Continuous Productivity

Humans Like Being Lemmings

I have always been fascinated by human-herding mentality. The question of "loyalty" to institution, or party, or brand is of deep interest to me. Now, there is some scientific evidence to back up some of my thoughts:

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

Wiltermuth's team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Anorexia and Suicide

Someone who develops anorexia is 50 to 60 times more likely to kill themselves than people in the general population. No other group has a suicide rate anywhere near as high (Archives of General Psychiatry, vol 60, p 179).

Recently, psychologists have tried to explain why anorexia and suicide are so intimately connected, something which is helping to answer the wider question of why anyone would commit suicide. If this explanation holds up, it will give psychiatrists a new tool for screening patients and determining which of them are most likely to kill themselves, perhaps saving lives.

Suicide has always been a conundrum for psychologists and other researchers interested in human behaviour. Self-preservation is one of the strongest human instincts, so the drive to commit suicide must be even more powerful. But what causes it?

Suicide is, of course, linked to depression and hopelessness, but nobody has been able to answer the question why some people commit suicide and others, in similar situations, don't. The basic question, and the hopes of understanding the answer through studying anorexia is:

The vast majority of depressed, hopeless people do not commit suicide, so why do some do it?

In 2005, psychologist Thomas Joiner, a suicide specialist at Florida State University in Tallahassee whose own father committed suicide, set out to answer that question. By studying suicide statistics and paying particular attention to the groups with above average rates, Joiner believes he has found a common thread others have missed. "It was the first grand theory of suicide in quite a while," says Nock.

In essence, Joiner proposed that people who kill themselves must meet two sets of conditions on top of feeling depressed and hopeless. First, they must have a serious desire to die. This usually comes about when people feel they are an intolerable burden on others, while also feeling isolated from people who might provide a sense of belonging.

Second, and most important, people who succeed in killing themselves must be capable of doing the deed. This may sound obvious, but until Joiner pointed it out, no one had tried to figure out why some people are able to go through with it when most are not. No matter how seriously you want to die, Joiner says, it is not an easy thing to do. The self-preservation instinct is too strong.

There are two ways people who want to die develop the ability to override the self-preservation instinct, Joiner argues. One is by working up to it. In many cases a first suicide attempt is tentative, with shallow cuts or a mild overdose. It is only after multiple attempts that the actions are fatal.

The other is to become accustomed to painful or scary experiences. Soldiers and police who have been shot at or seen their colleagues injured or killed are known to become inured to the idea of their own death. Both groups also have a higher-than-normal suicide rate. Similarly, doctors and surgeons who witness pain, injury and death are more likely to be able to contemplate it for themselves - the suicide rate for doctors is significantly higher than for the general population. Joiner describes this as a "steeliness" in the face of things that would intimidate most people.

Chicago Depressed?

Kedrosky pointed me to a very interesting search on Google.

It seems that the search for "suicide methods" has increased over 50 percent in the last year. Which, although not justifiable, makes intuitive sense given the state of the economy.

But, what city searches for "suicide methods" the most? Chicago. As a Chicagoan I find this interesting given that we have largely weathered the real estate turmoil, are not overly dependent on any one industry (technology, finance, etc) like our coastal brethren, and don't seem to have the same sub-prime issues. I wonder what is driving our search for "suicide methods." My half-joking guess would be the weather.

Some More Red and Blue Light

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A very good article at The New Yorker outlining the paradoxical views on sex of evangelicals.

I Feel Motivated...

Stealing from Deadspin-best pregame warmup ever:

Sleep Deprivation? Doesn't Exist

I always suspected that the various sleep deprivation studies were a bit spurious. Now, some proof:

Another line of evidence trotted out for chronic sleep deprivation is that we typically sleep longer on vacation and at weekends, often up to 9 or 10 hours a night. It is often assumed that we do this to pay off a sleep debt built up during the week.

However, just because we can easily sleep beyond our usual daily norm - the Saturday morning lie-in, the Sunday afternoon snooze - it doesn't necessarily follow that we really need the extra sleep. Why shouldn't we be able to sleep to excess, for indulgence? After all, we enthusiastically eat and drink well beyond our biological needs. Why shouldn't it be the same with sleep?

Most mammals will sleep for longer than normal if overfed, caged or bored. The three-toed sloth is a good example. Sloths kept in zoos sleep around 16 hours a day - yet in their natural, wild state they sleep less than 10. Niels Rattenborg and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, recently found this out by using miniature EEG recorders attached to the heads of sloths in Panama, the first such experiment on a free-ranging wild animal. Why this difference in its sleep? The most likely explanation is that sloths simply sleep to excess when caged (Biology Letters, vol 4, p 402). This is seen in domestic animals too. Sheep in pens, horses in stables and cows in barns sleep much more than when in open fields, and pet cats sleep extensively compared with feral cats.

One of the favorite examples of these studies is that we sleep longer when we can. Wouldn't you know it, of course we do, it's like anything else we indulge in. I think sleep, like many things in life (alcohol, food, drugs), etc, is something we do when we have nothing better to do. Anecdotally, the most active, diverse, and inquisitive people I know sleep the least. And it doesn't seem to be just the socially active folks, but rather people with diverse interests whether they be sports or reading or even meditating.

The Various Forms of Civilization

One of the more fascinating articles that I have read recently reminded me that there are still numerous "indigenous" tribes that don't quite live a life like ours:

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil's Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

Check out the pictures!

Obesity and Oil Prices

A really interesting study that determines that the impact of obesity is far greater than individual health issues:

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.

This is the first time that I have ever seen a study like this, but it makes absolute sense. I am really intrigued by the potential solutions:

Phil Edwards, who co-authored the article, said: "Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil and promotion of a normal weight.

We need to incentivize the obese to lose weight. Having society push for these measures since it impacts the masses could finally lead to individual changes.

Doctors and Suicide

There's a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own. An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year -- a suicide rate thought to be higher than in the general population, although exact figures are hard to come by.

Some doctors believe the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. Many fear admitting psychiatric problems could be fatal to their careers, so they suffer in silence.

And when the pain is too much, doctors have easy access to prescription drugs and a precise knowledge of both how the body works and the amount of a drug needed for an overdose to stop breathing and halt the heart.

This is something that I was completely unaware of. I could have guessed that policemen, firemen, and maybe even social workers are at the high end of the suicide spectrum, but not doctors. It seems to me that a profession which brings so much hope would not have these issues, but alas it's extremely common. The explanation as to why the suicide rate is so much higher for doctors is equally intriguing:

One explanation is that most suicide attempts in the broader population are unsuccessful, while doctors know how to successfully commit suicide, said Dr. Erika Frank, who specializes in research on physician health.

What Causes Divorce?

A nice synopsis of the root causes of divorce at EconLog.  I found the following most interesting, but you should head over and check out the entire post:

3.  Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It's a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4.  Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health"? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

6.  Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, "You let yourself go!" The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can't become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you've heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

I especially like the incentive/economics angle in the above root causes.

Mind-Reading Class

Interesting Financial Times profile on up-and-coming University of Chicago professor, Nick Epley.  His focus seems to be on how people read each other:

His research looks at how people intuit others’ thoughts, how good they are at it and the consequences of what he calls “mind-reading mistakes”. The findings are revealing: first, people generally know less about others’ views than they think they do. “For example, in experiments where people are asked which of their co-workers like them, their accuracy is barely better than if they picked them at random,” he says.

His research has very interesting implications for leaders in the business world:

“It’s uncomfortable to give other people negative performance feedback, so difficult conversations that need to be had often aren’t. Employees usually think they’re doing the right things – if the boss thinks the employee is doing something useless, there’s likely to be a gap there. So people go in with positive evaluations of themselves, hoping to hear the best and when they’re told the best – because the boss has a hard time having the difficult discussion – they come out thinking they got valid feedback.” Prof Epley says the other party should summarise what has been said. He also says companies should collect more data. “They should act like a scientist would and run some experiments. Lots of big organisations could do that really easily.” Finally, he says, if you want to avoid ambiguity, never depend on e-mail.

Another Surprise - People Should be Able to Change Their Minds

Thanks to Casnocha (another must read), I was able to find this Washington Monthly piece.  In summation, it's ridiculous to think that politicians (just like all people) shouldn't be able to change their minds. 

Not a Good Day for Short People?

Or maybe this one just indicates that people like long legs.

You're Not Hot (Part II)

So it seems that I missed this posting when it came out back in November, but it reverberates how we view our own physical attraction, our partner's, and how we adjust.  Some interesting conclusions from the academic study with data obtained from Hot or Not:

...the fact that nearly all users are in agreement about who is pretty and not-so-pretty and that, despite this, unattractive people were more open to potential dates than attractive people, lead the researchers to conclude that ugly people who date other ugly people do in fact know the pedigree of their partners.

How do less attractive people cope? In a separate study, the researchers asked 24 participants of an online speed-dating event to complete a short survey in "which they indicated, on a ten-point scale, how much they weighed each of six criteria (physical attractiveness, intelligence, sense of humor, kindness, confidence, and extroversion) when selecting potential dates." After the event, the participants then rated the attractiveness of all those they'd talked to. It turns out that less attractive people put relatively less weight on the physical appearance of potential partners and relatively more weight on other qualities than attractive people do.

So, basically, if you can't get a hot girl, you convince yourself that she is funny, or nice, or smart, or whatever.

Middle Class Violence

Fascinating article on the Foreign Policy web site.  The author does an amazing job of delineating why most suicide bombers are mild-mannered middle class folks.  The interesting aspect is the psycho-social explanation of why it is uneasy for humans to act violently:

To grasp the point, we need to first dismiss the myth that it is easy for someone to act violently. If someone has a sufficiently strong grievance, the thinking goes, all the person needs to do is get hold of a weapon and he or she will start killing people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sociologists in World War II found that only 15 to 25 percent of frontline soldiers were actually firing their guns. Later training methods have raised the firing rate somewhat, but the shooting is almost always very inaccurate. Firing a gun on a range is quite different from shooting a person. My own research on milder forms of violence, with fists and feet and clubs, shows that most angry confrontations end in a standoff, where participants find an excuse to back down.

Middle class folks, it seems can easily commit suicide bombings precisely because nobody expects them to be violent.