Psychology – Page 39 – a sibilant intake of breath

The peak-end rule

Some psychological insights have a great deal of practical importance. It seems to me that the ‘peak-end rule’ is among these. Essentially, the idea is that when remembering an experience like a medical procedure or a vacation, our recollection is strongly coloured by the most intense portion of the experience and by the ending. Sam Harris mentions this on p.77 of the hardcover version of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. It is also mentioned in Paul Bloom’s free series of psychology lectures.

The insight has practical value when it comes to unpleasant experiences. Harris describes how prolonguing the least painful portion of a colonoscopy (at the end) reduces how much pain patients later recall having experienced. It seems to me that the insight could also be exploited when planning pleasant activities. If you are setting up a concert, art show, or vacation, it seems like a good idea to include something that will serve as a positive and engaging emotional peak and to put some effort into ending things well.

Setting up a strong emotional peak could also benefit those hoping to cultivate romance. As mentioned before, people misattribute excitement unrelated to a person who they are getting to know. While it might be the scary movie or the rollercoaster that is causing your heart to pound, some part of your brain may wrongly attribute the feeling to the person who you are sitting beside.

The identifiable victim effect

In the second chapter of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , Sam Harris describes the strange phenomenon in human psychology where we care less about a problem as the number of victims rises. When we see one little girl who is starving, we generally feel more concern and willingness to help than we do when it is her and her brother, or her and her entire village.

This seems deeply irrational. Bigger problems should motivate a larger desire to help. Perhaps it reflects our implicit awareness of our own limitations. Helping one little girl may be within our power in a way that helping a large group is not. Still, this quirk seems likely to be very damaging. If we don’t feel a strong moral impulse in the face of a big problem, we are unlikely to band together and provide a big solution.

That applies directly to climate change. It may also have something to do with our sometimes strange notions about the value of avoiding extinction and our thinking about apocalypse.

Evaluating religiously motivated actions

One interesting claim made by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is that religious values are fundamentally driven by concerns about how circumstances will affect the lives of human beings. For instance, doing what is necessary to get into heaven and avoid hell is ultimately good for you as an individual, even if it involves difficulty and sacrifice during your lifetimes. Similarly, Harris argues that suicide bombers who are partially motivated by the promise of a lavish afterlife are making decisions on the basis of faulty information about how their actions will affect their lives and (possibly) those of others.

Religious believers are arguably trying to maximize human welfare in both this world and the afterlife, which changes their moral calculations:

Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm. (p.66 hardcover)

Harris also argues that when “people riot[ed], burn[ed] embassies, and [sought] to kill innocent people” in response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, they were demonstrating a “terrifying inversion of priorities” in which the strictures of a particular religious doctrine were held to be of greater importance than the personal security (and expression rights) of other people.

While I don’t necessarily agree with Harris completely, I think he is right about one critical thing: it is important to be able to criticize religion on logical grounds. ‘Because my religious beliefs require me to do so’ is not an adeqaute explanation for human behaviour, and we should not let people justify themselves on such an unsatisfying basis. I think it is perfectly fair to point out when a religious belief seems to cause harmful consequences, or when different elements of the same religious doctrine seem to be contradictory. That isn’t to say all religiously motivated actions are harmful or problematic – just that the fact that they are religiously motivated does not set them in a special category where their consequences cannot be rationally contemplated.

Psychology and delayed gratification

Back in 2009, The New Yorker published an interesting article on psychology and self-control. It describes an experiment in which children were challenged to delay gratification, and then considers what implication their success or failure at such tasks has for their lives. It also describes some of the mechanisms through which people are able to defer an immediate pleasure in favour of a larger one later:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

Perhaps the most useful thing about psychology is the way in which is allows us to learn about the limitations of our own minds. Once we recognize the many flaws in human reasoning, it becomes easier to avoid falling prey to them and being able to manage well in the world.

Photography and social roles

A number of my friends are fairly serious amateur photographers: people who have built up a repertoire of knowledge, various sorts of gear, and who display photography publicly online. Photography is certainly an excellent pastime. It satisfies geeky cravings for toys to play with, while serving as a creative outlet. It also lets you document and share what is going on in your life, with a group of friends who are increasingly likely to be far-flung (as we stay in touch with friends from former schools and employers, all over the world).

In addition to those appealing elements, photography has an interesting role within group dynamics. Everyone wants flattering photos of themselves, so being able to provide them makes you valuable to others. There is also competition between people who take photos. It takes place on the basis of quality of output, creativity, photographing interesting things, and gear. Indeed, photo gear is an increasingly appropriate way of demonstrating wealth. Whereas in some social circumstances, automobiles are probably the premier form of wealth expression, that isn’t well matched to a lifestyle where people move around often and relatively rarely see their friends in person. Photography is useful, visible, and a way of demonstrating capability, access, and wealth.

[Aside] On a somewhat related note, OKCupid has some data on what makes an attractive photo. Specifically, a non-flash shot taken with an SLR or 4:3 system camera at f/1.2 or f/1.8. The average 30 year old iPhone user has also had significantly more sexual partners than the average BlackBerry and (especially) Android user.

Sign you’re living badly

Paul Graham was written an interesting piece, on addictiveness. He argues that people are vulnerable to getting addicted to all sorts of things, and that avoiding this requires you to behave in an abnormal way: “You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.”

This strikes me as an interesting and possibly truthful observation, and an extension of our prior discussion of the nature of addiction.

Single player and multiplayer

I have always preferred the single player modes in games like Half Life and Warcraft III to the multiplayer modes. The latter strike me as excessively hectic, with everybody racing to destroy their enemies, generating a lot of chaos in the process. Single player games allow you to take your time and execute things perfectly, in a much more controlled way.

It has occurred to me that the two options might appeal to rather different sorts of people. Multiplayer fans may be the sort who are thrilled by immediate engagement and happy to come out on top, even when the process for doing so is risky and disorderly. If they lose 90% of their army but end up victorious, they are happy. Single player may appeal to the sort of obsessive individual who wants to find a way to beat the enemy without losing a single unit, or suffering a major setback. It is well suited to the risk averse.

In life, it does seem that the kind of skills required in multiplayer are generally of more use than those required in single player. While there are areas of life where developing a plan methodically and them implementing it is possible and a good strategy, there seem to be many more where a capacity for improvisation and a willingness to not reflect on losses and failures are more valuable. Is there any way, I wonder, to make a natural single player fan into a more engaged multiplayer user?

Pickup artists

I find the phenomenon of ‘pickup artists‘ somewhat disturbing.

Basically, these are individuals who exploit quirks of human psychology in order to get people to sleep with them easily. Human behaviour is predictable to such an extent that many tricks are effective against a sizable proportion of the population. For example, you can use a minor insult called a ‘neg’ to make a person feel like they have to prove themselves to you. A long piece on pickup artists in The Point Magazine describes how this is at the core of the technique: “the key to the method is, unquestionably, that the pickup artist ignore, tease, or even insult the targeted female, accustomed as she is to constant, beleaguering attention from men.” There is also the whole collection of cold reading tricks long employed by psychics and con artists to give the false sense that they have special insight into you.

If people were widely aware that such tricks can be effective, the practice of people using them would be less worrisome. When they are employed against unwitting subjects, however, they strike me as exploitative and potentially unethical. The article linked above contains a detailed discussion of the ethics and psychology of this unusual set of skills.

The DSM and defining mental illness

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and contains the most authoritative definitions of mental illnesses. The current version – the DSM-IV – was released in 1994. Now, work is ongoing on a fifth edition.

To me, it seems like ‘mental illness’ often describes a situation in which a person manifests a normal part of psychology to an excessive extent. For instance, it is perfectly normal and probably even essential for people to feel things like guilt, shame, and anxiety. Any of these felt to an extreme extent, whether that means extremely strongly or weakly, could form the basis for a mental illness.

There is a danger, perhaps, in being too quick to say that someone is ill, when they simply manifest a normal tendency to an unusual degree. Doing so might make them feel stigmatize and lead to unnecessary medical interventions. It also risks making people feel less responsible for their choices and actins, since they can be ascribed to a medical condition rather than to the free expression of their will. At the same time, increased awareness of mental illness is probably an important thing for society to develop. My sense is that most people do not have a great understanding of the character of mental illnesses, and that society is generally poorly set up to assist people suffering from them.

Tattoo motivations

I had never given much thought to why people in their teens and twenties are so often interested in getting piercings and tattoos. Recently, however, it occurred to me that one rather valid reason for doing so is so they can assert ownership of their own bodies, particularly in defiance of their parents. Having never felt as though I had less than complete ownership of my body, that potential motivation had never occurred to me before.

Arguably, it is especially important for young women to take such a stance (though there are obviously many ways of doing so). That is because their bodies have much more commonly been seen as the property of others, or at least under their control – whether the outside entity is the state, family, or some religious structure.