Naked Negative Emotions

by Gary Berg-Cross

A pundit on the political scene recently summarized today’s conflict of raw emotions and suggested (I paraphrase) that Hate & Anger was winning out over Love and Happiness while Fear over Hope. These battle of opposites may be so, although dichotomizes are often a simplification that hides important complexities (see my discussion of Binary Thinking). Certainly this sports-game metaphorical judgment of winners and losers seems disturbing. We might also apply other psychological state ideas like apathy and cynicism in the political sphere. I guess there is more mention of this although since they aren’t binary ideas they don’t have as easy a comparison of one going up and thus the other down a zero sum game.

More broadly our system seems not to be handling distressful social and cultural problems, such as school, office and church shootings or racial and ethnic tensions.  It is easy to be on the negative side of emotions but we might more systematically expand that observation of what is abroad in the emotional and attitudinal space of the nation.  

Discrete emotion theory developed 2 decades or so ago (Fogel and friends) assumes that psychological states & emotions are phylogenetically adapted to serve the basic function of survival. That is, they are like a skill such as language learning and planning. Human emotions like reasoning serves a human purpose. 

And like a tree growing from a small acorn we might conceptualize them unfold from simpler states – feeling good or bad, being energized or not. Seeing a bear gets one energized. That’s basic for survival. Arousal is a primitive state as is its unaroused, relaxed state. If seeing a bear generates enough fear we may run away and survive. Babies have both but emotions can build on these as they develop. Being a social animal as well as one that can be eaten by bears some complex emotions like parental love are largely social in nature but are central to babies hence society surviving. There is developmental support for the idea that emotional expression like language expressions emerges, driven by maturation of the central nervous system but also social interaction.  Human children learn rules that modify and modulate emotional expression and behavior.  Simple experiments to test the theory reveal surprising results.  When people are told to hold a pencil between their teeth for some period of time (this uses the facial muscles involved with smiling) they afterwards reported feeling happy!  Discrete emotion theory, mentioned earlier, proposes functional values for each emotion, suggesting that patterns of particular neural activity in the brain causes the associated, subjective changes in feeling, but also in behavior. Behavioral changes make the theory testable.  These behaviors can be as simple as distinct sets of facial, vocal, respiratory, skin (measurable galvanicly), and muscular responses

During childhood certain repetitive emotional experiences, say anger situations, can develop traits and biases that will be a strong factor in interpersonal relationships later in adulthood. 

So it is bad for us as a culture if indeed Hate & Anger are winning out over Love and Happiness while Fear is dominating Hope.  Cultural systems can favor some emotions over others. An economic system that has a central base of fear and greed may be heading for a bit on trouble.  Sure fear is a core emotion, but so is happiness. Greed is more complex, although we can see kids hugging toys to preserve comfort and happiness.  Guilt is used by  cultures, including religious ones, as a balance on greed. Mary share your toys!

Indeed some negative emotions like resentment may act as moral checks on drives like greed.  It’s a question of balance. So hearing a binary contest of greed versus generosity just seems to be simplifying things too much.

But to be sure in the contemporary atmosphere the end result of emphasizing a negative emotion like fear or anger is to produce people and groups whose trait is being in the state of fear, or frustration or anger for long periods.  That’s unbalanced and bad for reasoning which usually requires some middle ground between excited and relaxed. 

Misinformation, Lies and Ignorance

By Gary Berg-Cross

At a recent meeting I attended the topic of American decline came up somewhat as an obvious assertion as fact with the subsequent search for why this was happening.  After the usual suspects of ineffective government and various stresses such the wealth gap and declining resources it was suggested that an additional reason was “ignorance.” This was elaborated a bit as people not understanding they are being fooled, lied to and manipulated.  For a number of reasons people are just misinformed. We can blame Fox unNews and others parts of conservative media for misinformation on the Affordable Care Act - see What Epic Propaganda Looks Like Obamacare And Permanent Right-Wing Misinformation which includes the sensational rumor mongering ideas of “death panels” and fact-free claims that:

• Obamacare is a "cancer" and "a top-down, iron-fisted, Soviet-style program."
• Obamacare represents the "largest tax increase in the history of the world."
• Obamacare is "sticking it to men."

These are the type of unbalanced, sensational, emotion-generating stories that abuse common sense but appeal to some bias and thus spawns meme waves.  The more boring reality of a neutral story can't compete. 

How do we handle this? One idea is to simply ask, "what is the source or these claims?"  Challenging the source is one way to fight misinformation (MI) in a person, but it may not stem a tide of MIs.  Media and political machines provide an easy way to spread these oversimplified memes which are not sourced back to facts, but are just myths.

 As Mark Twain wrote:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.

 It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Yes, and Psychology tells us a bit about why people hold on this this Foxian misinformation. You can read a bit about it in Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing by Australian Stephan Lewandowsky and others.  

Novelty, emotional capability and over simplicity making misinformation memetic is part of it.  Having a megaphone to get the meme out is another, but it is also important that we live an nonintellectual climate that

accepts a naive idea of binary balance or what I called binary thinking.  You see in arguments about evolution vs. creationism.  There are 2 sides and so it is balanced to give them equal discussion.  No, this is not the way to balance fact and opinion, although Fox news seems to place the asymmetry in the other direction – more opinion than facts.  People will believe something if it comes from a well-positioned source.  Should I believe in creationism?  Well if it is good enough for my moral leaders (Rabbis, priests, ministers etc.) than it is good enough for me.

 The internet and the social web makes this easier than ever to get a preponderance of opinion and advocacy out there as opposed to literal fact. And of course people believe internet misinformation because it sounds literal like an authoritative source.
 
“A survey of the first 50 Web sites matching the search term “weight loss diets” revealed that only 3 delivered sound dietary advice.” Why People Believe Weird Things and 8 Ways to Change Their Minds by Jeremy Dean

I once had a conversation with a person who thought the facts were against climate change.  His source was a site with some authoritative  definitive name like Climate Facts I don’t remember the actual name, but I looked it up and found it was funded by Exxon. That gave me something to use aside from different climate change facts. With my confused friend I could show why the site he found might be misinforming him – they had hidden motives.

The lesson here is that people are partly ignorant because it is hard to keep up with the flow of information, and not critical thinking or skeptical enough. But there is also responsibility on the part or the 4^th Estate to inform.  As Carl Bernstein noted:

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. 

Psychologist Jeremy Dean proposes a few other ways to unstick folks from misinformation.  These include keeping the rebuttal short and sweet. By sweet one means not attacking the person and being affirmative and not just negative. Don’t overload a misinformed person but dose things out as they may be able to assimilate it and do it in an exchange
An interesting idea which I haven’t tried systematically is to, as Dean calls it “affirm identity.” The idea is to mitigate people’s natural resistance to new, countering, unpleasant facts by getting them to affirm their identity. So if people think of themselves as generous or open or having Christian values they may be better able to accept the value of funding food for hungry people while thinking of those identities. Research suggests this helps people deal with inconsistencies between their beliefs and the new information that is conflicting with it.

In this informative process there are some things to avoid.  After you have noted a topic you are addressing, don’t keep repeating a myth associated with it, such as “death panels”. It just activates emotions, so re-frame the discussion and repeat your main points, which should include facts to give

them a chance to replace unfacts. Think of it as dismantling a structure in stages, but providing a new, sturdy structure to replace it.  I had that experience in that same meeting where we discussed ignorance.  One person supported the idea that our society was declining because it was, yes, too complex, but that this was driven by the government making things too complex in order to be “fair.”  Step by step people in the group offered simple examples of how things like the tax code or laws are complex due to greed and interest on the part of power groups able to influence the construction of tax exemptions etc.  By the end we had a group understanding and the myth of government imposition of fairness was dismantled.

Lewandowsky and colleagues conclude their article with a mixed note of caution and information consumer advice:

“Correcting misinformation is cognitively indistinguishable from misinforming people to replace their preexisting correct beliefs. It follows that it is important for the general public to have a basic understanding of misinformation effects… Widespread awareness of the fact that people may “throw mud” because they know it will “stick”…will contribute to a well-informed populace.”

 Yes, we are all information consumers and know how to move other’s opinions.  It is the task of ethical information agents to pursue the true and educate our fellow citizens.

Images

Myth vs. Fact: http://lifehacker.com/5863557/the-debunking-handbook-explains-the-art-of-shooting-down-misinformation

No hell below us: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/misinformation-and-facts-about-secularism-and-religion

Replacing misinformation:http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/misinformation-and-facts-about-secularism-and-religion

Determined, Partially Determined: Understanding Networks of Influence in the Nature vs Nature argument

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By Gary Berg-Cross

One of the discussion topics after Chis Mooney’s presentation on The Republican Brain  concerned determinism.  One questioner framed a question about genetics “partially determining” ones personality, ideological stance etc. This was a gestured to by Simone Amselli in her blog on Mooney’ presentations:

“Mooney’s theory is somewhat deterministic: ‘our political inclination is dictated by the configuration of our brain’. This seems to be the conclusion Mooney is aiming at.

However determinism is a huge subject… and a lot can be said about it. Even the cultural context can be deterministic.”

Both Chris and I were more than a little uncomfortable with a verbal concept like “partially determined.”  This seems counter to the very idea of determinism which argues that for any happening there are conditions such that, given those conditions (say a set of genes), nothing else could happen. 

What people who propose “partially determinism might mean is that events are affected by a factor or as Chris said “influenced.”  Genetics and environment are huge factors involved in driving human behavior.  They certainly interact and they have many components that interact over time. An interactionist model, contrasted to pure genetic or environmental ones is shown in the 3 part graphic below.

 

As developmentalist  Jerome Kagan put it to broaden the nature vs nature issue:

Genes and family may determine the foundation of the house, but time and place determine its form.

That’s a much better model for what is going on than determinism by either single factor approach.

So part of what the research that Chris reports on is saying is that from things like twin studies we understand the 2 sides and their interactions better.

“Nature, we are starting to realize, is every bit as important as nurture. Genetic influences, brain chemistry, and neurological de velopment contribute strongly to who we are as children and what we become as adults. For example, tendencies to excessive worrying or timidity, leadership qualities, risk taking, obedience to authority, all appear to have a constitutional aspect.” Stanley Turecki

This general idea of interaction is an important way of understanding complex phenomena (like obesity).  Take climate change.  In a November 01, 2012 article in Business Week  Paul M. Barrett declared after Hurricane Sandy - It's Global Warming, Stupid.  The article  quotes Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota explaining how to understand the influence of climate change on a storm like Sandy:

“Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.”

Eric Pooley, senior VP of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), explained it using a baseball analogy that we all might understand:

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

And we can go way beyond that frame to understand some of the factors that influence something like a storm. Mark Fischetti of Scientific American summarized the broadening consensus about the mechanistic factors:

“Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.

Do sure climate scientists agreed that it's difficult to link a single weather event to global warming but many agree that the damage caused by Sandy was worse because of rising sea levels.

Climate change itself is multi-determined and involves factors combine to produce climate change and global warming, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide. And the model isn’t as simple as a one directional factor influence. It is more like a network of factors with some factors feeding back to affect other factors. So while climate is always changing, understanding recent changes starts with human generated increases of greenhouse gases.  These hold in heat which in turn warms the atmosphere and oceans.  But there is feedback, since as temperatures warm, the area of the Earth covered by light reflecting ice shrinks.  With less ice in polar regions, more of the sun's energy is absorbed by Earth, further warming the climate, which leads to still more ice melt.
It’s a network of influence.  And so is the gene-environment situation.  We shouldn’t think of it as 2 modular, isolated items. When we step closer we see a biological-development network. And there are structures and mechanism at work. Cells for example. In bio-organisms, most cellular components exert a  functional influnce through interactions with other cellular components. And in complex organisms we have complex organs. We humans have a complex brain. We know a bit about the neural interconnections there, but there are also interconnections at brain component such as the amygdale and neo-cortex.

All of this is not well covered by simple terms like “determined.”  We need to slowly develop a vocabulary to understand these better and not force arguments into Procrustean beds that lop off part of real understanding to fit binary views of reality. Opposing ideas are easy parts of a debate, and can start understanding but often evolve into larger understanding.
All part of open inquiry and a life of learning.

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world—the hardware—plays the role of a gigantic computer.  — P.C.W. Davies

'Laying Down the Laws', New Scientist. In Clifford A. Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them (2008)

Images

Gene-environment interaction: http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/2250_Genetic_Environmental_interaction.html
Twins: http://bestphotosaroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/08/nature-vs-nurture-are-we-shaped-by-one.html
Tangle of nature vs nurture: http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_tangle_of_the_naturenurture

If Winners Take all Do Losers Lose Mostly All?

By Gary Berg-Cross

It’s a pretty widely observed that culturally America has become more of a winner take all society than it was 60 years ago. The Winner-Take-All Society, was co-authored by Robert H. Frank &  Philip Cook discussed the contemporary trend towards inequality a dozen years ago. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week's list of the ten best books for 1995.The summarized points are not familiar:


"small differences in performance give rise to enormous differences in reward. Long familiar in sports and entertainment, this payoff pattern has increasingly permeated law, finance, fashion, publishing, and other fields. The result: in addition to the growing gap between rich and poor, we see important professions like teaching and engineering in aching need of more talent. This relentless emphasis on coming out on top—the best-selling book, the blockbuster film, the Super Bowl winner—has molded our discourse in ways that many find deeply troubling."

Frank, among others, has written more on this as the inequality problem has grown along with shallow ideologies that glorify self interest and competition without morals. It is at least partially based on false dichotomys of meritorious winners and inept losers.  The idea is if you are not one, preferably the winner, you are the other.  As I noted in The “Binary Thinking Habit” some complex questions such as “should we cut Medicare” are forced into an either-or frame.  Are you for a balance budget or not? It’s a simple up or down question with an embedded dichotomization of positions. Such forced choice questions fill the air in political debates. They are a bit like the binary view of the world as organized into male/female, matter/spirit, reason/intuition, god/no god and winners/losers. We have a 2 party political system and it forces people into more polar positions than they might take in an open discussion. This perhaps feeds on a Manichean tendency we have to set many things up as exclusive and naturally opposed choices.  We like winners and sometimes wealth is used as a proxy concept to establish merit of a winner.

But looking at the world in terms of binary of dichotomous categories simplifies things too much and causes problems. Is a successful thief a winner?  Are his victims just losers? It’s Ok to steal victory from the jaws of defeat in sports, but apply this to other realms seems wrong. It reduces things to a way of keeping score as in sports.  But society is more than I vs. thou. There are too many bad things such as inequality that damages all of society that can follow from this type of simplification.The downsides are more than hurt feelings after your team loses a ball game.

In 2007 Robert H. Frank pointed out some of the problems of a winner/loser dichotomy in Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle. In 2011 he followed up with an insightful The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.

 

As Darwin knew, when individual and group interests diverge, competition not only fails to promote the common good, it also actively undermines it.

The modern marketplace is rife with individual-versus-group conflicts like the one that spawned outsized antlers in bull elk. If you’re one of several qualified applicants seeking an investment banking job, for example, it’s in your interest to look good during your interview. But looking good is a

relative concept. If other applicants wear $600 suits, you’ll make a more favorable impression if you wear one costing $1,200.

Trading up is wasteful for the group, however, because the applicants are no more likely to get the positions if they all spend more on suits. But from each individual’s perspective, that’s no reason to regret buying the pricier suit.

What has been the consequence of winner take all ideology? Economist Paul Krugman notes that winner take all leads to "extreme concentration of income  income inequality” which in turn puts "the whole nature of our society" at risk and "is incompatible with real democracy." That a topic of interest to a democratic economy.
As J. Bradford DeLong noted in America - land of inequality it has produced people who have really lost something. The easy promise of a more leveled and middle class society has given way to real loses by the middle class. He attributes rising inequality to 4 major factors over the past 35 years and no surprise one of them is a transformation to a winner-take-all society.

• the others are waning progressivity of our tax system,
• decline in our willingness to invest in education and
• economic shift to industrial sectors that subtract value)

On this winner take all idea DeLong observes:

The information revolution now allows the most-skilled and luckiest to leverage their skills and luck across immense customer bases. In earlier centuries, Charles Dickens and Enrico Caruso were superstars but not super-wealthy. Today Stephen King and Placido Domingo and Oprah Winfrey are super-wealthy indeed. We saw this a century ago whenever luck and economies of scale in production and a continent-wide market all came together: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller became super-rich. But our Bill Gates is, and Sam Walton was, super-richer.

The trend is clear we are less a “win-win society” and more “I win and the rest of you lose” society.  Although on the political side sometimes the reality of loss is papered over in PR and obfuscation. Perhaps a topic for another time.  

Images

Middle Class and Lions: http://keepthemiddleclassalive.com/whoscrewedthemiddleclass/ 

Darwin as Economist: The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.

 Tax the Rich: America - land of inequality