“Under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.” ~Ecclesiastes 9:11 As every educated person understands, our traits and fates are predisposed by nature and guided by nurture. But as famed psychologist Albert Bandura emphasized four decades ago, a third force also powerfully steers our lives and world—random, unpredictable chance happenings. “If I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin’s bullet would have perfectly hit its mark and I would not be here tonight,” explained Donald Trump to his convention, after a bullet nicked his right ear as he turned right to view a campaign rally Jumbotron image—meaning he was facing shooter Thomas Crooks instead of perpendicular to him. Two seconds and two inches defined the difference between brain and blood, between catastrophe and an iconic fist-raised photo image that, for his supporters, affirmed his victimhood, his virile courage, and, as with so many folk heroes, his seeming divine protection. “They tried to slander him. They tried to imprison him. Now they have tried to kill him,” proclaimed Ben Carson to the Republican National Convention. “But if God is protecting him, they will never succeed.” Trump reportedly was buoyed by what columnist Ross Douthat called his “incredible, preternatural good luck.” As Trump basked in public sympathy, the betting markets immediately raised his election chances from 60 to 70 percent. And his Trump Media stock opened up 30 percent the following Monday, giving him a paper gain of $1.5 billion. (Both subsided after the ascendance of Kamala Harris.) If Trump’s fortuitous escape were to assist his winning the 2024 presidential election—and to enable his proposed abortion, taxation, deregulation, energy, and immigration policies—then the future will have turned with a mere head turn. As Nicholas Rescher reflected in Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life, “The hand of luck rests heavy on the shoulders of human history.” The sitting president understands the alternative devastating potential of random juxtapositions of time and place. As 30-year-old Joe Biden was two weeks from being sworn in as a senator, his wife Neilia picked the wrong second to pull onto Delaware Route 7—the second when a tractor-trailer truck was passing, killing her and daughter Naomi, and seriously injuring sons Beau and Hunter. If only she had left the house a moment earlier, or later. “It’s our role as humans to accept the randomness of the universe,” wrote Rabbi Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In his new book, The Random Factor, social welfare professor Mark Robert Rank offers examples of “how chance and luck” have shaped history: an arbitrary administrative decision that turned a teenage Adolf Hitler onto a road that led to the Holocaust; a temporary August 9, 1945, cloudiness over Kokura, Japan, that led to the second atomic bomb being diverted to Nagasaki; a Russian submarine officer getting stuck on a conning tower ladder that averted a likely World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis; an unexpected phone call that led to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s blocking adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment. Chance is built into the fabric of nature, from chance mutations that enable evolution to sporting outcomes to scientific discovery. As Louis Pasteur famously said of accidental scientific happenings, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And as Bandura stressed, chance forms relationships. He illustrated: Seeking relief from an uninspiring reading assignment, a graduate student departs for the golf links with his friend. They happen to find themselves playing behind a twosome of attractive women golfers. Before long the two twosomes become one foursome and, in the course of events, one of the partners eventually becomes the wife of the graduate golfer. Were it not for this fortuitous constellation of events, it is exceedingly unlikely that their paths would ever have crossed. Different partnerships create different life courses. The graduate student in this particular case happens to be myself. In his autobiography, Bandura delightedly recalled the book editor who came to his lecture on the “Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths,” and who ended up marrying the woman he chanced to sit beside. Careers, too, are deflected by chance events. In the summer of 1978, I was the guest of German social psychologist colleagues for a five-day research retreat near Munich. There I came to know an esteemed American colleague after he chanced to be assigned an adjacent seat. The next January, when he was invited to become a social psychology textbook author, he declined and spontaneously referred the McGraw-Hill psychology editor to me . . . which led to a new authoring career, ultimately including these TalkPsych.com essays. But for each of us, surely the most fortunate sequence of chance events is what produced our existence. Among some 250 million sperm, the one needed to make you won the race and joined that one particular egg. And so it happened for the all the generations in your past. Consider: If even one of your ancestors was formed from a different sperm or egg, or died early, or chanced to meet a different partner or . . . For better or for worse, chance is the great random power that shapes lives and diverts history. Whether we view life’s serendipities as “mere chance” or as guided by the hidden hand of providence, the biblical Ecclesiastes was right: Time and chance happen to us all, spicing our life with unpredictable happenings. With flukes of good luck come unexpected opportunities, and with bad luck the ever-present risk of tragedy. As the French writer Stendhal (quoted by Rank) surmised, “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Image credit: SDI Productions/Getty Images ... View more

It’s one of social psychology’s most consistent findings: Those who feel good often do good. Happy people are typically helpful people. Even a temporary mood boost—finding money, a sunny midwinter day, recalling a happy time—has made folks more likely to give money, assist with dropped papers, or volunteer time. We call it the feel-good, do-good phenomenon. The converse is also reliably found: Doing good feels good. When given money, those assigned to spend it on others end up happier than those told to spend it on themselves. People who volunteer typically find increased meaning and happiness. Employees given “prosocial bonuses” to give to charities become happier workers. For those feeling morose, one antidote is, therefore, a daily random act of kindness. Perhaps you too—after donating blood, carrying someone’s groceries, mentoring a student, or even just giving directions to a stranger—have felt an ensuing warm glow? Might the do-good, feel-good effect extend to other virtuous behaviors? Was Aristotle right to suppose that virtuous living supports human flourishing? Malte Mueller/Getty Images Baylor University psychologist-philosopher Michael Prinzing, answering yes, proposed that “acting proenvironmentally... doing something good for the earth” would provide a lift to people’s subjective well-being. To test his presumption, he first sampled more than 7000 daily experiences of 181 people in 14 countries. He texted them 5 times a day, inquiring about their past-hour experiences and their current mood. As he predicted, people who more often engaged in earth-protective or anti-pollution behaviors tended to report better moods—especially immediately following an environmentally-supportive behavior. A follow-up randomized experiment engaged nearly 600 University of North Carolina students. After first reporting on their past-month happiness, the participants were variously asked on the next day to (1) not alter their normal routine (the control condition), (2) “do three good things for yourself” (such as relaxing in a bath or spending time on a hobby), or (3) “do three good things for the planet” (such as walking or biking instead of driving, reducing waste, or picking up litter). The result: When their happiness was reassessed on the third day, the groups who did something good for themselves and something for the environment were happier, while those in the control condition were not. So, “incorporating proenvironmental behavior into individuals’ daily activities increases their SWB [subjective well-being],” concluded Prinzing. Doing so “makes people feel good about themselves.” He added, “People flourish when they seek to cultivate virtue and do good in the world.” Aristotle was right! The moral of the story: Doing good really does feel good. In addition to preserving the earth, going green doubles as a tonic for the human spirit. Virtue carries its own rewards. So go ahead—recycle that waste, pick up that litter, eat that plant-based meal, bike to work—and enjoy the warm glow.  David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.   ... View more

I can read your mind. I see your worried spirit. I sense that, when assessing today’s U.S. political divide and voter sentiments, you feel astonished at what so many others believe and embrace. If only you, and your preferred candidate, could persuade well-meaning but misinformed people to embrace truth and value decency. If you support an incumbent, you and your kindred souls will want voters to perceive the economy as thriving, crime rates as falling, and leadership as effective. If you support a challenger, you will want voters to see a darker present—a government plagued by corruption, an economy languishing, a society in decline—and to long for someone who can make things great again. So, how to win in 2024? Election triumphs require persuasion, which we social psychologists have long studied. Our experiments confirm ten strategies: Frame messages that speak to your audience’s viewpoint and values. Associate your message with their preexisting perspective. “Don’t mess with Texas” says the effective litter-reducing signage aimed at the leading litterers—18- to 35-year-old macho males. For a business audience, a climate-protecting policy could explain its economic benefit.               Harness the influence of multiple credible sources. Use communicators that your audience will regard as expert, trustworthy, and likable. And better three speakers each making one argument than one person making three arguments. Exploit the power of repetition. Barack Obama understood what experiments have documented—repetition feeds an illusion of truth: “If they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again . . . people start believing it.” Donald Trump understands: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” Even cliches, when repeated, will persist in people’s minds. So will repeated truths, crisply expressed: “The Biden Boom.” Invite public commitments. Once people voice or sign their support, they tend not only to have stood up for what they believe, but also then to believe more fervently and durably in what they have stood up for. Engage emotions. Appeal to the heart. Effective political appeals often elicit both negative emotions (warnings about a scary opponent) and positive emotions (patriotism, pride, and hope). Create visual images. People have much better memory for scenes than words. Even an irrelevant photo—of, say, a thermometer alongside a claim that “Magnesium is the liquid metal inside a thermometer”—can make assertions seem more believable. If you describe falling unemployment or an increasing stock market, portray the spoken words visually, with rising or lowering arm motions. Connect with people’s social identities. Present your candidate as one of “us,” as someone with whom your audience can identify. Inoculate your audience against future opposing arguments. Effective persuasion not only debunks misinformation, it “prebunks” such. It defuses the other side’s case by acknowledging and refuting it, thus preparing people to hear the opponent’s message, and to counterargue. Focus communications on those undecided or disengaged. Don’t waste limited time and resources on those with strong preexisting views. The future is decided by the muddled middle. Prioritize face-to-face appeals. In a mid-twentieth century field experiment, Michigan researchers Samuel Eldersveld and Richard Dodge divided citizens not planning to support an Ann Arbor city charter revision into three groups. Among those exposed to mass media appeals for the revision, 19 percent changed their minds and supported it, as did 45 percent of those who received four supportive mailings, and 75 percent of those visited personally. Finally, and even more important than any of these ten evidence-based persuasion principles, is one more: the power of self-persuasion. Get people to rehearse and verbalize your argument. When supporting a candidate, focus less on the crushing brilliance of your thinking than on what your audience is thinking. Remember: Your aim is not to score argument points, but to persuade. Skilled teachers understand the power of self-education. They guide students not just to be passive information receptacles but active information processors. With rhetorical questions, lab activities, and in-class writing exercises, they get students to glean and verbalize answers for themselves. As a mountain of recent research shows (see here for an animation in which I apply this to student learning), people best remember ideas that they have articulated in their own words. In the final days of the contested 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, 8 points down in a late October Gallup poll, used two memorable and potent rhetorical questions to stimulate voters’ active processing. His presidential debate wrap-up statement began by asking: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?” This rhetorical device proved so effective (most people privately answered “No”) that he repeated the questions over and again in his campaign’s final week, and won by a stunning 10 percent. So, in the upcoming U.S. presidential debate, the candidates would be wise to pose alternatives, and ask people what they advocate. A U.S. Republican candidate or supporter might invite people to reflect on questions for which majority sentiment favors their position; for example, “Do you favor or oppose a more secure southern border to stop illegal immigration?” And a Democratic candidate or supporter might respond by asking people if they favor or oppose the bipartisan border protection act deep-sixed by Donald Trump, or they might ask, “Do you agree more with Donald Trump that climate change is a ‘hoax’ and that government should support more fossil fuel production, or with Joe Biden that government should prioritize clean energy?” When you know that most folks support your side of an issue, don’t just tell them what you think. Ask them what they think. If someone acknowledges a positive aspect of your candidate, invite them to elaborate. Political “push polls”—negative campaigning and rumormongering in the guise of surveys—similarly attempt to nudge voter thinking. But they often do with obvious guile, as illustrated by a 2013 National Rifle Association pseudo-survey: “Would you knowingly vote to reelect a member of the U.S. House or Senate who supports the Obama gun-ban agenda?" Another possible strategy for using the power of self-persuasion—as a supplement to touting economic numbers—might be to present a simple graph or two and invite people to verbalize what the graph indicates. Here is an example that I (unsuccessfully) proposed to the Barack Obama 2012 reelection campaign: The Economic Facts Do you understand these charts? Which direction has the economy been trending with Obama in the White House? Here’s the last five years of the stock market: What does this show? U.S. Job losses and gains: What do these data indicate? Today, depending on one’s candidate and the relevant evidence, the examples will differ, but the effective principle remains: Don’t just throw words and arguments at people. Follow the Reagan model. Induce people—especially those undecided or uncertain—to think about and to rehearse the gist of your (or your candidate’s) evidence and argument. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on X: @davidgmyers.)     ... View more

Macmillan Learning is honored to sponsor the PsychSessions podcast, a platform dedicated to insightful conversations about teaching and psychology. Today, we celebrate a monumental milestone—the 200th episode of the flagship series, PsychSessions: Conversations About Teaching N' Stuff. This episode features special guest host Chris Cardone as she joins Garth Neufeld to interview the esteemed social psychologist and author, Elliot Aronson. Listen here! Click here to receive a free PsychSessions discussion guide for this episode!      ... View more

As polite people, we know better than to raise political, religious, or “culture war” topics with acquaintances who we expect will disagree. Sometimes that is prudent. Rather than risk discomfiting disagreement with family members we love—and whose minds we are not going to change—we steer clear of discussing transgender kids, climate change, and the Trump trials. Or we may just dread confrontation, perhaps as an emotional expression of our natural loss aversion. We prioritize not risking pain over potential positive gain. Yet when we push beyond our comfort zone, by engaging those who differ, the outcome is often unexpectedly positive. Being too pessimistic about meaningful dialogue across divides, we avoid such—and thus miss out on opportunities to connect and to learn. That’s the conclusion of new research by Kristina Wald, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley. Their experiments build on earlier studies in which Epley and others induced people to reach out to strangers. Did striking up a conversation with a stranger feel a tad awkward? Yes, but the typical outcome was surprisingly positive, leaving both conversationalists feeling happier. Their new experiments first confirmed that people have low expectations of discussion with someone who embraces a differing view of abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration policy, etc. People therefore avoid conversing with those of an opposing view. Their second experiment matched people with someone of a kindred or opposing view on some hot topic. During a 10-minute discussion, each shared their position, why it was important to them, and why they felt as they did. The result: People expected they would dislike the conversation, yet afterward most felt much better about it than they had expected. In a third experiment, some participants experienced a video call with an agreeing or disagreeing partner. Other participants recorded and exchanged monologues explaining their respective views. Again, the relational two-way conversation proved surprisingly satisfying. Listening to a monologue less so. So why do we miscalculate the typically positive results of dialogue across differences? For at least three reasons, suggest Wald and colleagues: Focus on differences: We often underestimate our common ground, thanks to our acute sensitivity to how we differ from others. Civility: We seek to make everyday conversation a polite exchange, but fail to fully anticipate our civility when imagining a difficult conversation. Confirmation bias: By avoiding conversations about disagreements, we “miss having the very conversations” that could better inform our expectations. In other experiments, James Dungan and Epley found that roommates and romantic partners were similarly too pessimistic about the outcomes of hard conversations. Their conclusion: “Misunderstanding how positively others would respond to an honest conversation about a problematic relationship issue may leave people overly reluctant to have the kinds of difficult conversations that are important for their relationships to thrive.” The bottom line: We needlessly avoid constructive conversations with friends, fellow students, or family members. To our collective detriment, we isolate ourselves in silos with like-minded others. “People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams,” notes David Brooks. Communication experts advise us on how to optimize dialogue across differences: Before offering your own view, listen to and reflect what the other is saying, noting points of agreement and what you’ve learned. Acknowledge the other’s admirable motives. Such are among the aims of organizations such as Braver Angels, which have engaged tens of thousands of partisan “red” and “blue” Americans in civil conversation: “We state our views freely and fully, without fear. We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.” At the end of the process, “97% of Braver Angels participants say they found common ground with someone across the divide.” Braver Angels workshop participants seek to bridge their divide. “What’s interesting about our work isn’t that talking to folks you disagree with turns out well,” Epley tells me. That much they already knew, from the many confirmations of Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis, in which equal status contact reduces prejudice. “What’s interesting is that people’s expectations are overly pessimistic, on average, and that has the potential to keep us overly segregated.” Martin Luther King, Jr., understood. His 1962 remarks at Cornell College provide an epigraph for the new Wald-Kardas-Epley research: [People] hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication. David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

Most academic fields are blessed with public intellectuals—people who contribute big ideas to their disciplines and also to public discourse. Economics has had (among others) Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman. History has had Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Evolutionary biology has had Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson. And psychological science? On my top 10 psychology public intellectuals list—admittedly reflecting my current interests—would be the late Daniel Kahneman, along with Martin Seligman, Elizabeth Loftus, Steven Pinker, Jennifer Eberhardt, Angela Duckworth, Roy Baumeister, Jean Twenge, and Robert Cialdini. With so many deserving candidates, your interests and list will differ. Likely it would now also include Jonathan Haidt, whose new book, The Anxious Generation, appeared with a trifecta—as the simultaneous #1 nonfiction bestseller at the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon—and with featured reviews in major newspapers and The New Yorker; interviews on TV networks, talk shows, and podcasts; and Haidt’s own The Atlantic feature article. In collaboration with Jean Twenge (my social psychology text coauthor), Haidt aims less to sell books than to ignite a social movement. Teen depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking have soared in the smartphone/social media era, Haidt and Twenge observe, and especially so for those teen girls who devote multiple daily hours to social media. For an excellent 7-minute synopsis of their evidence—perfect for class discussion, youth groups, or the family dinner table—see here. Their solution is straightforward: We need to stop overprotecting kids from real-world challenges and under-protecting them in the virtual world. We should decrease life experience–blocking phone-based childhood and increase resilience-building unrestricted play and in-person social engagement. To make this practical, Haidt offers schools and parents four recommendations: No smartphones until high school (flip phones before). No social media before age 16. Phone-free schools (deposit phones on arrival). More free play and unsupervised real-world responsibility.  Given such high visibility assertions, Haidt and Twenge’s writings are understandably stimulating constructive, open debate that models what Haidt advocated in his earlier The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), and in founding the Heterodox Academy to support “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” His colleague critics, including psychologist Candice Odgers writing in Nature and an Oxford research team, question the smartphone effect size and offer alternative explanations for the teen mental health crisis. Although the research story is still being written, my reading of the accumulated evidence supports Haidt and Twenge, whose replies to their skeptics provide a case study in rhetorical argumentation: Are they merely offering correlational evidence? No, longitudinal studies and experiments confirm the social media effect, as do quasi-experiments that find mental health impacts when and where social media get introduced. Are the effects too weak to explain the huge increase in teen girls’ depression and anxiety? No, five social media hours a day double teen girls’ depression risk. Moreover, social media have collective effects; they infuse kids’ social networks. Is teen malaise instead a product of family poverty and financial recession? No, it afflicts the affluent as well, and has increased during an era of economic growth. Are the problems related to U.S. politics, culture, or school shootings? No, they cross Western countries. Are teens more stressed due to increased school pressures and homework? No; to the contrary, homework pressure has declined. Two other alternative explanations—that kids are experiencing less independence and less religious engagement—actually dovetail with the social media time-drain evidence. (Haidt, a self-described atheist, includes a chapter on the smartphone-era decline in experiences of spiritual awe, meditation, and community.) Haidt’s inspiring an international conversation about teens and technology takes my mind back to 2001. A committee of four of us, led by Martin Seligman, evaluated candidates for the first round of Templeton Foundation–funded positive psychology prizes. Our $100,000 top prize winner—recognizing both achievements and promise—was an impressive young scholar named (you guessed it) Jon Haidt. More than we expected, we got that one right. In 2024, our culture is becoming wiser and hopefully healthier, thanks to Haidt’s evidence-based teen mental health advocacy, enabled by his persistent public voice. (David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.) ... View more

Basketball players, coaches, and fans agree: Players are more likely to make a shot after they’ve successfully completed one or multiple consecutive shots than after they’ve had a miss. Players therefore know to feed the teammate who’s “hot.” Coaches know to bench the one who’s not. This understanding is dittoed for the batter who’s on a hitting streak, the poker player who’s drawing strong hands and the stock picker who has a run of soaring successes. In life, as in sports, it pays to go with the hot hand. But as psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky revealed in a seminal 1985 report, the basketball hot hand is one of those universally shared beliefs that, alas, just isn’t so. When they studied detailed individual shooting records from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and university teams, the hot hand was nowhere to be found. Players were as likely to score after a miss as after a make. When told Gilovich’s team’s cold facts about the hot hand in a July 27 interview, Stephen “Steph” Curry, an all-time NBA three-point shooter, looked incredulous. “They don’t know what they’re talking about at all,” he replied. “It’s literally a tangible, physical sensation of "all I need to do is get this ball off my fingertips, and it’s gonna go in....” There are times you catch the ball, and you’ve maybe made one or two in a row—and ... the rim feels like the ocean. And it’s one of the most rewarding feelings.” Sports fans concur with Curry. In an article published on the same day, sports writer Jack Winter counseled, “Don’t be fooled by numbers-driven naysayers. The next time you’re feeling it at your local pickup game, don’t hesitate to indulge the temptation for even the most brazen of heat checks. Why? Stephen Curry, the truest expert on the matter, knows the hot hand is real.” The scientific story did not, however, end in 1985 with Gilovich and his colleagues. Their analyses stimulated a host of follow-up studies of streaks in free-throw shooting, as well as in baseball, golf and tennis. Occasional examples of a slight hot hand have appeared, as in NBA three-point shooting contests—but nothing like the 25 percent increase in shots made following a make that was estimated by Philadelphia 76er players surveyed in Gilovich’s team’s study. In a January 2022 study, operations researcher Wayne Winston of Indiana University Bloomington and computer scientist Konstantinos Pelechrinis of the University of Pittsburgh analyzed some 400,000 shot sequences across all NBA players over the 2013 –2014 and 2014–2015 seasons. Their results showed the slight opposite of a hot hand: after making one or two field goals, the average player became slightly less likely to make the next shot. (This replicated an earlier study that analyzed 12 NBA seasons between 2004 and 2016: 45 percent of field goal attempts were successful after a make, and 46 percent were successful after a miss.) Nevertheless, some players analyzed in Winston and Pelechrinis’s January 2022 study were, to a varying extent, more likely to make a shot after making one or more. So I wondered, “Was Curry among them?” In their data, Curry “did not exhibit the hot hand phenomenon,” Pelechrinis wrote in an e-mail to me. The computer scientist elaborated further: “After a single make his FG% [field goal percentage] was almost identical to the one expected based on the shot quality.” “After two consecutive makes his FG% was slightly below expected (2.5 percentage units).” “After three consecutive makes his FG% was 7.5 percentage units below expectation.” I can hear you protesting, “Are Gilovich and the stats geeks denying the reality of amazing hot and cold streaks in sports and in other life realms?” Actually, they are saying quite the opposite: Streaks do occur. Indeed, random data are streakier than folks suppose. And when streaks happen, our pattern-seeking mind finds and seeks to explain them. Given enough data—from sports statistics, stock market fluctuations or death rates—some really weird clusters are sure to appear. Buried in the essentially random digits of pi, you can find your eight-digit birthdate. (Is that a wink from God or just a lot of digits?) To demonstrate the streaks in random data, I flipped a coin 51 times, with these results (“H” and “T” represent heads and tails.): HTTTHHHTTTTHHTTHTTHHTTHTTTHTHTTTTTTHTTHTHHHHTHHTTTT Looking over the sequence, patterns jump out. For example, on the 30th to 38th tosses, set in boldface above, I had a “cold hand,” with only one head in nine tosses. But then my fortunes reversed with a “hot hand”: six heads out of seven tosses. Did I mentally snap out of my tails funk and get in a heads groove? No, these are the sorts of streaks found in any random sequence. When I compared each toss outcome with the next, 24 of the 50 comparisons yielded a changed result—just the sort of nearly 50 percent alternation we would expect from coin tossing. Can you see a similar hot hand in one of the basketball shot sequences shown below? Both show a player making 11 successful shots out of 21 attempts. Which one has outcomes that approximate a random sequence? Player B’s outcomes look more random to most people. (Do they look that way to you, too?) But Player B has fewer streaks than expected. For a 50 percent shooter, chance shooting, like chance coin tossing, should produce a changed outcome about half the time. But Player B’s outcome changes in successive shots 70 percent of the time (that is, in 14 out of 20 shots). Player A, despite a six-of-seven hot streak followed by a one-of-six cold streak, scores in a pattern that is more like what we would expect from a 50 percent shooter: Player A’s next outcome changes 10 times out of 20 shots. So, like his fans, coaches and commentators, Curry is right to perceive hot and cold streaks. Basketball shooting, like so much of life, is streaky. We just misinterpret the inevitable streaks. After the fact, we describe the “hot” player as “in a zone.” The phenomenon is ubiquitous. Maternity ward staff notice streaks of births of boys or girls—such as when 12 consecutive female babies were born in one New York State hospital in 1997—and sometimes these events are attributed to the phases of the moon during conception or to other mysterious forces. Cancer or leukemia cases may cluster in neighborhoods, sometimes provoking a fruitless search for a toxin. My then 93-year-old father once called me from his Seattle retirement home, where about 25 people died each year. He wondered about a curious phenomenon. “The deaths seem to come in bunches,” he said. “Why is that? A contagion?” How odd that folks should pass en masse! The streaks are real; the invented explanations are not. Nevertheless, forced to choose between data science and personal observation, between the statistics and their lying eyes, players and fans prefer the latter, so the hot hand hype lives on. After hearing the late CBS basketball commentator Billy Packer admonish college coaches to recognize the hot hand phenomenon, a friend of mine sent him my textbook summary of Gilovich’s team’s facts of life. Packer replied: “There is and should be a pattern of who shoots, when he shoots, and how often he shoots, and that can and should vary by game-to-game situations. Please tell the stat man to get a life.” I smiled. So did my colleague Thomas Gilovich when I shared Steph Curry’s response to his work:.“Steph is one of my favorite players (how unusual is that!),” Gilovich wrote, “so to hear him say that we don’t know what we’re talking about is precious.” Moreover, we can understand the science of serendipitous streaks and still marvel at the fact that Curry made 105 consecutive three-point practice shots. We can realize the realities of randomness and yet find pleasure in life’s weird streaks and coincidences. As countless things happen, we can savor the happenstances—such as three of the first five U.S. presidents dying on July 4 or someone winning the lottery twice or discovering a mutual friend on meeting a stranger overseas. In 2007 the late psychologist Albert Bandura recalled a book editor who came to Bandura’s lecture on the “Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths" and ended up marrying the woman he happened to sit next to. As statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller observed in a 1989 paper, “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” And what fun when it does! This essay appeared earlier at ScientificAmerican.com as “Your Brain Looks for ‘Winning Streaks’ Everywhere—Here's Why.”  David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Photo permission: jeffmilner/Getty Images         ... 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“Of making many books there is no end.” Ecclesiastes 12:12 The National Museum of Psychology’s invitation to gift my textbooks to their archives prompts me to pause and reflect on my team’s long-term educational mission—to help spread the contributions of psychological science to human understanding, over 40 years, in 22 languages. My role began unexpectedly, after being invited to join seven other American social psychologists, and sixteen European colleagues, in a week-long research retreat at a castle near Munich. There I was providentially assigned to sit adjacent to University of Massachusetts professor Ivan Steiner. Six months later, in January of 1979, McGraw-Hill’s psychology editor, Nelson Black, called Steiner, circled at left, asking if he might help author a new social psychology text. Steiner demurred, but in the spur of the moment he gave them the name of a little-known social psychologist shown at right. Black’s ensuing out-of-the-blue phone call to me began months of conversation, which led to my agreeing—with considerable self-doubt—to risk the project (reasoning that even if the book flopped, I would at least become a more informed teacher). Fast-forward to 2024, and here are the fourteen editions of Social Psychology and nine editions of the brief Exploring Social Psychology (with recent editions now co-authored by Jean Twenge). Shortly after Social Psychology went into production, my editor, Alison Meerschaert, moved to Worth Publishers (now an imprint of Macmillan Learning). A week later, she called with an invitation to author an introductory psychology text. After more weeks of pondering, I accepted. Fast-forward 40 years, and here are the resulting 50 editions of varied length and format, including special editions for the mushrooming population—now 300,000+ annually—of AP Psychology students. (For recent editions, Nathan DeWall and June Gruber have joined our team as co-authors, as has Elizabeth Hammer for our new AP edition.) A word on behalf of oft-maligned textbooks: Textbooks are no substitute for caring teachers, who can personalize instruction with enthusiasm, give-and-take discussion, and engaging demonstrations. But compared with home-brewed or most free online materials, the best publisher-provided texts are more thoroughly comprehensive, meticulously edited, professionally reviewed, frequently updated, attractively illustrated, and accompanied by interactive resources and tested pedagogy. While reading and reporting on my discipline's fruits, I have occasionally felt an urge to share its wisdom with those outside the academic realm. I have fed that itch in these periodic TalkPsych essays, and also in general-audience books exploring topics such as the scientific pursuit of happiness, the powers and perils of intuition, the psychology of hearing loss, and the meeting ground between psychological science and faith. In The World’s Last Night, C. S. Lewis described “two sorts of jobs”: Of one sort, a [person] can truly say, “I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid while I do it.” The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is that of the earning of money; work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid. How blessed I am to have the first sort of job—to be tasked with discerning and communicating wisdom gleaned from the most fascinating subject on Earth, and hopefully, also, with expanding minds, deepening understanding, increasing compassion, arousing curiosity, cultivating critical thinking, and, as a gratifying by-product, with being philanthropic. How blessed, and fortunate: If I relived my life a thousand times—sans that providential castle seating assignment and name-dropping—I surely would never have become a textbook author. Moreover, I have been blessed to work on a creative team that loves its mission and loves one another. Although one name appears on most of these covers, the pack is greater than the wolf. For my introductory psychology texts, our pack has included many, some of whom I’ll mention: Jack Ridl. My books all acknowledge “the editing assistance and mentoring of my writing coach, poet Jack Ridl, a master writing teacher [Michigan’s 1996 Carnegie Professor of the Year]. He, more than anyone, cultivated my delight in dancing with the language, and taught me to approach writing as a craft that shades into art.” Phyllis Vandervelde and Sara Neevel, our meticulous manuscript developers until their premature deaths, Kathryn Brownson, my in-house project manager/researcher/editor of 25 years, Christine Brune, my Worth/Macmillan editor/guide of 37 years—surely one of the most enduring author/editor collaborations in American publishing (with 53,404 exchanged emails since 2000), Carlise Stembridge, our executive program manager of 19 years, Catherine Woods and Kevin Feyen, our senior publishers across decades, Tracey Kuehn and Won McIntosh, our managing (production) editors, Talia Green, our associate project manager, Charles Linsmeier and Shani Fisher, VPs who oversee us all, Betty Probert, our longest-serving team member, and painstaking editor of pedagogical supplements, Nancy Fleming, Danielle Slevens, Trish Morgan, and Ann Kirby-Payne, our gifted manuscript editors (Trish also edits this blog), and psychologist colleagues Tom Ludwig, Rick Straub, Martin Bolt, and John Brink who independently authored the highest quality text-accompanying teaching/learning resources . . . and, also, my supportive colleagues in the Hope College psychology department, who have offered for their gifts of space, freedom, and encouragement. Other team members have put our words into millions of student hands. These include our longtime marketing exec Kate Nurre (and her predecessors, including Kate Geraghty and Renee Altier). They supported the on-the-ground sales team, led by legends such as Tom Kling, Bill Davis, Rory Baruth, Guy Geraghty, Jen Cawsey, and Greg David. Our privilege of supporting AP Psychology teachers and their students has been enabled by the success of Janie Pierce-Bratcher, Ann Heath, Yolanda Cossio, and their many colleagues. Kudos also to Worth Publishers and its parent Macmillan Learning for investing in quality. As I first contemplated this project, publisher-owner Bob Worth explained that his simple aim was “to produce a few Mercedes rather than a lot of Chevys.” He made good on that promise, investing his resources in world-class talent, and in networking us all, as in our triennial book planning retreats: With more texts in the works, we have, God-willing, miles to go before we sleep. At age 81, still in my Hope College office, I look above my monitor at the encouraging onward nudge from Psalm 92:14: “They will still bear fruit in old age; they will stay fresh and green.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on X: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

“Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian than their elders. Why?” headlined a recent Washington Post article. ’Tis true, as many surveys reveal. In a late October 2023 YouGov poll, 20 percent of adults under age 29, but 65 percent of those 65 and over, reported pro-Israel sympathies in the Israel-Hamas war. In a follow-up Pew survey, 18- to 29-year-olds were less than half as likely as adults ages 65+ to “favor the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.” Consider other attitudinal generation gaps: Politics. In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Biden won the support of most voters under age 30, while Trump was favored by a slight majority of those ages 65+. Climate concerns. In survey after survey, young adults express more concern for the future climate. They are, for example, more than twice as likely as adults ages 65+ to favor phasing out fossil fuels:  Same-sex marriage. In the latest Gallup survey, 60 percent of those ages 65+, and 89 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, favored gay marriage. Moreover, a generation gap exists worldwide. Religiosity. It’s no secret that worldwide, today’s young adults, compared with their elders, are less often religiously affiliated and engaged. They believe less, attend less, and pray less. These generational dissimilarities—with more documented by social psychologist Jean Twenge in Generations—have at least two possible explanations: A life-cycle explanation observes that attitudes can change with age. Our youthful progressivism may mutate into a more conservative later-life perspective. With life experience, people change. A cohort (generational) explanation observes that emerging adults form attitudes in response to their time, and then carry those attitudes throughout life? There is wisdom in both. We are not fixed entities. Over the last half century, most people, regardless of age, have become more accepting of same-sex marriage. With age, people may increasingly seek to conserve familiar traditions as values. Some agree with the old cliche, “Those who are not socialist by age 20 have no heart. Those who are not conservative by age 40 have no brain.” Yet, as Twenge and I explain in Social Psychology, Fourteenth Edition, the evidence more strongly supports the cohort/generational explanation. Attitudes form in youth and emerging adulthood, and then become more stable. In surveys of the same people over years, attitudes tend to change more from ages 15 to 25 than from ages 55 to 65. When asked to recall memorable life and world events, adults also tend to reminisce about happenings during their impressionable teens and young adult years. These are also the prime years for recruiting people into cults or to new political views. The teens and early twenties are formative. In Public Religion Research Institute data, below, depicting generation gaps in religiosity over time, I found more evidence of the cohort/generational effect. Note that in 1996, 20 percent of people in their 20s were religiously unaffiliated; 10 years later, 17 percent of people in their 30s were the same; and, 26 years later, 20 percent of people at roughly midlife, were religiously unaffiliated. But surely, you say, some people in each cohort will change as they age, by becoming religiously engaged or disengaged. And overall there has been a slight trend toward disaffiliation in each cohort. Yes, and yes. But what’s striking is each cohort’s overall stability over time. Today’s older generations were more likely, as youth, to have attended worship and religious education programs—the footprints of which they have retained into their later lives. In explaining the U.S. generation gap in attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, the Washington Post also offers a cohort explanation: Each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel, Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said. Beliefs about the world tend to form in our late teens and early 20s and often don’t change, he said. Older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews. . . . But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials. Evidence of cohort stability over time implies two important lessons. First, generational succession is destiny. Today’s older generation, with its ambivalence about gay rights, will be replaced by younger gay-supportive generations. Barring unanticipated events, support for climate change mitigation efforts will grow. In the absence of religious/spiritual renewal—which could happen (the proportion of religious “nones” does appear to have peaked)—secularism will increase. Second, there are few more influential vocations than educating, mentoring, guiding, and inspiring people during their formative teen and college-age years. To be sure, our entire life is a process of becoming and reforming. At every age, we are unfinished products. Yet the foundation of our future selves and of our deepest beliefs and values tends to be laid in the teachings, relationships, and experiences of those seminal years. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) *Photo credit Maskot/Getty Images   ... View more

Have you heard about the recent epidemic of shoplifting? Perhaps you’ve seen upsetting TV replays of flash-mob grabs in Nordstrom, Nike, or Macy’s stores? And perhaps you’ve read about stores abandoning their crime-prone urban locations or putting more goods under lock and key? Small wonder, given an Axios headline: “Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions.” What a disturbing trend, which in October provoked Donald Trump to support shooting shoplifters, and in January New York Governor Kathy Hochul to propose increased tough-on-crime shoplifting penalties. Image from Wikipedia Commons Is this just another example of a larger crime epidemic that each year since 2005 has been perceived by Americans (7 in 10 of whom have annually told Gallup that crime has increased in the past year)? “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable,” declared Trump. On that much, Florida governor Ron DeSantis agrees: “Crime infests our cities.” Yet the truth is the inverse of what most people are led to believe. Since the early 1990s, violent and property crime rates have fallen, by about half. The National Crime Victimization Survey confirms that we are much safer today. In the third quarter of 2023, violent crime fell by another 8 percent compared to a year earlier, and property crime dropped to its lowest level since 1961. But the shoplifting epidemic! Actually, despite a retail theft uptick in a few cities, the national rate indexed by retail “shrinkage,” is essentially unchanged over time (except for a downtick during the home-bound pandemic). Shoplifting is a significant business expense, but not newly so. As I documented in a prior essay, other examples of public misinformation abound: In a time of near record-low unemployment, rising stock markets, and real wages outpacing declining inflation, half of Americans in 2023 perceived the economy as worsening. In a time when the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has plummeted by two-thirds since 1990, 87 percent of folks surveyed across 24 countries believe global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. In a time when undocumented immigrants to the U.S. have a lower incarceration rate than U.S.-born Americans, politicians lament the influx of “vicious predators and bloodthirsty killers” and, Gallup has reported, “Americans are five times more likely to say immigrants make the [crime] situation worse rather than better.” So why do most of us sometimes believe what just isn’t so? Why, for example, was I dismayed to learn (incorrectly, as it turns out) about the supposed shoplifting epidemic? There’s a simple but powerful principle at work, note psychologists Eryn Newman (Australian National University) and Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California): Visual images often overwhelm representative data. Their new paper, “Misinformed by Images: How Images Influence Perceptions of Truth and What Can Be Done About It,” adds fresh evidence that photos and videos (1) seize our attention, (2) get remembered, (3) touch our hearts, and (4) sway our judgments. Attention. “Messages with images receive more attention and reach a wider audience,” they note. Images draw people’s “attention to a message that may be ignored without an image, they inflate message effects.” The news story of the mob invading the Los Angeles Nordstrom store would hardly have been noticed without the shocking images. Memory. We have excellent memory for visual images. If you were shown more than 2000 faces for 3 to 10 seconds each, you could later, with 80+ percent accuracy, pick out those faces when they were paired with previously unseen faces. Memory aids help us remember a grocery list by associating its items with visual images. Even imagined events get well-remembered when vividly pictured, which misleads people sometimes to misrecall actually experiencing them. Emotion. Images, more than statistics, speak to the heart. As Nathan DeWall, June Gruber, and I illustrate in Psychology, Fourteenth Edition, A viral photo of a Syrian child lying dead on a beach had massive impact. Red Cross donations to Syrian refugees were 55 times greater in response to that photo than in response to “psychically numbing” statistics describing the hundreds of thousands of other refugee deaths (Slovic et al., 2017). Dramatic incidents make us gasp (“four deaths!”); probabilities we barely grasp (“per million”). It’s so easy to scare people with a horrific happening and then harder to unscare them with representative data. Judgment. Thanks to the “availability heuristic” (our tendency to judge the likelihood of events by their recall availability), images power judgments. Place an image of a single violent act in a news story about an otherwise peaceful demonstration, and many readers will later recall mostly the violence. Moreover, the image may predispose how they interpret and remember complex or ambiguous information. These image-empowering dynamics are not applied evenly to good and bad news. Good news seldom is news. The media—and our own threat-detection system—are attuned to bad-news images—of crime, violence, and economic malaise. When did your news feed last display planes landing safely, hardworking immigrants living peaceably, or honest shoppers paying for purchases? So, for worse or for better, images—of shoplifters or violent immigrants attacking two New York City police officers, or of suffering children—come with the power to grab our attention, write themselves on our memories, touch our hearts, and bias our judgments. To see is to believe. In an era awash in disturbing news images, social media images, and AI-generated fake images, critical thinkers will strive to self-consciously resist being overly swayed by what they see, remembering that—however awful or wonderful—the image is but one data point. They will, ideally, respond with, “Yes, that shoplifting mob was terrible—but how representative is it? Please, show me the data.” P.S. 3/14/2024 afterword on shoplifting data: Brookings reports that "Shoplifting in major cities did not actually spike in the ways that media has reported. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, only 24 cities consistently reported shoplifting data over the past five years, and of those cities, shoplifting decreased in 17. Moreover, looking across all 24 cities, the prevalence of shoplifting in 2023 remained below 2018 and 2019 levels. Even San Francisco—which has often been cited as having a “shoplifting epidemic”—saw a 5% decline in shoplifting between 2019 and 2023." (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Image generated by ChatGPT-4 “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. . . . No, not just for some, but for everyone.” Such was true in 1965, when that Burt Bacharach and Hal David song filled the airwaves. It is truer in today’s often angry world. And it was urgently true at Virginia Tech  on April 16, 2007, when the world was shocked by America’s worst school mass shooting, after a student shot and killed 32 classmates and faculty. In response to the resulting grief and anxiety, Virginia Tech Distinguished Professor E. Scott Geller and his students founded an “Actively Caring For People” (AC4P) Movement. Their aim: to spread “prosocial behavior and interpersonal gratitude across campus and beyond.” AC4P unites two disparate schools of psychology—humanism and applied behavioral science— into a “humanistic behaviorism,” at the heart of which lies the power of positive consequences. To strengthen a behavior, catch someone doing something good and reinforce it. Prioritize giving supportive feedback—praise, gratitude, admiration—for desirable behavior over giving corrective or punitive feedback for undesirable behavior. You nod your head knowingly. This is Psychology 101. Yet few of us routinely experience and practice the power of positive consequences. “Only one in three workers in the U.S. and Germany strongly agree that they received recognition or praise in the past seven days for doing good work,” reports Gallup. “And those who disagree are twice as likely to say they'll quit in the next year. Praise is that powerful.” Expressed praise and gratitude are powerful not only for the recipient, but also for the giver. Geller reports an experiment in which students were prompted to thank their  class instructors “with a sincere statement of gratitude for their positive learning experience.” Not only did every instructor appreciate the affirmation, but so did the initially nervous students: “It made my day so much better.” “Made me feel good and lifted my spirits.” “Feels good to make someone smile.” University of Pennsylvania researchers Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns confirmed the two-way power of positive consequences. In one experiment, they instructed compliment-givers to observe a stranger and find “something about them that you like” (often their hair or clothing), and compliment them on it. Were the compliment-receivers put off, as the compliment-givers expected? To the contrary, the micro praise was warmly received. And it also left the compliment-giver feeling uplifted. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has the idea. As part of his  concerted effort to combat epidemic loneliness, he paused during a recent talk and challenged audiences to take 45 seconds to send a text message of gratitude to someone—and to repeat the exercise on five ensuing days.  Moreover, sometimes exceptional gestures of actively caring for people can produce an unexpected outcome. The late billionaire Amway co-founder Rich DeVos made a regular practice of handwriting unsolicited appreciative notes to people, many of whom he didn’t know. In 2002, I received one such note, and then another, expressing appreciation for my locally publicized efforts to support people with hearing loss (by advocating the installation of hearing aid compatible assistive listening in auditoriums and worship places). In response to his second gratitude note, I invited him out for coffee, where we discussed my vision of a more hearing-accessible America. In response, he directed his philanthropy office to support installations at the Grand Rapids’ DeVos Convention Center and the DeVos Performance Hall, and then to co-fund, with my family foundation, a two-year national “Get in the Hearing Loop” initiative . . . which, along with the engagement of many other hearing advocates, has now led to more than 5,000 installations nationwide, including in several airports. The moral: Our small expressions of kindness and gratitude brighten others’ days. They brighten our own day. And sometimes they lead to good things happening. I therefore challenge myself to thank the barista for being there for us, to applaud my department chair’s supportive leadership, to salute my editors for  enabling and mentoring my writing, to let a colleague know how important her  research is, to look the flight attendant in the eye when saying thank you on departing the plane, to tell the window installer how much I appreciate him doing what I could not do myself. Imagine taking an opposite interpretation of the saying, “If you see something, say something.” Instead of looking for negative behavior to report to the proper authorities, look for positive behavior to recognize and appreciate. Says Geller, “Reciprocal expressions of positive gratitude between supervisors and employees, teachers and students, parents and their adult offspring, police officers and citizens” would be a game-changing step toward creating “an actively caring for people culture.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Credit: Kitsap County, Washington If only folks would smoke less, eat healthier, vote more, achieve more, invest for their future, protect the climate, reduce gun violence, drive safely, and accept diversity. What a happier and healthier world that would be! Psychology mostly offers person-focused answers that reflect Western cultural individualism: Make individuals fearful of smoking. Persuade folks to exercise more and consume less. Remind citizens to vote. Help underachieving students adopt a growth mindset. Nudge employee retirement savings. Offer homeowners feedback on their carbon footprints. Change violence-inclined hearts. Conduct safe-driving campaigns. Mandate employee implicit bias training. Psychologists Nick Chater (University of Warwick) and George Lowenstein (Carnegie Mellon) understand the appeal of changing individuals’ thoughts and actions. They have studied the subtle power of “nudges”—of framing choices that gently induce people to make healthy, productive decisions. Compared with individuals who must choose to opt-in to a retirement savings plan, more people elect the retirement plan when enrolled by default, unless they choose to opt-out. Moreover, few object because everyone remains free to choose. So what’s not to like about this “libertarian paternalism”? Shouldn’t we applaud these efforts to persuade individuals to make healthy, smart choices that enhance their lives and protect their environments? Such individual-focused (“i-frame”) efforts have their place, note Chater and Lowenstein in several papers including a new review. But, they report, efforts to better the world by “bettering” individuals face three problems. 1. Ineffectual impact. Individual-change efforts often are ineffective. Chater and Lowenstein offer one analysis of 126 nudge trials with 23 million people, which found just a 1.4 percent average impact. In most cases, a nudge provides only a small budge. Likewise, note Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues, proponents overstate “weak evidence” that achievement rises after training in growth mindsets and gritty persistence. Even 10 years of deliberate practice is no guarantee of expert performance, they contend. 2. System-focused (s-frame) changes have greater impact. Some examples: Weight control. Despite varied weight-loss strategies, the U.S. obesity rate has tripled since the early 1960s. Individual willpower has been no match for modern high-calorie fast food and exercise-replacing technologies and transportation. What’s more effective are systemic factors—subsidies for healthy food, sugar taxes, and environments designed to support walking and biking. Climate change. Efforts to motivate individual climate support with smart meters, carbon footprint calculators, and extreme weather warnings help a wee bit. But systemic carbon pricing, green building codes, electric vehicle subsidies, and decarbonized power generation accomplish much more. Voting. Reminding individuals to vote helps. But what helps more is systemic support of voting with nearby polling places, short voting lines, and easy mail-in voting. Lessening gun violence. In response to a Maine mass shooting leaving 18 dead and dozens wounded, newly elected U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson offered an i-frame: “The problem is the human heart—it’s not guns.” If only Americans, like folks in Britain (where gun deaths are rare), had purer hearts! If only we could transplant British hearts into American bodies? Or offer mental health treatments to evil-hearted Americans? Alas, the U.S./U.K. gun violence divide is a difference not of human nature but of gun-enabling versus gun-restricting contexts. Reducing opioid addiction. Chater and Lowenstein quote Purdue Pharmaceutical’s Richard Sackler advocating an opioid epidemic i-frame solution: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem.” The epidemic—more than 80,000 U.S. opioid deaths in 2021—arose from easier access to painkilling drugs, for which the s-frame solution is litigation against opioid-promoting pharma companies and more restricted medical access. Minimizing implicit bias. The evidence is clear: Implicit biases are real. Yet efforts to date in implicit bias training for individuals have accomplished little. As my social psychologist colleague Charles Green explains, “Working for racial justice in your organization [requires] addressing unequal power distribution and creating opportunity for all. It is structural, not personal.” 3. “I-frame interventions may draw attention and support from crucial s-frame changes.” A great lesson of social psychology is the “fundamental attribution error”—our inclination to attribute responsibility to individual (i-frame) rather than situational (s-frame) influences. Moreover, i-frame understandings can “crowd out” s-frame understandings, say Chater and Lowenstein: When people consider individual green energy nudges, they become less supportive of alternative green policies such as a carbon taxes. Psychologists’ enthusiasm for i-frame efforts has therefore unwittingly “reduced the impetus for system reform.” No wonder, the researchers argue, “that public relations specialists representing corporate interests have effectively deflected pressure for systemic change by reframing social problems in i-frame terms.” Much as gun manufacturers blame the finger not the trigger, so companies that sell unhealthy foods, fossil fuels, and plastics offer ads that hold individuals responsible for healthy behaviors and environmental protection. In response to Chater and Lowenstein, famed nudge advocates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein each argue that both individual and systemic change matter. “Almost every policy problem has multiple causes,” notes Thaler. “I know of no behavioral economist, policy maker, or journalist who is on the record saying that nudges are a panacea, nor the appropriate tool to address every policy problem.” “Some nudges have quite large impacts,” adds Sunstein, though “for countless problems, nudges are hardly enough. They cannot eliminate poverty, unemployment, and corruption.” And the good news is that when society combines i-frame persuasion with s-frame reforms, real change can happen. From 1954 to 2023 the U.S. smoking rate plummeted from 45 to 12 percent thanks to i-frame cancer education and gruesome cigarette pack images, and also to s-frame cigarette tax increases, clean indoor air laws, tobacco litigation, and enforcement of age restricted sales. Or consider Edmonton, Canada, which combined a safe-driving campaign with traffic system changes— “protected bike lanes, connected sidewalks and high-visibility crosswalks, and ample room for people walking, biking and riding transit, as well as lowering speeds with traffic calming measures, such as road diets, speed humps, leading pedestrian intervals and retiming signal progressions for safer speeds.” The result: A six-year traffic-death decline of 50 percent. Without such system interventions, Dallas, with only 18 percent more people, had 228 traffic-related deaths in 2022. Edmonton, even with its more treacherous winter driving, had only 14. Credit: City of Edmonton https://twitter.com/VisionZeroYEG/status/1392963809136967681 Moreover, when s-frame changes such as traffic congestion zone charges or single-use plastic bag bans are introduced, initial public outcry typically subsides with surprising speed. Even charging people a token amount for single-use plastic bags “is remarkably effective in reducing their use.” If new carbon taxes charged producers and customers for the future environmental costs of climate change—but then redistributed that revenue in other beneficial ways—people would similarly adapt. So, to create a better world, should we seek to persuade, to nudge, to educate, to inspire? Yes! But simultaneously we should, all the more, work to create situations and incentives that will naturally engender sustainable human flourishing. We can better the world by changing individuals and systems. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

It’s a “national youth mental health crisis.” So says U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy of post-2010 soaring teen depression. Today’s teens are sadder, lonelier, and (among girls) more suicide prone. It’s truly a tough time to be a teen. Image generated by Dall-E3 Converging evidence (as I summarized in a prior essay) points to a culprit: long hours on social media (4.8 hours per day, reports a new Gallup teen survey): Correlational evidence reveals not only the simultaneous increase in smartphones and depression, but also an association between daily social media hours and depression risk. Longitudinal studies have found that social media use at Time 1 predicts mental health issues at Time 2. Experiments that randomly assign people to more or less social media exposure verify causation. Quasi-experimental evidence confirms that the rollout of social media in a specific time and place predicts increased mental health issues. In hindsight, it’s understandable: Daily online hours entail less face-to-face time with friends, less sleep, and more comparison of one’s own mundane life with others’ more glamorous and seemingly successful lives. Others, it seems, are having more fun. As Theodore Roosevelt reportedly observed, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Still, this its-social-media claim has dissenters. In the latest of her lucid Substack essays, Jean Twenge—psychology’s leading teen mental health sleuth—identifies a baker’s dozen alternative explanations for today’s teen malaise, each of which she rebuts. To sample a few: Today’s teens are just more transparent about their bad feelings. But behavioral measures, such as emergency room self-harm admissions, closely track the self-report changes. The media/depression correlation is too weak to explain the crisis. But even a small .20 correlation can explain “a good chunk” of the increased depression—with “girls spending 5 hours a day or more on social media [being] twice as likely to be depressed.” The new Gallup survey confirms Twenge’s surmise, reporting that “teens who spend five or more hours per day on social media apps are significantly more likely to report experiencing negative emotions compared with those who spend less than two hours per day.” And Twenge is surely right: “If teens who ate 5 apples a day (vs. none) were three times more likely to be depressed, parents would never let their kids eat that many apples.” It’s because of school shootings. But teen mental health risks have similarly surged in countries without school shootings. It’s due to increased school pressure and homework. But today’s teens, compared to their 1990s counterparts, report spending less time on homework. It’s because their parents are more depressed. But they aren’t. The mental health “crisis of our time” is a teen/young adult crisis. Of the thirteen alternative explanations, Twenge concedes some credibility to but one—“It’s because children and teens have less independence.” Indeed, compared to yesteryear’s free-range children, today’s kids less often roam their neighborhood, play without adult supervision, and spend time with friends. But this trend, Twenge notes, dovetails with their increased online time. Moreover, the trend toward less teen independence predated the upsurge in both online hours and depression. Twenge’s conclusion: “If teens were still seeing friends in person about as much, were sleeping just as much, and were not on social media 5 hours a day—all things traceable to the rise of smartphones and social media, I highly doubt teen depression would have doubled in a decade.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Each year, millions of people, including half a million Americans, experience cardiac arrest. With no discernible heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, they have experienced the medical definition of death, notes Sam Parnia, the NYU Medical Center’s director of cardiopulmonary resuscitation research. Yet, with CPR, some 10 percent survive. Moreover, in Parnia-led interviews of 2060 survivors, about 1 in 10 recalled a “transformative” death experience, which often involved a peaceful out-of-body experience of being drawn toward a light. Two percent recalled “‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation.” Anticipating the next steps in his death-experience research, Parnia invited a dozen of us psychological and medical researchers for a day-long research consultation in 2019. There we offered advice regarding his plans for two unprecedented further studies of recalled experiences of death. In the first study, just published, a cardiac arrest at one of 21 participating hospitals alerted a trained researcher to rush to the patient with a small equipment bag. Without interfering with the resuscitation, the researcher attached an EEG recording cap and headphones, then activated a tablet computer. Across 567 cardiac arrests—defined as no heartbeat or respiration—53 patients (9.3 percent) survived. Twenty-eight did so with sufficient health to be available for volunteer interviews, yielding three take-home findings. First, most of the 53 survivors initially flat-lined on the EEG, but, with continued CPR, recovered brain activity up to 60 minutes later. This result not only encourages first responders to persist, it also suggests the possibility of to-be-recalled cognitive activity in comatose patients. Second, 6 of the 28 interviewed survivors (21 percent) had a “transcendent recalled experience of death.” This roughly accords with prior studies’ finding that 10 to 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report a memorable transcendent conscious experience (which Parnia labels a “recalled experience of death” rather than a “near-death experience”). The 6 survivors reported experiences such as: Separation from the body: “I found myself above my body.” “I knew that I had died.” “I felt so light and free.” “I was high up in the ceiling of the ward looking down upon the bed.” “I could see the doctors and nurses working over me.” “I perceived and saw everything around me, like in 360 degrees.” Perception of heading toward a destination: “I experienced going down a tunnel towards a huge bright shining light.” Reviewing and reevaluating life: “I saw my entire life in great detail.” “I felt so warm, safe, protected and deeply loved.” “My body was dead for two minutes; for me, the time passed as if it were many years.” Third, the study enabled an unprecedented objective test of survivors’ recall accuracy. Many have wondered: Have those who recall death experiences—even of happenings during the resuscitation—experienced hallucinations, such as commonly reported with oxygen deprivation or psychedelic drugs? Or are their out-of-body reports of cardiac arrest events factual and verifiable? Parnia and his three dozen collaborators creatively devised and implemented a plan to put claims of death-experience recollections to the test. As patients underwent CPR, a tablet computer displayed one of ten visual images, such as an animal, a person, or a monument. When later interviewed, could the 28 survivors report the image displayed during their death experience? If not, could they, when shown the ten possible images, guess which image had been displayed? The result: “Nobody identified the visual image." During 5 minutes of the CPR, patients also were repeatedly exposed through the headphone audio to the names of 3 fruits: apple, pear, banana. When the 28 survivors were later asked to guess the 3 fruits, how many correctly recalled them? One person. (A chance result? When a colleague invited his psychology students to name 3 fruits, a similar 2 of 50 named an apple, pear, and banana.) Although these new results are not what Parnia might have wished, his reporting models science at its best: proposing novel ideas, putting them to the test, and then, with integrity, placing the results in the public domain. Sometimes, as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple observed, the outcome is unexpected. “But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” Yet science is a process, and this is but one study, with more to come. At our research consultation, Parnia proposed a second possible method for exposing temporarily brain-dead people to stimuli that might later be recalled. Aortic repair surgery sometimes puts patients under anesthesia, cools the body to 70 degrees, stops the heart, and drains the blood—with flat-lined brain activity for about 40 minutes. Will such functionally dead people sometimes later accurately recall events occurring in the room during their dormancy? What do you think? (Stay tuned: The results of this study are forthcoming, Parnia tells me.) Parnia knows of credible-seeming reports of resuscitated patients displaying accurate recall. including one Britisher who, after being left for dead, later recovered and recounted associated events. So he would not be surprised at some accurate recall. I, however, would be stunned, for two reasons: Parapsychology’s null findings. Parnia emphasizes that his scientific exploration of people’s experiences and recollections of death transitions are not parapsychology. Yet parapsychology experiments have also indicated that mind seemingly does not travel out-of-body. Would-be psychics cannot “see” remote happenings, such as cards being drawn in an adjacent room. Brain-mind science. The entirety of cognitive neuroscience links mind to brain. Every mental event is simultaneously a biological event. No brain, no mind. Nevertheless, the data are not done speaking, and sometimes reality surprises us. As even Miss Marple’s more rationalist counterpart Sherlock Holmes acknowledged, “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Psychological science has offered many surprising—even shocking—findings. And it surely has more to come. Afterword: Some may wonder, does the assumption and the evidence of embodied minds threaten various religious understandings of human nature and hopes for life after bodily death? Not at all, argue cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves (founder of Britain’s top-rated psychology department) and developmental psychologist Thomas Ludwig. They reflect on the deep implications of brain-mind science in their recent book, Psychological Science and Christian Faith, and offer an alternative to a death-denying dualism. A disembodied immortal soul is Plato’s thinking, they argue, and not the assumption of biblical religion. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Many Americans are indifferent about marriage. In a 2019 Pew survey, 55 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, and nearly half of all adults, agreed that couples who want to stay together are “just as well off if [they] decide not to marry.” In 2007 to 2009 University of Michigan surveys, high school seniors expressed even less esteem for marriage, with only about a third agreeing that “most people will have fuller and happier lives if they choose legal marriage rather than staying single or just living with someone.” Yet it’s no secret among those of us who study such things that marriage is a major predictor of health and human flourishing. See, for example, these General Social Survey data which I extracted from more than 64,000 randomly sampled Americans since 1972 (showing, also, a COVID-related 2021 morale dip). So does marriage—what anthropologist Joseph Henrich says “may be the most primeval of human institutions”—make for happiness? Before assuming such, critical thinkers should wonder about two other possibilities. First, does marriage (especially when compared to divorce) predict health and happiness merely because it compares those in surviving happy versus failed marriages? To see if getting married predicts long-term health and well-being across all new marriages, Harvard epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele, with Ying Chen and colleagues, harvested data from 11,830 nurses who, in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, were unmarried in 1989. They identified those who married versus those who didn’t in the next four years, and then tracked their lives for 25 years. Even when including those who later divorced, those who had married were, 25 years later, healthier and less likely to have died. They were also happier, more purpose-filled, and less depressed and lonely. Ah, but what about the second possibility: Were the to-be-married nurses simply happier, healthier, and richer to begin with? Did happiness à marriage rather than marriage à happiness? Happy people do enjoy better and more stable relationships. Depressed people tend to be irritable, not fun to live with, and vulnerable to divorce. So surely happiness does predict marriage and marital stability. Yet even after controlling for preexisting health and well-being, reports VanderWeele, marriage remains “an important pathway to human flourishing. It increases physical health, mental health, happiness, and purpose.” And not just for straight folks, I would add (as Letha Dawsom Scanzoni and I explained in our 2005 book, A Christian Case for Gay Marriage). Marriage is one effective way to help fulfill the deep human need that Aristotle long ago recognized—the need to belong. Marriage mostly (though not always) works, VanderWeele suspects, because marriage provides companionship. It boosts health and longevity. And it offers sexual satisfaction. Thus, he reasons, societies’ tax, parental leave, and child-support policies should incentivize marriage. And marriage enrichment and counseling should be widely available. Indeed, mindful that all healthy close relationships support our human need to belong, society should support varied opportunities for companionship and attachment. Our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our worship places, our recreational facilities, and our schools can all work at being places of supportive connection—places where you and I feel like we belong. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) Photo credit: Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank/Getty Images ... View more