Forget Exercising, Learn to Smile

The secret to long life isn't heart healthy foods or extreme marathons. It is smiling...

Paul Bloom's "How Pleasure Works"

This was a fun book to read with many interesting points, but halfway through the book a gnawing since that the book wasn't gelling overtook me. He makes many observations and in Bloom's mind he may have a thesis he is pushing, but I didn't find it. The one theme throughout the book is the human need for "essentialism". I can buy that, but so what? The book claims to look at "the new science of why we like what we like" but I didn't walk away with any deep insight to answer that question.

A Paul Bloom speciality is to use shock value to get your attention. He starts chapter two, entitled "Foodies", with the story of Armin Meiwes, a German who used the Internet to find a volunteer to let him kill and eat. In chapter 5, entitled "Performances", he writes:

Or consider the most famous work of Piero Manzoni: a series of 90 cans of the artist's feces. They sold well; in 2002, the Tate gallery paid $61,000 for one of the cans. This is interesting artwork in many ways and nicely connects to the theme of essentialism. It is the epitome of positive contagion, the idea that the pleasure we get from certain objects is due to the belief that they contain a residue of the creator or the user. As Manzoni puts it, "If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit." Also, it comes with a wonderfully comic vision. Manzoni intentionally failed to properly autoclave the cans, and so at least half of these cans of feces, proudly on display in museums and private collections, later exploded.

I have a real problem accepting "essentialism". Sure, many people have magical thinking that owning something once touched by a Hollywood star has some "special magic" in it, but I think that is a minority. The number of people who actually put money down for "collectibles" is a minority of the population. Most of us are too busy living normal lives and most of us don't have the prerequisite magical thinking that is the basis of "essentialism".

Since I reject a key "idea" of the book, I find the book unpersuasive and consequently feel that the book has no integrity, nothing holding it together. It is full of wonderful stories and interesting observations, but nothing compelling and certainly no "science". I'm not impressed by the "essentialism" of Bloom's credentials -- his doctorate and position on the faculty at Yale -- to buy the swill he is selling. Sure he is a fun author to read, but this isn't science beyond quoting a number of experiments showing magical thinking in some people. There is no overarching theory that does what Bloom claims. It doesn't explain "how pleasure works".

I do think he makes some interesting points and they need to be incorporated in a serious and proper science, but they won't get the centre stage he is giving them. I find material like this unscientific and deeply unsatisfying:

The situation here is reminiscent of waht the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said about babnies' relations to transitional objects like teddy bears and soft blankets. He claimed -- plausibly, see Chapter 4 -- that these were substitutes for the mother, or perhaps just for her breast. But what do babies themselves think of them? Do they recognize that they are substitutes, or do they think that they are actually mothers/breasts? Winnicott has an odd remark about this: "Of the transitional object, it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question:'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is taht no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated."

In other words: don't ask. I think Winnicott's remark captures the ambiguity that many people feel with regard to their religious beliefs. They have an odd and fragile status. For science too, there are questions that arise about certain more theoretical constructs. Are quarks and superstrings real or convenient abstractions? Some would advise: don't ask.

I buy this statement from Bloom:

Many significant human pleasures are universal. But they are not biological adaptations. They are by-products of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes.

Yes, many of our pleasures are spandrels.

But I don't buy this:

In the chapters that follow, I will argue that the pleasure we get from many things and activities are based in part on what we see as their essences. Our essentialism is not just a cold-blooded way of making sense of reality; it underlies our passions, our appetites, and our desires.

He tries to provide many examples, but they leave me cold. For example, he argues that the cult of "viginity" is based on essentialism. I think it is a weird corruption caused by a mistranslation of "young woman" into a word for a woman with no sexual experience. I've never had a fetish for virginity and I can't claim to know anybody who either pants after the experience of "a virgin" or who wails and moans about lacking the experience of "having a virgin". This is just nutty. I don't deny that there is a segment of the population, I would guess maybe 10%, who are caught up in the fantasy. But I don't buy the "essentialism" argument. Nobody I know in the throes of sex are calculating "is this my partner's 'first time'?" I can buy that it is a fun topic for imaginative fun, but few in the real world pay it much heed.

Buying into essentialism means you buy into putting virginity on a pedestal, you buy into the kind of "art" popularized by Manzoni, and you buy into cannibalism as a way to integrate another person' "essence". Sorry, I don't buy into GM foods as "Frankenfood", and I certainly don't buy into cannibalism.

I expect a book that is introducing me to a science to start with a motivation, then go over the facts and the meanings of these facts, and to end by reviewing "what we learned" so that I get a complete "learning package". This book is very unsatisfying because it never presents "the science of pleasure". It is a hodgepodge of ideas, but nothing gelled for me.

I would recommend reading Paul Blooms' book, but don't expect to uncover some "new science" of pleasure. Instead, you will find delightful stories, some discussion of current psychological research, and some strange views about "essences" and how this is key to human nature. This is worth taking the time to read. But don't expect enlightenment or a coherent introduction to a "new science".

How Real is a Smile

I've read about William James' theory of emotion. That always struck me as getting it right.

Here's a bit from an article about current research on telling whether a smile is real or fake that uses a similar approach of "body feedback". I find this fascinating. This is from an article by Carl Zimmer in the NY Times on recent research:

Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.

Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.

In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.

But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren’t. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.

Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues have also been testing the importance of eye contact for smiles. They had students look at a series of portraits, like the “Laughing Cavalier” by the 17th-century artist Frans Hals. In some portraits the subject looked away from the viewer, while in others, the gaze was eye to eye. In some trials, the students looked at the paintings with bars masking the eyes.

The participants rated how emotional the impact of the painting was. Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues found, as they had predicted, that people felt a bigger emotional impact when the eyes were unmasked than when they were masked. The smile was identical in each painting, but it was not enough on its own. What’s more, the differences were greater when the portrait face was making direct eye contact with the viewer.

Dr. Niedenthal suspects that she and other psychologists are just starting to learn secrets about smiles that artists figured out centuries ago. It may even be possible someday to understand why Mona Lisa’s smile is so powerful. “I would say the reason it was so successful is because you achieve eye contact with her,” said Dr. Niedenthal, “and so the fact that the meaning of her smile is complicated is doubly communicated, because your own simulation of it is mysterious and difficult.”

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that we are purely rational calculating beings or "pure souls". We aren't. We are animals with all the complicated physiological interconnections with our brain and a complicated social life that make us an emotional beings. Sure we are rational calculators. But we are generally poor at rational calculation. The classic demonstration of this is the Wason Selection Task. Go read about it and try it out on yourself. You will discover that you aren't as "rational" as you thought you were. But you will also discover that you are very, very good at policing social rules! But to your shock and horror, you will discover that the two tasks are fundamentally the same, but when presented as a social rule you can ace it. On the other hand, when presented as a logical task, you will generally flub it. Amazing. We are fallible creatures!

What is Happiness

The NY Times blog The Opinionator posts thought pieces by philosophers. I like the current piece on 'happiness' by David Sosa, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is discussing happiness and uses a thought experiment by Robert Nozick (and the plot of the movie The Matrix) to demonstrate that happiness is not simply a "happy feeling".

happiness isn't just a state of mind. To be really happy, the happiness has to be grounded in reality, to be honest, to be fulfilling, to be useful, etc. In short, real happiness is an achievement of a moral goal of "well being". In short, a "happy fool" isn't truly happy. A person who has just been conned and think they "got a steal" isn't really happy. I like the Aristotelean formula: To live a happy life is to flourish.

I've long held the view that the Stoics were on to something. They lived in a Roman empire in which day-to-day life was precarious. It was cheap and unpredictable. The question of happiness was a pressing question. And they came up with pretty good answers. From Wikipedia:

Following Socrates, the Stoics held that unhappiness and evil are the results of human ignorance of the reason in nature. If someone is unkind, it is because they are unaware of their own universal reason which would lead to the conclusion of kindness. The solution to evil and unhappiness then, is the practice of Stoic philosophy — to examine one's own judgments and behavior and determine where they have diverged from the universal reason of nature.

Here is the key bit of David Sosa's take on happiness:

Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them. And then, too, we shouldn’t ignore the modest happiness that can accompany pride in a clear-eyed engagement with even very painful circumstances.

The wonderful thing about philosophical "problems" is that they are difficult nuts to crack. So they are a puzzle with endless amusement as you consider them again and again under different light and from different perspectives. They are the ultimate "mind games".

Pity the Super-Rich

Here'e the lead-in for a short article on current research on money & happiness trying to figure out why money buys a little happiness but not as much as you would expect:

Spare a thought for the super-rich, the poor darlings can't appreciate a tin of spam, a lump of coal or a cardboard box the way you and I can.
It's a mystery why money doesn't make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn't bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don't choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can't make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

Go read the blog posting the get the details of the research. It is worth a peek!

Money & Happiness

Here are some bits from the Jonah Lehrer's blog The Frontal Cortex that address that age-old question of whether money makes you happy:

Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)

Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy?

...

The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.

...

This makes me think of the Amish. From a certain perspective, the Amish live without a lot of the stuff most of us consider essential. They don’t use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quiet permanence to hefty bank accounts. The end result, however, is a happiness boom. When asked to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the Amish are as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. There are, of course, many ways to explain the contentment of the Amish. (The community has strong ties, plenty of religious faith and stable families, all of which reliably correlate with high levels of well-being.) But I can’t help wonder if part of their happiness is related to experience-stretching. They don’t fret about getting the latest iPhone, or eating at the posh new restaurant, or buying the au courant handbag. The end result, perhaps, is that the Amish are better able to enjoy what really matters, which is all the stuff money can’t buy.

The above shouldn't surprise anyone. The ancient Greeks addressed the issue of happiness and came up with the idea of "moderation". The famous Epicureans were famous for equating happiness with modest pleasure and tranquility. (Funny, history distorts this philosophy into one of hedonism. Sure, it puts pleasure as the goal of life, but not the debauched pleasure-seeking that history came to assign to this philosophy.)

Simple life, simple pleasures, a circle of friends are the secrets of secure happiness. The consumption-driven society of today is diametrically opposed to these insights.

Scott Adams, the Philosophy

Here are a few words of wisdom from Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon. This is actually very insightful:

Suppose humans were born with magical buttons on their foreheads. When someone else pushes your button, it makes you very happy. But like tickling, it only works when someone else presses it. Imagine it's easy to use. You just reach over, press it once, and the other person becomes wildly happy for a few minutes.

What would happen in such a world?

You could imagine that everyone in the world would be happy just about all the time. People would make agreements with each other to push each other's buttons on a regular basis, thus guaranteeing the complete and utter happiness of all humans.

No, I can't imagine that either.

The first thing that would happen is that we'd create some rules of etiquette saying you can't press anyone's button without explicit permission. That makes sense, since sometimes you need to get some work done, and happiness can make you lose focus. You wouldn't want people making you happy against your wishes.

The next thing that would happen is that people would realize they can sell the button-pushing service. People would stop giving it away for free. You'd be begging people to press your button and it would just seem pathetic. You might get some takers for a brief button-pushing fling, but it would get tiresome to push another person's button every few minutes all day.

Perhaps some people would give their button-pushing services away for free, to anyone who asked. Let's call those people generous, or as they would become known in this hypothetical world: crazy sluts.

Button pushing would become an issue of power and politics within relationships and within business. The rich and famous would get their buttons pushed all day long, while the lonely would fantasize about how great that would be.

I can't think of any imaginary situation in which long term happiness could come from other people. The best you can hope for is that other people won't thwart your efforts to make yourself happy.

I like the point he is making: happiness only comes from within. But Scott Adams's homily shouldn't be taken too seriously. I also like the insight that our greatest happiness comes when we interact with others. We are a social species and that "happiness button" is really within us and gets "pushed" when we find satisfactory relationships and practice the Golden Rule and give of ourselves to others.

Another thing to realize is that we each have our own unique level of happiness. I'm a pretty contented soul. But others are restless their whole lives trying to find something that they feel eludes them. They search for some happiness that they know is "out there". But in reality the only happiness you can really have is when you accept who you are and your situation. (I don't mean become a patsy and let people walk all over you, but don't expect life to be handed to you on a silver platter. You can work to improve your situation, but happiness isn't really tied to material things.)

I really enjoy the book Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert. You can see the gist of the book in a TED talk linked here. The most important point that Gilbert makes is that our "set point" for happiness is very stable. When I was in sixth grade I was devastated when the teacher read us a story about a boy with 6 days until he went blind. I felt great anguish about the horror that I knew it must be to go from a world of ability to a world of disability. But Gilbert points out that people who lose sight or limbs generally get back to their natural state of happiness in about six months. There's a good evolutionary reason for this: if we can't emotionally overcome disappointments, we wouldn't reproduce. So the message is: the happiness you are born with is the happiness you will carry through life. For some that is a tragedy because they feel a lack of happiness. For others, it means you are generally happy-go-lucky your whole life. It is simply the luck of the draw.

I guess that if you are born unhappy, then you are like Scott Adams' character, you have a button that needs pushing, and pushing fairly frequently. You can't bully people into pushing it, and you can't cajole them into it, and you blackmail them into it. You can only use social relationships to get that "joy juice" of happiness if you are feeling low. You need to get out and interact with people, give of yourself, be involved, and you will get a nice feedback. That's your medicine. And the good news is that you can self administer it (unless you are a depressive and dysfunctional).

Good Advice

Here's some simple, but good and useful advice from Tal Ben-Shahar:

Slippery Happiness

Here is a nice talk by Daniel Kahneman on research in "happiness". This talk focuses on the slippery understanding we have of happiness because of our confusion between "as experienced" and "as remembered".



I enjoy the paradoxes he calls up. We think we know ourself, but as he points out, we have a complexity within ourself that unless pointed out, we probaby never realize and therefore get fooled by what he calls the "remembered self". I especially enjoyed the bit where he says the correlation between the experiencing self and the remembering self. That is amazing.

Note: The last two minutes of this video are very important. Here they pose the question of happiness research as a guide for public policy. It is obvious to me that this should be done. Kahneman believes it will. But I think that despite the fact that it should and that an expert thinks it will, my gut belief is that American's won't. Their political prejudices won't let them embrace this scientific research. To embrace it would be to embrace a role of government in their lives while the whole premise of much of America is a "freedom from" government rather than a vision of a positive role for government in their lives.

Morten L. Kringelbach's "The Pleasure Center"

I started reading this book with very high hopes. But I was not rewarded. The material is up-to-date but it is too scattershot, too unfocused. I never got a satisfactory feeling that I was "mastering" anything. It was just "stuff".

Sadly this writer does not have a style that grabs you and holds your attention. If found my attention meandering as I read. The chapters ostensibly were focused on a topic but I never felt I learned anything. I paged through this book finding interesting nibbles here and there but no tasty meal. Nothing satisfying.

My suspicion is that his research isn't driven by theory. It is a collectors cupboard of curiosities. And that is exactly how this book reads. Little bits here and there, but no compelling narrative. Here is an example pulled from the chapter on madness:

Among the many brain regions found in neuroimaging studies, depression shows up most in a region called the subgenual cingulate cortex, which is intimately connected to the orbitofrontal cortex. This brain region has also been shown to be an important part of the brain's resting network, which is active even at reast. Studies in monkeys have shown that neurons in this brain region change their activity when the monkey is about to fall asleep. In addition, as shown in earlier chapters activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to the monitoring of the pleasantness and unpleasantness of stimuli. So dysregulation of the activity in these regions would seem likely to affect the subjective hedonic experience and perhaps even lead to anhedonia.

Based on these findings, the American neuroscientist Helen Mayberg used deep brain stimulation in the subgenual cingulate cortex for patients with treatement-reistant depression. Initially, the treatment resulted in sutained remission of depression in four of six patients. Given the strong placebo component in depression, it is too early to say to what extent this might help others.

You read through this expecting great insight, important fact fitted into some big picture, and it doesn't. It is just "stuff". Pages and pages of stuff.

I was disappointed with this book. I can't say that I learned much of anything useful. It isn't because there wasn't new "stuff" in the book. It was that the material was not presented in a way that made it meaningful, made it find a home in what I already knew or created a new framework for thinking about the brain and pleasure. Sadly, I closed this book and felt robbed of the pleasure that a good read should give you.

Educate to be Happy?

Justin Wolfers in the Freakonomics blog responds to a reader's question of whether "ignorance is truly bliss?" by offering...

My reasoning is simple: more intelligent people tend to earn higher incomes, and we know that people with higher incomes are more likely to be happy.

But then he "backs up" his argument with data that shows that people who score high on intelligence tests are happier.

That's fine, but his claims go beyond the data presented (earlier blogs point to his research that links happiness and income/wealth). In this blog he has introduced 3 variables: happiness, intelligence, and income. But produced data for only 2 variables: happiness & intelligence.

The problem is the relationship between these three factors. Is it causal? Are they merely statistically related with a hidden factor that links them causally? I'm willing to guess that higher income is a concomitant of higher intelligence that is only weakly linked because there are other factors (e.g. those who tout EQ, an emotional intelligence, or other factors in a personality that favours money-making activities). Obviously a blog is not a place to develop or espouse a full fledged theory.

Wolfers then muses...

But this doesn’t answer the harder question: What creates a relationship between (measured) intelligence and (measured) happiness? Are those who are lucky enough to be born intelligent also lucky enough to be born happier? Do happy folks elicit greater attention from their teachers? Or does the sort of intelligence that is created by education also enable us to successfully pursue happiness? If it’s the latter, then perhaps these data point to yet another reason to invest in education.

But here Wolfers misses the really critical question: what kind of education? The Classical World "solved" this through Stoicism and Epicureanism which taught a world weariness and acceptance. But I really doubt that this is the kind of "education" Wolfers intends.

Here's the Stoic road to happiness from Wikipedia:

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes." A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy," thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole".

And the Epicurean road to happiness from Wikipedia:

Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear (ataraxia) as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires. The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form.

But I really doubt these are the "educational goals" that Wolfers is promoting.

I don't doubt Wolfer's data, but my personal experience is that income and intelligence lead to idle time and that idle time sets up certain personality types for neuroticism and unhappiness. For some, intelligence and income enable them to live wonderful productive and happy lives. But I suspect the world isn't simple. For some, education helps them find happiness. Some intelligent people can find happiness, but sometimes the education they receive introduces in them expectations or desires that leave them unhappy. Some unintelligent people can be happy if they are unaware of limitations. In short, it is complex. And worse, the answer is dynamic since happiness is not simply an internal state. We interact with others and perceive ourselves in and through them which in turn alters our own perception. Any social science is a very tricky science indeed!

The Secrets of Happiness, the Harvard Version

Here's Dan Gilbert, one of my favourite psychologists, giving a talk at a TED conference in July 2005. His book Stumbling on Happiness is an excellent book. He nails the secret of happiness. The bad news is that we don't always understand our own irrationality, and the good news is that we are hard-wired to enjoy our life no matter how miserable it is.

The Self-Evident Right to Pursue Happiness

The following is very interesting. The rich have gotten richer, but they've also gotten less happy. The poor have gotten poorer, but happier. What? Here's a NY Times article by Eduardo Porter:

Despite the fact that income inequality — the chasm between rich and poor — has grown to levels rarely seen outside the third world, happiness inequality in the United States seems to have declined sharply over the past 35 years. And that is not because everyone is just that much more cheerful.

According to new research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the happiness gap between blacks and whites has fallen by two-thirds since the early 1970s. The gender gap (women used to be happier than men) has disappeared. Most significant, the disparity in happiness within demographic groups has also shrunk: the unhappiest 25 percent of the population has gotten a lot happier. The happiest quarter is less cheerful.

It seems odd that happiness would become more egalitarian over a period in which the share of the nation’s income sucked in by the richest 1 percent of Americans rose from 7 percent to 17 percent. In fact, the report does find a growing happiness gap between Americans with higher levels of education and those with less, which is roughly in line with the widening pay gap between the skilled and unskilled.

For the fanatical, here's the original research paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the Wharton School at the U of Penn. Here are the key graphs that summarize the research:

This graph shows a rise in inequality:

The following two graphs show a rise in equality:

Tavris & Aronson's "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)"

This book walks you through how "cognitive dissonance" plays a role in making mistakes and persisting in mistakes, and making our mistakes truly horrible.


The book is not all gloom and doom. For me, the high point of the book is captured in this quote:

The last American president to tell the country he had made a terrible mistake was John F. Kennedy in 1961. He had believed the claims and faulty intelligence reports of his top military advisors, who assured him that once Americans invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the people would rise up in relief and joy and overthrow Castro. The invasion was a disaster, but Kennedy learned from it. He reorganized his intelligence systems and determined that he would no longer accept uncritically the claims of his military advisers, a change that helped him steer the country successfully through the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: "This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a Wise man once said, 'An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.' ... Without debate without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed -- an no republic can survive." The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said "mine, and mine alone." Kennedy's popularity soared.

We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything worng myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility." That doesn't cut it.

This book is not focused on politics, but of course it has discussions of George Bush as a classic example of a person who resolves cognitive dissonance by refusing to admit mistakes and, instead, blaming things and people around him for any problems. These authors explain just how a person falls prey to the self-justificiations required to resolve cognitive dissonance. They show just how the refusal to admit mistakes reinforce and deepen the mistakes and errors and problems.

One of the discoveries of research is that once you do something that is dissonant with your image of yourself (e.g. as a "good guy" or a "smart guy" or whatever) then rather than admit a mistake, we dig ourself into a hole by refusing to admit to not be good or smart or whatever. Instead we find excuses. And as we do this, we become ever more committed to our justification or rationalization. The authors show how this lead cults to take bizarre stands. For example, if they predict the "end of days" and it doesn't come to pass. They don't admit an error. Instead they seize on this as "proof" that, for example, their prayers of intercession have worked and deepens their commitment to the cult. This is an example of "confirmation bias", a mental trick we use to reinterpret evidence in a way to justify and confirm our image of ourselves as good or smart or whatever.

There is an excellent section on the "recovered memories" movement and how it destroyed lives. Our memories are patchy and fade over time, other memories, other stories, and even suggestions by others can help "fill in" our memories. If we are confronted about their authenticity, we can either admit to fallibility or cover over the cognitive dissonance by seizing a story, no matter how incredible, and running with it. That's how many "victims" of the recovered memory movement came to accuse fathers and mothers of incest and torture. And the courts went along. Despite the fact that we know that memories are fallible and that really horrible events haunt us and are not usually "repressed". This movement grew on the myth of "recovered memories" that had been repressed. Court cases ensued. Families were torn apart. All on the basis of a faddish idea that swept the US in the 1980s.

Similarly the idea that "children cannot lie" and that sex therapists can work with a child an elicit stories of sex abuse that "must be true" because they come from the mouths of innocent babes. In reality, experiments can show how easy it is to plant an idea in a young child's mind.

The book is full of little psychological insights and delightful little tales of foibles and the mechanisms we use to dig ourselves deeper into the holes of self-deception that we've created to cover up our mistakes, to cover up those errors that we refuse to admit and instead find ways to rationalize away. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number daycare operators were accused of satanic cult child abuse based on therapists eliciting "evidence" from the kids. No matter how absurd these stories were, once parents, police, and prosecutors became committed to this view, they could not admit mistakes and followed the "leads" despite more and more unreal "revelations". Sadly people were imprisoned over this modern day Salem witchhunt. As the authors of this book point out, these supposely responsible adults were driven by cognitive dissonance to cling more tenaciously to these absurd tales of satanic acts even as the details became more absurd. The book explains the mechanism. And it documents many tragedies committed because authorities were ignorant of this basic pscyohological predisposition to which we all fall prey.

The book is full of tradegies that our faulty psychology leads us into. The one that strikes me hardest is the fact that prosecutors will do almost anything to avoid ever admiting to participating in convicting an innocent person. Similarly cops will justify lies and horrible abuse in an interrogation because they will interpret any and all behaviour by a suspect as confirmation of their guilt. All this is completely irrational, but it lies at the heart of our justice system but little or nothing is done to identify and rectify it. Similarly the medical community has a long history of refusing to admitting that their practices can lead to harm rather than healing. People blind themselves to their failings because of our quirky psychological make-up. You would think that those in responsible positions would strive hard to eliminate these errors. But as the authors point out, it is those who are low on the pecking order who find it easiest to admit mistakes and change course when evidence is presented. The higher your social standing the more likely you will persist in an error and rationalize it away. It creates a tragedy for society because it means that the worst outrages are committed and covered up at the very top of society!

There is an excellent section in the book dealing with marriage and relationships. The advice is really simple. Fighting doesn't cause breakups and divorces. No. It is when you no longer can separate the issue/problem from the person. Once a couple starts to see the problem as the other person and not an act of the other person, the split becomes irreconcilable. Healthy couples find a way to find a way to fault the issue/problem while giving credit to the other person as not intending the issue/problem. So long as both can retain this distinction, the relationship is healthy. The book is full of wonderful examples that put flesh on these ideas. Just this section alone makes the book worthwhile because this section gets down to where we all live and the problems we all face.

In good marriages, a confrontation, difference of opinion, clashing habits, and even angry quarrels can bring the couple closer, by helping each partner learn something new and by forcing them to examine their assumptions about their abilities or limitations. It isn't always easy to do this. Letting go of the self-justifications that cover up our mistakes, that protect our desires to do things just the way we want to, and that minimize the hurts we inflict on those we love can be embarrassing and painful. Without self-justification, we might be left standing emotionally naked, unprotected, in a pool or regrets and losses.

Yet, in the final analysis, we believe it is worth it, because no matter how painful it can be to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance.

The book is an excellent antidote to cynicism because it gives hope through using science to understand our human situation, the dilemmas we create for ourselves, and the muddles we make worse through the simple -- but dangerous -- mechanism of self-justification in covering up cognitive dissonance.

Errors are inherent in baseball, as they are in medicine, business, science, law, love, and life. In the final analysis, the test of a nation's character, and of an individual's integrity, does not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.

Money Matters

In both senses of the term!

The NY Times has an article by David Leonhardt that takes on the conclusions of a 1974 study by Richard Easterlin that concluded that beyond the initial happiness that a modest income rise to cover basic needs, additional money does not buy additional happiness.

People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. ... Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote.

But new research undercuts the Easterlin conclusions:

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argue that money indeed tends to bring happiness, even if it doesn’t guarantee it. They point out that in the 34 years since Mr. Easterlin published his paper, an explosion of public opinion surveys has allowed for a better look at the question. “The central message,” Ms. Stevenson said, “is that income does matter.” ...

If anything, Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers say, absolute income seems to matter more than relative income. In the United States, about 90 percent of people in households making at least $250,000 a year called themselves “very happy” in a recent Gallup Poll. In households with income below $30,000, only 42 percent of people gave that answer.

Here's a graphic (larger size) from the Stevenson and Wolfers report as presented on the NY Times site:



In his article, Leonhardt, notes that he talked to both parties as well as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman to try and understand the apparantly inconsistent results. The bottom line:

Economic growth, by itself, certainly isn’t enough to guarantee people’s well-being — which is Mr. Easterlin’s great contribution to economics. In this country, for instance, some big health care problems, like poor basic treatment of heart disease, don’t stem from a lack of sufficient resources. Recent research has also found that some of the things that make people happiest — short commutes, time spent with friends — have little to do with higher incomes.

But it would be a mistake to take this argument too far. The fact remains that economic growth doesn’t just make countries richer in superficially materialistic ways.

If you want an account of this research from -- so to speak -- the "horses's mouth", then here is a blog entry by Justin Wolfers on the Freakonomics web site that explains the research. Wolfers give two reasons why his new study corrects the results of the earlier Easterlin study. First:

What explains these new findings? The key turns out to be an accumulation of data over recent decades. Thirty years ago it was difficult to make convincing international comparisons because there were few datasets comparing rich and poor countries. Instead, researchers were forced to make comparisons based on a handful of moderately-rich and very-rich countries. These data just didn’t lend themselves to strong conclusions.

Moreover, repeated happiness surveys around the world have allowed us to observe the evolution of G.D.P. and happiness through time — both over a longer period, and for more countries. On balance, G.D.P. and happiness have tended to move together.

And second:

There is a second issue here that has led to mistaken inferences: a tendency to confuse absence of evidence for a proposition as evidence of its absence. Thus, when early researchers could not isolate a statistically reliable association between G.D.P. and happiness, they inferred that this meant the two were unrelated, and a paradox was born.

Justin Wolfers followed this up with another blog entry and provided the following graphic:


He makes the point about the data underlying this graphic:

There is an incredibly high correlation between average levels of happiness and average incomes — greater than 0.8. ... Thus, a 10 percent rise in income in the United States appears to increase happiness by about as much as a 10 perecent rise in income in Burundi.

And from a fourth installment of the Wolfers blog, there is this graphic which nicely sums up how happiness increases with income: