Relationships are fraught with the potential for peril as well as the prospect of prosperity. Navigating a new relationship can be especially challenging, since you don’t really know the other person as well as someone who’s been in a relationship for years.
There are no sure-fire ways to ensure your new relationship is going to make it past the 3-month mark, much less three years. But if you keep the following five tips in mind, at least you won’t lose the plot before it even begins.
You know it’s not good when one of the most prestigious pediatric journals, Pediatrics, can’t differentiate between correlation and causation.
And yet this is exactly what the authors of a “clinical report” did in reporting on the impact of social media on children and teens. Especially in their discussion of “Facebook depression,” a term that the authors simply made up to describe the phenomenon observed when depressed people use social media.
Shoddy research? You bet. That’s why Pediatrics calls it a “clinical report” — because it’s at the level of a bad blog post written by people with a clear agenda. In this case, the report was written by Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson and the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2011).
Many newspapers and media outlets are picking up the new Pediatrics study that looked for “self injury” or “self harm” videos on YouTube and were surprised that they actually found them. I’m not sure “study” is the correct word for what the researchers did here, since millions of people each day perform similar “research” (by typing these keywords into YouTube).
From a completely descriptive study — e.g., research that is simply observing what the researchers find online — the researchers nonetheless draw the following conclusion: “The nature of nonsuicidal self-injury videos on YouTube may foster normalization of nonsuicidal self-injury and may reinforce the behavior through regular viewing of nonsuicidal self-injury — themed videos.” This isn’t a conclusion they can draw from their data, of course.
Alternative explanations abound. Could it be that a teen’s peer group has already been engaging in such behavior for years? Or that a person is unlikely to try something just because they see it on TV? After all, how many of us have gone out and killed someone after seeing hundreds (if not thousands) of murders regularly depicted on American television? Does this somehow “normalize” murder? Isn’t is equally as likely that teenagers are sharing mutual experiences, because for some minority of teens, these kinds of behaviors are completely normal already?
We’re often told, “You should sleep on it” before you make an important decision. Why is that? How does “sleeping on it” help your decision-making process?
Conventional wisdom suggests that by “sleeping on it,” we clear our minds and relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a decision. Sleep also helps organize our memories, process the information of the day, and solve problems. Such wisdom also suggests that conscious deliberation helps decision making in general. But new research (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009) suggests something else might also be at work — our unconscious.
Previous research suggests that sometimes the more consciously we think about a decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what’s needed is a period of unconscious thought — equivalent to “sleeping on it” according to the researchers — in order to make better decisions. Here’s how they study this phenomenon:
[… In a] typical experiment demonstrating this effect, participants choose between a few objects (e.g., apartments), each described by multiple aspects. The objects differ in desirability, and after reading the descriptions, participants are asked to make their choice following an additional period of conscious thought or unconscious thought. In the original experiments, unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers when the decisions were complex.
The researchers suggest that unconscious thought, contrary to the way many of us think about it, is an active, goal-directed thought process. The primary difference is that in unconscious thought, the usual biases that are a part of our conscious thinking are absent. In unconscious thought, we weigh the importance of the components that make up our decision more equally, leaving our preconceptions at the door of consciousness.
So this is all fine and good, but how you do take laboratory findings and adapt them to a real-world experience to show that unconscious thinkers think better (e.g., with less distortions or biases)? One way to do this is to look at sports, because our weighting of different components is done beforehand and individually — not as an artificial variable manipulated by the researchers.
Each week over a period of 6 weeks, the researchers took 352 undergraduates from the University of Amsterdam and asked them to predict the outcome of four different upcoming soccer matches. Participants expertise about soccer was measured, and then they were asked to predict the result of each of the four upcoming soccer matches.
[Then] participants were divided into three experimental conditions. In the immediate condition, participants saw the four matches on the computer screen and were asked to provide their answers in 20 s[econds].
In both the conscious-thought and the unconscious-thought conditions, participants saw the four matches on the computer screen for 20 s[econds] and were told they would have to predict the outcomes later on.
Conscious-thought participants were told they had an additional 2 min to think about the matches. Unconscious-thought participants were told they would do something else for 2 min and performed a two-back task designed to occupy conscious processing.
A second experiment was conducted on another group of undergraduates to replicate the findings and understand more about the underlying process.
What did they find?
These experiments demonstrate that among experts, unconscious thought leads to better predictions of soccer results than either conscious thought or quick, immediate guesses.
Experiment 2 sheds light on why this may be so: Unconscious thinkers seem to be better at using the appropriate information to arrive at their estimates. Unconscious thinkers who had more accurate knowledge about the single best prediction criterion (world ranking) made better predictions. This was not true for conscious thinkers or for immediate decision makers.
Just to emphasize this finding — if you’re an expert and you had extra time to think about your decision in the area of your expertise (conscious thinker) or had to make a quick decision, you made worse decisions than those who were unconscious thinkers. The researcher hypothesize that conscious thought can lead to poor weighting in decision-making — the more you think about something, the more your biases interfere with good decision-making.
Unconscious thinkers in this experiment appear to weight the relative importance of diagnostic information more accurately than conscious thinkers did.
As always, these results must be taken with a grain of salt. The experiment was conducted only on undergraduates and may not generalize to other age groups or people with different educational backgrounds. Furthermore, other research has not found a significant performance difference between unconscious thinkers and conscious thinkers, and unconscious thought is not always the mode to rely on when faced with a complex decision (e.g., you can’t use this for gambling and certain kinds of information).
But for certain kinds of decisions — those that are complex and where you have some expertise — “sleeping on it” may be more helpful than spending minutes or hours of conscious thought on it. The brain makes good unconscious decisions, when we let it.
Reference:
Dijksterhuis, A. Bos, M.W., van der Leij, A., & van Baaren, R.B. (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02451.x.
The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968 describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. A group of herdsmen shared a communal pasture, so the story goes, but some realized that if they increased their own herd, it would greatly benefit them. However, increasing your herd without regard to the resources available also brings unintentional tragedy — in the form of the destruction of the common grazing area.
Being selfish by using a shared group resource can hurt others. But it doesn’t always have to.
Since that time, we’ve had a great deal of research into this phenomenon that’s resulted in a few common solutions, as outlined by Mark Van Vugt (2009). These solutions include providing more information in order to reduce uncertainty about the future, ensuring people’s need for a strong social identity and sense of community is met, the need for being able to trust our institutions that we put in charge of our “commons,” and the value of incentives for improving oneself and responsible use, while punishing overuse.
As Van Vugt notes, “people have a fundamental need to understand their environment” in order to help them understand what happens in the future or in times of uncertainty. The more information a person has, the more secure they feel in making rational decisions that may impact the environment they live in. We listen to the weather forecast to know whether to pack an umbrella which will keep us dry.
Van Vugt gives an example of local water usage. People conserve more when they understand that their usage can directly help alleviate a water shortage or drought. He also emphasizes that simple messages are the most effective. The energy efficiency rating on a major appliance purchased in the U.S. tells consumers exactly where that appliance stands in comparison to other appliances the consumer could alternatively purchase, as well as telling them how much money they’re likely to spend on using that appliance. Such clear, simple messages can impact consumer behavior.
We humans, as Van Vugt notes, have a deep need to belong to social groups. We’re inherently social creatures and crave group acceptance and group belonging. We’ll go to some effort to staying within our chosen group and to increase our feelings of belongingness.
An example given in the article is that in fishing communities where the fisherman have a good social network going, they exchange catch information informally and more frequently than in communities where such networks don’t exist. Guess what? Such an information exchange results in more sustainable fishing.
Belonging to a group also means being more concerned about your reputation within that group. Nobody wants to be an outcast of the society they’ve chosen to be a part of. Knowing where you stand within a group — even in the form of a simple smiley or frowney face on your electric bill, based upon your energy usage compared to that of your neighbors’ — can change individual behavior.
Often times we imagine that if we simply policed the commons, that would be sufficient to ensuring fair use of the shared resource. However, policing is only as good as the institution charged with it. If it is corrupt and trusted by no one, policing is a part of the problem, not the solution. Look at virtually any dictatorship to see how this plays out in the real world. Citizens who live in such societies recognize there is little fairness in how shared resources are distributed.
Authorities gain users’ trust by employing fair decision making rules and procedures, according to Van Vugt. “Regardless of whether people receive bad or good outcomes, they want to be treated fairly and respectfully.” People have little incentive to participate in a group process if they believe the authorities or institutions running the process are corrupt or play favorites. Authorities can often encourage feelings of trust in their users or citizens by simply listening to them, and providing accurate, unbiased information about the resources.
The last component of helping people avoid the tragedy of the commons is incentives. Humans can be motivated by a marketplace that rewards positive environmental behavior, and punishes unwanted, harmful behavior. Van Vugt cites the pollution credit market in the U.S. as being a successful example of incentivizing “green” behavior.
Van Vugt also points out that financial (or other) incentives aren’t always needed when other factors, such as a strong group identity, are in place. In fact, incentive schemes can be counterproductive if they directly undermine other core needs, such as information, identity or institutions. Littering fines, for instance, while well-intentioned might undermine a person’s trust in the authorities (because they’re suggesting littering is more of a problem than it really is), or transform it in our minds from an ethical issue or one of helping the environment, to an economic issue (the government needs another way to get our money).
The amount of research conducted over the past 40 years suggests that we have a much greater understanding of the tragedy of the commons. But we also have a greater understanding of ways to avert it, or to limit people’s self-interests at the expense of their neighbors.
Reference:
Van Vugt, M. (2009). Averting the tragedy of the commons: Using social psychological science to protect the environment. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3), 169-173.
Since the news media seems to be unable to tear itself away from the Michael Jackson story, we learn about every fascinating detail about his life, and his death. Including the details of standard autopsy procedures, as though they were new or bizarre. The latest, of course, is that Michael Jackson’s body is being buried without his brain.
But this is not unusual in an autopsy where the cause of death isn’t certain and the brain is suspected to carry some clues. The brain needs to harden, in order to perform the later slicing needed in the autopsy procedure:
It involves removing the brain from the skull and leaving it to soak in a diluted mixture of formaldehyde and water called formalin. This soaking process usually takes four weeks and the brain genuinely does harden.
Vaughan over at Mind Hacks has the gory details of a brain autopsy.
I sincerely wish the media attention would die down on this story already. Michael Jackson was a talented performer and singer, but he wasn’t Einstein or Michelangelo. I enjoyed his music, but I was sorry to see the tragic turn his life took later in his career.
Josh Visser over at CTV.ca News has an insightful article into Michael Jackson and the “false narrative phenomenon” — how the singer’s death completely changed the story people tell about his life and what they think of him:
But here’s the rub: Three weeks ago, Jackson was seen by most people as a joke at best; or another rich celebrity who got away with horrible crimes, at worst.[…]
But in death, all that changed. The media in particular, and society at large, seemed to develop a mass amnesia — the last 18 years of lacklustre musical output, the criminal allegations and civil judgments, and the just plain weirdness was forgotten.
Why do we paint these stories that only emphasize and focus on the positive in a person’s life, and discounting the negative? Visser has a suggestion:
We do it for our gone-too-young celebrities and politicians, but we also do it for the regular people in our lives — choosing to remember only the good — rather than an accurate portrait of a person.
Indeed, news organizations know they are going to get more traction with their stories about how great a person and entertainer Michael Jackson was, glossing over the later problems in his life, than to paint a more balanced picture of a seemingly troubled individual who had apparent difficulties adjusting to his life and celebrity.
I would also point readers to Maureen Orth’s five investigative journalism articles in Vanity Fair that detailed Michael Jackson’s celebrity life and the difficulties he faced.
In death, we seem to always focus on the positive, perhaps simply out of respect for the deceased. That seems reasonable. But I think a celebrity should be different, especially because they can act as role models for others. I’m certain the same happened when Elvis died, but his death also serves as a warning about the excesses of such celebrity lives. We need to hear about the bad, along with the good, so that we understand the humanity of the person who has left this world.
Because Michael Jackson, in the end, wasn’t just a celebrity or performer — he was a complex and seemingly troubled human being. Understanding that he wasn’t simply a great singer or dancer helps us understand how we are all imperfect… How we lead lives trying to understand how we fit into this world.
And how, sometimes, we fail to do so.