Psychology – Page 40 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.

Debit chic

Back in the heady days of high stock prices, rising house prices, and seemingly robust economic growth, having an elite credit card with a high credit limit was a status symbol. Now that the whole world has been forced to confront problematic levels of debt, it seems like having the ability to make impulse purchases on credit shouldn’t have much cachet anymore.

Indeed, perhaps the humble debit card should be today’s status symbol. By breaking it out and typing in your PIN, you can demonstrate to everybody around you that you have the cash on hand to fund your purchase right now, rather than the confidence of Visa or Mastercard that you will be able to pay them back later.

Materialism and free will

I have written before about the apparent contradiction between free will and materialism (the idea that the universe is exclusively comprised of particles that obey physical laws). The problem is easy enough to state: if every particle in the universe behaves in a manner governed by a combination of random chance and predictable laws, how can a physical entity like the brain respond to stimuli in a way that is neither random nor determined?

Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington recently summarized some experiments on monkeys that illuminate this issue. They found that they could use a computer to predict how monkeys will respond to visual stimuli, suggesting that such mental functions are automatic.

Of course, there is a big difference between parts of mental life like maintaining a steady heartbeat and tracking a moving object visually and those like making ethical decisions. That said, I continue to be unable to see what mechanism could exist between the former and the latter, and which could square our intuitive belief in free will with what we know about the functioning of the universe. That being said, we do not have any reason to act as though free will does not exist. The reason for that is simple: if free will doesn’t exist, we don’t have any influence over what we believe or how we act, while if it does exist we certainly want to behave appropriately. As such, if we do have any scope to choose, we should choose to believe in free will.

Age and openness to new ideas

I wonder whether there is a time in life by which our aesthetic and political preferences have been essentially locked in, after which we are no longer fully capable of integrating new ideas. It certainly seems plausible that this could be true. It could also help to explain the broader pattern of social change in society; as each generation rises to positions of influence, they bring with them the intuitive assumptions about politics and ethics that they absorbed when they were younger. Often, that means being willing to accept things that were outside the bounds of what was acceptable for the generation before, but which are less radical than what will be accepted by the generation after.

If true, this dynamic could also be a major reason for which people dying is an important form of social progress. To take one example, as there have been fewer and fewer surviving parents who would not tolerate having their child in an inter-racial relationship, the less taboo such relationships have become within society generally. I have also read about how scientific progress depends to some extent upon the death of highly respected individuals who have become overly wedded to new ideas in their old age, and who are now keeping the mainstream from accepting what the latest research has shown to be true about the universe.

Obviously, not everybody has their preferences and instincts ossified at exactly the same time, or to the same extent. That said, if there is evidence for such a phenomenon existing generally, it could have political and sociological importance. For one thing, it would highlight the importance of the education system and the overall collective of information available to youth, when it comes to determining what society is going to look like a few decades from now.

Do people think such a phenomenon is real? If so, what would the most important consequences be?

Emotional responses to oil production

When I was a child, I remember seeing working on terrestrial or offshore oil rigs as an heroic profession: using knowledge and technology to do something difficult and important, at considerable risk to your personal safety. No doubt, that view was partly formed through exposure to advertising. Like the military and space programs, oil companies realized a long time ago that the combination of high technology with human dedication is an image that people find compelling. Throw together footage of people in hardhats riding helicopters between giant machines, with intense music in the background, and you can pretty easily create a sense of your company and personnel as impressive. Nonetheless, it still has a certain emotional validity, as long as the interactions you think about are all the voluntary ones: companies accessing oil reserves and then upgrading their crude contents into useful products that serve important functions.

Of course, when you start to think about the involuntary interactions, the waters get substantially muddied. Oil producers and users are both guilty of putting their own needs and desires ahead of those who are inevitably harmed as a consequence of their activities, through routes like air and water pollution and climate change.

Now, when I see ads for oil companies, I respond to them like personal insults. They look like taunts from powerful and politically influential companies that are fully aware of how much damage they are causing, but are happy to continue to do so, while continuing to try to foster the image I used to hold of them as brave technical experts.

Of course, there are still people out there who factually reject the idea that oil production and use causes significant suffering for third parties. From that mindset, it is almost inevitable that you would end up with a profoundly different view of oil producers and consumers. It is not all that surprising, then, that deep aesthetic and political disagreements about how the industry should be treated are ongoing.

Now, it seems like a real shame that so much energy, effort, and money have gone into building up an industry that has proven to be so harmful. If all the intellectual effort that has gone into extracting and processing fossil fuels during the last few decades had been applied instead to the development and deployment of renewable forms of energy, we would be a lot farther along the path to carbon neutrality today.

The internet and confirmation bias

The issue of confirmation bias has come up repeatedly here before. Basically, people evaluate new information in a way that is far from impartial; new information that seems to confirm pre-existing beliefs is generally filed as evidence for the appropriateness of those beliefs, while contradictory information is downplayed or ignored. While this phenomenon is ancient, there does seem to be good reason to think that it may be especially acute now, as the media becomes more personalized and segmented.

That danger is highlighted by Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman, who gave a TED talk on how social networks mislead us. Because we are exposed to the thoughts of people who are already much like us, we are at risk of being convinced that we are more typically than we really are, and our views are more mainstream and justified than may actually be the case.

How much of a problem would people say this is, both from the perspective of being well-informed citizens and in the context of being effective in promoting particular policies? Is there any way either social networks or individuals can combat this entrenching of confirmation bias? For my own sake, I have been trying to incorporate more articles from newspapers I disagree with into my daily reading.

Uncovering motivations

Often, it seems that people are not fully aware of the strategies they are following in various situations, or the reasons behind their choices. Psychological experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that factors that people do not consciously acknowledge can nonetheless affect things like knowledge and decision-making. That said, it stands to reason that people are not always fully aware of why they behave as they do, in relation to things like career choices and interpersonal relationships.

The task of trying to identify one’s ‘real’ motivations is a challenging one, with at least two types of error possible. On the one hand, it is possible to accept overly superficial explanations: ‘I stormed out of there because I found the offer unacceptable.’ While this may be true in a sense, it probably doesn’t capture the entirety of your thought process, or the factors that had put you in that particular state of mind. On the other hand, it is also possible to over-interpret your own decisions, in an almost paranoid way, and see them as more cynical or strategic than they really are.

I suppose all of this is indicative of how perplexing it is to be a creature that can never really step outside itself for purposes of comprehension. We have more information than anybody else about what makes us act as we do, but the same cognitive filters that determine how we act make it difficult or impossible for us to understand the process objectively.