Quality, Quantity, Creativity

There are two competing narratives about the current television landscape. The first is that we’re living through a golden age of scripted shows. From The Sopranos to Transparent, Breaking Bad to The Americans: the art form is at its apogee.

The second narrative is that there’s way too much television - more than 400 scripted shows! - and that consumers are overwhelmed by the glut. John Landgraf, the CEO of FX Networks, recently summarized the problem: "I long ago lost the ability to keep track of every scripted TV series,” he said last month at the Television Critics Association. “But this year, I finally lost the ability to keep track of every programmer who is in the scripted programming business…This is simply too much television.” [Emphasis mine.] Landgraf doesn’t see a golden age – he sees a “content bubble.”

Both of these narratives are true. And they’re both true for a simple reason: when it comes to creativity, high levels of creative output are often a prerequisite for creative success. Put another way, throwing shit at the wall is how you figure out what sticks. More shit, more sticks.

This is a recurring theme of the entertainment business. The Golden Age of Hollywood – a period beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927) and ending with the downfall of the studio system in the 1950s – gave rise to countless classics, from Casablanca to The Searchers. It also led to a surplus of dreck. In the late 1930s, the major studios were releasing nearly 400 movies per year. By 1985, that number had fallen to around 100. It’s no accident that, as Quentin Tarantino points out, the movies of the 80s “sucked.”

The psychological data supports these cultural trends. The classic work in this area has been done by Dean Keith Simonton at UC-Davis. In 1997, after decades spent studying the creative careers of scientists, Simonton proposed the “equal odds rule,” which argues that “the relationship between the number of hits (i.e., creative successes) and the total number of works produced in a given time period is positive, linear, stochastic, and stable.” In other words, the people with the best ideas also have the most ideas. (They also have some of the worst ideas. As Simonton notes, “scientists who publish the most highly cited works also publish the most poorly cited works.”) Here’s Simonton, rattling off some biographical snapshots of geniuses:

"Albert Einstein had around 248 publications to his credit, Charles Darwin had 119, and Sigmund Freud had 330,while Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents—still the record granted to any one person by the U.S. Patent Office. Similarly, Pablo Picasso executed more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, and pieces of sculpture, while Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 1,000 works, enough to require a lifetime of 40-hr weeks for a copyist just to write out the parts by hand."

Simonton’s model was largely theoretical: he tried to find the equations that fit the historical data. But his theories now have some new experimental proof. In a paper published this summer in Frontiers in Psychology, a team of psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of New Mexico extended Simonton’s work in some important ways. The scientists began by giving 246 subjects a version of the Foresight test, in which people are shown a graphic design (say, a zig-zag) and told to “write down as many things as you can that the drawing makes you think of, looks like, reminds you of, or suggests to you.” These answers were then scored by a panel of independent judges on a five-point scale of creativity. In addition, the scientists were given a variety of intelligence and personality tests and put into a brain scanner, where the thickness of the cortex was measured.

The results were a convincing affirmation of Simonton’s theory: a high ideation rate - throwing shit at the wall - remains an extremely effective creativity strategy. According to the scientists, “the quantity of ideas was related to the judged quality or creativity of ideas to a very high degree,” with a statistical correlation of 0.73. While we might assume that rushing to fill up the page with random thoughts might lead to worse output, the opposite seemed to occur: those who produced more ideas also produced much better ideas. Rex Jung, the lead author on the paper, points out that this “is the first time that this relationship [the equal odds rule] has been demonstrated in a cohort of ‘low creative’ subjects as opposed to the likes of Picasso, Beethoven, or Curie.” You can see the linear relationship in the chart below:

The scientists also looked for correlations between the cortical thickness data and the performance of the subjects. While such results are prone to false positives and Type 1 errors – the brain is a complicated knot – the researchers found that both the quantity and quality of creative ideas were associated with a thicker left frontal pole, a brain area associated with "thinking about one's own future" and "extracting future prospects."

Of course, it’s a long way from riffing on a zig-zag in a lab to producing quality scripted television. Nevertheless, the basic lesson of this research is that expanding the quantity of creative output will also lead to higher quality, just as Simonton predicted. It would be nice (especially for networks) if we could get Breaking Bad without dozens of failed pilots, or if there was a way to greenlight Deadwood without buying into John from Cincinnati. (Call it the David Milch conundrum.) But there is no shortcut; failure is an essential inefficiency. In his writing, Simonton repeatedly compares the creative process to Darwinian evolution, in which every successful adaptation emerges from a litter of dead-end mutations and genetic mistakes. The same dismal logic applies to culture.* The only way to get a golden age is to pay for the glut. 

Jung, Rex E., et al. "Quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity: a brain and behavioral test of the equal-odds rule." Frontiers in Psychology (2015).

*Why? Because William Goldman was right: "NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess..."

The Best Way To Increase Voter Turnout

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”

-Alexis de Tocqueville

Why don’t more Americans vote? In the last midterm election, only 36.4 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, the lowest turnout since 1942.

To understand the causes of low turnout, the Census Bureau regularly asks citizens why they chose not to exercise their constitutional right. The number one reason is always the same: “too busy.” (That was the reason given by 28 percent of non-voters in 2014.) The second most popular excuse is “not interested,” followed by a series of other obstacles, such as forgetting about the election or not liking any of the candidates.

What’s telling about this survey is that the reasons for not voting are almost entirely self-created. They are psychological, not institutional. (Only 2 percent of non-voters blame “registration problems.”) It’s not that people can’t vote – it’s that they don’t want to. They are unwilling to make time, even if it only takes a few minutes.

Alas, most interventions designed to mobilize these non-voters – to help them deal with their harried schedule and political apathy - are not very effective. One recent paper, for instance, reviewed evidence from more than 200 get-out-the-vote (GOTV) projects to show that, on average, door-to-door canvassing increased turnout by 1 percentage point, direct mail increased turnout by 0.7 percentage points, and phone calls increased turnout by 0.4 percentage points.* Television advertising, meanwhile, appears to have little to no effect. (Nevertheless, it’s estimated that 2016 political campaigns will spend more than $4.4 billion on broadcast commercials.)

However, a new working paper, by John Holbein of Duke University, proposes a very different approach to increase voter turnout. While most get-out-the-vote operations are fixated on the next election, trying to churn out partisans in the same Ohio/Florida/Nevada zip codes, Holbein’s proposal focuses on children, not adults. It also comes with potentially huge side benefits.

In his paper, “Marshmallows and Votes?” Holbein looks at the impact of the Fast Track Intervention, one of the first large scale programs designed to improve children’s non-cognitive skills, such as self-control, emotional awareness and grit. (“Non-cognitive” remains a controversial description, since it implies that these skills don’t require high-level thinking. They do.) Fast Track worked. Follow-up surveys with hundreds of students enrolled in the program showed that, relative to a control group, those given an education in non-cognitive skills were less aggressive at school, better at identifying their emotions and more willing to work through difficult problems. As teenagers, those in the treatment group “manifested reduced conduct problems in the home, school, and community, with decreases in involvement with deviant peers, hyperactivity, delinquent behavior, and conduct disorders.” As adults, they had lower conviction rates for violent and drug-related crimes.

Holbein wanted to expand on this analysis by looking at voter behavior when the Fast Track subjects were in their mid to late twenties. After matching people to their voter files, he found a clear difference in political participation rates. According to Holbein’s data, “individuals exposed to Fast Track turned out to vote in at least one of the federal elections held during 2004-2012 at a rate 11.1 percentage points higher than the control group.” That represents a 40 percent increase over baseline levels. Take that, television ads.

There are two important takeaways. The first is that a childhood intervention designed to improve non-cognitive skills can have “large and long-lasting impacts on political behavior in adulthood.” In his paper, Holbein emphasis the boost provided by self-regulation, noting that the ability to "persevere, delay gratification, see others' perspectives, and properly target emotion and behavior" can help people overcome the costs of participating in an election, whether it's waiting in a line at a polling place or not getting turned off by negative ads.  And since the health of a democracy depends on the involvement of its citizens – we must learn how to use our freedom, as Tocqueville put it – it seems clear that attempts to improve political participation should begin as early as possible, and not just with lectures about civics.

The second lesson involves the downstream benefits of an education in non-cognitive skills. We’ve been so focused for so long on the power of intelligence that we’ve largely neglected to teach children about self-control and emotional awareness. (That’s supposed to be the job of parents, right?) However, an impressive body of research over the last decade or so has made it clear that non-cognitive skills are extremely important. In a recent review paper, the Nobel Laureate James Heckman and the economist Tim Kautz summarize the evidence: “The larger message of this paper is that soft skills [e.g, non-cognitive skills] predict success in life, that they causally produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies.”

Democracies are not self-sustaining – they have to invest in their continued existence, which means developing citizens willing to cast a ballot. In Making Democracy Work, Robert Putnam and colleagues analyzed the regional governments of Italy. On paper, all of these governments looked identical, having been created as part of the same national reform. However, Putnam found that their effectiveness varied widely, largely as a result of differing levels of civic engagement among their citizens. When people were more engaged with their community – when they voted in elections, read newspapers, etc. – they had governments that were more responsive and successful. According to Putnam, civic engagement is not a by-product of good governance. It’s a precondition for it.

This new paper suggests that the road to a better democracy begins in the classroom. By teaching young students basic non-cognitive skills – something we should be doing anyway – we might also improve the long-term effectiveness of our government.

Holbein, John. "Marshmallows and Votes? Childhood Non-Cognitive Skill Development and Adult Political Participation." Working Paper.

*There is evidence, however, that modern campaigns have become more effective at turning out the vote, largely because their ground games can now target supporters with far higher levels of precision. According to a recent paper by Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler, the Romney and Obama campaigns were able to increase voter participation in the 2012 election by 7-8 percentage points in “highly targeted” areas. Unfortunately, these additional supporters were also quite expensive, as Enos and Fowler conclude that “the average cost of generating a single vote is about 87 dollars."

Can Tetris Help Us Cope With Traumatic Memories?

In a famous passage in Theatetus, Plato compares human memory to a wax tablet: 

Whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings; and whatever is imprinted we remember and know as long as its image lasts, but whatever is rubbed out or cannot be imprinted we forget and do not know.

The appeal of Plato’s metaphor is that it fits our intuitions about memory. Like the ancient philosopher, we’re convinced that our recollections are literal copies of experience, snapshots of sensation written into our wiring. And while our metaphors of memory now reflect modern technology – the brain is often compared to a vast computer hard drive – we still focus on comparisons that imply accurate recall. Once a memory is formed, it’s supposed to stay the same, an immutable file locked away inside the head.

But this model is false. In recent years, neuroscientists have increasingly settled on a model of memory that represents a dramatic break from the old Platonic metaphors. It turns out that our memories are not fixed like an impression in a wax tablet or a code made of zeroes and ones. Instead, the act of remembering changes the memory itself, a process known as memory reconsolidation. This means that every memory is less like a movie, a collection of unchanging scenes, and more like a theatrical play, subtly different each time it’s performed. 

On the one hand, the constant reconsolidation of memory is unsettling. It means that our version of history is fickle and untrustworthy; we are all unreliable narrators. And yet, the plasticity of memory also offers a form of hope, since it means that even the worst memories can be remade. This was Freud’s grand ambition. He insisted that the impossibility of repression was the “corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.” Because people could not choose what to forget, they had to find ways to live with what they remembered, which is what the talking cure was all about. 

If only Freud knew about video games. That, at least, is the message of a new paper in Psychological Science from a team of researchers at Cambridge, Oxford and the Karolinska Institute. (The first author is Ella James; the corresponding author is Emily Holmes.) While previous research has used beta-blockers to weaken traumatic memories during the reconsolidation process – subjects are given calming drugs and then asked to remember their traumas – these scientists wanted to explore interventions that didn’t involve pharmaceuticals. Their logic was straightforward. Since the brain has strict computational limits, and memories become malleable when they’re recalled, distracting people during the recall process should leave them with fewer cognitive resources to form a solid memory trace of the bad stuff. “Intrusive memories of trauma consist of mental images such as visual scenes from the event, for example, the sight of a red car moments before a crash,” write the scientists. “Therefore, a visuospatial task performed when memory is labile (during consolidation or reconsolidation) should interfere with visual memory storage (as well as restorage) and reduce subsequent intrusions.” In short, we’ll be so distracted that we’ll forget the pain. 

The scientists began by inducing some experimental trauma. In the first experiment, the “trauma” consisted of a 12 minute film containing 11 different scenes involving “actual or threatened death, as well as serious injury.” There was a young girl hit by a car, and a man drowning in the sea and a teenager, staring at his phone, who gets struck by a van while crossing the street. The subjects were shown these tragic clips in a dark room and asked to imagine themselves “as a bystander at the scene.” 

The following day, the subjects returned to the lab and were randomly assigned to two groups. Those in the first group were shown still pictures drawn from the video, all of which were designed to make them remember the traumatic video. There was a photo of the young girl just before she was hit and a snapshot of the man in the ocean, moments before he slipped below the surface. Then, after a brief “music filler task” – a break designed to let the chemistry of reconsolidation unfold – the subjects were told to play Tetris on a computer.  Twelve minutes later, they were sent home with a diary and asked to record any “intrusive memories” of the traumatic film over the following week.  

Subjects in the control group underwent a simpler procedure. After returning to the lab, they were given the music filler task and told to sit quietly in a room, where they were allowed to “think about anything.” They were then sent home with the same diary and the same instructions.

As you can see in the charts below, that twelve minute session of Tetris significantly reduced the number of times people remembered those awful scenes, both during the week and on their final return to the lab:

A second experiment repeated this basic paradigm, except with the addition of two additional control groups. The first new group played Tetris but was not given the reactivation task first, which meant their memories never became malleable. The second new control group was given the reactivation task but without the Tetris cure. The results were again compelling:

It’s important to note that the benefits of the Tetris treatment only existed when the distraction was combined with a carefully timed recall sequence. It’s not enough to play a video game after a trauma, or to reflect on the trauma in a calming space. Rather, the digital diversion is only therapeutic within a short temporal window, soon after we’ve been reminded of what we’re trying to forget. "Our findings suggest that, although people may wish to forget traumatic memories, they may benefit from bringing them back to mind, at least under certain conditions - those which render them less intrusive," said Ella James, in an interview with Psychological Science. 

The virtue of this treatment, of course, is that it doesn’t involve any mood-altering drugs, most of which come with drawbacks and side-effects. (MDMA might be useful for PTSD, but it can also be a dangerous compound.) The crucial question is whether these results will hold up among people exposed to real traumas, and not just a cinematic compilation of death and injury. If they do, then Tetris just might become an extremely useful psychiatric tool.  

Last point: Given the power of Tetris to interfere with the reconsolidation process, I couldn’t help but wonder about how video games might be altering our memory of more ordinary events. What happens to those recollections we think about shortly before disappearing into a marathon session of Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto V? Are they diminished, too? It’s a dystopia ripped from the pages of Infinite Jest: an entertainment so consuming that it induces a form of amnesia. The past is still there. We just forget to remember it.

James, Ella L., et al. "Computer game play reduces intrusive memories of experimental trauma via reconsolidation-update mechanisms." Psychological Science (2015)

How Does Mindfulness Work?

In the summer of 1978, Ellen Langer published a radical sentence in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It’s a line that’s easy to overlook, as it appears in the middle of the first page, sandwiched between a few dense paragraphs about the nature of information processing. But the sentence is actually a sly attack on one of the pillars of Western thought. “Social psychology is replete with theories that take for granted the ‘fact’ that people think,” Langer wrote. With her usual audacity, Langer then went on to suggest that most of those theories were false, and that much of our behavior is “accomplished…without paying attention.” The “fact” of our thinking is not really a fact at all.

Langer backed up these bold claims with a series of clever studies. In one experiment, she approached a student at a copy machine in the CUNY library. As the subject was about to insert his coins into the copier, Langer asked if she could use the machine first. The question came in three different forms. The first was a simple request: “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” The second was a request that included a meaningless reason, or what Langer called “placebic information”: “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” Finally, there was a condition that contained an actual excuse, if not an explanation: “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”

If people were thoughtful creatures, then we’d be far more likely to let a person with a valid reason (“I’m in a rush”) cut in line. But that’s not what Langer found. Instead, she discovered that offering people any reason at all, even an utterly meaningless one (“I have to make copies”) led to near universal submission. It’s not that people aren’t listening, Langer says – it’s that they’re not thinking. While mindlessness had previously been studied in situations of “overlearned motoric behavior,” such as typing on a keyboard, Langer showed that the same logic applied to many other situations.

After mapping out the epidemic of mindlessness, Langer decided to devote the rest of her career to its antidote, which she refers to as mindfulness. In essence, mindfulness is about learning how to control the one thing in this world that we can control: our attention. But this isn’t the sterile control of the classroom, in which being attentive means “holding something still.” Instead, Langer came to see mindfulness as a way to realize that reality is never still, and that what we perceive is only a small sliver of what there is. “When you notice new things, that puts you in the present, but it also reminds you that you don’t know nearly as much as you think you know,” Langer told me. “We tend to confuse the stability of our attitudes and mindsets with the stability of the world. But the world outside isn’t stable – it’s always changing.” Mindfulness helps us see the change. 

This probably sounds obvious. But then the best advice usually is. In recent years, Langer and others have documented the far-reaching benefits of mindfulness, showing how teaching people basic mindfulness techniques can help them live longer, improve eyesight, alleviate stress, lose weight, increase happiness and empathy, decrease cognitive biases and even enhance memory in old age. Most recently, Langer has showed, along with her Harvard colleagues, that mindfulness can attenuate the progress of ALS, a disease that is believed to be “almost solely biologically driven.”

However, it’s one thing to know that mindfulness can work. It’s something else to know how it works, to understand the fundamental mechanisms by which mindfulness training can alter the ways we engage with the world. That’s where a recent paper by Esther Papies, Mike Keesman, Tila Pronk and Lawrence Barsalou in JPSP can provide some important insights. The researchers developed a short form of mindfulness training for amateurs; it takes roughly twelve minutes to complete. Participants view a series of pictures and are told to “simply observe” their reactions, which are just “passing mental events.” These reactions might include liking a picture, disliking it, and so on. The goal is to go meta, to notice what you notice, and to do all this without judging yourself.  

At first glance, such training can seem rather impractical. Unlike most programs that aim to improve our behavior, there is no mention of goals or health benefits or self-improvement. The scientists don’t tell people which thoughts to avoid, or how to avoid them; they offer no useful tips for becoming a better person.

Nevertheless, these short training sessions altered a basic engine of behavior, which is the relationship between motivational states – I want that and I want it now – and our ensuing choices.  At any given moment, people are besieged with sundry desires: for donuts, gossip, naps, sex. It’s easy to mindlessly submit to these urges. But a little mindfulness training (12 minutes!) seems to help us say no. We have more control over the self because we realize the self is a fickle ghost, and that it’s craving for donuts will disappear soon enough. We can wait it out.

The first experiment by Papies, et al. involved pictures of opposite-sex strangers. The subjects were asked to rate the attractiveness of each person and whether or not he or she was a potential partner.  In addition, they were asked questions about their “sexual motivation,” such as “How often do you fantasize about sex?” and “How many sexual partners have you had in the last year?” In the control condition – these people were given no mindfulness training – those who were more sexually motivated were also more likely to see strangers as attractive and as suitable partners. That’s not very surprising: if you’re in a randy mood, motivated to seek out casual sex, then you see the world through a very particular lens. (To quote Woody Allen: “My brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”) Mindfulness training, however, all but erased the correlation between sexual motivation and the tendency to see other people as sexual objects. “As one learns to perceive spontaneous pleasurable reactions to opposite-sex others as mere mental events,” write the scientists, “their effect on choice behavior…no longer occurs.” One might be in the mood, but the mood doesn’t win.

And it’s not just sex: the same logic can be applied to every appetite. In another experiment, the scientists showed how mindfulness training can help people make better eating choices in the real world. Subjects were recruited as they walked into a university cafeteria. A third of subjects were assigned to a short training session in mindful attention; everyone else was part of a control group. Then, they were allowed to choose their lunch as usual, selecting food from a large buffet.  Some of the meal options were healthy (leafy salads and other green things) and some were not (cheese puff pastries, sweet muffins, etc.)

The brief mindfulness training generated impressive results, especially among students who were very hungry. Although the training only lasted a few minutes, it led them to choose a meal with roughly 30 percent fewer calories. They were also much more likely to choose a healthy salad, at least when compared to those in the control groups (76 percent versus 49 percent), and less likely to choose an unhealthy snack (45 percent versus 63 percent).

What makes this research important is that it begins to reveal the mechanisms of mindfulness, how an appreciation for the transitory nature of consciousness can lead to practical changes in behavior. When subjects were trained to see their desires as passing thoughts, squirts of chemistry inside the head, the stimuli became less alluring. A new fMRI study from Papies and colleagues reveals the neural roots of this change. After being given a little mindfulness training, subjects showed reduced activity in brain areas associated with bodily states and increased activity in areas associated with "perspective shifting and effortful attention." In short, they were better able to tune their flesh out. Because really: how happy will a donut make us? How long will the sugary pleasure last? Not long enough. We might as well get the salad.

The Buddhist literature makes an important distinction between “responding” and “reacting.” Too often, we are locked in loops of reaction, the puppets of our most primal parts. This is obviously a mistake. Instead, we should try to respond to the body and the mind, inserting a brief pause between emotion and action, the itch and the scratch. Do I want to obey this impulse? What are its causes? What are the consequences? Mindfulness doesn’t give us the answers. It just helps us ask the questions.

This doesn’t mean we should all take up meditation or get a mantra; there are many paths to mindfulness. Langer herself no longer meditates: “The people I know won’t sit still for five minutes, let alone forty,” she told Harvard Magazine in 2010. Instead, Langer credits her art – she’s a successful painter in her spare time – with helping her maintain a more mindful attitude. “It’s not until you try to make a painting that you’re forced to really figure out what you’re looking at,” she says. “I see a tree and I say that tree is green. Fine. It is green. But then when I go to paint it, I have to figure out exactly what shade of green. And then I realize that these greens are always changing, and that as the sun moves across the sky the colors change, too. So here I am, trying to make a picture of a tree, and all of a sudden I’m thinking about how nothing is certain and everything changes. I don’t even know what a tree looks like.” That’s a mindful epiphany, and for Langer it’s built into the artistic process.

The beauty of mindfulness is that it’s ultimately an attitude towards the world that anyone can adopt. Pay attention to your thoughts and experiences. Notice their transient nature. Don’t be so mindless. These are simple ideas, which is why they can be taught to nearly anyone in a few minutes. They are also powerful ideas, which is why they can change your life.

Langer, Ellen J., Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz. "The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of" placebic" information in interpersonal interaction." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36.6 (1978): 635.

Papies, E. K., Pronk, T. M., Keesman, M., & Barsalou, L. W. (2015). The benefits of simply observing: Mindful attention modulates the link between motivation and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(1), 148.

The Corrupting Comforts of Power

The psychology of power is defined by two long-standing mysteries.

The first is why people are so desperate to become powerful. Although power comes with plenty of spoils, it’s also extremely stressful. In a study of wild baboons in Kenya, a team of biologists found that those alpha males in charge of the troop exhibited extremely high levels of stress hormone. In fact, the stress levels of primates at the top were often higher than those at the very bottom. There are easier ways to pass on your genes.

The second mystery is why power corrupts. History is pockmarked with examples of cruel despots, leaders slowly ruined by the act of leading. It's surprisingly easy to initiate this corrupting process in the lab. A 2006 experiment by Adam Galinsky and colleagues asked subjects to either describe an experience in which they had lots of power or a time when they felt powerless. The subjects were then asked to draw the letter E on their foreheads. Those primed with feelings of power were two to three times more likely to draw the letter in a “self-oriented direction,” which meant it would appear backwards to everyone else. (Those primed to feel powerless were more likely to draw the letter so others could easily read it.) According to the psychologists, this is because feelings of power make us less interested in thinking about the perspectives of other people. We draw the letter backwards because we don’t care what they see.

A forthcoming paper by the psychologists Adam Waytz, Eileen Chou, Joe Magee and Adam Galinsky, gives us new insights into these paradoxes of power. The paper consists of eight separate experiments. After randomly assigning subjects to either a high or low power condition – participants were asked to write about all the ways in which people have power over them, or they have power over other people – they were given a short loneliness survey. As expected, those primed to feel powerful also felt less lonely. The same correlation held when people were allowed to dictate the assignments and payouts of a subordinate. Being a boss, even briefly, helps protect us from feeling left out.*

Why is power a buffer against loneliness? The key mechanism involves the desire to connect with others, or what psychologists call the “need to belong.” In another online study, 607 subjects were assigned to be either the boss or a subordinate in an online game. The boss got to decide how $10 was divided; the subordinate was simply told the outcome.

Then, everyone was given two surveys: one about their “need to belong” and another about their current feelings of loneliness. Those in the “boss” condition were less lonely than their “subordinates,” largely because they felt less need to belong. Simply put, those in charge don’t feel a desire to fit in, which makes them less sensitive to being left out. Why cater to the group when you command it?

This research begins to explain the allure of power. While power might actually make us more isolated – Machiavelli urged the prince to reject the trap of friendship and loyalty – it seems to reduce our subjective feelings of loneliness. (That powerful prince won’t miss his former friends.) And since we are wired to abhor loneliness, perhaps we lust after power as a substitute for more genuine connection. Instead of companions we collect underlings. Being feared by others can compensate for a lack of love. 

The scientists also speculate on how these new findings might explain the large body of research linking the acquisition of power to reduced levels of empathy and compassion. Because power makes us less motivated to connect with others - it's rather comfortable being alone at the top - we might also become less interested in considering their feelings, or making them feel better.

There are, of course, the usual social science caveats. These are temporary interventions, done in the lab and with online subjects. The effects of power in real life, where people rise to the top over time, and where their authority has real consequences, might be different. Perhaps Machiavelli’s prince realized that he missed his friends.

After reading this paper, it’s hard not to see power as a risky mental state; climbing the ladder often sows the seeds of our downfall. (Lincoln said it best: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”) The essential problem of power is that leaves us socially isolated even as it masks our isolation. We feel less lonely, so we don’t realize how disconnected we’ve become. Even worse, being in charge of others makes us less interested in understanding them. We shrug off their social norms; we ignore their complaints; we are free to listen to that selfish voice telling us to take what we need.

And so the leader becomes detached from those below. He has no idea how much they hate him.

*Michael Scott was a notable exception.

Waytz, Adam, et al. "Not so lonely at the top: The relationship between power and loneliness." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 130 (2015): 69-78.

Is This Why Love Increases Lifespan?

In 1858, William Farr, a physician working for the General Register Office in the British government, conducted an analysis of the health benefits of marriage. After reviewing the death statistics of French adults, Farr concluded that married people had a roughly 40 percent lower mortality rate than those in the “celibate” category. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” wrote Farr. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

Farr was prescient. In recent decades, dozens of epidemiological studies have demonstrated that married people are significantly less likely to suffer from viral infections, migraines, mental illness, pneumonia and dementia. They have fewer surgeries, car accidents and heart attacks. One meta-analysis concluded that the health benefits of marriage are roughly equivalent to the gains achieved by quitting smoking. (These studies are primarily concerned with married couples, but there is little to reason to believe similar correlations don’t apply to any committed long-term relationship.) The effects are even more profound when the attachment is secure. For instance, one study of patients with congestive heart failure sorted their marriages into high and low quality brackets. The researchers concluded that marital quality was as predictive of survival as the severity of the illness, with people in poor marriages dying at much faster rate.

But if the correlations are clear, their underlying cause is not. Why does a good love affair lead to a longer life?

A new study in Psychological Science, by Richard Slatcher, Emre Selcuk and Anthony Ong, helps outline at least one of the biological pathways through which love influences our long-term health. The scientists used data from 1078 adults participating in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) project, a longitudinal study that has been following subjects since 1995. While MIDUS looks at many different aspects of middle age, Slatcher et al. focused on the correlation between the quality of long-term romantic relationships and cortisol, a hormone with far reaching effects on the body, especially during times of stress.

In particular, the scientists investigated changes in cortisol levels over the course of a day. Cortisol levels typically peak shortly after we wake up, and then decrease steadily as the hours pass, reaching a low point before bedtime. While nearly everyone exhibits this basic hormonal arc, the slope of the drop varies from person to person. Some people have steep slopes – they begin the day with higher initial levels of cortisol, leading to sharper declines during the day – while others have flatter slopes, characterized by lower cortisol levels in the morning and a smaller drop off before sleep. In general, flatter slopes have been associated with serious health problems, including diabetes, depression, heart disease and a higher risk of death.

What determines the shape of our cortisol slope? There’s suggestive evidence that social relationships play a role, with several studies showing a connection between interpersonal problems and flatter slopes, both among adults and young children. This led Slatcher and colleagues to look at measurements of perceived partner responsiveness among MIDUS subjects. (Such responsiveness is defined as the “extent to which people feel understood, cared for, and appreciated by their romantic partners.”) After collecting this relationship data at two time points, roughly a decade apart, the scientists were able to look for correlations with the cortisol profiles of subjects.

Here’s the punchline: more responsive partners led to steeper (and healthier) cortisol slopes. Furthermore, these changes in hormone production were triggered, at least in part, by a general decline in the amount of negative emotion experienced by the subjects. This study is only a first step, and it needs to be replicated with other populations, but it begins to define the virtuous cycle set in motion by loving relationships. When we have a more responsive partner, we get better at dealing with our most unpleasant feelings, which leads to lasting changes in the way we process cortisol. The end result is a longer life.

While reading this new paper, I couldn’t help but think about the pioneering work of Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University. In the 1990s, Meaney began studying the link between the amount of licking and grooming experienced by rat pups and their subsequent performance on a variety of stress and intelligence tests. Again and again, he found that those pups who experienced high levels of licking and grooming were less scared in new cages and less aggressive with their peers. They released fewer stress hormones when handled. They solved mazes more quickly.

More recently, Meaney and colleagues have shown how these feelings of affection alter the rat brain. High-LG pups have fewer receptors for stress hormone and more receptors for the chemicals that attenuate the stress response; they show less activity in parts of the cortex, such as the amygdala, closely associated with fear and anxiety; even their DNA is read differently, as all that maternal care activates an epigenetic switch that protects rats against chronic stress.

A similar logic probably extends to human beings. The feeling of love is not just a source of pleasure. It’s also a kind of protection.

Slatcher, Richard B., Emre Selcuk, and Anthony D. Ong. "Perceived Partner Responsiveness Predicts Diurnal Cortisol Profiles 10 Years Later." Psychological Science (2015)

The Triumph of Defensive Strategy

One of the most useful measurements of modern sabermetrics is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Pioneered in baseball, the statistic attempts to calculate the total number of additional wins generated by a given player, at least compared to a “replacement level player” of ordinary talent. In general, a player who generates more than eight wins per season is of MVP quality. Five wins is All Star level, while most starters hover around the two wins mark.

Baseball, of course, is an ideal sport for the WAR approach, since the performance of its players is largely independent. Every hitter hits alone; every pitcher is on the mound by himself.  In recent years, however, the WAR stat has moved beyond baseball. Bill Gerard developed a similar model for soccer players in the Premier League, while John Hollinger created “Estimated Wins Added” for the NBA. All of these statistics rely on the same basic strategy as WAR in the major leagues: they compare each player’s performance to a hypothetical “replacement,” and convert the difference into the only measurement that matters: winning.

Football, for the most part, has missed out on the WAR revolution. This is for an obvious reason: it’s really hard to disentangle individual statistics from team performance. (There’s also a shortage of individual stats in football.) Take a running back that scores on a two-yard touchdown run. Was the touchdown really due to his talent? Or was it triggered by the excellent blocking of his offensive line? And what if the play was setup by a long pass, or a fifty yard punt return? The running back gets most of the glory, but it’s unclear if he deserves it; a replacement level player might have scored just as easily.

To get around these issues, most football metrics make a problematic but necessary assumption: that all player statistics are independent of teammates. The wide-receiver doesn’t depend on his quarterback and the quarterback doesn’t need a good offensive line.* But that’s beginning to change. A new paper, by Andrew Hughes, Cory Koedel and Joshua Price in the Journal of Sports Economics, outlines a WAR statistic at the position level of the NFL, rather than at the level of individual players. While this new stat won’t tell you who the MVP is in a given year, it will tell you which positions on the field are most valuable, and thus probably deserve the most salary cap space.

The logic of positional WAR, as outlined by Hughes et al., is quite elegant. In essence, the economists look at what happens to a team in the aftermath of an injury or suspension to a starter. As they note, such events – while all too common in the brutish NFL – are also largely random and exogenous. This means that they provide an ideal means of investigating the difference between a starter and a replacement player at each position. By comparing the performance of teams before and after the injury, the economists can see which starters matter the most, and which positions are the hardest to replace.

So what did they find? On the offensive side, there are few surprises. Quarterback is, by far, the most valuable position: a starting QB that misses four games due to injury will cost his team an average of 1.3 wins. That’s followed by tight ends, fullbacks, wide-receivers and outside offensive linemen, all of whom cost their team roughly half a win for every four missed games. Interestingly, running backs appear to be rather interchangeable: when a starting back goes down, there is no impact on the team’s overall performance. Such data would not surprise Bill Belichick. 

The defensive side is where things get strange. According to Hughes et al., teams are not hurt by the loss of defensive starters at any position. Put another way, the positional WAR for every defensive player is essentially zero. If a starting cornerback, safety, linebacker or defensive lineman goes down, a team should expect to win just as many games as before.

At first glance, this data makes no sense. Could a team really win just as many games with second-tier defensive players? The answer is almost certainly no. Instead, the low WAR of defensive positions is probably a testament to the power of defensive strategy. As Hughes et al. note, “defensive schemes can be adjusted to account for replacement players more easily than offensive schemes.” If a cornerback goes down, the safeties can help out, or the linebackers can drop back. The same pattern applies across the entire defense, as coaches and coordinators find ways to compensate for the loss of any single starter. Of course, if multiple starters go down, or if a defense has a lower level of overall talent, then it’s that much harder to compensate. Schemes and scheming have their limits.

That said, this data does suggest that the typical NFL team could improve their performance by spending less on defensive superstars. If you look at the average salary for the ten highest paid players at each position, it becomes clear that NFL teams treat defensive starters as far more valuable than their replacements: only quarterbacks and wide-receivers make more money than defensive ends, with linebackers, cornerbacks and defensive tackles close behind. Again: it’s not that these positions aren’t valuable or that Richard Sherman isn’t supremely talented. It’s that a smart defensive plan might be able make up for a missing defensive star. Russell Wilson, on the other hand, is probably worth every penny. 

And so a statistical tool designed to reveal the most important players on the field ends up, largely by accident, revealing the unexpected importance of the coaches on the sideline. While there are numerous measurements of bad coaching – one study concluded that suboptimal 4th down decisions cost the average team roughly ¾ of a win per season – this new paper highlights the impact of good coaching, especially on the defensive side.  If you have a successful system, then you might not need the best available safety or lineman. Perhaps you should save your money for the passing game. 

At its best, the sabermetric revolution is not about neat answers, or the reduction of talent to a few mathematical formulas. Rather, it’s about revealing the deep complexity of human competition, all the subtleties the eye cannot see. Sometimes, these subtleties lead us to unexpected places, like discovering that you can’t effectively evaluate half the men on the field without taking their group strategy into account. The whole precedes the parts.

* Total QBR is a possible exception to this rule. Alas, its equations are proprietary and thus impossible to evaluate.

Hughes, Andrew, Cory Koedel, and Joshua A. Price. "Positional WAR in the National Football League." Journal of Sports Economics (2015)

Is Talk Therapy Getting Less Effective?

In the late 1950s, when Aaron Beck was a young psychoanalyst at the University of Pennsylvania, he practiced classic Freudian analysis. The goal of therapy, he believed, was to give voice to the repressed urges of the id, revealing those inner conflicts – most of which involved sex - that we hid from ourselves.

But then Beck began treating a patient named Lucy. In a 1997 essay, Beck describes one of their early sessions:

“She was on the couch and we were doing classical analysis. She was presumably following the ‘fundamental rule’ that the patient must report everything that comes into her mind. During this session, she was regaling me with descriptions of her various sexual adventures. At the end of the session, I did what I usually do. I asked her, ‘Now, how have you been feeling during this session?’ She said, ‘I’ve been feeling terribly anxious, doctor.’”

When Beck asked Lucy why she felt so anxious, she gave him an answer that would reshape the future of talk therapy: “Well, actually, I thought that maybe I was boring you. I was thinking that all during the session.”

This offhand remark triggered Beck’s lifelong interest in what he called “unreported thoughts." Although these thoughts are rarely expressed, Beck believed that they shaped our experiences and influenced our emotions. After Beck taught Lucy how to evaluate her negative thoughts – and how to dismiss the incorrect ones – she began feeling better. For Beck, it was proof that talk therapy could work, but only if we talked about the right things.

In many respects, Lucy was patient zero of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. Since that session, CBT has become one of the most widely practiced forms of psychotherapy. This is largely because it works: hundreds of studies have confirmed the effectiveness of CBT at treating a wide range of mental illnesses, from anxiety to schizophrenia. However, CBT is mostly closely associated with the treatment of depression. In part, this is because Beck himself focused on depression. But it’s also because CBT is a remarkably good treatment, at least when it comes to mild and moderate forms of the illness. While direct comparisons with anti-depressant medication are difficult, numerous studies have demonstrated that CBT is about as effective as the latest pills, and might even come with longer-lasting benefits. 

That said, many questions about CBT remain. One unknown involves refinements to the practice of CBT, including the introduction of new concepts (schema theory, etc.) and new techniques (mindfulness based CBT and related offshoots). Are these revisions improving CBT or making it worse? Another unknown involves the rapid growth of CBT as a treatment, and the impact of this growth on the quality of CBT therapists. Given these changes, it makes sense to investigate the healing power of CBT over time.

The hope, of course, is that CBT has been getting more effective. Given all that we’ve learned about the mind and mental illness since Beck began studying automatic thoughts, it seems reasonable to expect a little progress. This, after all, is the usual arc of modern medicine: there are very few healthcare interventions that have not improved over the last 60 years.

Alas, the initial evidence does not support the hope. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new paper in Psychological Bulletin by the researchers Tom Johnsen and Oddgeir Friborg. They collected 70 studies of CBT used as a treatment for depression, published between 1977 and 2014. Then, Johnsen and Friborg tracked the fluctuation of CBT’s effectiveness – measured as its ability to reduce depressive symptoms – over the decades. The resulting chart is a picture of decline, as the effect size of the treatment (as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory) has fallen by nearly 50 percent over the last thirty years:

The same pattern basic pattern also applies to studies using a different measure of depression, the Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression:

These are distressing and humbling charts. If nothing else, the decline they document is a reminder that it’s incredibly hard to heal the mind, and that our attempts at progress often backfire.  Decades after Beck pioneered CBT, we’re still struggling to make it better. 

So what’s causing this decline in efficacy? Johnsen and Friborg dismiss many of the obvious suspects. Publication bias, for instance, is the tendency of scientific journals to favor positive results, at least initially. (Once a positive result is established, null or inconclusive results often become easier to publish.) While Johnsen and Friborg do find evidence of publication bias in CBT research, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for the decline in efficacy.  They also find little evidence that variables such as patient health or demographics are responsible.

Instead, Johnsen and Friborg focus on two likely factors. The first factor concerns the growing popularity of the treatment, which has led many inexperienced therapists to begin using it. And since there’s a correlation between the experience of therapists and the recovery of their patients – more experience leads to a greater reduction in depressive symptoms – an influx of CBT novices might dilute its power. As Johnsen and Friborg note, CBT can seem like it’s easy to learn, since it has relatively straightforward treatment objectives. However, the effective use of CBT actually requires “proper training, considerable practice and competent supervision.” There is nothing easy about it.

The second factor is the placebo effect. In general, new medical treatments generate stronger placebo responses from patients. Everyone is excited; the breakthrough is celebrated; the intervention seems full of potential.  But then, as the hype gives way to reality, the placebo effect starts to fade. This phenomenon has been used to explain the diminished potency of various pharmaceuticals, from atypical antipsychotics to anti-depressants.  Because we are less likely to believe in the effectiveness of these pills, they actually become less effective. Our skepticism turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Johnsen and Friborg speculate that a similar trend might also apply to CBT:

“In the initial phase of the cognitive era, CBT was frequently portrayed as the gold standard for the treatment of many disorders. In recent times, however, an increasing number of studies have not found this method to be superior to other techniques. Coupled with the increasing availability of information to the public, including the internet, it is not inconceivable that patients’ hope and faith in the efficacy of CBT has decreased somewhat…Moreover, whether widespread knowledge of the present results might worsen the situation remains an open question.”

It’s an unusually meta note for a scientific paper, as Johnsen and Friborg realize that their discovery might influence the very facts they describe. After all, if patients believe that CBT is no longer the "gold standard" then its decline will accelerate. And so we are stuck with a paradox: we cannot study the power of mental health treatments without impacting future results. Belief is part of the cure.

Johnsen, Tom J., and Oddgeir Friborg. "The Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as an Anti-Depressive Treatment is Falling: A Meta-Analysis." Psychological Bulletin (2015).

The Strange Allure of Almost Winning

In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, the cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull describes the extensive use of the “near miss” effect in slot machines. The effect exists when game designers engineer the reels to stop next to winning symbols far more often than predicted by random chance. Consider the tricks used by slot machine manufacturer Universal, which developed a two-stage process after each spin. The first stage determined whether or not the player won. If he lost – and most spins are losers - the second stage initiated the near miss effect, setting up the player to believe he had come exceedingly close to a real payout. For instance, there might be two 7s on the main payline, and then a third 7 just below.* Although near misses cost the casinos nothing, they provide gamblers with motivational juice, persuading people to stick with a game that’s stacked against them.  And so players keep losing money, because they almost won.

While the psychological power of near misses is an old idea – B.F. Skinner celebrated their influence in the early 1950s – scientists have only begun to glimpse their strange mechanics. In a 2009 Neuron paper, scientists found that near misses in a slot machine game recruited the mesolimbic reward machinery of the brain, just like actual wins. Other research has shown that people with a gambling addiction – roughly 1-5 percent of the population - show a larger than normal response in those same reward areas when exposed to near misses. In essence, their brains fail to differentiate between near misses and wins, which might play a role in their inability to step away from the casino.

What remains unclear, however, is why near misses are so influential, even among people without gambling issues. One possibility, explored in a new paper by Monica Wadhwa and JeeHye Christine Kim in Psychological Science, is that near misses trigger a particularly intense motivational state, in which people are determined to get what they want. In fact, according to Wadhwa and Kim, coming close to winning a reward can be more motivating than a real win. This suggests, rather perversely, that a gambler who keeps losing money with near misses will stay with the game longer than a gambler who actually wins some cash.

The scientists began by building their own digital game. Players were shown a grid containing sixteen tiles and were told to click on the tiles one at a time. Half of the tiles concealed a rock, while the other half concealed a diamond. The goal of the players was to uncover eight diamonds in a row. (Needless to say, the odds of this happening by chance are vanishingly slim.) Players were randomly assigned to one of three rigged conditions: a clear loss condition, in which they uncovered a rock on the very first click; a near miss without anticipation condition, in which they found a rock on the second trial but went on to find seven diamonds in total; and a near miss with anticipation condition, in which players uncovered seven diamonds in a row before uncovering a rock on the very last trial.

After the game was over, the scientists measured the impact of these various forms of losing.  In the first study, they clocked the speed of subjects as they walked down the hallway to collect a chocolate bar. As expected, those in the near miss with anticipation condition – the ones who came within a single tile of winning – walked much faster (up to 20 percent faster) than those in the other conditions. (In a separate experiment, people in this condition also salivated more when shown pictures of money.) According to the scientists, these differences in speed and salivation were triggered by the increased motivation of almost winning the game, which spilled over to an unrelated task. The Vegas equivalent would be running over to the poker tables, because you barely lost at blackjack.

The last experiment featured a scratch lottery ticket with a 6X6 grid.  If the ticket contained six 8’s in a row, the player won. Once again, the game was rigged: some tickets were clear losers, others were near winners (they contained five adjacent 8s) and some were winners. The scientists gave people these lottery tickets as they entered a fashion accessory store. Those given near miss lottery tickets showed higher levels of motivation, and went on to spend significantly more money while shopping. Maybe this is why Las Vegas is so overstuffed with luxury boutiques.

In the context of slot machines and lottery tickets, the near miss effect can seem like a programming bug, a quirk of dopaminergic wiring that leads us to lose cash on stupid games of chance. We are highly motivated, but that motivation is squandered on random number generators, dice and roulette wheels.

And yet, if you zoom out a bit, there’s a more uplifting explanation for the motivational oomph of near misses. One possibility is that the effect is actually an essential part of the learning process. Education, after all, is entwined with mistakes and disappointment; we learn how to get it right by getting it wrong. This is true whether we’re practicing jump shots or trying to write the Great American Novel – the process will be full of bricks and airballs and terrible drafts. But if every failure made us quit, then we’d never get good at anything. So the human brain had to learn how to enjoy the slow process of self-improvement, which is really a never-ending sequence of near misses. Pseudo-wins. Two sevens and a bell.

But here’s the poignant punchline of this new study: in some situations, those near misses turn out to be more motivating than real wins. Although we assume success is the ultimate goal, the bittersweet flavor of almost success is what makes us persist. It’s the ball that rims out; the sentence that works followed by one that doesn’t; the slot reel that stopped an inch short of a jackpot. And so we find ourselves drawn to those frustrating pursuits where victory is close at hand, but always just out of reach.

Such a frustrating way to live. Such an effective way to learn.

*This particular bit of slot machine programming was later deemed illegal, although similar techniques are still widely practiced.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Wadhwa, Monica, and JeeHye Christine Kim. "Can a Near Win Kindle Motivation? The Impact of Nearly Winning on Motivation for Unrelated Rewards." Psychological Science (2015) 

Why Do Married Men Make More Money?

In 1979, Martha Hill, a researcher at the University of Michigan, observed a strange fact about married men: they make a lot more money, at least compared to their unmarried peers. (According to Hill’s numbers, marriage led to a roughly 25 percent boost in pay.) What’s more, the effect remained even after Hill controlled for most of the relevant variables, including work experience and training. 

In the decades since, this correlation has been repeatedly confirmed, with dozens of studies showing that married men earn between 10 and 50 percent more than their unmarried peers. (Because the world is so unfair, women get hit with a marriage penalty, as married females earn roughly 10 percent less than unmarried women.) What’s more, these income differences among men don’t seem to depend on any of the obvious demographic differences, including age, education, race and IQ scores. For whatever strange reason, companies seem to find married men more valuable. Their human capital is worth more capital.

But why? What does marriage have to do with work performance? A number of competing explanations for the male marriage premium have been proposed. There is the discrimination hypothesis – employers are biased against bachelors – and the selection explanation, which posits that men who are more likely to get married are also more likely to have the character traits required for career success. (If you can get along with your spouse, then you can probably get along with your colleagues.) Another possibility is that married men benefit from the specialization of their labor: because they don’t have to be worry about the dishes or other household chores – that’s the job of their partners - they’re more productive at work. Lastly, there is the marriage-as-education hypothesis, which suggests that married men might learn valuable skills from their marriage. In the midst of a long-term relationship, men might get trained in things like commitment and self-control, which are also useful at the office. If true, this means that the male marriage premium is rooted in something real, and that it has a causal effect on productivity. Companies are right to pay extra for men with wedding rings.

There have been a number of clever attempts to test these different possibilities. Economists have looked at the effect of shotgun weddings and the impact of a working wife on a husband’s earnings. They’ve looked at whether the gains of the marriage premium effect occur all at once or over time – most conclude the wage gains accrue over time – and that the premium dissipates as couples approach divorce. 

And yet, despite this bevy of research, the literature remains full of uncertainty. In a new paper, published last month in Labour Economics, the economists Megan de Linde Leonard and T.D. Stanley summarize the current confusion. “Researchers report estimates of the marriage-wage premium that range from 100% to a negative 39% of average wage,” they write. “In fact, over the past four years, we found 258 estimates, nine percent of which are statistically negative, 40% are significantly positive” and many of which were indistinguishable from zero. So the effect is either positive, negative, or non-existent. So much for consensus.

To help parse the disagreement, de Linde Leonard and Stanley use a technique called meta-regression analysis. The statistical equations are way over my head, but de Linde Leonard was kind enough to describe the basic methodology by email:

"To do a meta-analysis, we search for all papers, published and unpublished, that have estimates of the phenomenon that we are interested in. We then record those estimates into a spreadsheet along with other important factors about the study. (Was it published? What data set was used? Was the data from the US?, etc.) Once that is complete, we use statistical analysis to draw out the signal from the noise. We don't only use studies that we consider to be best practice; we use all the studies we can find and let the data tell us what is true. That is the beauty of the technique. We don't have to rely on our (almost always biased) professional judgment to decide what is real and important. We let the body of research do the talking."

So what did the body of research say? After looking at more than 661 estimates of the male marriage premium, de Linde Leonard and Stanley settled on a 9.4 percent premium among male workers in the United States. (The effect seems to be less potent in other countries.) Interestingly, the male marriage premium seems to getting more powerful in the 21st century, as a review of the most recent studies finds an average premium of 12.8 percent. 

What’s more, the meta-regression technique allowed the economists to assess the likelihood of various explanations for the marriage premium. Since the effect is increasing among men, even as the percentage of women in the workforce continues to increase, it seems unlikely that labor specialization plays a large role. (In other words, not doing the dishes doesn’t make you more productive at the office.*) De Linde Leonard and Stanley are also skeptical of the selection hypothesis, which suggests that married men only make more money because the men who tend to marry already possess the traits associated with high salaries. While the selection effect is real, the economists conclude that it’s not the main driver of the marriage premium, and probably accounts for just a 2 percent bump in wages, or less than 20 percent of the total marriage premium.

We’re left, then, with the marriage-as-education explanation. According to this theory, matrimony is a kind of college for the emotions, instilling partners with a very valuable set of non-cognitive traits. As De Linde Leonard and Stanley point out, marriage might cause men to “‘settle down,’ be more stable, and focused on work and career.” While we often draw a sharp distinction between the worlds of work and love, and assume that the traits and skills that are essential in one domain are irrelevant in the other, the marriage premium is a reminder that such distinctions are blurry at best. In fact, the talents that married men learn from marriage are roughly equivalent, at least in monetary value, to the income boost the average worker gets from attending college, but not graduating. (A bachelor’s degree gives people a much bigger salary boost.) Of course, women also probably pick up useful mental skills from matrimony, which makes the existence of the female marriage penalty – even if it’s just a penalty against having kids - that much more unjust. 

And yet, despite the plausibility of the marriage-as-education theory, we know remarkably little about what’s learned from our closest romantic relationships. There’s some scattered evidence: men who score higher in grit are also more likely to stay married, and those with secure romantic attachments are also happier employees. But these are just glimpses and glances of what remains a mostly mysterious schooling. Besides, the greatest “skills” we learn from marriage (or really any committed relationship) might not be measurable, at least not in the psychometric sense. This is rampant speculation, rooted in my own n of 1 experience, but it seems that marriage can provide us with a valuable sense of perspective, stretching out the timescale of our expectations. We learn that moods pass, fights get forgotten, forgiveness is possible. We realize that everything worthwhile requires years of struggle (even love!), and that success is mixed up with the salty residue of sweat and tears. I have no idea how much that wisdom is worth at the office, but I damned sure know it helps with the rest of life. 

*I’m actually partial to what might be called the non-specialization-of-labor hypothesis, which is that spouses often add tremendous value to one’s work. Call it the Vera effect. 

de Linde Leonard, Megan, and T. D. Stanley. "Married with children: What remains when observable biases are removed from the reported male marriage wage premium." Labour Economics 33 (2015): 72-80.

Does the Science of Self-Control Diminish Our Self-Control?

In 1998, the psychologist Roy Baumeister introduced the “strength” model of self-control. It’s a slightly misleading name, since the model attempts to describe the weakness of the will, why people so easily succumb to temptation and impulse. In Baumeister’s influential paper – it’s since been cited more than 2500 times – he and colleagues describe several simple experiments that expose our mental frailties. In one trial, subjects forced to eat radishes instead of chocolate candies gave up far sooner when asked to solve an impossible puzzle. In another trial, people told to suppress their emotions while watching a tragic scene from Terms of Endearment solved significantly fewer anagrams than those who watched a funny video instead. The lesson, writes Baumeister et al., is that the ego is easily depleted, a limited resource quickly exhausted by minor acts of self-control.

It’s a compelling theory, as it seems to explain many of our human imperfections. It’s why a long day at work often leads to a pint of ice cream on the couch and why we get grumpy and distracted whenever we miss a meal. Because the will is so feeble, we must learn to pick our battles, exerting power only when it counts. In a particularly clever follow-up experiment, published in 2007, Baumeister and colleagues showed that a variety of typical self-control tasks led to lower glucose levels in the blood. (The mind, it seems, consumes more energy when attempting to restrain itself.) Not surprisingly, giving “depleted” subjects a glass of sweet lemonade improved their subsequent performance on yet another self-control task. However, depleted subjects given lemonade sweetened with fake sugar experienced no benefits. Saccharine might trick the tongue, but it can't help your frontal lobes.

So far, so depressing: as described by Baumeister, self-control is a Sisyphean struggle, since the very act of exerting control makes it harder to control ourselves in the near future. We can diet in the morning, but that only makes us more likely to gorge in the afternoon. The id always wins.

But what if the will isn’t so fragile? In recent years, several papers have complicated and critiqued the strength (aka ego depletion) model of self-control. In a 2012 paper, Miller et al. pointed out that only people who believed in the impotence of willpower – they agreed that “after a strenuous activity, your energy is depleted and you must rest to get it refueled again” – performed worse on repeated tests of the will. In contrast, subjects who believed that self-control was seemingly inexhaustible – “After a strenuous mental activity, you feel energized for further challenging activities” – showed no depletion effects at all. This suggests that the exhaustion of willpower is caused by a belief about our mental resources, and not by an actual shortage of resources. We think we’re weak, and so we are. The science becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s a long introduction to the latest volley in the ego-depletion debate. In a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Veronika Job, Gregory Walton, Katharina Bernecker and Carol Dweck left the lab and tracked more than 100 students at a selective American university. The assessment began with a survey about their willpower beliefs. Is it depleted by strenuous mental activity? Or does “mental stamina fuel itself”? Then, the students were sent weekly questionnaires about their self-control failures in a variety of domains, from academics (“How often did you watch TV instead of studying?”) to emotional control  (“How often did you have trouble controlling your temper?”) Finally, Job, et al., asked students to anticipate the amount of self-control they’d need to exert over the next week. Did they have a big exam coming up? A class presentation? Were they having problems with friends or professors? In addition to these surveys, the scientists got access to the students’ GPA. 

When the demand for self-control was low, the students’ beliefs about willpower had no effect on their self-control performance. However, when the semester got stressful, and the students felt a greater need to resist temptation, the scientists observed a significant difference: those who believed they had more self-control were better able to control their selves. Here are the scientists: “Far from conserving their resources and showing strong self-regulation when needed, students who endorsed the limited theory [of self-control] and who dealt with high demands over the term, procrastinated more (e.g., watching TV instead of studying), ate more junk food, and reported more excessive spending as compared to students with a nonlimited theory about willpower.”  (This relationship held even after controlling for trait levels of self-control.) What’s more, these beliefs had a tangible impact on their college grades, as students with a non-limited view of self-control got a significantly higher GPA when taking heavy course loads.

It’s a fascinating paper, limited mostly by its reliance on self-reports. (The GPA data is the lone exception.) I’m not sure how much we should trust a college student’s retrospective summary of his or her self-control performance, or how those reports might be shaped by their implicit beliefs. Are you more likely to notice and remember your failures of willpower if you believe the will is bound to fail? I have no idea. But it would be nice to see future studies track our lapses in a more objective fashion, and hopefully over a longer period of time.

That said, these quibbles obscure a bigger point. We are constantly being besieged with bodily urges that we’re trying to resist. Maybe it’s a rumbling belly, or a twitchy attention, or a leg muscle pooling with lactic acid. Although we know what we’re supposed to do – not eat a candy bar, stay on task, keep working out – it’s hard for the mind to persist. And so we give in, and tell ourselves we didn’t have a choice. The flesh can't be denied.

But here’s the good news: we’re probably tougher than we think. In one paper, published last year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, subjects who were flashed happy faces for 16 milliseconds at a time – that’s way too fast for conscious awareness – pedaled a bike at an intense pace for 25 minutes and 19 seconds. Those flashed sad faces only made it for 22 minutes and 22 seconds. (An even bigger boost was observed after some cyclists were primed with action words, such as GO and ENERGY.) What caused the difference? The subliminal faces didn’t strengthen their muscles, or slow down their heart rate, or mute the pain in their quads. Instead, the visuals provided a subtle motivational boost, which helped the cyclists resist the pain for 12 percent longer.

These results suggest, like the recent Job, et al. paper, that our failures of self-control are primarily not about the physical limits of the brain and body. Those limits exist, of course – the legs will eventually give out and the frontal lobes need glucose. But in the course of an ordinary day, those brute limits are far away, which means that the constraining variable on self-control is often psychological, tangled up with our motivations and expectations. And that’s why our implicit beliefs about self-control and the mind can be so important. (And also why we need to ensure our kids are given the most useful beliefs, which Dweck refers to as a "growth mindset."*) If you believe the self is weak or that the mind is fixed – say, if you’ve read all those ego depletion papers – then you might doubt your ability to stay strong; the lapse becomes inevitable. “A nonlimited theory does not turn people into self-control super heroes who never give in to temptations,” write Job, et al. “However, they lean in when demands on self-regulation are high.” The self they believe in does not wilt after choosing a radish; it is not undone by a long day; it can skip the lemonade and still keep it together.

We are not perfect. Not even close. But maybe we’re less bound to our imperfections than we think.

*In a new paper, Paunesku et. al. show that offering high-school students a brief growth mindset intervention - teaching that them "struggle is an opportunity for growth," and not an indicator of failure - led to significantly better grades among those at risk of dropping out. While this result itself isn't new, Paunesku showed that it was scalable, and could be delivered to thousands of students at low-cost using online instruction.

Job, Veronika, et al. "Implicit theories about willpower predict self-regulation and grades in everyday life." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (April 2015)

Can People Change? The Case of Don Draper

Can people change? That is the question, it seems to me, at the dark heart of Mad Men.  We’ve spent eight years watching Don Draper try to become a better man. He wants to drink less and swim more. He wants to get close to his kids and stay faithful to his wife.

But little has changed; Don remains mostly the same. The world around him is now wearing orange plaid and bushy sideburns, but Don still looks like an astronaut, clad in crisp suits and pomade hair. He’s still sipping bourbon in bars, still sleeping around, still most alive when selling himself to strangers. What we’ve learned from the passing of time is that Don has learned nothing.  

I have no idea how Mad Men will end. Perhaps Don will have a midlife epiphany and move to California. Maybe he’ll find true love in the arms of a waitress from Racine. But given the pace of the show so far, I’d bet on a far less dramatic finale. If anything, the turbulence of the sixties only highlights the brittleness of human character. Fashions change. Politics change. A man can walk on the moon. But we are stuck with ourselves. 

Is this true? Are we really stuck? Do people ever change? Put another way: is Don Draper the exception or the rule? 

Obviously, the empirical answers are irrelevant to the success of Mad Men; the art doesn’t need to obey the facts of social science. But let’s admit that these are interesting mysteries, and that our capacity for change isn’t just relevant on cable television. It’s also a recurring plot point of real life.  

The best way to grapple with these scientific questions is to follow people over time, measuring them within the context of a longitudinal study. And since Mad Men is a basically the longitudinal study of a single man over a decade, it might be worth comparing its basic conclusions – most people don’t change – with the results of actual longitudinal research.

The most fitting comparison is the Grant Study of Adult Development, which has been tracking more than 200 men who were sophomores at Harvard between 1939 and 1944. Every few years, the subjects submit to a lengthy interview and a physical exam; their wives and children are sent questionnaires; they are analyzed using the latest medical tests, whether it’s a Rorschach blot or an fMRI. The oldest subjects are now in their mid-nineties, making them a few years older than Don Draper.

George Vaillant led the Grant study for more than thirty years, and has written extensively about its basic findings. His first survey of the project, Adaptation to Life, is a classic; his most recent book, Triumphs of Experience, provides a snapshot of the men as they approach the end of life. And while Vaillant’s writing is full of timeless wisdom and surprising correlations – alcoholism is the leading cause of divorce; a loving childhood is more predictive of income than IQ scores; loneliness dramatically increases the risk of chronic disease - it’s most enduring contribution to the scientific literature involves the reality of adult development.

Because people change. Or rather: we never stop changing, not even as old men. In fact, the persistence of personality change is one of the great themes of the Grant study. The early books are full of bold claims. But then, as the years pass, the stories of the men become more complicated, subtle, human. 

Take divorce. Vaillant initially assumed, based on his interviews with the Grant subjects, that “divorce was a serious indicator of poor mental health.” It signaled an unwillingness to commit, or perhaps an inability to deal with intimacy. These marriages didn’t fail because they were bad marriages. They failed because the men were bad partners, just like Don.

But time is the great falsifier. When the subjects were in their seventies and eighties, Vaillant conducted extensive interviews with them about their marriages. As expected, more than 90 percent of those in consistently happy first marriages were still happy. The same pattern applied to those stuck in poor relationships – they were still miserable, and probably should have gotten divorced. However, Vaillant was startled by what happened to those men who divorced and later remarried: roughly 85 percent of them said “their current marriages were happy - and had been for an average length of thirty-three years.” This data forced Vaillant to reconsider his beliefs about divorce. Instead of seeing marital failure as an innate character flaw, he came to believe that it was “often a symptom of something else,” and that these men had learned how to become good husbands. They changed.

The same idea returns again and again, both in the statistics and the individual case studies. The man raised in a loveless home becomes a loving father; the alcoholic stops drinking while another one starts; some gain wisdom, others grow bitter. The self is a verb, always becoming. As Vaillant writes, “Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities.” 

Of course, longitudinal studies are not the only way to measure adult development. In a recent Science paper, the psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson came up with a novel way to measure our inner changes. The survey itself was simple: they asked more than 19,000 adults, ranging in age from 18 to 68 years, questions about how much they’d changed during the previous ten years and how much they expected to change over the next ten. By comparing the predictions of subjects to the self-reports of those who were older, the scientists were able to measure the mismatch between how much we actually changed (a significant amount) and how much we expected to change in the future (not very much at all.)

The scientists refer to this as the “end of history illusion,” noting that people continually dismiss the possibility that their personalities, values, and preferences will evolve over time. As the scientists write, “People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” But no such moment exists. History is never over, and we never stop changing.

In his writing, Vaillant repeatedly quotes the famous line of Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” Mad Men shows us the changes of the river. It shows us a society disrupted by the pill and the civil rights movement and Vietnam. But Don remains the same, forever stuck in his own status quo. For a show obsessed with verisimilitude – every surface is faithful to the period - this might be the most unrealistic thing on the screen.

Vaillant, George E. Adaptation to Life. Harvard University Press, 1977.

Vaillant, George E. Triumphs of Experience. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Quoidbach, Jordi, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson. "The end of history illusion." Science 339.6115 (2013): 96-98.

Should Cell Phones Be Banned In Cars?

The other day I was talking on the phone, handsfree, while driving a car. I was trying to avoid rush hour traffic, traveling on some unfamiliar side streets. Out of nowhere I hear a loud horn, followed by some curse words. I look around: I’m the only one here. I must be the motherfucking asshole.

The other driver had a point: I’d just run a stop sign. It wasn’t a close call – no screeching brakes were required – but it could have been ugly. I got off the phone and drove the rest of the way home in chastened silence.

This little episode got me thinking: how bad is it to talk on the phone when driving? Does it really increase the risk of an accident? These are psychological questions with vast practical implications, as more than 80 percent of drivers admit to cellphone use while behind the wheel. According to a 2007 survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), roughly 11 percent of drivers are using a cellphone on the road at any given moment.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious: driving requires focus. We should give our full attention to these 4000 pound machines hurtling down the road at high speed. Such a response is rooted in everyday experience – 45 percent of drivers say they’ve been hit or almost hit by another driver chatting on the phone – and numerous studies, both in the field and the lab. Perhaps the most cited work comes from David Strayer at the University of Utah. In one study, Strayer and colleagues observed more than 1700 drivers as they approached a four way stop sign on a residential street. The scientists noted whether or not the drivers were talking on the phone. They also noted whether or not they obeyed all traffic laws. The differences were not subtle: those drivers on the phone were roughly 10 times more likely to commit a stopping violation. (Handsfree devices provided "no safety advantage.") In other words, I’m not the only one.

A similar pattern emerged from realistic simulations of driving conducted in the Strayer lab. In one study, the scientists compared the performance of 40 drivers under three conditions: driving without distraction, talking on the phone while driving and driving with a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit. Based on the detailed driver data, Strayer, Jason Watson and Frank Drews concluded that “the impairments associated with cell-phone drivers may be as great as those commonly observed with intoxicated drivers.” 

We could stop here. And many do: Strayer’s research is frequently cited in discussions around cell phone driving laws. It seems to provide clear evidence that phone conversations significantly impair driver performance. The gadgets should probably be banned.

There is, however, an obvious rebuttal to this research, at least if you stop and think about it. If talking on a cell phone while driving is really as dangerous as being drunk, then why haven’t crash rates surged along with cell phone usage? Pull up to a red light in my city and half the drivers are talking to their dashboards, or maybe into a dangling white cord. (The other half are texting.) And yet, the roads are not littered with wrecked cars.

This conundrum led me to a recent study by Saurabh Bhargava at Carnegie Mellon and Vikram Pathania at the London School of Economics. The scientists begin their paper with a telling chart, which documents the seemingly inverse relationship between cell phone ownership and crash rates:

What the chart doesn’t show, of course, is that the rise of cell phones has also paralleled the rise of air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, automated braking systems and other car technologies that, at least in theory, have also made driving a less fraught activity. It’s entirely possible (likely, even) that the rate of car crashes would have plummeted even more if it weren’t for cell phones.

But Bhargava and Pathania are only getting warmed up. The bulk of their study is taken up with an attempt to establish a causal relationship between “cell phone use and crashes in the field.” To do this, they exploit a natural experiment triggered by an old quirk in the cost of a cell phone call. I’d forgotten about these phone plans, but many cellular companies used to divide weekdays into “peak” and “off peak” hours.  For the most part, calls placed during the “off peak” hours did not count towards the allotted minutes included in the plan. Not surprisingly, this led to a 7.2 percent spike in calls placed by drivers just after the start of the “off peak” period, which was typically 9 PM.

Bhargava and Pathania then compared the crash rate from 8 to 9 PM – the hour before the surge in cell phone use – to the 9 to 10 PM hour. Did the rise in calling correlate with a rise in crashes? The answer: Not really. (They also ran control analyses on weekends, when the peak rules were not in effect, and on crash rates from 1995 to 1998, before phone plans had peak restrictions.) While this null finding does not, by any means, rule out a possible increase in crash risk caused by cell phone conversations, it does suggest that, as Bhargava and Parathi note, “cellular use is not analogous to drunk driving as some policymakers and academics have suggested.” In particular, it suggests that prior estimates of the hazards posed by cell phone conversations in the car were significantly too high.

The finding comes with numerous caveats. For starters, Bhargava and Pathania aren’t able to ensure that their cell phone data comes from drivers on the phone, and not chatty passengers. It’s also possible that the lack of increased crash risk is unique to either the region in question (outside the downtown area of a large city in California) or the time (between 9 and 10 PM.) Perhaps the drivers most vulnerable to the hazards of cell phone use are less likely to be driving at night, or maybe the lack of cars on the road at off peak hours makes distraction less dangerous. It’s also possible that the 9 to 10 PM sample is picking up an “unrepresentative” set of cell phone calls. Perhaps these calls are less urgent, or somehow require less attention than calls made earlier in the day.

To mitigate some of these concerns, the economists conducted two additional statistical analyses. First, they looked for correlations between local variation in cell phone ownership – some regions adopted mobile technology at a faster pace – and changes in crash rate. No correlations were found. Secondly, they looked to see if there had been any impact on the number of fatal crashes in three states (New York. Connecticut and New Jersey) and two large cities (Chicago and Washington D.C.) that had banned handheld cell phone usage. They found no short-term or long-term impact triggered by these changes in the law. More recent studies of other states have come to similar conclusions. 

This is the part of the blog where I tell you the neat takeaway, how this new study displaces all of our old knowledge. But it’s not that simple, is it? While Bhargava and Pathania estimate a minimal increase in crash risk, Strayer’s experimental research estimates a 20 to 30 percent increase. Police annotations on accidents put the increased risk around 1 percent, while a 1997 analysis of individual crash records puts the increased risk closer to 33 percent. Meanwhile, a paper looking at calls made using the hands free OnStar system found no evidence of an increased crash risk (at least for crashes that involved the deployment of an airbag), and a thorough field study by the NHTSA came to similar conclusions, but an analysis by Jed Kolko found that increased cell phone ownership was associated with an 11 percent increase in fatal crashes in bad weather. 

In short, the effect is either huge or negligible. Talking on the phone either makes you drive like a drunkard or has virtually no impact on your performance. Banning all cell phone use in the car will either save no one or it will save thousands of lives every year. In an email, Bhargava put it this way: "One way I think to reasonably reconcile the lab findings and field findings like ours is that cell phones could distract, as lab studies sensibly suggest, but on the road, people may compensate for such distraction by using their phones in particularly safe situations, or adjusting their driving when on the phone. It’s also possible that cell phone use simply substitutes for other risk-taking behaviors such as talking to a passenger or playing with the radio.” This substitution effect might be especially potent in the era of smartphones - it’s almost certainly safer to talk on the phone than to send a text while driving.

Social science is hard. If nothing else, the struggle to pin down the riskiness of talking on the phone in the car is a reminder of the difficulties or parsing causes in a world overstuffed with variables. It’s been eighteen years since the first prominent study of cell phone use and driving and yet we’re still not that close to a definitive answer. 

As for me? I’m fairly convinced by these field studies that posit a lower risk ratio. Nevertheless, the elegant statistics carry less emotional weight than my own n of 1 experience. I have no idea if the conversation caused my traffic violation, or if it was triggered instead by one of the many other factors at play.  But at the time it felt like I should just shut up and drive. Such feelings carry little validity – people are notoriously terrible at introspecting on their mental limitations – but it’s what comes to mind first when my phone rings and I’m on the road.  

Suarabh Bhargava and Vikram Pathania. “Driving Under the (Cellular) Influence.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 5, No. 3, p. 92-125, 2013.

The Power of Redemption Stories

The story of redemption is as American as apple pie. It’s there in the Autobiography of Ben Franklin – he went from being a fugitive teen in Philadelphia to the founder of a nation - and the pulp fiction of Horatio Alger, which recount the “rags to riches” tales of working-class boys in the mean city. It’s the narrative that President George W. Bush pitched on the campaign trail - he was “born again” after years of drinking and troublemaking – and what Oprah preached on her show, often using her own painful childhood as an example.

Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has spent years studying the details of these redemptive narratives. He describes five distinct themes that define this “quintessentially American story about how to live a good life.” The first theme is “early advantage,” as the protagonist becomes aware of their special blessings; they feel marked from the start. This is soon followed by scenes in which the narrator describes their “sensitivity to suffering,” how they noticed the unfairness of the world. Then, there is the trope of “moral steadfastness”: these people live their lives guided by a strong sense of right and wrong. This is followed by “redemption sequences,” or moments in which a significant mistake or hardship – addiction, divorce, unemployment, etc. – becomes a means to absolution and grace, or what McAdams describes as the “deliverance from suffering to an enhanced status or state.” Finally, there is the education provided by the hard times, as the protagonist commits to “prosocial goals” and tries to “improve the lives of other people.”

In a new paper published in Psychological Science, McAdams and Jen Guo demonstrate the strange power of these stories of redemption, how they frame our lives, shape our personalities and influence our behavior. The scientists demonstrated this by interviewing 157 late-middle aged adults for two to three hours. The subjects were asked to describe their life as it were a novel, complete with chapters, characters and themes. After the interviews were transcribed, their stories were analyzed in terms of the five motifs of the redemptive narrative. Were there hints of “moral steadfastness”? Did the subject describe “redemption sequences”? What about “prosocial goals”?

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that these biographical tales are inherently biased and subjective. When we create a personal narrative, we are not seeking the literal truth – we are craving coherence and meaning. (As John Updike once wrote, “Composition, in crystalizing memory, displaces it.”) This is especially true of redemption narratives, which force a happy ending onto the trials and tribulations of life. In the real world, not everyone gets redeemed. Not all suffering has a point. The poet Randall Jarrell, who knew a thing or two about anguish, put it this way: “Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.”

And yet, and yet. For many people, these redemption narratives – even when they simplify the facts of life - help them live better lives. In the new paper, McAdams and Guo show that the five themes of redemptive stories are strongly linked to “generativity,” a personality trait associated with generosity and selflessness. “Generative adults seek to give back to society,” McAdams writes in his 2006 book The Redemptive Self. “They work to make their world a better place, not just for themselves but for future generations.” McAdams then quotes a highly generative adult on the lessons he gleaned from his hardest times: “When I die, I guess the chemicals in my body, well, they’ll go to fertilize some plants, you know, some ears of corn, and the good deeds I do will live through my children and through the people I love.”

Not surprisingly, high levels of generativity are linked to a surplus of benefits, from positive parenting styles to community engagement to better mental health. (In previous research, McAdams has shown that generativity is also inversely correlated with depression.) This suggests, say the scientists, that “the prototype of the redemptive self appears to be a life-story format that is deeply implicated in healthy psychosocial adaptation in the midlife years.”

But the question remains: why are redemptive narratives so closely associated with generativity? One possibility – and it’s only a possibility, since correlation is not causation – is that redemption narratives better prepare us for the “hard work and daunting challenges” of the well-lived life. To care for someone, or to agitate for social change, or to try to make a positive difference in the world, is to commit to a long struggle, a marathon in which success is mingled with failure and triumph is mixed up with disappointment. In order to not give up, it helps to have a life story in which pain is merely a precursor to wisdom, and every struggle an opportunity for growth. As it goes in Romans 5:3-4: “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance, character, and character, hope.”

Is that biblical equation always true? Does suffering always lead to something better? Of course not. But sometimes we need to believe.

McAdams, Dan P., and Jen Guo. "Narrating the Generative Life." Psychological Science (2015)

How Fast Is Usain Bolt?

On the night of August 16, 2009, during the 100 meter final at the 2009 World Championships, Usain Bolt ran faster than any other human being has ever run before. He shattered his previous world record by more than a tenth of a second and, according to a statistical model of expected sprint times, set a pace not expected until roughly 2030. (Around the 60 meter mark, Bolt was going 27.78 miles per hour.) By any reasonable standard, it was one of the most impressive athletic achievements in modern sporting history. To watch Bolt in this race is to see a man literally leave his competitors behind. 

That, at least, is how it looks to the naked eye. However, according to a new study by Manuel Varlet and Michael Richardson, the singularity of Bolt’s performance is misleading. While it appears that Bolt was running by himself, paces ahead of everyone else, the scientists used a careful analysis of his stride to show that Bolt’s steps were actually synchronized with the steps of Tyson Gay, the American sprinter running just to his right. (Gay ran the race in 9.71 seconds, the third fastest time ever.) “These results demonstrate that even the most optimized and highly demanding individual motor skills can be modulated by the simple presence of other competitors through interpersonal synchronization processes,” write Varlet and Richardson. “This can happen without the awareness of the athletes nor that of millions of spectators.” In short, even when we’re trying outrun everyone, we can’t help but mirror the movements of someone else.

The scientists documented this synchronization using a frame-by-frame dissection of the two sprinters during the race. They found that, on roughly 28 percent of their steps, Bolt and Gay were in close sync, their strides aligned. Here’s what the data looks like, with the synchronized moments occurring around phase zero:

What makes this synchronization so surprising is that Bolt, because of his height, has an extremely long stride. As a result, it took him only 41 steps to reach the finish line; Gay required 45-46 steps. And yet, despite these innate physical differences, the sprinters often found themselves pounding the track at the exact same time.

It’s possible, of course, that this synchronization is random chance, an accidental side-effect of two men taking a lot of steps in a very short space. To rule out this possibility, Varlet and Richardson compared the strides of Bolt and Gay during their separate semifinal races. As expected, the runners exhibited far less synchronization when running apart, and shared a stride less than 10 percent of the time. (Similar results were achieved from a simulation of randomly generated phase distributions.)

So the synchronization of sprinters seems to be real. But does it matter? How did it impact the performance of Bolt and Gay? One possibility is that it slowed them down, interfering with the natural ease of their movements. Instead of sprinting the way they trained, Bolt and Gay might have warped their stride to fit the stride of someone else.

However, Varlet and Richardson conclude that syncing might have made the men faster, with the scientists citing a number of previous studies showing “that the stability and efficiency of gait behavior can be enhanced when entrained to external rhythms.” (The benefits of “external rhythms” might also explain the benefits of listening to pop music while exercising.) This suggests that having Bolt and Gay run side-by-side – each of them flanked by one of the few human beings capable of keeping pace  - improved their already near perfect form.

The moral of this clever study is that human synchronization is largely inescapable. As such, Varlet and Richardson’s analysis of two sprinters builds on a vast body of research documenting the ways in which subtle syncing influences almost all of our interactions. It doesn’t matter if we’re chatting with a stranger or kissing a lover or playing with a baby – our bodies are subtly blurred together, with pulse, breathing rate and blood pressure all converging on a similar state. The psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon refer to this process as “limbic resonance,” noting all the ways in which humans learn to synchronize their feelings and flesh with other people. (It's empathy in its most visceral form.) They argue that limbic resonance is especially important for the development of close relationships, and that if it weren’t for our ability to “bridge the gap between minds” we’d struggle to cope with stress or share our joys.

No man is an island. Not even the fastest man in the world.

Varlet, M., and M. J. Richardson. "What Would Be Usain Bolt's 100-Meter Sprint World Record Without Tyson Gay? Unintentional Interpersonal Synchronization Between the Two Sprinters." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human perception and performance (2015).

The Sabermetrics of Effort

The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.

The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll, the Dodgers just hired Andrew Friedman, and baseball fans now speak in clumps of acronyms. (“His DICE and DIPS are solid, but I’m worried he’ll regress to the mean given his extremely high BABIP.”)

However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.

And this brings me to a new paper in the Journal of Sports Economics by Daniel Weimar and Pamela Wicker, economists at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the German Sport University Cologne. They focused on a variable of athletic performance that has long been neglected, if only because it’s so difficult to measure: effort. Intuitively, it’s obvious that player effort is important. Fans complain about basketball players slow to get back on defense; analysts gossip about pitchers who return to spring training carrying a few extra pounds; it’s what coaches are always yelling about on the sidelines. Furthermore, there's some preliminary evidence that these beliefs are rooted in reality: One study found that baseball players significantly improved their performance in the final year of their contracts, just before entering free-agency. (Another study found a similar trend among NBA players.) What explained this improvement? Effort. Hustle. Blood, sweat and tears. The players wanted a big contract, so they worked harder.

And yet, despite the obvious impact of effort, it’s surprisingly hard to isolate as a variable of athletic performance. Weimer and Wicker set out to fix this oversight. Using data gathered from three seasons and 1514 games of the Bundesliga – the premier soccer league in Germany – the economists attempted to measure individual effort as a variable of player performance, just like shots on goal or pass accuracy. They did this in two ways: 1) measuring the total distance run by each player during a game and 2) measuring the number of “intensive runs” - short sprints at high speed – by the players on the field.

The first thing to note is that the typical soccer player runs a lot. On average, players in the Bundesliga run 11.1 km per game and perform 58 intensive sprints. That said, there were still significant differences in running totals among players. Christoph Kramer averaged 13.1 km per game during the 2013-2014 season, while Carlos Zambrano ran less than 9 km; some players engaged in more than 70 sprints, while others executed less than 45. According to the economists, these differences reflect levels of effort, and not athletic ability, since “every professional soccer player should have the ability to run a certain distance per match.” If a player runs too little during a game, it’s not because his body gives out – it’s because his head doesn’t want to.

So did these differences in levels of effort matter? The answer is an emphatic yes: teams with players that run longer distances are more likely to win the game, even after accounting for a bevy of confounding variables. According to the calculations, if a team increases the average running distance of its players by 1 km (relative to the opponent), they will also increase their winning probability by 26-28 percent. Furthermore, the advantages of effort are magnified when the team difference is driven by extreme amounts of effort put forth by a few select players. As the economists note, “teams where some players run a lot while others are relatively lazy have a higher winning probability.”

Taken together, these results suggest that finding new ways to measure player effort can lead to moneyball opportunities for astute soccer teams. Since previous research demonstrates that a player’s effort has an “insignificant or negative impact” on his market value, it seems likely that teams would benefit from snapping up those players who run the most. Their extra effort isn’t appreciated or rewarded, but it will still help you win.

The same principle almost certainly applies to other sports, even if the metrics of effort aren’t quite as obvious as total running distance in soccer. How should one measure hustle in basketball? Number of loose balls chased? Time it takes to get back on defense? Or what about football? Can the same metrics of effort be used to assess linemen and wide-receivers? These questions don’t have easy answers, but given the role of effort in shaping player performance it seems worthwhile to start asking them.

There is a larger lesson here, which is that our obsession with measuring talent has led us to neglect the measurement of effort. This is a blind spot that extends far beyond the realm of professional sports. The psychologist Paul Sackett frames the issue nicely in his work on maximum tests versus typical performance. Maximum tests are high-stakes assessments that try to measure a person’s peak level of performance. Think here of the SAT, or the NFL Combine, or all those standardized tests we give to our kids. Because these tests are relatively short, we assume people are motivated enough to put in the effort while they’re being measured. As a result, maximum tests are good at quantifying individual talent, whether it’s scholastic aptitude or speed in the 40-yard dash.

Unfortunately, the brevity of maximum tests means they are not very good at predicting future levels of effort. Sackett has demonstrated this by comparing the results from maximum tests to field studies of typical performance, which is a measure of how people perform when they are not being tested. (That, presumably, is what we really care about.) As Sackett came to discover, the correlation between these two assessments is often surprisingly low: the same people identified as the best by a maximum test often unperformed according to the measure of typical performance, and vice versa.

What accounts for the mismatch between maximum tests and typical performance? One explanation is that, while maximum tests are good at measuring talent, typical performance is about talent plus effort. In the real world, you can’t assume people are always motivated to try their hardest. You can’t assume they are always striving to do their best. Clocking someone in a sprint won’t tell you if he or she has the nerve to run a marathon, or even 12 kilometers in a soccer match.

And that’s why I find this soccer data so interesting. Sports teams, after all, have massive financial incentives to improve their assessments of human capital; tens of millions of dollars depend on the wisdom of their personnel decisions. Given the importance of effort in player performance, I’m hopeful they’ll get more serious about finding ways to track it. With any luck, these sabermetric innovations will trickle down to education, which is still mired in maximum high-stakes tests that fail to directly measure or improve the levels of effort put forth by students. As the German football league reminds us, finding ways to increase effort is extremely valuable knowledge. After all, those teams with the hardest workers (and not just the most talented ones) significantly increase their odds of winning.

Old-fashioned effort just might be the next on-base percentage.

Weimar, D., & Wicker, P. (2014). Moneyball Revisited Effort and Team Performance in Professional Soccer. Journal of Sports Economics, 1527002514561789.

What Your Mother Has To Do With Your Lover

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you."

-Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

The poem has the structure and simplicity of a nursery rhyme, which makes its tragic message that much harder to take. In three short verses, Larkin paints the bleakest possible view of human nature, insisting that our flaws are predestined by our birth, for children are ruined by their parents. “Man hands on misery to man,” Larkin writes; the only escape is to “get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.” 

Larkin, of course, was exaggerating for effect - not every parent-child relationship is a story of decay. Not every family is a litany of inherited faults. In most cases, the people who love us first don’t just fuck us up - they also fix us. They cure us of the faults we’d have if left alone.

And yet, Larkin’s short verse does describe a difficult truth, which is that poor parenting can leave lasting scars. And so the terrible cycle repeats and repeats, as we inflict upon others the same sins and errors that were inflicted upon us. The sadness, Larkin writes, “deepens like a coastal shelf.”

But why? What are the mechanics of this process? A bad mum and dad might fuck us up, but what, exactly, are they fucking up?

A new paper in Psychological Science by the psychologists Lee Raby, Glenn Roisman, Jeffry Simpson, Andrew Collins and Ryan Steele gives us a glimpse of some possible answers.* By drawing on the epic Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, Raby, et. al. were able to show how a particular kind of poor parenting - insensitivity to the child’s signals - can have lasting effects. If we don’t feel close to our caregivers, then we struggle to stay close to other people later in life. In this sense, learning to love is like learning anything else: it requires a good teacher. 

First, a little history about the Minnesota Longitudinal Study. In the mid-1970s, Alan Sroufe and Byron Egeland began recruiting 267 pregnant women living in poverty in the Minneapolis area. What makes the Minnesota study is so unique is its time-scale: the researchers have been tracking and testing the children born to these women for nearly 40 years. They made home visits during infancy and tested them in the lab when they were toddlers. They set up a preschool and a summer camp. They watched them interact with their mothers as teenagers and kept track of their grades and test scores. They were interviewed at length, repeatedly, about nearly everything in their life.

The point of all this data - and it’s a staggering amount of data - is to reveal the stark correlations between the quality of the early parent-child relationship and the ensuing trajectory of the child. Because the correlations are everywhere. According to the Minnesota study, children who are more securely attached to their mother exhibit more self-control and independence in preschool. They score higher on intelligence tests, get better grades and are far more likely to graduate from high-school. As adults, those who experienced more supportive parenting are more supportive with their own children; they also have better romantic relationships. In their masterful summary of the study, The Development of the Person, Sroufe, Egeland and Elizabeth Carlson compare our early attachment experiences to the foundation of a house. While the foundation itself is not sufficient for shelter - you also need solid beams and sturdy roof – the psychologists note that “a house cannot be stronger than its foundation.” That’s what we get as young children: the beginnings of a structure on which everything else is built.

And this brings us back to the latest follow-up study, conducted when the Minnesota subjects were between 33 and 37 years old. Raby, et. al began by asking the subjects and their long-term romantic partners a series of questions about their relationship, including the top three sources of conflict. Then, the couples were instructed to seek a resolution to one of these major disagreements.    

While the subjects were having these difficult conversations, the scientists were measuring the “electrodermal reactivity” of their hands. It’s long been known that certain types of emotional experiences, such as fear and nervous arousal, trigger increased skin reactivity, opening up the glands of the palm. (Lie detectors depend on this principle; suppressing our true feelings makes us sweat.) Not surprisingly, the couples experienced higher electrodermal reactivity when talking about their relationship problems than when doing a simple breathing exercise. These were not fun conversations.

Here’s where the longitudinal data proved essential. By comparing the changes in skin response triggered by the conflict discussion to the early childhood experiences of the subjects, the scientists were able to document a troubling correlation. In general, those who “experienced less sensitive, responsive and supportive caregiving” during childhood and adolescence displayed a significantly higher skin conductivity response when talking to their partners about their relationship problems as thirtysomethings. This correlation held even after correcting for a bevy of other variables, including the quality of the current romantic relationship, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

What explains this finding? Why does a less sensitive parent lead to sweatier palms in middle-age? One possibility - and it’s only a possibility - is that the elevated skin conductance is a marker of “behavioral inhibition,” a sign that the subjects are holding their feelings back. Because these adults had parents who struggled to respond to their emotional needs, they learned to hide their worries away.  (Why express yourself if nobody’s listening?) This might explain why these same individuals also seem to have a tougher time discussing relationship problems with their adult partner, at least based on the spike in skin reactivity. 

As the years pass, this inability to discuss relationship issues can itself become a serious issue. For instance, research by John Gottmann and colleagues at the University of Washington found that, once the honeymoon period was over, couples who experienced more “verbal conflict” were actually more likely to stay together. “For a marriage to have real staying power, couples need to air their differences,” Gottmann writes. “Rather than being destructive, occasional anger can be a resource that helps the marriage improve over time.” Intimacy requires candor and vulnerability, not inhibition and nerves.

This new study from the Minnesota subjects comes with all the usual caveats. It has a relatively small sample size - only 37 couples participated - and correlation does not prove causation. Nevertheless, it’s powerful proof that the shadow of that first loving relationship - the one we have with our parents - follows us through life, shaping every love thereafter.

Raby, K. Lee, et al. "Greater Maternal Insensitivity in Childhood Predicts Greater Electrodermal Reactivity During Conflict Discussions With Romantic Partners in Adulthood." Psychological Science (2015)

Raby, K. Lee, et al. "The interpersonal antecedents of supportive parenting: A prospective, longitudinal study from infancy to adulthood." Developmental Psychology 51.1 (2015)

Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2009). The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood. Guilford Press.

*Just a reminder that this research on poor parenting has massive public policy implications. According to a 2013 report from the Center on Children and Families by Richard Reeves and Kimberly Howard, if the “emotional support skills” of the weakest parents are merely boosted to an average level, the result would be a 12.5 percent decrease in teen pregnancy, a 9 percent increase in high-school graduation rates and an 8.3 percent decrease in criminal convictions before the age of 19.

How To Convince People They're Criminals

In November 1988, Christopher Ochoa was interrogated by police about the brutal rape and murder of Nancy DePriest at a Pizza Hut in Austin, Texas. He was questioned for nearly twelve hours. The cops told him that his best friend, Richard Danziger, had already linked him to the crime scene. They said that Ochoa would be given the death penalty - and showed him where on his arm the needle would go - unless he confessed and pled guilty. 

And so that’s what Ochoa did. He testified that he and Danziger had planned to rob the Pizza Hut, and then tied up the victim with her bra before raping her; they only shot the victim in the head after she recognized them. (Ochoa and his friend worked at another Pizza Hut in the area.) During the trial, Ochoa testified against Danziger – who had maintained his innocence – and both men were sentenced to life in prison.

In 1996, a convict named Achim Josef Marino serving three life sentences wrote letters to various Texas officials insisting that he had raped and killed DePriest, and that Ochoa and Danziger were both innocent. Marino said that evidence linking him to the crime scene, including the keys of the victim, could be found at his parents’ home. After recovering this evidence, Austin police then re-interviewed Ochoa. His story, however, remained the same: he had committed the crime. He was a guilty man.

In fact, it would take another three years before students at the Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison were able to test semen recovered from the crime scene. The genetic tests proved that neither Ochoa nor Danziger had any involvement with DePriest’s rape and murder. On February 6, 2002, both men were exonerated.

There is no more potent form of legal evidence than a confession. To know that someone confessed is to assume they must have done it: why else would they submit a guilty plea? And yet, the tragic files of the Innocence Project demonstrate that about 25 percent of false convictions are caused by false confessions, as many people take responsibility for violent crimes they didn’t commit.

These false confessions have multiple causes. Most often, they seem to be associated with devious interrogation techniques (telling Ochoa that Danziger was about to implicate him) and the use of violence and intimidation during the interrogation process (insisting that Ochoa would be sentenced to death unless he pled guilty.)

And yet, false confessions are not simply a matter of police officers scaring suspects into admissions of guilt. In many instances, they also involve the generation of false memories, as suspects come to believe - typically after hours of intense and repetitive interrogation – that they committed the crimes in question. In the scientific literature, these are sometimes referred to as “honest lies,” or “phantom recollective experiences.”

What’s so unsettling is how easy it is to implant false memories in someone else’s head. This ease is old news: in the mid-1990s, Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues famously showed how a few suggestive interviews could convince people they’d been lost in a shopping mall at the age of six. Subsequent studies have extended her findings, persuading subjects that they’d been rescued by a lifeguard after nearly drowning or had tea with Prince Charles. You can trick people into misremembering details from a car accident and get them to insist that they shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

However, a new study by the psychologists Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter takes this false memory paradigm in a most disturbing direction, revealing a clear connection between false memories in the lab and false confessions in the legal system. In their paper, Shaw and Porter demonstrate that a majority of people can also be persuaded that they committed serious crimes. Their memories were rich, detailed and convincing. They were also complete fictions.

Shaw and Porter began the study by contacting the primary caregivers of 126 undergraduates, asking them to report “in some detail on at least one highly emotional event” experienced by the student during childhood. Then, sixty of these students were questioned three times for about forty minutes, with each of the interviews occurring a week apart. The interviews followed a technique proven to elicit false memories, as the scientists described two events from the subject’s childhood. The first event was true, at least as described by the caregiver. The second was not.

The novelty of this study involved the nature of the false event. Half of the subjects were randomly assigned to a “criminal condition,” told that they had committed a crime resulting in police contact. The crimes themselves varied, with a third told they had committed assault, another third that they had committed assault with a weapon, and the final third that they had committed theft. Those in the non-criminal condition, meanwhile, were assigned one of the following false memories: they’d been attacked by a dog, injured during a powerful emotional experience, or lost a large sum of money and gotten into a lot of trouble with their parents. 

During the interview process, the subjects were asked to recall both the true and false events. Not surprisingly, the subjects had trouble recalling the fictional event they’d never experienced. The scientists encouraged them to try anyway. To make the false memories feel more believable, they embedded their questions about the event with accurate details, such as the city the subject had lived in at the time, or the name of a friend from his or her childhood. They also relied on a collection of interrogation strategies that have been consistently associated with the generation of false confessions. Here are the scientists describing their devious method:

"The tactics that were scripted into all three interviews included incontrovertible false evidence (“In the questionnaire, your parents/ caregivers said. . .”), social pressure (“Most people are able to retrieve lost memories if they try hard enough”), and suggestive retrieval techniques (including the scripted guided imagery). Other tactics that were consistently applied included building rapport with participants (e.g., asking “How has your semester been?” when they entered the lab), using facilitators (e.g., “Good,” nodding, smiling), using pauses and silence to allow participants to respond (longer pauses seemed to often result in participants providing additional details to cut the silence), and using the open-ended prompt “what else?” when probing for additional memory details."

In the two follow-up interviews, the subjects were, once again, asked to describe their false memories. In addition, they were asked a number of questions about the nature of these memories, such as how vivid they seemed, and whether or not they felt true.

The results were shocking. Of the thirty people assigned to the criminal condition, twenty-one of them (70 percent) now reported a false memory of being involved in a serious felony that resulted in police contact. What’s more, these “honest lies” were saturated with particulars, as the subjects reported an average of more than 71 details from the non-existent event, including 12 details about their interactions with the police officers. “This study provides evidence that people can come to visualize and recall detailed false memories of engaging in criminal behavior,” write Shaw and Porter. “Not only could the young adults in our sample be led to generate such memories, but their rate of false recollection was high, and the memories themselves were richly detailed.” While the subjects’ true memories were slightly more detailed than their false memories, and they were a bit more confident that the true events had happened, there were no obvious distinctions in form or content between their real and imagined recollections.

The study, then, is yet another reminder that our memory takes a post-modern approach to the truth, recklessly blurring together the genres of autobiography and fiction. Although our recollections tend to feel accurate and immutable, the reality is that they are undergoing constant revision: we rewrite our stories of the past in light of the present. (This is known as reconsolidation theory.) The end result is that the act of remembering is inseparable from misremembering; the memoirs we carry around in our heads are overstuffed with bullshit.

What’s most disturbing, of course, is that we believe most of it anyway, which is why Shaw and Porter were able to make people remember crimes they’d never committed. When the experiment was over, after three weeks of interviews, the scientists told the subjects the truth: There was no assault, no weapon, no theft. They had been innocent all along.

It took nearly fourteen years for Christopher Ochoa to be told the same thing.

Shaw, Julia and Stephen Porter. "Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime," Psychological Science. 2015.

Why Dieting Is So Hard

New year, new you. For many people, a new you really means a new diet, shorn of white carbs, fried foods and ice cream. (Losing weight is, by far, the most popular New Year’s resolution.) Alas, the new you has to struggle against the habits of the old you, which knows perfectly well how delicious French fries taste. Most diets fail because the old you wins.

Why is the new you so weak? A recent study in Psychological Science by Deborah Tang, Lesley Fellows and Alain Dagher at McGill University helps reveal the profound challenges faced by the typical dieter, struggling for a slimmer waistline. We were not designed to diet; the mind does not crave celery. We were designed to gorge.

The study began by asking 29 people to evaluate pictures of fifty different foods, some of which were healthy (fruits and vegetables) and some of which were not (chocolate bars, potato chips, et. al.) The subjects were asked two questions about each picture: 1) How much they wanted to eat it, on a twenty point scale and 2) How many calories it contained.

The first thing the scientists found is that people are terrible at guessing the number of calories in a given food. In fact, there was no correlation between subjects’ estimate of calories and the actual amount of calories. This failure of dietary intuition means that even when we try to eat healthy we often end up eating the wrong thing. A Jamba Juice smoothie might seem like a responsible choice, but it’s actually a speedball of energy, with a large serving of the Orange Dream Machine clocking in at 750 calories. That’s 35 percent more calories than a Big Mac.

But here's the fascinating twist: although our conscious assessments of calories are not to be trusted, the brain seems to contain a calorie counter of its own, which is pretty reliable. (This calorie counter learns through personal experience, not nutritional labels.) In short, part of you knows that the low-fat smoothie contains more calories than the double burger, even if the rest of you is in sweet denial.

The scientists revealed this internal calorie counter in two ways. First, they showed that the amount people were willing to bid in an auction for a familiar food was closely related to its true caloric content, and not their liking ratings or the number of calories they thought the food had. In short, people were willing to pay larger amounts for food with more energy, even if they didn’t particularly like the taste of it.

The second source of evidence featured fMRI data. After showing the subjects the food photos in a brain scanner, the scientists found that activity in a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was closely correlated with the actual number of calories, and not individual preferences or the estimated number of calories. And given previous scanning research linking the vmPFC to assessments of subjective value - it helps determine the worth of alternatives - this suggests that, for certain parts of the brain, “the reward value of a familiar food is dependent on implicit knowledge of its caloric content.” Kale juice is for suckers.

This research comes with a few unsettling implications. The first is a sobering reminder that the mind is a calorie-seeking machine. Although we live in a world of cheap glucose and abundant fats, part of us is still terrified of going hungry. That, presumably, is why we assiduously track the amount of energy in certain foods.

But wait - it gets worse. Not only does the brain ascribe high value to calorically dense foods, but it also seems to get a lot of pleasure from their consumption, regardless of how the food actually tastes. A 2008 study by researchers at Duke, for instance, showed that mutant mice who can’t taste sweet things still prefer to drink sugar water, simply because their gut enjoyed the fuel. (The ingestion of calories triggers a release of dopamine regardless of how the calories taste.) This suggests that we’d still crave that Jamba Juice smoothie even if it wasn’t loaded with fruit sugars; energy makes us happy. 

There are no easy fixes here, which is why losing weight is so hard. This is true at the individual level - the cravings of the old you are difficult to resist - and at the societal level, as the government seeks to persuade people to make healthier eating choices. In fact, this study helps explain why calorie labeling on menus doesn’t seem to work very well, at least in some early trials. Although the labels attempt to educate consumers about the true caloric content of foods, the brain is already tracking calories, which makes it hard for the fine-print on menus to compete. And even if we did notice the energetic heft of the smoothie it’s not clear how much we’d care. Simply put, we are wired to prefer those foods with the most fuel, even when that fuel makes us fat.

The old you wins again.

Tang, Deborah W., Lesley K. Fellows, and Alain Dagher. "Behavioral and Neural Valuation of Foods Is Driven by Implicit Knowledge of Caloric Content." Psychological Science 25.12 (2014): 2168-2176.

Are Toddlers Noble Savages?

The bluestreak cleaner wrasse is a trusting fish. When a large predator swims into its cleaning station, the tiny wrasse will often enter the gills and mouth of the “client,” picking off ectoparasites, dead skin and stray bits of mucus. The wrasse gets a meal; the client gets cleaned; everyone wins, provided nobody bites.

This is a story of direct reciprocity. Nature is full of such stories, from the grooming of Sri Lankan macaques to the sharing of blood by vampire bats. In fact, such reciprocity is an essential component of biological altruism, or the ability to show concern for the wellbeing of others. Despite our reputation for selfishness, human beings are big believers in altruism, at least when it's rooted in reciprocity. If somebody gives us something, then we tend to give something back, just like those fish and bats. 

But where does this belief in reciprocity come from? One possibility is that we’re hard-wired for it, and that altruism emerges automatically in early childhood. This theory has been bolstered by evidence showing that kids as young as eighteen months don’t hesitate to help a stranger in need. In fact, human toddlers seem especially altruistic, at least when compared to our chimp relatives. As Michael Tomasello, the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, writes in his recent book Why We Cooperate: "From around their first birthday - when they begin to walk and talk and become truly cultural beings - human children are already cooperative and helpful in many, though obviously not all, situations. And they do not learn this from adults; it comes naturally."

It's an uplifting hypothesis, since it suggests that niceness requires no education, and that parents don't have to teach their kids how to be kind; all we have to do is not fuck them up. As Tomasello writes, “There is very little evidence in any of these cases…that the altruism children display is a result of acculturation, parental intervention or any other form of socialization.” If true, then Rousseau was mostly right: every toddler is a noble savage.

However, a new paper in PNAS by Rodolfo Cortes Barragan and Carol Dweck at Stanford University suggests that the reality of children’s altruism is a little more complicated. Their study provides powerful evidence that young kids do like to help and share, but only when they feel like they're part of a sharing culture. They want to give, but the giving is contingent on getting something back.

The experiments were straightforward. In the first study, thirty-four 1 and 2 year olds were randomly assigned to either a "reciprocal play" or "parallel play" warm-up session. In the reciprocal play setup, the scientist shared a single set of toys with the child, taking turns rolling a ball, pushing buttons on a musical toy and passing plastic rings back and forth. The parallel play condition featured the same toys, only the scientist and child each had their own set. In both conditions, the scientist sat three feet away from the toddler and flashed a smile every thirty seconds.

Then, six minutes after play began, the scientist removed the toys and began testing the willingness of the children to offer assistance. They demonstrated a need for help in reaching four different objects: a block, bottle, clothespin and pencil. The children were given thirty seconds to help, as the scientist continued to reach out for the object.

The differences were stark. When children were first exposed to the reciprocal play condition, they offered help on roughly three of the four trials. However, when they first played in parallel, the rate of assistance plummeted to an average of 1.23 out of four.

In the second study, the scientists replicated these results with a stranger. Instead of having the children help out the same person they'd been playing with, they introduced an unknown adult, who entered the room at the end of playtime. Once again, the children in reciprocal play were far more likely to help out, even though they'd never met the person before. As Barragan and Dweck note, these are "striking" shifts in behavior. While children in the parallel play condition tended to ignore the needs of a new person, those in the "reciprocal play condition responded by helping time and time again, despite the fact that this new person had previously done nothing for them and now gave them nothing in return."

The last two studies extended these results to 3 and 4 year old children. Once again, the young subjects were randomly assigned to either a reciprocal or parallel play condition. After a few minutes of play, they were given the chance to allocate stickers to themselves or the adult. Those in the reciprocal play condition shared far more stickers. The last study explored the cause of this increased altruism, showing that children were more likely to say that a reciprocal play partner would provide help or share a toy, at least when compared to a parallel play partner.

I have a selfish interest in this subject. As a parent of two young kids, a significant portion of my day is spent engaged in negotiations over scarce resources (aka toys). In my small sample size, appeals to pure altruism rarely work: nobody wants to share their Elsa doll to cheer up another toddler. However, if that Elsa doll is part of a group activity – we can dress her up together! – then an exchange of Disney characters just might be possible. As this paper demonstrates, the key is to make sharing feel like a non-zero sum game, or one in which cooperation leaves everyone better off.

And this is where parents come in. As Barragan and Dweck note, their data contradicts “the notion that socialization has little or no part to play in early occurring altruism.”  Instead, their work demonstrates how the modeling of adults – the mechanics of our playing - strongly shapes the sharing instincts of children. I’ve made the mistake of believing that my kids will share once they’ve got enough toys, that altruism depends on a sense of abundance. (Ergo: my many trips to the Disney store.) But this appears to be an expensive mistake. After all, the parallel play condition offered kids the same playthings in greater amounts, since they didn’t have to share the ball or rings with the grown-up. But that surplus didn’t make them generous. Rather, their generosity depended on being exposed to an engaged and attentive adult, willing to get down on the ground and roll a ball back and forth, back and forth. My takeaway? Buy less, play more.

The wrasse and the bat seem to be born knowing all about reciprocity; those species have quid pro quo in their bones. But human kindness is more subtle than that. Unless we are exposed to the right conditions – unless someone shares their toys with us - then we never learn how much fun sharing our toys can be.

Barragan, Rodolfo Cortes, and Carol S. Dweck. "Rethinking natural altruism: Simple reciprocal interactions trigger children’s benevolence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.48 (2014): 17071-17074.