo, the mythical creature common to the legends of many tribes of Algonquian origin.  The Wendigo is depicted as a skinny, creepy-looking guy with stringy hair that goes around eating people because he's been cursed to always be hungry and never able to satisfy his appetite.  Why he eats people and not something with more meat on them, e.g. moose, I'm not sure.  Maybe even the Wendigo doesn't dare to piss off a moose.

Which makes it even odder that here he would be, doing the macarena right next to one.  Although Kennedy admits that there's a more likely explanation, which is that it's a piece of a reflection from the inside of the car's windshield.  In fact, if you watch closely, you'll see that there's an odd pattern to the movement -- the guy's not holding the camera steady, and when he jitters it to the right, the creature moves a little to the left, and vice versa.

Exactly what would happen if it was a reflection.

I'm not completely convinced of this explanation, however, and I'm far from an expert in video analysis.  What I'm pretty sure of is that this isn't an alien or a woodland monster or whatever else people have been claiming.

Although I must admit that it's kind of creepy-looking.  It's hard to watch it without pareidolia taking over and convincing you that it's humanoid.  So who knows?  It could be real, I guess.  Maybe the moose and the creature are friends.  Maybe they like to collaborate in attacking humans.  Maybe the creature is saying, "Hey!  Moose!  Look over there!  Those guys aren't just taking your picture, like what happened to your Cousin Fred in the Grand Tetons.  They're videotaping you!"

Which could explain why the video is under a half a minute long.  Because at that point, the moose had enough and chased the people off down the road.

Damn presumptuous humans.  Always pointing and aiming cameras, when all moose want to do is have a nice snack and a chat with their dancing alien friends, or perhaps snort angrily and punt some innocent prairie dogs.  That'd also be in character.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

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

Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question despite being one myself, and being happily married to a wonderful woman.  Of course, truth be told, said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me, because I'm just that clueless when someone is flirting with me.  But still.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts last month, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm kind of clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Celeborn and Galadriel, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations. I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress from the Merciful-Heavens-How-Does-That-Stay-Up school of haute couture, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Hotbody and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard; between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

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