What if you ran a company where your employees are spending their days in their cubicles staring at computer screens in silence? What if you wanted your employees to interact face-to-face a little more? Would you be willing to give your employees free drinks to talk to each other? Here’s another creative example for the next time you cover operant conditioning. (Read more here.) Kokuyo, Co., a manufacturer of office supplies, installed a Suntory Beverage & Food company vending machine in one of their offices. While the vending machine behaves like other vending machines, it has one additional feature. If an employee grabs a buddy and they both allow the vending machine to scan their employee ID cards at the same time, the vending machine dispenses a free beverage to both employees. While there is no guarantee that those employees, with free beverage in hand, will have a conversation, it certainly provides the opportunity. The behavior: inviting a fellow employee to go to the vending machine with you. If you continue to make buddy trips to the vending machine, the positive reinforcement is a free beverage. If the behavior is occurring too frequently, the vending machine can be programmed to limit the hours when free beverages would be available, or it can be programmed to limit how many free beverages a particular ID can get in a specific time period. Maybe it can also be programmed so that a pair of IDs can only be used a certain number of times, and after that, you have to invite someone else? If you’d like, challenge your students to think about how the Kokuyo management would know if the vending machine was working to increase employee face-to-face interactions. What variables would students measure? And if the vending machine was not working as well as they would like, what else could the company do? Maybe put the vending machine in a space with a living room-type atmosphere, complete with comfy chairs? Do some beverages lend themselves better to conversation than others? For example, might a vending machine that dispensed coffee or tea be more effective at encouraging conversation than, say, one that dispensed energy drinks? Having taught many classes in two- to three-hour blocks for almost 30 years, I witnessed the short class breaks only occasionally leading to students talking to each other. Would such a vending machine outside the classroom increase interactions? What if the machine required, say, three student IDs to dispense a free beverage or snack? The cynical side of me wonders if that would lead to student ID theft? But then I suppose that wouldn’t last long because if Student A reported their ID missing, a quick scan of the vending machine’s data would show which other student used Student A’s ID at the machine.   In what other contexts can your students see value in having such a system? What else might be dispensed from a machine that students might find reinforcing? (Having reread that question, I’m not sure this is the best question to ask students. They’re your students; use your best judgment.) ... View more

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation is promoting intentional acts of kindness this September (#BeKind21) with a goal toward better mental health for everyone. Every day, from September 1 to September 21, let’s engage in purposeful acts of kindness to others and ourselves. I encourage you and your students to sign up.   Zara Abrams (2021) provides a nice summary of the research on kindness, emphasizing its benefits to both our physical and mental health. Even small acts, such as bringing a colleague coffee, counts. Buying me a beer also counts. Without too much difficulty, we can tie acts of kindness into what students are learning in their Intro Psych course. Here are a few examples. Biopsych chapter: Which neurotransmitters are most likely to be released in our brains when we do good deeds for others? Explain Development chapter: What are developmentally-appropriate good deeds we could perform for each group: toddlers, middle-schoolers, high-schoolers, middle-aged adults, older adults? Explain. Learning chapter: Identify at least three acts of kindness you have engaged in. Was your act positively reinforced? Explain. Memory chapter: We tend to have stronger memories for events that are emotional. Based on the emotional reaction of those who were on the receiving end of your kindness, will any of your acts of kindness be remembered years from now by one of your recipients? After September 21st, give your students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. What was especially good about engaging in intentional acts of kindness? Were there any surprises? Will they continue to be intentionally kind?   References Abrams, Z. (2021, August). The case for kindness. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/apa/kindness-mental-health ... View more

Good cartoonists are excellent observers of people, and that’s why cartoons can be a tremendous resource for teaching psychology. Use these cartoons by visiting their websites as copying/pasting into your slide deck or your learning management system is most likely a violation of copyright. Use these to freshen your operant conditioning examples, or use these as a basis for discussion or as a stand-alone assignment. Edge City, May 3, 2021. We see both Colin’s behavior and his father’s behavior. What behavior has likely been positively reinforced? And what behavior has likely been negatively reinforced? Explain. Deflocked, March 26, 2021. We know both the sheep’s behavior and the sheep’s mother’s behavior. Which behavior has been positively reinforced? And which behavior has been negatively reinforced? Explain. Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog, March 11, 2021. The real dog has learned to turn off the robot vacuum. Has the “turning off” behavior been positively or negatively reinforced? Explain. Stone Soup Classics, February 9, 2021. Max has learned a new word. When he yells this word, he gets a reaction that will likely increase the chances of him saying it again. Has his saying the word been positively or negatively reinforced? Explain. Nest Heads, December, 2020. We know both Taylor’s behavior and her grandfather’s behavior. What behavior has likely been positively reinforced? And what behavior has likely been negatively reinforced? Explain. And now for the hard one. Drabble, February 23, 2021. In operant conditioning, a discriminative stimulus is a signal that a specific behavior is likely to be reinforced. What is the discriminative stimulus in this strip? What behavior has this discriminative stimulus signaled will be reinforced? ... View more

Have a few minutes? Listen to this APA podcast episode discussing why human infants have such long periods of growth and what this means for the development of our society! https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/childrens-amazing-brains ... View more

We are two weeks into the new year! Are your resolutions feeling a little...flat? Here's how to keep them going, psychology style! New podcast from APA: https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/behavioral-habits ... View more

Observational learning may be psychology’s easiest concept for students to understand, although students may not appreciate the range of areas where observational learning takes place. Here are some examples to help your students see the ubiquity of observational learning. Example 1: Utah’s 2020 governor’s race video Chris Peterson (Democrat) and Spencer Cox (Republican) were both running for Utah governor. They created a video that models how two people can disagree politically but still have civil discourse. Their goal was to model civility. The candidates were interviewed on Today about their video. Example 2: Learning fear from parents In this experimental research, children learned fear by watching their parents show fear. Example 3: Otters learn from each other Researchers “gave select otters clear containers filled with meatballs and found that when one otter learned how to open the container, its friends subsequently learned how to open it more quickly.” Example 4: Crows learn from each other In a now-famous experiment on crow learning, crows who were captured and banded by researchers wearing a caveman mask were very unhappy with anyone wearing a caveman mask. “Even after going for a year without seeing the threatening human, the crows would scold the person on sight, cackling, swooping and dive-bombing in mobs of 30 or more.” But researchers didn’t capture and band all of those birds. The birds learned by watching others. Example 5: Dogs learn from each other The story of Saint Bernards as rescue dogs alone is worth reading this article written by psychologist Stanley Coren. Anyone who has added a second (or third, or…) dog to their family has watched as the new dog learned the ropes (both good and bad behaviors) from the resident dog(s). I’ve been relying on my current dog(s) to teach the newcomers how to be dogs since 1995. I can’t imagine doing house training from scratch any more. The resident dog urinates and defecates outside, so the newcomer quickly learns to do the same. If you’d like to use this a basis for discussion ask your students for their own examples of observational learning—or ask students to cull the Internet for other non-human animal examples. Examples will likely be most prevalent in animal species that are more social. ... View more

I started my day by reading this Memebase post: “22 Loving People Who Restored Our Faith in Humanity.” It’s example after example of people being kind to animals and each other. After reading it, I felt compelled to reach out to a stranger and do a kindness for them. Being in pandemic lockdown makes it hard to connect with strangers, though. And then I remembered. A few months ago, I received a text from someone whose phone number is just one number off from mine. It read, "Hi number neighbor." I found the sentiment so delightful, I replied with "LOL! Thanks for that". This morning, after reading the Memebase post, I texted my number neighbor with this: "Good morning, number neighbor! Regardless of your politics, today is probably going to be a hard day. Wanted you to know that I'm thinking of you, stranger, and sending good thoughts." My number neighbor replied with, "Thank you I really appreciate it. I hope you stay safe regardless of the outcome." I wished them the same. In my Intro Psych course, we’re covering the learning chapter this week. Myers and DeWall (2020) write in that chapter The good news is that people’s modeling of prosocial (positive, helpful) behaviors can have prosocial effects… Real people who model nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others” (p. 184). In my online courses I post announcements two or three times a week. Today’s announcement included a link to that Memebase post as well as my text exchange with my number neighbor. I know that the Memebase post prompted me to engage in a bit of prosocial behavior. I hope that the Memebase post and my own prosocial behavior will encourage my students to find a way to do a little prosocial behavior themselves today. I did an Internet search for “random acts of kindness stories” and “faith in humanity restored” to find some other examples of people doing good things for strangers. There are lots out there. My plan for the rest of the term is to include a link to webpage that features such stories with my beginning-of-the-week announcements along with something that I did for a stranger. In the U.S., regardless of your politics, the coming weeks will likely be a challenge. Modeling prosocial behavior is the least we can do. ... View more

I read my share of blogs and news stories. Concepts we cover in Intro Psych appear with some frequency out there in the land of popular culture. Freudian terms—**bleep** retentive, oral fixation—seem to be less commonly used than they used to be. Correlations—described, if not named—pop up often. Unfortunately, they’re too often discussed in terms of causation. Classical and operant conditioning often make appearances, and, yes, negative reinforcement is frequently confused with punishment. When a writer mentions classical/Pavlovian conditioning, I go on the alert. Is this really an example of classical conditioning? Or is it mislabeled operant conditioning? I’m pulling for the writer to get it correct. And I do a little celebratory dance when they do. I haven’t been doing many celebratory dances lately. When it comes to conditioning, the default assumption seems to be that whatever the example is, it’s classical conditioning. If the person says it is an example of operant conditioning, they’re usually correct. If the person says it is an example of classical conditioning, well, they’re less often correct. When I cover classical and operant conditioning in Intro Psych, I emphasize that classical conditioning invokes involuntary behaviors and operant conditioning requires voluntary behaviors. Since we cover these topics sequentially, it’s easy to just cover and move on. But given how easy it is for people to conflate these types of conditioning, some interleaving is in order. In interleaving, it’s important for students to get practice moving back and forth between classical and operant conditioning. Here’s an example you can use to help students get a bit of practice in separating classical from operant conditioning. Ask students to read this short article (“Simone Giertz built a photo booth that lets her dog take selfies for treats”). Students do not need to watch the 15-minute video, but they certainly may if they’d like. In a synchronous or an asynchronous group discussion, ask: The author of the article writes that Simone Giertz “Pavlov’d her dog into taking selfies.” Is this true? Has the selfie-taking dog been trained using classical (also called Pavlovian) conditioning? Or has the dog been trained using operant conditioning? Explain the reasons for your choice. Once students have correctly identified this as operant conditioning, you may want to expand the discussion. What would happen if the dog kept pressing the pedal and no more treats were given? Let’s take the discussion a little further. Now let’s say that after several repetitions, the dog salivated when the rotating dispenser delivered a treat. Would that be classical or operant conditioning? Explain the reasons for your choice. And one more step. What would happen here if the dispenser rotated, but no treat was delivered? What would happen to the selfie-taking dog’s amount of salivation? Conclusion By giving students interleaving practice with classical and operant conditioning using real-world examples, hopefully, they will be better equipped to detect errors—and when they start writing for the public, they’ll not make those same errors in identification. And, in the end, the public will learn from the correct applications of these concepts. ... View more

Many cartoonists are excellent observers of the human condition. One of the best is Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame. With 50 years of comic strips, that’s 17,897 individual strips—drawn by him and him alone—Schulz’s characters can be a rich source of psychology examples. In this strip that ran most recently on May 5, 2019, Schulz gifts us with a beautiful example of classical conditioning. Students don’t need to be familiar with the characters to see the classical conditioning. If they are familiar with Charlie Brown and Lucy and the relationship these characters have with each other, they’ll better appreciate the humor. The characters are playing baseball. From the outfield, Lucy yells, “Hey, manager!” Charlie Brown, standing on the pitcher’s mound, looks at us with a queasy expression. He explains that hearing her say “Hey, manager!” is enough to give him a stomachache because every time she yells that, she follows it up with a stupid/dumb/sarcastic remark. In this particular case, she surprises him (and long-time Peanuts readers) by saying something else. In the last panel, though, Lucy reveals that she knows exactly what’s going on. I ask my students these questions about the strip: In this example, identify the unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned response.  Use this example to explain generalization and discrimination. What would need to happen in order to bring about extinction? What would spontaneous recovery look like? While I do this as part of a larger homework assignment, it also works as an in-class discussion topic or as a lecture example. Through this example, I have learned that many of my students are not familiar with the Peanuts comic strip. I know who is and who is not familiar based on what they call Charlie Brown. Students who know it call him Charlie Brown. Students who don’t know it simply call him Charlie—which is jarring to my 52-year-old, US-born ears. ... View more

Are you getting tired of your classical conditioning examples? Here are some new ones from FailBlog. You won’t be surprised to see that while the FailBlog post is called “29 people share the Pavlovian (reflex) responses they’ve developed,” not all of these are actually examples of classical conditioning. The key is that the response has to be involuntary. In several of these, the behavior is voluntary. For example, #21: “TV commercial, look at phone.” Since looking at phone is a voluntary behavior, this is operant conditioning where the TV commercial is a discriminative stimulus. There is negative reinforcement (removing the commercial) and positive reinforcement (something more interesting than a commercial on the phone). And #23 is a reference to The Office “mouth tastes bad” scene – which is still not an example of classical conditioning. (What’s the involuntary response? Now, if he salivated to the ding…) After covering both classical and operant conditioning, if your students are up for the challenge, ask them to work in pairs or small groups to identify the examples that are classical conditioning and the ones that are not. Read through all 29 of these before giving them to your students. The language and content of some may not be appropriate for your student population. Make sure you are comfortable explaining the classical conditioning behind the classical conditioning examples and explaining why the other are not examples of classical conditioning. Use only the ones you want. After the groups have had time to do their identifications, go through each example in turn. “Number 1: classical conditioning, which groups say yes?” You can do a show of hands, clickers, or some other polling method. Spend time discussing the ones that are not classical conditioning that students thought were. If time allows, or as a take-home assignment, assign each student group one or more of the classical conditioning examples. Their task is to identify the unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response in each of their assigned examples. ... View more

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych? These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures. Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data. Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control. Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias. Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment. Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon. Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error. Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts: Spotlight effect Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement ... View more

If you want an entire country, state, province, territory, or city to stop ingesting certain consumables, you tax them. “Sin taxes” are applied to things like alcohol and cigarettes. The goal is to make these goods so expensive to purchase, people will stop purchasing them. Or, for those who continue to consume them, the tax they pay can go toward the public health coffers. The U.S. federal government, for example, has a tax of about $1.01 on each pack of cigarettes (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, 2017). Each U.S. state/territory can add their own tax on top of that. The national average is $1.79/pack with a low of $.17 (Missouri) and a high of $5.10 (Puerto Rico) (Boonn, 2018). Finally, cities can add their own taxes. New York City, for example, adds a $1.50 tax. If you want to buy a pack of cigarettes in New York City, you’re tax is $1.01 (federal) plus $4.35 (state) plus $1.50 (city) for a total of $6.86 (Mathias, 2017). And, then, of course, is the cost of the cigarettes themselves. Do sin taxes work? Does this added cost reduce consumption of tobacco? Using a list of tobacco taxes in the U.S. (Boonn, 2018) and a list of smoking rates in the U.S. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018), I ran the correlation: -.42. The higher the tax, the lower the smoking rates. Of course, correlation does not mean causation. Do higher taxes cause people to smoke less? Or is it the other way around? Are people in states where people smoke less more likely to vote for higher taxes on cigarettes? Or is there some third variable(s) that affect both the cigarette tax and the smoking rate? It doesn’t answer the question of causation, but the World Health Organization reported on interesting longitudinal data from South Africa (WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2008). When the tax was high, cigarette purchasing was low. From the mid-1980s through the late 1990s, South Africa reduced the tax, and gradually the cigarette purchasing rates climbed. In the late 1990s when they started raising the tax again, cigarette purchasing rates declined again. If “sin taxes” cause us to reduce our purchasing of “sin” products, then operant conditioning offers an explanation why. If a product costs a lot of money to purchase, we’ll be less likely to purchase it – especially if we are not financially well-off. Punishment is defined as anything that reduces a behavior. High prices are, well, punitive. Or at least that’s the idea. For a six tax to be punitive, the amount of additional tax has to be enough for us to actually reduce the behavior, i.e. stop purchasing the product. What that amount is for you may be different than what it is for me. For a 1-pack-a-day smoker in New York City, they’re paying $6.86 in tax alone for that pack of cigarettes. If they make $14.00 an hour, one half hour of work goes toward that cigarette tax. Every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if that smoker quite smoking, or at least reduced how much they smoke. For a different 1-pack-a-day smoker who makes $150 an hour, that $6.86 in tax doesn’t hurt so much. They can make that amount of money in less than 3 minutes. Every day. This is the discussion in Seattle right now around a year-old sugary drink tax. In the city, each sugary drink is assessed a $.0175 per ounce tax. That 16 ounce Coke you are buying with your lunch is now $0.28 more. “The city predicted the tax would cut soda consumption by 40 percent. But through the first nine months, the tax is generating revenues at a rate 52 percent higher than predicted — suggesting it’s possible it may be having no effect on Seattleites’ soda appetites whatsoever.” One possibility is that most of the city residents are making enough money that that $0.28 isn’t even felt (Westneat, 2018).  Like the rest of the city, that $0.28 is not going to stand between me and my Coke.* Here’s a quick classroom demonstration. Ask students to think about their favorite beverage. How much more would their drink have to cost for them to reduce how much they buy? Start at $0.25 and raise it by $0.10, then another $0.10, and so on. Ask students to raise their hands when the additional cost hits the point when they buy less of it and to keep their hands up until everyone has their hands in the air (or use clickers – “vote A when we hit your no-go tax.”) Reiterate that punishment is only punishment if it reduces the behavior. What that punishment point is differs by person. The other thing that punishment does is make us good at avoiding punishment. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that there is a thriving black market for cigarettes in New York City. Of these smuggled packs of cigarettes, 30.9% have no state stamp; 44.7% carry a Virginia stamp where the state tax is $0.30 per pack, well-below the New York State/New York City combined tax of $5.85 (Mathias, 2017). If the tax is too high, people will find ways to not pay it. Conclude this part of your lecture by emphasizing the importance of understanding the principles of operant conditioning. From their pets to their dating partners/spouses to their children to the population of a city, state/province/territory, or country, operant conditioning is at work.   *Actually, I haven’t had a full-sugar Coke in years, but if they similarly taxed Diet Coke or Coke Zero, I’d have no problem paying that $0.28. Don’t tell the Seattle City Council.   References Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. (2017). Federal excise tax increase and related provisions. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.ttb.gov/main_pages/schip-summary.shtml Boonn, A. (2018). State cigarette excise tax rates and rankings. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0097.pdf Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Map of cigarette use among adults. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.cdc.gov/statesystem/cigaretteuseadult.html Mathias, C. (2017). Inside New York City’s dangerous, multimillion-dollar cigarette black market. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/cigarette-smuggling-new-york-_n_5041823.html Westneat, D. (2018). The city’s new soda tax is usurious — and also too low. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/story-of-seattle-the-citys-new-soda-tax-is-usurious-and-also-too-low/ WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic. (2008). Geneva, Switzerland. ... View more

Crows are smart. Never underestimate a crow. Comparative psychology is “the study of nonhuman animal behavior with the dual objective of understanding the behavior for its own sake and furthering the understanding of human behavior” (American Psychological Association, n.d.). The better that we understand how crows behave, think, communicate, and solve problems, the better we will understand both crows and ourselves. I have a short written assignment that my Intro Psych students do. After its completion, students have a greater appreciation for the crows around them. John Marzluff, a University of Washington zoologist, has made studying crows his life’s work. In his 22-minute TEDx talk, Marzluff shares what he thinks everyone should know about crows. I assign this during the thinking chapter in Intro Psych, after we’ve covered neuroscience and learning. It makes for a nice review of previously covered content. Here are the questions I ask my students to address: What three factors does Marzluff cite for the crow's problem-solving ability? Explain how each contributes to problem-solving skills. How do the brain areas of crows map onto the human brain? What do those brain areas do and why are they important? How do their brains differ from those of humans? Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to positive reinforcement. Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to observational learning. What is your reaction to this video?      Video Link : 2348   Reference American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Comparative psychology. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/comparative-psychology ... View more

At the end of each term, I ask my Intro Psych students for their top ten list of important concepts they learned in the course. Last fall, interestingly, none of my students put parenting styles in their top ten lists. This term, a quarter of my students did. The only difference between those classes is that this term I asked my students to read an Atlantic article on distracted parenting (Christakis, 2018). In our coverage of development I asked students, after they had read the article, whether they thought this is a new “parenting style” or if it fits one of the existing four: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or neglectful. (Most students called it neglectful, but many weren’t quite ready to go all the way there and called it a “new branch” or a “type” of neglectful parenting.) The article makes for an excellent discussion starter for small groups after you’ve covered parenting styles in class. The discussion of the impact distracted parenting has on children will be meaningful to students since you would have just covered child development. Later when you cover operant conditioning – if you haven’t already done so – you can refer back to this section of the article. Young children will do a lot to get a distracted adult’s attention, and if we don’t change our behavior, they will attempt to do it for us; we can expect to see a lot more tantrums as today’s toddlers age into school. But eventually, children may give up (Christakis, 2018) If the adult drops the phone and attends to the child’s tantrum, the child’s tantrum behavior has been positively reinforced by getting attention, and the adult’s dropping-the-phone behavior has been negatively reinforced by stopping the tantrum. If the adult’s phone is more attention-grabbing than the child’s tantrum, then the adult will ignore the child. The result? Extinction. The child will no longer throw tantrums – or, perhaps, any other behavior that is a plea for adult attention. The author of the article cites two research studies. If you’d like to challenge your students’ research skills, ask them to find those studies. The study that took place in Philadelphia is a pretty easy find because the article’s author gives us the names of the researchers. The Boston research article is a little more challenging because we don’t have clues to the citation. I don’t want to give the reference here because it would make it too easy for your Googling students to find. I can give you a hint, however: it was published in 2014 in a highly-respected peer-reviewed journal. And, if you email me (sfrantz@highline.edu), I would be happy to send you either or both references – as long as I don’t think you’re a student. If you’d like to extend this activity, ask students to assess how well the article’s author did at describing those studies. Did the author hit the important high points? Was there other information in the research articles that would be important for a reader of The Atlantic to know? Reference Christakis, E. (2018). The dangers of distracted parenting. Retrieved August 29, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/the-dangers-of-distracted-parenting/561752/ ... View more

A young man, raising funds for his high school football team, knocked on the door of a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) researcher. And not just any CTE researcher: a CTE researcher who looks specifically at teenage brains. The two sat down, and the young man learned about how concussions are not necessary to trigger CTE; repeated shots to the head will do it. The young man listened, and, in fact, chose CTE as his research project in English. When I read this NPR story, I was hoping for a better ending. And what did the young man decide about playing football? He’s still going to play. “This is something I love. I dedicate myself to [this]. This makes me healthier physically, mentally. I'm doing what I love, making friends, there's a lot of great experiences that I'm having from this.” He did decide, however, to cut back on boxing, so that’s something. When I read this article I was immediately struck by the power of immediate reinforcement over the potential of bad things happening at some unknown time in the distant future. [As an operant conditioning bonus, in the very first paragraph, the student gives us a great example of discriminative stimuli. “He’d look for lights on and listen for kids’ voices.” Those stimuli signaled a greater likelihood of receiving a donation.] But the reinforcement aside, I wondered about the social psychology of playing an intense team sport, like football. The student said, “I’m doing what I love, making friends, there’s a lot of great experiences that I’m having from this.” In Sebastian Junger’s book, War, the author writes about his experience spending 15 months with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan. Once, when out on patrol, the platoon got into a firefight along a road, taking cover behind a rock wall. Afterwards, Junger asked one of the soldiers if he was scared. He said he was. Junger asked why he didn’t run. He said he stayed because the soldier on his left stayed and the soldier on his right stayed.   While still considering the power of groups, my news feed produced a fascinating article on identity fusion. Research “suggest[s] that extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by 'identity fusion', a visceral sense of oneness with the group resulting from intense collective experiences (e.g. painful rituals or the horrors of frontline combat) or from perceptions of shared biology.” Once a person fuses their identity with the group, all it takes is a threat to the group to lead the person to self-sacrifice. And those groups need to be “local” groups, like a team or a platoon. “Extended fusion” to bigger groups like one’s country can happen, but it looks like it can only happen after “local fusion.” Those who have experienced identity fusion with a local group describe the others in the group as family. It’s common to hear teammates and platoon-mates describe each other as brothers (Whitehouse, 2018). What sacrifices are you willing to make for your family?   References Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000249 ... View more