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The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
Chris Mooney, Mother Jones
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.
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"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ.

... In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
(18 April 2011)
Suggested by a former editor of The Oil Drum. -BA

It's Not Just Rude, It's Ruining Your Brain
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Is it rude to be constantly checking messages while you're socializing with someone else? That's a matter of opinion. But a professor friend emails to remind me that rudeness is actually the least of the problems with the perpetual multitasking of the smartphone generation:

,,,there is convincing evidence that this inveterate multitasking has a serious, measurable and long lasting negative effect on cognitive function. Look up Stanford psychologist Clifford Nass sometime. There's a lovely episode of Frontline from a year or so ago featuring him. He has shown that multitaskers are not only bad at multitasking, but they are also worse than nonmultitaskers on every individual one of the tasks.

That's the millennial student and it isn't something to be catered to. Put the damn iPhone down before you make yourself stupid.

I should have remembered that! Nass has been studying "high multitasking" for years, and his results are pretty unequivocal. Here's the Frontline interview:

Q: What did you expect when you started these experiments?

A: Each of the three researchers on this project thought that ... high multitaskers [would be] great at something, although each of us bet on a different thing.

I bet on filtering. I thought, those guys are going to be experts at getting rid of irrelevancy. My second colleague, Eyal Ophir, thought it was going to be the ability to switch from one task to another. And the third of us looked at a third task that we're not running today, which has to do with keeping memory neatly organized. So we each had our own bets, but we all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something.

Q: And what did you find out?

A: We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another.

(19 April 2011)

Please Step Away From the Fear
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
Recently did my fine and ever-loving and yet slightly overworried parents, still married and flirty and sort of amazing after something like 147 years together -- and no, I have no idea how the hell they did it, so don't even ask -- forward on a terrifying hunk of email to me, full of sound and fury and unchecked socioeconomic gloom, signifying nothing.

It was an email, I quickly surmised, that had bounced around their group of retired, largely Republican friends and then commented on and fretted over a bit too much, all about what the hell is happening to the world, how dramatically things have changed, what can or cannot be done about it and, more than anything else, how they feel fearful for their kids -- which, for the purposes of this column, we'll call, me.

It was an email, simply put, about the end of the world. More specifically, the end of the American empire, of the United States as global economic superpower, primarily due to various and sundry "horrific" factors having to do with the threadbare American workforce, the staggering loss of manufacturing and factory jobs in this country, the spiraling debt, the shocking erosion of our industrial base, and so on.

... A quick Google side trip revealed the column's origins: a frighteningly Christian lad named Michael Snyder, shameless slinger of endless "shocking" doomsday scenarios via a site called "The Economic Collapse Blog," packed like a Jesus-clad fallout bunker with screeching headlines like "20 signs a horrific global food crisis is coming,"

... I stumbled across yet another new study that essentially reaffirms something you already suspected.

The study said: The brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently. We respond to stimuli differently, process information differently, view the world through lenses unique to our political viewpoint. I know, shocking.

But then, the upshot: "Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear."

... And here are my otherwise fantastic and usually savvy parents, lured in by this overamped Christian, feeling increasingly powerless against the onslaught of his unfiltered "facts," the imp of fear driving them headlong into excess worry and despair. My father explained the emotional toll that such context-free information has on his group of friends, thusly:

"None of us work any longer, so there is no chance to rebuild -- we feel frustrated and helpless because there is nothing we can do (itals mine). ... "

... This struck me as heart wrenching as it was revelatory. "Of course, there are a thousand things you can do," I thought. "Of course, while some anxiety is to be expected, most is just, well, poisonous." But then I recognized the conservative brain aswim in its element, overworking the fear synapse, seeing only frustration and the lack of power to return to some perceived previous glory, instead of engaging the more liberal mindset: seeking ways to invent a wildly new future.

This is what I told my fine folks: It's never too late. There are a million things you can do, are doing, right now, to improve the world. The products you buy, the foods you eat, the stores you patronize, the news sources you value, the politicos you vote for, the love you make, the information you choose to share, the stories you believe in -- every single choice, from coffee cup to charity donation, joke retold to tender human touch -- these are what make all the difference.
(20 April 2011)
Problem is, a lot of what the offending article said is true. I think that Morford is right though in the determination not to be cowed into passivity and fear in the face of the nasty problems. -BA