On (Not) Changing Our Minds

I Don’t Want to Be Right

By Maria Konnikova on The New Yorker, 19/05/2014

Extracts:

"Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked. (…)

Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. (…)

One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief.

But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur. (…)

If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong. (…)

False beliefs, it turns out, have little to do with one’s stated political affiliations and far more to do with self-identity: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person do I want to be? All ideologies are similarly affected. (…)

Facts and evidence, for one, may not be the answer everyone thinks they are: they simply aren’t that effective, given how selectively they are processed and interpreted. Instead, why not focus on presenting issues in a way that keeps broader notions out of it—messages that are not political, not ideological, not in any way a reflection of who you are?

Take the example of the burgeoning raw-milk movement. So far, it’s a relatively fringe phenomenon, but if it spreads it threatens to undo the health benefits of more than a century of pasteurization. The C.D.C. calls raw milk “one of the world’s most dangerous food products,” noting that improperly handled raw milk is responsible for almost three times as many hospitalizations as any other food-borne illness. And yet raw-milk activists are becoming increasingly vocal—and the supposed health benefits of raw milk are gaining increased support. To prevent the idea from spreading even further, Nyhan advises, advocates of pasteurization shouldn’t dwell on the misperceptions, lest they “inadvertently draw more attention to the counterclaim.” Instead, they should create messaging that self-consciously avoids any broader issues of identity, pointing out, for example, that pasteurized milk has kept children healthy for a hundred years.

I asked Nyhan if a similar approach would work with vaccines. He wasn’t sure—for the present moment, at least. “We may be past that point with vaccines,” he told me. “For now, while the issue is already so personalized in such a public way, it’s hard to find anything that will work.” The message that could be useful for raw milk, he pointed out, cuts another way in the current vaccine narrative: the diseases are bad, but people now believe that the vaccines, unlike pasteurized milk, are dangerous. The longer the narrative remains co-opted by prominent figures with little to no actual medical expertise—the Jenny McCarthys of the world—the more difficult it becomes to find a unified, non-ideological theme. The message can’t change unless the perceived consensus among figures we see as opinion and thought leaders changes first.

And that, ultimately, is the final, big piece of the puzzle: the cross-party, cross-platform unification of the country’s élites, those we perceive as opinion leaders, can make it possible for messages to spread broadly. The campaign against smoking is one of the most successful public-interest fact-checking operations in history. But, if smoking were just for Republicans or Democrats, change would have been far more unlikely. It’s only after ideology is put to the side that a message itself can change, so that it becomes decoupled from notions of self-perception.”

On Addiction and Capitalism

Extracts of Dr. Gabor Maté’s radio interview on “Making Contact”, about the origins of addiction:

“What we see is a society that literally makes people sick. 50% of North American adults have a chronic illness: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer or any number of auto-immune illnesses. According to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations:

1) It separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health;

2) It separates individuals from their environment, so that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives.

Those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid. (…)

The justice system is criminal. It’s based on the very idea that people are making choices when they become addicts. If they are not making choices, why punish them for it? Another idea is that it is genetics. And a third idea, of course, is that drugs are addictive, which is inherently nonsense. If it was true then anybody who tried a drug should become addicted. But most people who try most drugs don’t become addicted. Most people who try cigarettes don’t become nicotine addicts. Most people who have a drink don’t become alcoholics.

Ex:

If you look at the aboriginal population of North America, these people actually had potentially addictive substances available to them. Not only were they available, they used them. If the substances in themselves had been addictive, and if these people are genetically predisposed, they should have been addicted. But there was no history of addiction prior to the coming of the caucasians. As a matter of fact, the natives used these plants, but what did they use them for? They used them in spiritual ways. They used them to elevate their level of consciousness, whereas the very essence of addiction is to obstruct your level of consciousness, because you don’t want to be aware. So, addiction is an escape from awareness whereas the spiritual use of these substances is the enhancement of awareness.

Now if choice and genetics don’t explain it, all we have to do is look at history. We’d have to actually ask what happened to the native people in this part of the world that drove them into addiction. Now alcohol has been known in the Western world for thousands of years, and there was plenty of drunkenness, even in ancient times, but there is no alcoholism for the most part. Alcoholism came around in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism. You can make a very good case that one of the medical outcomes or one of the health outcomes of capitalism is addiction. In other words, you can’t understand people in isolation from the system in which they live.

First of all, because the biology of human beings is shaped by the psychological and social environment in which they live. I can give you one example. Asthma. It’s well known now, not controversial, that children whose parents are stressed, are more likely to have asthma. Now, ask the average physician what’s the connection and they’d have no idea. And yet, if you ask the physician “how do you treat the asthma?”: with stress hormones — with adrenaline and cortisol, or copies of it. I’m not going to go into the reasons why, but shouldn’t the very fact that we are treating this condition with stress hormones cause us to ask if stress has something to do with it? The emotional levels of stress in the parents disorganize the stress response mechanisms of the child. And when women are stressed during pregnancy, their children have abnormal stress hormone levels and are more likely to use addictive substances to soothe their stresses.

Now, if you look at the parameters of stress, what it is that stresses people? The research shows that what is the most stressful in people is

1) uncertainty, lack of information, loss of control, and

2) lack of opportunity to express yourself.

When Karl Marx talked about freedom, he talked about freedom in 4 senses of the word. Freedom, for him, was:

1) freedom from economic necessities,

2) freedom from the threat to life,

3) freedom from interference of other people, and

4) freedom to express yourself — to be yourself.

That’s freedom. Now what freedom is there in this “free society”, you know, in the free world, the freest society in history? What freedom is there when people are not free of economic worry, where there is tremendous uncertainty and fear lack of control? When people lack control over their lives, they have no freedom. And they’re physiologically stressed. And when they’re physiologically stressed, that’s going to manifest in the form of illness.

Ex:

The California-based “Adverse Childhood Experience Studies” looked at 18,000 people: 80% Caucasian, 10 Hispanic, 10 Afro-American. They looked at what happened to them in childhood and what the adult outcomes were. An adverse childhood experience could be something like physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the loss of a parent due to a death, being jailed, or rancorous divorce, violence in the family, addiction in the family; for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction went up by 2 to 4 fold. So, by the time a male child had had 6 of these experiences, his risk of becoming an injection using substance addict was 4600 greater than that of a male child that had had no such experiences. (…)

Stress is not just an abstract psycho social event. When you’re stressed, your whole body - homeostasis or the internal balanc - is perturbed and fundamentally you have: disturbances in the nervous system; increase in heart-rate, blood pressure, and in the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline - which play their job in helping you escape, or to fight back in the face of an acute threat. But if you’re chronically stressed they actually create stress, thin your bones, suppress your immune system, give you heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes– a whole range of heart conditions.

When it comes to addiction, I never had a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. As were many of the men. The heart of addiction is always emotional loss. And the obvious ones were those losses incurred by those adverse childhood experiences identified in this California study. But there is another side to it as well, because if you look at what is happening with this burgeoning number of children being diagnosed with this or that disorder — not all of them were abused, many of them were not, but what is going on?

As D.W. Winnicott, the great British child psychiatrist pointed out, there are two things that can go wrong in childhood:

1) When things happen that shouldn’t happen: that’s the abuse and the trauma, and

2) When things don’t happen that should happen: that’s the presence of non-stressed, non depressed, emotionally attuned available caregivers.

That’s not available in a country with average maternity leave with 6 and a half weeks. That’s not available where kids spend most of the time away from the nurturing adults in their lives and in company of other kids. So that they are forced to look to each other as their attachment figures - the desperation of the kids to always connect. (…)

A study out of Notre Dame University showed that the healthiest environment for child rearing is the hunter gatherer society, hunter gatherer village. Why? Because in the HG village, 3 things happen to the kids that does not happen in our culture anymore for many kids:

1) The kids are always with their parents.

2) When the kids cry, they get picked up. Imagine picking up a kid when he is crying! We tell people when the kid is five or six months old, “don’t pick up, you want them to become independent”. We are missing a point. The way to promote independence is to invite dependence, because people go independent when they feel secure in the world. So you promote independence by inviting dependence.

3) Children are brought up in the context of nurturing adults but not just parents - not just the father, not just the mother, but a clan, a tribe, a community.”

On the indigenous family

Extract from “An intimate history of humanity”, by Theodore Zeldin.

 

On Addiction

On Mastering Your Mind

On the News

On Being Alone

How to be alone. Beautiful.

On Conflict

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality

Squaring recent research suggesting we're "naturally moral" with all the strife in the world

By Robert Wright, 23/10/2013, featured on The Atlantic


Extracts:
“In 1999, Joshua Greene—then a philosophy graduate student at Princeton, now a psychology professor at Harvard—had a very fertile idea. He took a pretty well-known philosophical thought experiment and infused it with technology in a way that turned it into a very well-known philosophical thought experiment—easily the best-known, most-pondered such mental exercise of our time. In the process, he raised doubts, in inescapably vivid form, about the rationality of human moral judgment. The thought experiment—called the trolley problem—has over the past few years gotten enough attention to be approaching “needs no introduction” status. But it’s not quite there, so: An out-of-control trolley is headed for five people who will surely die unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto a track where it will instead kill one person. Would you—should you—pull the lever? Now rewind the tape and suppose that you could avert the five deaths not by pulling a lever, but by pushing a very large man off a footbridge and onto the track, where his body would slow the train to a halt just in time to save everyone—except, of course, him. Would you do that? And, if you say yes the first time and no the second (as many people do), what’s your rationale? Isn’t it a one-for-five swap either way?
Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem. The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.
If you put Greene’s findings in general form — human “reasoning” is sometimes more about gut feeling than about logic — they are part of a wave of behavioral-science research that in recent years has raised doubts about how much trust your brain deserves. (…)
Greene’s diagnosis is, at its foundation, Darwinian: the impulses and inclinations that shape moral discourse are, by and large, legacies of natural selection, rooted in our genes. Specifically, many of them are with us today because they helped our ancestors realize the benefits of cooperation. As a result, people are pretty good at getting along with one another, and at supporting the basic ethical rules that keep societies humming. Anyone who doubts that basic moral impulses are innate will have Paul Bloom’s book to contend with. He synthesizes research—much of it done by him and his wife, Karen Wynn—demonstrating that an array of morally relevant inclinations show up in infants and toddlers. His list of natural moral endowments includes “some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions,” as well as “empathy and compassion—suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away.” Bloom’s work has also documented “a rudimentary sense of justice—a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.”
So if we’re such moral animals, why all the strife? Joshua Greene’s answer is appealingly simple. He says the problem is that we were designed to get along together in a particular context — relatively small hunter-gatherer societies. So our brains are good at reconciling us to groups we’re part of, but they’re less good at getting groups to make compromises with one another. “Morality did not evolve to promote universal cooperation,” he writes.
Greene seems to think this wouldn’t be such a big problem if we were still living in the Stone Age, back when sparse population meant that groups didn’t bump into one another much — and when, anyway, a neighboring village might share your language and your culture and maybe even include some of your kin. But the modern world smushes groups together, and to further complicate things, they have different values. (…)
I think the big problem comes earlier, in the diagnosis phase, and it’s a problem common in analyses of the world’s conflicts: overestimating the role played by divergent values.
(…) It’s true that some Jews believe God reserved the West Bank for them. But it’s also true that this belief — and religious belief in general — has had very little to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zionism was a largely secular movement, featuring minimal God talk, and the Arab resistance to it wasn’t particularly religious. After the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, enraged by Robert F. Kennedy’s pledge to send arms to Israel, assassinated Kennedy, he said he had done it for “my country,” not “my religion.” And, anyway, his religion was the same as Kennedy’s: Christianity.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its root a conflict between two peoples who think they’re entitled to the same piece of land. When they argue about this, they don’t generally posit different ethical principles of land ownership. They posit different versions of history — different views on how many Arabs were living in Palestine before 1948, on who started the fighting that resulted in many Arabs leaving the area, on which side did which horrible things to the other side first, and so on. It’s not clear why these arguments over facts would change if both groups were godless utilitarians.
In fact, Greene’s own book suggests they wouldn’t. Notwithstanding its central argument, it includes lots of evidence that often the source of human conflict isn’t different moral systems but rather a kind of naturally unbalanced perspective. He cites a study in which Israelis and Arabs watched the same media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre and both groups concluded that the coverage was biased against their side. Any suspicion that this discrepancy was grounded in distinctive Jewish or Arab or Muslim values is deflated by another finding he cites, from the classic 1954 study in which Princeton and Dartmouth students, after watching a particularly rough Princeton-Dartmouth football game, reached sharply different conclusions about which side had played dirtier. Was the problem here a yawning gap between the value systems prevailing at Princeton and Dartmouth in the 1950s? Maybe a mint-julep-versus-gin-and-tonic thing?
No, the problem was that both groups consisted of human beings. As such, they suffered from a deep bias — a tendency to overestimate their team’s virtue, magnify their grievances, and do the reverse with their rivals. This bias seems to have been built into our species by natural selection — at least, that’s the consensus among evolutionary psychologists. Such biases seem to be, in part, a legacy of all the zero-sum games that got played during human evolution: two clans fighting over some finite resource, two people competing for the same mate or for social status. Ironically, this means that some self-serving biases are rooted in what Greene presents as the good news about our evolutionary past: that people are designed by natural selection to extract the benefits of cooperating—successfully playing non-zero-sum games — with other people. After all, even many non-zero-sum games have a zero-sum component. Yes, you and your three fellow hunter-gatherers will all be better off if you cooperate on a hunt to kill an animal none of you could kill individually. But when it comes time to divvy up the meat, it’s better to get 30 percent than 25 percent. So we’re naturally good bargainers — with ready access to facts that support our worthiness and less-ready access to facts that don’t; we seem designed to believe in our entitlement. In one study, collaborators on jointly authored academic papers were asked what fraction of the team’s accomplishment they were responsible for. On the average four-person team, the sum of the claimed credit was 140 percent.
If real-world examples of our self-serving biases seem hard to find, that’s because they’re supposed to be hard to find; the whole idea is that we’re not aware of the information these biases exclude. So, for example, if you’re like the average American, here’s a fact you don’t know: in 1953, the United States sponsored a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a brutally repressive regime that ruled for decades. Iranians, on the other hand, are very aware of this, which helps explain why, to this day, many of them are gravely suspicious of American intentions. It also helps explain the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran—an event that many Americans no doubt chalk up to unfathomable religious zealotry. This is the way the brain works: you forget your sins (or never recognize them in the first place) and remember your grievances.
As a result, the antagonisms confronting you may seem mysterious, and you may be tempted to attribute them to an alien value system. Indeed, this temptation may itself be part of our built-in equipment for making our rivals’ positions seem groundless. In any event, viewing values as deeply causal, as Greene and so many others do, seems to be deeply human. It’s also unfortunate, because, time and again, that belief keeps us from addressing the actual issues that underlie conflict. (…)
What makes the moral stakes especially high is the way these biases interact with a feature of psychology that is more obviously moral in nature. Namely: the sense of justice — the intuition that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished. A sense of justice sounds like a fine thing. Rewarding good behavior increases its frequency, and the threat of punishment discourages bad behavior. But this assumes impartial judgment — that the punishment will go to those who did the bad things and the rewards will go to those who did the good things. And, as we’ve just seen, our judgments are designed not to be impartial.
When you combine judgment that’s naturally biased with the belief that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, you wind up with situations like two people sharing the conviction that the other one deserves to suffer. Or two groups sharing that conviction. And the rest is history. Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis, thanks to their common humanity, shared the intuition that bad people should suffer; they just disagreed — thanks to their common humanity — about which group was bad. (…) The impulses governing cooperation range from the gratitude that cements friendships to the sort of righteous indignation that fuels violence.
(…) This all feeds into his belief that “our brains are wired for tribalism.” (…) Both Greene and Bloom cite studies in which people were randomly divided into two groups and immediately favored members of their own group in allocating resources — even when they knew the assignment was random.
Of course, for things to get really nasty, you need more than just the existence of two groups. The most common explosive additive is the perception that relations between the groups are zero-sum — that one group’s win is the other group’s loss. In a classic 1950s study mentioned by Bloom (a study that couldn’t be performed today, given prevailing ethical strictures), experimenters created deep hostility between two groups of boys at summer camp by pitting them against each other in a series of zero-sum games. The rift was mended by putting the boys in non-zero-sum situations — giving them a common peril, such as a disruption in the water supply, that they could best confront together. (…)
The question of how large a role differing value systems play in human conflict hovers over some of the world’s most salient tensions. Many Americans see Muslim terrorists as motivated by an alien “jihadist” ideology that compels militants to either kill infidels or bring them under the banner of Islam. But what the “jihadists” actually say when justifying their attacks has pretty much nothing to do with bringing Sharia law to America. It’s about the perception that America is at war with Islam.
Just look at the best-known terrorist bombers and would-be terrorist bombers who have targeted the United States since 9/11: the Boston Marathon bombers, the would-be “underwear bomber,” the wouldbe Times Square bomber, and the would-be New York subway bombers. All have explicitly cited as their motivating grievance one or more of the following: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in various Muslim countries, and American support for Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
There’s no big difference over ethical principle here. Americans and “jihadists” agree that if you’re attacked, retaliation is justified (an extension of the sense of justice, and a belief for which you could mount a plausible utilitarian rationale, if forced). The disagreement is over the facts of the case — whether America has launched a war on Islam. And so it is with most of the world’s gravest conflicts. The problem isn’t the lack of, as Greene puts it, a “moral language that members of all tribes can speak.” Retributive justice, for better or worse, is a moral language spoken around the world — but it is paired with a stubborn and lethal bias about who should be on the receiving end of the retribution.
None of this is to deny the existence of genuine disputes over values, or to say that such disputes never matter. Certainly domestic politics features explicit debates over values, and here—in the realm of abortion and gay rights—Greene’s argument may hold more water. I’m sure there would be less homophobia if people were driven more by pure reason—not just because they would sidestep scriptural injunctions, but also because they would transcend gut reactions against forms of sex that they themselves don’t find enticing.
But even in the domestic arena, the fact that people fight over values doesn’t mean values are the prime mover. The conflicts may draw at least as much energy from prior intertribal tensions—including a sense that your group is threatened by another group, so that the game is zero-sum. Two decades ago, then–Vice President Dan Quayle paired criticism of abortion and gay parenting with a warning about the “cultural elite” who were said to be foisting such values on ordinary Americans. That was smart, because once you’re convinced that an enemy group has contempt for your values, your values will seem, more than ever, worth fighting for. (…) 
Some of our deepest moral intuitions are gut feelings that are with us for no more lofty a reason than that they helped our ancestors protect themselves and spread their genes. Even the emotional aversion to pushing the guy onto the trolley track (an aversion so deep that utilitarians overcome it only with effort) isn’t here because natural selection frowned on pushing people to their death per se. Greene speculates, rather, that we are averse to conspicuously harming people because in the hunter-gatherer environment of our evolution, that would have invited retaliation from the victims or their kin or friends. Killing someone remotely, by pulling a lever, doesn’t trigger the same aversion as low-tech, obvious assault.
(…) We seem designed to twist moral discourse — whatever language it’s framed in — to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting. So maybe the first step toward salvation is to become more self-aware. (…)
Self-doubt can be the first step to moral improvement. But our biases are so subtle, alluring, and persistent that converting a wave of doubt into enduring wisdom takes work. The most-impressive cases of bias neutralization I’m aware of involve people who have spent ungodly amounts of time—several hours a day for many years — in meditative practices that make them more aware of the workings of their minds. These people seem much less emotion-driven, much less wrapped up in themselves, and much less judgmental than, say, I am. (And brain scans of these highly adept meditators have found low levels of activity in brain networks associated with self-regarding thought.)
Happily for those of us who can’t spare several hours a day, more-modest progress can be made by pursuing this “mindfulness meditation” in smaller doses. And this practice exploits a strategy that is common in successful evangelical missions: using self-help as bait. Loosening the grip of your emotions can make you happier, and for many meditators that’s the big draw. The fact that emotionally driven and subtly self-centered moral judgments loosen their hold on you as well seems almost like a side effect. (…)
It’s tempting for us utilitarians to look around at people with more emotionally rooted value systems and think that these primitive worldviews are what stand in the way of progress. But if psychology tells us anything, it is to be suspicious of the intuition that the other guys are the problem and we’re not.”