On Life-Choice Evangelists

This column will change your life: life-choice evangelists

On 09/03/2013, by Oliver Burkeman, the Guardian

'Their real motivation, you suspect, isn't their certainty that marriage, or parenthood, would be best for you. Rather, it's that they worry that it's not best for them'

Extracts:

“You almost certainly know at least one infuriating person who is what I'll call, for want of a better term, a life-choice evangelist. As the label suggests, LCEs are driven by the anxious insistence that whatever major decisions they've made – to get married, to have or not have kids, to sacrifice fulfilling work for a higher salary, or vice versa – are best for everyone. If he's married, an LCE will seem unable to comprehend why anyone wouldn't choose to be; if she's single and you're not, she'll drop hints that you should envy her freedom. Contradict an LCE, by suggesting an alternative life path, and you'll witness a face flicker of confusion, as if you might not be speaking English. (…)

The LCEs' real motivation, you suspect, isn't their certainty that marriage, or parenthood, or leaving the city for the country, would be best for you. Rather, it's that they worry, perhaps subconsciously, that it's not best for them: their efforts to persuade are an attempt to reassure themselves. A study soon to be published in Psychological Science strongly suggests that's so. The Stanford researcher Kristin Laurin and her colleagues found that people think more highly of those with the same relationship status as them – even when it shouldn't matter, as when hiring someone for a job, or deciding which politician to vote for. (…)

The truly telling detail, though, was that the effect was more marked the more permanent people believed their own status to be. It wasn't the most happily coupled-up people who thought coupledom was best; it was those who thought their position least likely to change who most strongly felt it was preferable for all. "Perceiving an unchangeable situation as undesirable can lead to feelings of being 'trapped'," the researchers write. One way to avoid that "is to represent one's current situation as an ideal – not just for oneself, but universally." If marriage is best for everyone, the logic goes, it must be best for me.”

On Social Constructs and Policy-Making

Why football is random but we think it isn't;
Why wine is rubbish yet we drink it;
Why native English speakers don't learn foreign languages
and other interesting heuristics.

The insightful Rory Sutherland:

On Inconsistency

Why people act out of line with their beliefs

On 12/03/2013, by Tom Stafford on BBC Future 

Ever been forced to defend a particular position and ended up believing it? You’ve succumbed to one of the most famous theories in social psychology.

Extracts:

“If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards. And if you find yourself acting out of line with your beliefs, change them. This sounds like motivational advice from one of the more cynical self-help books, or perhaps a Groucho Marx line (“Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others…”), but in fact it is a caricature of one of the most famous theories in social psychology.

Leon Festinger's Dissonance Theory is an account of how our beliefs rub up against each other, an attempt at a sort of ecology of mind. Dissonance Theory offers an explanation of topics as diverse as why oil company executives might not believe in climate change, why army units have brutal initiation ceremonies, and why famous books might actually be boring. (…)

Fans of cognitive dissonance will tell you that this is why people forced to defend a particular position – say because it is their job – are likely to end up believing it. It can also suggest a reason for why military services, high school sports teams and college societies have bizarre and punishing initiation rituals. If you've been through the ritual, dissonance theory predicts, you're much more likely to believe the group is a valuable one to be a part of (the initiation hurt, and you're not a fool, so it must have been worth it right?). (…)

Changing your beliefs to be in line with how you acted may not be the most principled approach. But it is certainly easier than changing how you acted.”

On Happiness

Happiness, Beyond the Data 

On 10/04/13, by Gary Gutting, the Opinionator

Extracts:

"Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and governments are moving toward quantitative measures of a nation’s overall happiness, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. (…)

Happiness involves four things, and the first one is mostly a matter of luck. You have be sufficiently free of suffering — physical and mental — for happiness to be even possible. Suffering can be noble and edifying, but it can also reduce us to a state where there’s nothing beyond our distress that can make it meaningful. (…)

The second requirement for happiness: fulfilling work. Since humans are distinct persons but with essential ties to a community, my work must be fulfilling both individually and socially: I must do something that satisfies me as an individual and that I regard as producing significant good for others. Of course, unless I have the luck of being born rich, my work must also generate enough income to provide me the minimal goods without which happiness is not even possible. The challenge is to find satisfying work with an adequate income. (…)

A third feature of happiness is what the ancient Greeks called the proper “use of pleasure.” Here I am using “pleasure” to refer not to just any feeling of satisfaction but to the immediate gratification of the senses: not only the five physical senses but also the aesthetic sensibilities directed to art and nature. (…) The danger — particularly for a society as rich as ours — is making pleasure the central focus in the pursuit of a happy life. (…) Pleasures themselves often induce a desire for their repetition and intensification, and without moderation from a reflective mind, they can marginalize the work that lies at the core of true happiness. (…)

Finally, and often most important, there is the happiness of human love, where my happiness arises from and contributes to the happiness of my spouse, my children, my friends — even perhaps of all humankind. Such love can take us beyond the domain of mere happiness, into the world of moral and religious values. It can even lead to sacrificing my happiness for another’s. Love is both the culmination of happiness and a reminder that there is more to life than happiness."

On Brain Tricks

10 Ways Your Brain Is Smacking You Around
Sometimes it seems like your brain just isn't on your side.    
11/12/12 by David DiSalvo in Psychology Today
 
Extract:    
 
“We'd be nowhere without the marvel of evolution in our skulls, but sometimes our brains act in ways not in our best interests, and that's when we have to remember that not every message coming from the control center is accurate or beneficial. Here are 10 examples:

1. Telling you that you have more impulse control than you really do.
2. Producing more automatic thoughts than you can possibly manage.
3. Pulling you into rumination about your worst fears.
4. Directing you toward distractions to take the pressure off.
5. Making you think you’re a mind-reader and a fortune-teller.
6. Sending mixed messages about which rewards to pursue.
7. Looking for patterns, here, there and everywhere.
8. Pushing you into extending trust whether or not it’s reciprocated.
9. Making things seem urgent that really aren’t.
10. Tripping your guilt wire every time something goes wrong.”


The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational  
By George Dvorsk, On iO9

Extract:                                               

“The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn't mean our brains don't have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we're subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about.

1. Confirmation Bias
We love to agree with people who agree with us.

2. Ingroup Bias
It causes us to overestimate the abilities and value of our immediate group at the expense of people we don't really know.

3. Gambler's Fallacy
We tend to put a tremendous amount of weight on previous events, believing that they'll somehow influence future outcomes.

4. Post-Purchase Rationalization
Also known as Buyer's Stockholm Syndrome, it's a way of subconsciously justifying our purchases — especially expensive ones. Social psychologists say it stems from the principle of commitment, our psychological desire to stay consistent and avoid a state of cognitive dissonance.

5. Neglecting Probability
It’s our inability to grasp a proper sense of peril and risk — which often leads us to overstate the risks of relatively harmless activities, while forcing us to overrate more dangerous ones.

6. Observational Selection Bias
This is that effect of suddenly noticing things we didn't notice that much before — but we wrongly assume that the frequency has increased.

7. Status-Quo Bias
We humans tend to be apprehensive of change, which often leads us to make choices that guarantee that things remain the same, or change as little as possible.

8. Negativity Bias
People tend to pay more attention to bad news. (...) Evolutionarily, heeding bad news may be more adaptive than ignoring good news.

9. Bandwagon Effect
Though we're often unconscious of it, we love to go with the flow of the crowd.
Much of this bias has to do with our built-in desire to fit in and conform, as famously demonstrated by the Asch Conformity Experiments.

10. Projection Bias
We tend to believe that people not only think like us, but that they also agree with us. It's a bias where we overestimate how typical and normal we are, and assume that a consensus exists on matters when there may be none. 
 
11. The Current Moment Bias
We humans have a really hard time imagining ourselves in the future and altering our behaviors and expectations accordingly. Most of us would rather experience pleasure in the current moment, while leaving the pain for later.

12. Anchoring Effect
Also known as the relativity trap, this is the tendency we have to compare and contrast only a limited set of items. The classic example is an item at the store that's on sale; we tend to see (and value) the difference in price, but not the overall price itself."

On Optimism

The Science of Our Optimism Bias and the Life-Cycle of Happiness
Based on Tali Sharot’s book in "The Science of Optimism: Why We’re Hard-Wired for Hope", on Brain Pickings.

“To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one.”

Extracts:

“Sharot cites, this “optimism bias” might be better termed “narcissism bias” — a phenomenon known as the “superiority illusion”:

‘In a survey by two Ohio researchers, 25 percent of respondents said they were in the top 1 percent for getting along well with others. A separate study of college students found that 93 percent of respondents in the U.S. believed they were above average in driving ability. Most people would even be willing to bet money on it if you asked them to. This high level of car-handling expertise, however, is statistically impossible — we cannot all be better than everyone else.’

On pessimism:

‘The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. Not everyone agrees with this assertion. Some people believe the secret to happiness is low expectations. If we don’t expect greatness or find love or maintain health or achieve success, we will never be disappointed. If we are never disappointed when things don’t work out and are pleasantly surprised when things go well, we will be happy. It’s a good theory — but it’s wrong. Research shows that whatever the outcome, whether we succeed or we fail, people with high expectations tend to feel better. At the end of the day, how we feel when we get dumped or win an award depends mostly on how we interpret the event.’"

On Context

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World
07/01/13, by Sam McNerney, on Big Think.

Extract:

“McNerney: Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World” (a book by Sam Sommers) is a reaction to the idea that personalities are immutable, that the individual changes the situation but not the other way around. We’re more influenced by those around us than we’d like to believe. Even our private sense of identity is highly context-dependent. (...)

Sommers: Yes, the real moral of the book is that personality is overrated. Why do we put so much stock in the idea of immutable character? The world is a frighteningly unpredictable place–it's reassuring to at least be able to hang our hats on the idea that the people around us are reliably predictable entities."