Artificial intelligence—the long-promised computer simulation of human intelligence—has arrived. A striking new example: On December 1st, OpenAI released a chatbot, ChatGPT, that you can play with here. I was introduced to this by one of my children, a computer systems engineer, who is mightily impressed (and not normally so wow’d by new technology that impresses me). He illustrated with a couple examples of his own: In this next example, the Sherlock joke, though wonderful, is familiar. But consider ChatGPT’s answer to the follow-up question: Impressive! Then I challenged Chat GPT to write some psychological science. I asked it to write me an essay explaining the difference between classical and operant conditioning. Its response would have merited an A grade from any instructor. Then I reset the conversation and asked it the same question again, and it responded with a new and equally impressive essay. Then I gave it a harder challenge (seeing if it understands a concept that a respected public intellectual and his editor miscast): Kudos to ChatGPT, which grasps that oft-misunderstood psychological concept. I also wondered if students could ask ChatGPT to improve their writing before handing in a paper: The future is here. For ideas on how you can explore and play with ChatGPT, or with OpenAI Playground, Ethan Mollick offers a variety of possibilities here. For crisp synopses of AI's history and future, see here. Or see here how Michelle Huang “ trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries" so that she could "engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child.'" And then consider: How might the new AI enable creative thinking? Tutoring? Cheating? Paper or essay grading? Conversing about important topics?   (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.) Image credit:  baona /E+/Getty Images ... View more

Last week, I spent 3 hours under general anesthesia (while receiving a cochlear implant). Being a curious psychological scientist, and knowing my anesthesiologist, I seized the opportunity for a simple memory test. First, the reason for my curiosity: A complete night’s sleep serves to process our day’s experiences for permanent memory storage. To sleep well is to remember. Nevertheless, the initial neural recording (the “encoding”) of memories takes a bit of waking time. Rats in experiments will therefore forget what they’ve just experienced if their memory formation gets interrupted with an electric current passed through their brain. Humans are similarly amnesic for what they experience in the moments before receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). And, as I’ve explained in my psychology texts, “Football players and boxers momentarily knocked unconscious typically have no memory of events just before the knockout.” Would the same be true for someone falling asleep, or for someone lapsing into a drug-induced temporary coma? Are you amnesic for what you were thinking or experiencing just before nodding off? To enable my experiencing an answer, my anesthesiologist alerted me to his drug administration, indicating that I would soon experience mental lights out. That was my signal to start counting the seconds out loud: “1, 2, 3, . . .” knape/E+/Getty Images On awakening 3.5 hours later, I remembered the trip into the operating room and onto the operating bed. I remembered chatting with the attending staff. I remembered the anesthesiologist connecting the bodily sensors . . . but nothing thereafter. In reality, I learned on awakening, my unremembered conscious engagement continued for about 3 minutes, including my counting to 16. A segment of my life—fully experienced but unrecorded—had vanished into the mind’s black hole. It was a weird experience. But weirder yet is what I have underappreciated until now: that I—and you—experience this fascinating phenomenon daily. An anesthesia-induced coma is not sleep (and may also be complicated by an amnesic drug effect). Nevertheless, last month when I proposed my anticipated quasi experiment to Baylor University sleep researcher Michael Scullin, he predicted my experience. The expected memory loss, he said, would be an example of (a new concept to me) mesograde amnesia. [i] We routinely but unknowingly experience mesograde amnesia as our immediate pre-sleep experience falls into oblivion. The phenomenon was demonstrated in a 1997 experiment by James Wyatt and colleagues: People failed to recall words spoken to them shortly before an EEG recording detected their transition to sleep. (The memory loss—from up to 4 minutes before sleep commenced—was, like mine on the operating table, surprisingly long.) Weirder yet, as Scullin further explained, sleep-induced mesograde amnesia implies that you and I will typically not remember our short (1- to 4-minute) awakenings during our night—a phenomenon also experimentally confirmed. Thus, university students who send a text message while briefly awake will, the next morning, often have no memory of doing so. And sleep apnea patients will experience multiple brief awakenings without remembering them. Mesograde amnesia explains one of my own recent sleep experiences. As I slipped into bed alone on a recent warm night, I pushed the blanket down to my feet. The room cooled during the night, and in the morning I awoke to find the blanket pulled up—with my having no memory of how that happened. Had my fairy godmother noticed my chill? Scullin’s memory tutorial also led to my wondering about an evening after-work experience I have at least weekly—briefly nodding off while watching a British mystery. When I snap back to consciousness, I typically need to replay about 10 minutes for which I have no memory. I’ve assumed that the program gap represents a 10-minute nap. In reality, I now realize, 4 minutes of mesograde amnesia plus 6 minutes of napping could account for the missing 10 minutes. What’s true for the sleep-experiment participants, and for me, is also true of you. Your falling asleep—at the beginning of your sleeping or napping, and again during your interrupted sleep—makes you amnesic for your immediately preceding life experience. Over time, your mesograde amnesia experiences add up to hours of your conscious life that have vanished, having gone unrecorded on your cerebral hard drive. Count it as one more example of our wonder-full lives. (For more such wonders, see my just-published How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. 😊 ) [i] Most amnesia is either anterograde (trouble making new memories) or retrograde (trouble accessing old memories). Mesograde (middle grade) amnesia is not clearly due to either the inability to store a new memory or retrieve the memory once stored. Some say it is produced by memory-disruptive bursts of hippocampal activity during the wake-to-sleep transition. ... View more

As President Biden approaches his 80th birthday and contemplates seeking reelection, many wonder: Does someone entering their ninth life decade have—and will they sustain—the energy, mental acuity, and drive to excel? From its early 2022 national survey (with ABC News), the Washington Post reported that “54 percent say they do not think Biden has the mental sharpness it takes to serve as president, while 40 percent say he does.” Mr. President. I empathize. I, too, turned 80 this fall. So on behalf of you and all of us octogenarians, let me shine the light of psychological science on our capacities. First, people should understand that the more we age, the less age predicts our abilities. Knowing that James is 8 and Jamal is 18 tells us much about their differences. Not so with two adults who similarly differ by a decade. Many a 80-year-old can outrun, outbike, and outthink a 70-year-old neighbor. It’s true that we 80s folks have some diminishing abilities. Like you, Mr. President, I can still jog—but not as fast or far. The stairs we once bounded up have gotten steeper, the newsprint smaller, others’ voices fainter. And in the molasses of our brain, memories bubble more slowly to the surface: We more often experience brain freezes as we try to retrieve someone’s name or the next point we were about to make. Hence your legendary gaffs. Yet with a lifetime’s accumulation of antibodies, we also suffer fewer common colds and flus than do our grandchildren. Physical exercise, which you and I regularly do, not only sustains our muscles, bones, and hearts; it also stimulates neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells and neural connections. The result, when compared with sedentary folks like your predecessor, is better memory, sharper judgment, and minimized cognitive decline. Moreover, we either retain or grow three important strengths: Crystallized intelligence. We can admit to experiencing what researchers document: Our fluid intelligence—our ability to reason and react speedily—isn’t what it used to be. We don’t solve math problems as quickly or learn new technologies as readily, and we’re no match for our grandkids at video games. But the better news is that our crystallized intelligence—our accumulated knowledge and the ability to apply it—crests later in life. No wonder many historians, philosophers, and artists have produced their most noteworthy work later in life than have mathematicians and scientists. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (“Grandma Moses”) took up painting in her 70s. At age 89, Frank Lloyd Wright designed New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. At age 94, my psychologist colleague Albert Bandura has just co-authored yet another article. Perhaps our most important work is also yet ahead? Wisdom. With maturity, people’s social skills often increase. They become better able to take multiple perspectives, to offer helpful sagacity amid conflicts, and to appreciate the limits of their knowledge. The wisdom to know when we know a thing and when we do not is born of experience. Working at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, psychologist Paul Baltes and his colleagues developed wisdom tests that assess people’s life knowledge and judgments about how to conduct themselves in complex circumstances. Wisdom “is one domain in which some older individuals excel,” they report. “In youth we learn, in age we understand,” observed the 19th-century novelist Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach. Stable emotionality. As the years go by, our feelings mellow. Unlike teens, who tend to rebound up from gloom or down from elation within an hour, our highs are less high and our lows less low. As we age, we find ourselves less often feeling excited or elated. But our lives are also less often disrupted by depression. In later life we are better able to look beyond the moment. Compliments produce less elation; criticisms, less despair. At the outset of my career, praise and criticism would inflate and deflate my head. A publication might have me thinking I was God’s new gift to my profession, while a rejection led me to ponder moving home to join the family business. With experience, both acclaim and reproach become mere iotas of additional feedback atop a mountain of commentary. Thus, when responding to the day’s slings and arrows, we can better take a big-picture, long-term perspective. Mr. President, I understand these things, as I suspect you do, too. When in my 60s, I assumed—wrongly—that by age 80, I would no longer have the energy to read, to think, to write. Instead, I take joy in entering my office each day at a place called Hope. I relish learning something new daily. I find delight in making words march up a screen. And I’m mellower, as it takes more to make me feel either ecstatic or despondent. And you? Will you, as a newly minted octogenarian, show your age? Yes, that jog up to the podium will surely slow. You will likely more often misspeak or forget a point. Your sleep will be more interrupted. But you will also benefit from the crystallized intelligence that comes with your lifetime’s experience. You can harness the wisdom that comes with age. And you can give us the gift of emotional maturity that will enable you, better than most, to navigate the “battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses.” ------------ *This essay updates a 2020 essay published at TalkPsych.com (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.) ... View more

This moment is both the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will henceforth be. To live is to age. But which age tends to offer the best of life, and which the worst? Should we anticipate our mid- or later-life future with hope, or with dread? When asked which life eras are the unhappiest, some say it’s the teen years: mood swings, social anxieties, parental demands, peer pressures, and career worries. Some say it’s later life, with its diminished occupational purpose, stamina, recall, and social networks—and with the Grim Reaper looming ever closer. Still others say it’s the in-between “midlife crisis” years, when people (traditionally referring to men) realize their career fantasies are not being realized, their marriage is ho-hum, and their bodies are aging. “While Diana puts on a brave face,” declared a 1991 People magazine cover, “a brooding [42-year-old] Prince Charles grapples with a midlife crisis and retreats to his old girlfriends.” Three decades ago, when authoring The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy—and Why, I surmised that, apart from happy and stressful life events, no time of life was notably happier or unhappier. Consider Ronald Inglehart’s 1991 aggregated worldwide big data: Follow-up research confirmed the life span stability of well-being, with Robert McCrae, Paul Costa, and colleagues finding “no evidence” of instability in midlife men and women, including one study with 10,000 participants. Moreover, when the Gallup Organization (in data shared with me in 2010) asked 142,682 people worldwide to rate their lives on a ladder, from 0 (“the worst possible life”) to 10 (“the best possible life”), age gave no clue to life satisfaction: Andrew Jebb and colleagues analyzed more recent Gallup data from 1.7 million people in 166 countries, and although they also found claims of a U-shaped happiness trend, they similarly observed that a midlife dip is “overblown.” Any age differences, said the researchers, are “trivial.” Amassing similar, newer cross-sectional and longitudinal data similar, University of Alberta psychologist Nancy Galambos and her collaborators (see here and here) agree: “We cannot conclude that there is a universal U shape in happiness.” But hold on. Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower and his colleagues (here and here) beg to differ, citing more than 300 studies, with data from 146 countries, that do find a U shape: “The midlife low occurs in the mid-40s.” Moreover, new data lend credence to a U-shaped happiness trajectory. A mostly British research team led by economist Osea Giuntella notes that prior research, being mostly cross-sectional, has compared people of differing ages at one point in time. When researchers compare different cohorts (groups born at different times), they also are comparing people raised in different economic, political, cultural, and educational circumstances. The Giuntella team instead harvested international data following some 500,000 people through time. Their conclusion? The midlife crisis is real: “Midlife is a time when people disproportionately take their own lives, have trouble sleeping, are clinically depressed, spend time thinking about suicide, feel life is not worth living, find it hard to concentrate, forget things, feel overwhelmed in their workplace, suffer from disabling headaches, and become dependent on alcohol.” When examining the newest Gallup World Poll survey data, Harvard epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele and his co-researchers similarly “found the classic U-shaped pattern with life evaluation being higher for younger people and older people (up through about age 80) and lower in middle life.” The Blanchflower, Giuntella, and VanderWeele findings have changed me from a confident skeptic of U-shaped life span happiness to a curious agnostic, but still believing the age effect to be modest compared to bigger happiness predictors, such as personality traits, social support, and sense of life purpose, meaning, and hope. What’s more certain and concerning is a dramatic decline in psychological well-being among younger Americans. The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented soaring of serious depression among U.S. teens and young adults. In a large survey, VanderWeele’s team similarly found not a U-shape life curve but rather lower well-being among younger Americans; or, said differently, better well-being among older Americans. So be kind to the young adults in your life (possibly yourself). And consider more good news. As Nathan DeWall and I documented in Psychology, 13th Edition, older adults become more attentive to positive news, with their brains less responsive to negative events. They experience fewer relationship stresses, including less anxiety and anger. They become more trusting. And they become more likely to remember their lives’ good rather than bad events. In later life, we also become more emotionally stable, our emotional highs less high, our lows less low. Things that used to irritate—slow traffic, poor restaurant service, a friend’s snub—no longer seem like such big deals. With age, compliments trigger less elation and criticisms less despair, as each become mere iotas of additional feedback atop a lifetime of accumulated praise and reproach. “At 70,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that ‘this, too, shall pass!’” Ergo, despite recent indications of a slight midlife dip, people’s happiness and life satisfaction is remarkably stable—with the striking exception being the dramatic recent rise in teen/young adult depression. But the best news is that later life is not to be feared. For most older adults, life seems, on balance, to be, and to have been, mostly good. (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.) ... View more

Reading my discipline’s discoveries leaves me sometimes surprised and frequently fascinated by our mind and its actions. In hopes of sharing those fascinations with the wider world, I’ve authored How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind, which I’m pleased to announce is published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Its 40 bite-sized essays shine the light of psychological science on our everyday lives. I take the liberty of sharing this with you, dear readers of this wee blog, partly because the book is also a fund-raiser for the teaching of high school psychology. (All author royalties are pledged to support psychology teaching—half to the American Psychological Foundation to support Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools, and half to the Association for Psychological Science Fund for the Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science.) My hope is that some of you—or perhaps some of your students (a Christmas gift idea for their parents?)—might enjoy these brief and playful musings half as much as I enjoyed creating them. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" ~ Donald J. Trump, January 23, 2016 The conservative sage and former George W. Bush speech writer Peter Wehner is aghast at what his U.S. Republican Party has come to accept: Republican officials showed fealty to Trump despite his ceaseless lying and dehumanizing rhetoric, his misogyny and appeals to racism, his bullying and conspiracy theories. No matter the offense, Republicans always found a way to look the other way, to rationalize their support for him, to shift their focus to their progressive enemies. As Trump got worse, so did they. Indeed, in the wake of misappropriated top-secret documents, civil suits over alleged business frauds, and the revelations of the January 6 House Select Committee, Donald Trump’s aggregated polling data approval average increased from late July’s 37 percent to today’s 41 percent, a virtual tie with President Biden. Democrats join Wehner in being incredulous at Trump’s resilient approval rating, even as MAGA Republicans are similarly incredulous at Biden’s public approval. In politics as in love, we are often amazed at what others have chosen. Psychological science offers some explanations for why people might be drawn, almost cult-like, to charismatic autocratic leaders on the right or left. Perceived threats and frustrations fuel hostilities. Punitive, intolerant attitudes, which form the core of authoritarian inclinations, surface during times of change and economic frustration. During recessions, anti-Black prejudice has increased. In countries worldwide, low income years and low income people manifest most anti-immigrant prejudice. In the Netherlands and Britain, times of economic or terrorist threat have been times of increased support for right-wing authoritarians and anti-immigrant policies. In the U.S., MAGA support rides high among those with less than a college education living amid high income inequality. The illusory truth effect: Mere repetition feeds belief. In experiments, repetition has a strange power. It makes statements such as ““A galactic year takes 2500 terrestrial years”” seem truer. Hear a made-up smear of a political opponent over and over and it becomes more believable. Adolf Hitler, George Orwell, and Vladimir Putin all have understood the persuasive power of repetitive propaganda. So have Barack Obama (“If they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again . . . people start believing it”) and Donald Trump (“If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you”). Conflicts feed social identities. We are social animals. Our ancestral history prepares us to protect ourselves in groups, to cheer for our groups, even to kill or die for our groups. When encountering strangers, we’re primed to make a quick judgment: friend or foe?—and to be less wary of those who look and sound like us. Conflicts—from sporting events to elections to wars—strengthen our social identity: our sense of who we are and who they are. In the U.S., White nationalist rallies serve to solidify and sustain aggrieved identities. Still, I hear you asking: Why do people, once persuaded, persist in supporting people they formerly would have shunned, given shocking new revelations? In just-published research, Duke University psychologists Brenda Yang, Alexandria Stone, and Elizabeth Marsh repeatedly observed a curious “asymmetry in belief revision”: People will more often come to believe a claim they once thought false than to unbelieve something they once thought true. The Duke experiments focused on relative trivia, such as whether Michelangelo’s statue of David is located in Venice. But consider two real life examples of people’s reluctance to unbelieve. Sustained Iraq War support. The rationale for the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq was that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was accumulating weapons of mass destruction. At the war’s beginning, Gallup reported that only 38 percent of Americans said the war was justified if there were no such weapons. Believing such would be found, 4 in 5 people supported the war. When no WMDs were found, did Americans then unbelieve in the war? Hardly. Fifty-eight percent still supported the war even if there were no such weapons (with new rationales, such as the supposed liberation of oppressed Iraqi people). Sustained Trump support. In 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute asked U.S. voters if “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Only 3 in 10 White evangelical Protestants concurred that politicians’ personal lives have no bearing on their public roles. But by July of 2017, after supporting Donald Trump, 7 in 10 White evangelicals were willing to separate the public and personal. It was a “head-spinning reversal,” said the PRRI CEO. Moreover, despite tales of Trump’s sexual infidelity, dishonesty, and other broken Ten Commandments, White evangelicals’ support of Trump continues. Once someone or something is embraced, unbelieving—letting go—is hard. In Stanley Milgram’s famed obedience experiments, people capitulated in small steps—first apparently delivering a mild 15 volts, then gradually delivering stronger and stronger supposed electrical shocks—after progressively owning and justifying their actions. Each repugnant act made the next easier, and also made the commitment more resilient. “With each moral compromise,” observes Peter Wehner, “the next one—a worse one—becomes easier to accept.” In small steps, conscience mutates. Cognitive dissonance subsides as people rationalize their commitment. Confirmation bias sustains belief as people selectively engage kindred views. Fact-free chatter within one’s echo chamber feeds group polarization. And so, after believing in a would-be autocrat—after feeling left behind, after hearing repeated lies, and after embracing a political identity—it becomes hard, so hard, to unbelieve.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

Language evolves. The fourteenth century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived but 25 generations ago, would struggle to communicate with us. Word meanings change. Yesterday’s evangelicals who led the abolition of Britain’s slave trade would wince at a particular subset of today’s American evangelicals—Trump acolytes who are infrequent worshippers, and for whom “evangelical” has become more of a cultural than a religious identity. In political discourse, a “socialist” becomes not just a person who favors public-owned industries, but someone who advocates reduced inequality and a stronger social safety net. And “critical race theory,” a once obscure idea in law journals that has been nonexistent in social psychology’s prejudice chapters and books, has been distorted and inflated as a way to malign efforts to ameliorate racism and teach real history. Similar concept creep has happened in the mental health world, observes University of Melbourne psychologist Nick Haslam. Concepts with a precise meaning have expanded to capture other or less extreme phenomena. Examples: “Addiction” (compulsive substance use) has expanded to include money-depleting gambling, sexual fixations, time-draining gaming, and even excessive shopping and social media use, as in: “I’m addicted to my phone.” Thus, between 1970 and 2020, the proportion of academic psychology abstracts mentioning “addiction” has increased sixfold. “Abuse” still refers to intentional physical harm or inappropriate sexual contact, but in everyday use may now include neglectful omissions and painful mistreatments: hurtful teasing, distressing affronts, or overwrought parents screaming at their children. Accompanying this semantic inflation, the proportion of post-1970 psychology abstracts mentioning “abuse” has multiplied seven times over. “Trauma” initially referred to physical injury (as in traumatic brain injury), then expanded to encompass horrific emotional traumas (rape, natural disaster, wartime combat, torture), and now has been inflated to include stressful life experiences within the range of normal human experience—to job loss, serious illness, and relationship breakups, and even, reports Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, to wisdom tooth extraction, enduring obnoxious jokes, and the normal birthing of a healthy child. So, no surprise, over the past half century the proportion of psychology abstracts mentioning “trauma” has increased tenfold. Haslam offers other concept-creep examples, such as broadening the “prejudice” of yesterday’s bigotry to include today’s subtler but persistent “implicit biases” and “micro aggressions.” And we could extend his list. ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and the DSM-5’s new “prolonged grief disorder” all refer to genuine pathologies that have been broadened to include many more people. At least some of yesterday’s normally rambunctious boys, easily distracted adults, socially awkward people, and understandably bereaved parents or spouses are now assigned a psychiatric label and offered mental health or drug therapies. This psychologization or psychiatrization of human problems serves to expand the mental health and pharmacology industries, entailing both benefits and costs. Concept creep does have benefits. It represents an expansion of our circle of moral concern. As vicious violence, appalling adversity, and blatant bigotry have subsided in Western cultures, albeit with horrendous exceptions, we have become more sensitive to lesser but real harms—to upsetting maltreatment, dysfunctional compulsions, and toxic systemic biases. Progressive and empathic people, being sensitive to harm-doing, mostly welcome the expanded concepts of harm and victimization But concept creep, Haslam argues, also risks casting more and more people as vulnerable and fragile—as, for example, helpless trauma victims, rather than as potentially resilient creatures. “I am beginning to think that our world is in a constant state of trauma,” writes one psychotherapist/columnist. “Living with trauma, PTSD, unregulated depression and anxiety is almost the norm these days.” As is common in many professions, mental health workers may sometimes overreach to broaden their reach and client base: “Your hurt was an abuse, and you need me to help you heal.” Concept creep also risks trivializing big harms, Haslam notes, by conflating them with lesser harms: “If everyday sadness becomes ‘depression’ and everyday stressors become ‘traumas’ then those ideas lose their semantic punch.” If more and more pet-loving people seek to travel with their “emotional support” companions, the end result may be restricted access for those for whom companion animals serve a vital function. “Many traumas do indeed have severe and lasting effects that must not be minimized,” Haslam and co-author Melanie McGrath emphasize. “However, as the concept of trauma stretches to encompass fewer extreme experiences, the tendency to interpret marginal or ambiguous events as traumas is apt to promote hopelessness, submission, and passivity in response to challenges that might be overcome better if placed in a different interpretive frame.” The bottom line: Addiction, abuse, and trauma are genuine sources of human suffering. But where should we draw the line in defining and treating them? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

As we approach the start of a new semester, psychology teachers can use this 5-minute animation written and narrated by David Myers to help students effectively learn and remember course material: https://t.co/24UIFUnWFy  ... View more

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” ~ Anonymous proverb Character education’s greatest task is instilling a mark of maturity: the willingness to delay gratification. In many studies, those who learn to restrain their impulses—by electing larger-later rather than smaller-now rewards—have gone on to become more socially responsible, academically successful, and vocationally productive. The ability to delay gratification, to live with one eye on the future, also helps protect people from the ravages of gambling, delinquency, and substance abuse. In one of psychology’s famous experiments, Walter Mischel gave 4-year-olds a choice between one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows a few minutes later. Those who chose two later marshmallows went on to have higher college graduation rates and incomes, and fewer addiction problems. Although a recent replication found a more modest effect, the bottom line remains: Life successes grow from the ability to resist small pleasures now in favor of greater pleasures later. Marshmallows—and much more—come to those who wait. The marshmallow choice parallels a much bigger societal choice: Should we prioritize today, with policies that keep energy prices and taxes low? Or should we prioritize the future, by investing now to spare us and our descendants the costs of climate change destruction? “Inflation is absolutely killing many, many people,” said U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, in explaining his wariness of raising taxes to fund climate mitigation. Manchin spoke for 50 fellow senators in prioritizing the present. When asked to pay more now to incentivize electric vehicles and fund clean energy, their answer, on behalf of many of their constituents, is no. But might the cost of inaction be greater? The White House Office of Management and Budget projects an eventual $2 trillion annual federal budget cost of unchecked climate change. If, as predicted, climate warming increases extreme weather disasters, if tax revenues shrink with the economy’s anticipated contraction, and if infrastructure and ecosystem costs soar, then are we being penny-wise and pound-foolish? With the worst yet to come, weather and climate disasters have already cost the U.S. a trillion dollars over the past decade, with the total rising year by year. nattrass  /E+/Getty Images The insurance giant Swiss Re also foresees a $23 trillion global economy cost by 2050 if governments do not act now. The Big 4 accounting firm Deloitte is even more apprehensive, projecting a $178 trillion global cost by 2070. What do you think: Are our politicians—by seizing today’s single economic marshmallow—displaying a mark of immaturity: the inability to delay gratification for tomorrow’s greater good? A related phenomenon, temporal discounting, also steers their political judgments. Even mature adults tend to discount the future by valuing today’s rewards—by preferring, say, a dollar today over $1.10 in a month. Financial advisors therefore plead with their clients to do what people are not disposed to do . . . to think long-term—to capitalize on the power of compounding by investing in their future. Alas, most of us—and our governments—are financially nearsighted. We prioritize present circumstances over our, and our children’s, future. And so we defend our current lifestyle by opposing increased gas taxes and clean-energy mandates. The western U.S. may be drying up, sea water creeping into Miami streets, and glaciers and polar ice retreating, but even so, only “1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country, far behind worries about inflation and the economy.” The best time to plant a tree, or to have invested in climate protection, was 20 years ago. The worst time is 20 years from now, when severe climate destruction will be staring us in the eye. As we weigh our present against our future, psychological science reminds our political representatives, and all of us, of a profoundly important lesson: Immediate gratification makes today easy, but tomorrow hard. Delayed gratification makes today harder, but tomorrow easier. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

With 45,000+ annual U.S. firearm deaths (123 per day, from homicide, suicide, and accidents), America has a gun problem, of which the recent Buffalo, Uvalde, and Highland Park mass killings are horrific examples. In response, we often hear that the problem is not America’s 400 million guns but its people. “We have a serious problem involving families, involving drugs, involving mental health in this country,” asserted Colorado congressional representative Ken Buck. “We have become a less safe society generally. Blaming the gun for what’s happening in America is small-minded.” To protect against mass killings by 18-year-olds, as in Buffalo and Uvalde, we are told that we don’t need to match the minimum age for assault rifle purchase, still 18 after the new gun safety act, with the age for beer purchase, 21. We don’t need to train and license gun owners as we do drivers. We don’t need safe-storage laws or restrictions on large-capacity magazines. Instead, we need to fix the problem perceived by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre: evil people. To solve the gun violence problem, we need better people, enabled by commendable social changes: more married fathers, less pornography, fewer violent video games. And most importantly, we’re told, we need to deal with mass killers’ mental sickness. “People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings,” observed former U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. While president, Donald Trump agreed: “When you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution.” Mass killers, he later added, are “mentally ill monsters.” However, reality intrudes. As I documented in an earlier essay, most mentally ill people are nonviolent, most violent criminals and mass shooters have not been diagnosed as mentally ill, and rare events such as mass shootings are almost impossible to predict. As much as we psychologists might appreciate the ostensible high regard, today’s psychological science lacks the presumed powers of discernment. If mental-health assessments cannot predict individual would-be killers, three other factors (in addition to short-term anger and alcohol effects) do offer some predictive power: Demographics. As the recent massacres illustrate, most violent acts are committed by young males. The late psychologist David Lykken made the point memorably: “We could avoid two-thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.” Past behavior. It’s one of psychology’s maxims: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. The best predictor of future GPA is past GPA. The best predictor of future employee success is past employee success. The best predictor of future class attendance or smoking or exercise is, yes, the recent past. Likewise, recent violent acts are a predictor of violent acts. Guns. Compared to Canada, the United States has 3.5 times the number of guns per person and 8.2 times the gun homicide rate. Compared to England, the U.S. has 26 times as many guns per person—and 103 times the gun homicide rate. To check U.S. state variations, I plotted each state’s gun-in-home rate with its gun homicide rate. As you can see, the correlation is strongly positive, ranging from (in the lower left) Massachusetts, where 15 percent of homes have a gun, to Alaska, where 65 percent of homes have a gun—and where the homicide rate is 7 times greater. Of these three predictor variables, gun policy is one that, without constraining hunters’ rights, society can manage with some success: When nations restrict gun access, the result has been fewer guns in civilian hands, which enables fewer impulsive gun uses and fewer planned mass shootings. Many people nevertheless believe that, as Senator Ted Cruz surmised after the Uvalde shooting, “What stops arms bad guys is armed good guys.” Never mind that in one analysis of 433 active shooter attacks on multiple people—armed lay citizens took out active shooters in only 12 instances. Many more—a fourth of such attacks—ended in a shooter suicide. Moreover, if the answer to bad guys with guns is to equip more good guys with guns, then why are states with more armed good guys more homicidal? What explains the state-by-state guns/homicide correlation? Are the more murderous Alaskans (and Alabamians and Louisianans) really more “evil” or “mentally ill”? Or is human nature essentially the same across the states, with the pertinent difference being the weapons? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

“Donald Trump . . . unleashed something, that is so much bigger than he is now or ever will be: He pushed the limits of acceptability, hostility, aggression and legality beyond where other politicians dared push them.” ~ Charles Blow, 2022 This is a venomous time. From 2015 to 2019, FBI-reported U.S. hate crimes increased 25 percent. Social psychologists have therefore wondered: Is this increase, and the accompanying resurgence of white nationalism, fed by Donald Trump’s rhetoric—his saying, for example, that the torch-carrying Charlottesville white nationalists included some “very fine people”? Or did the president’s tweets and speeches merely reflect existing prejudices, which, in a few disturbed individuals, fed hateful acts? Simply put: Do political leaders’ words merely voice common prejudices and grievances? Or do they also amplify them? They do both. Leaders play to their audiences. And when prominent leaders voice prejudices, it then becomes more socially acceptable for their followers to do likewise. When disdain for those of another race or religion or sexual orientation becomes socially acceptable, insults or violence may ensue. Social norms mutate, and norms matter. A new Nature Human Behaviour report of 13 studies of 10,000+ people documents the norm-changing influence of President Trump’s rhetoric. During his presidency, “Explicit racial and religious prejudice significantly increased amongst Trump’s supporters,” say the report’s authors, social psychologists Benjamin Ruisch (University of Kent) and Melissa Ferguson (Yale University). Some of their studies followed samples of Americans from 2014 to 2017, ascertaining their attitudes toward Muslims (whether they agreed, for example, that “Islam is quite primitive”). As seen on this 7-point scale of anti-Muslim prejudice, Trump supporters’ anti-Muslim sentiments significantly increased. But what about those for whom Donald Trump was not a positive role model? Would they become less imitative? Might they be like those observed in one study of jaywalking, in which pedestrians became less likely to jaywalk after observing someone they didn’t admire (a seeming low-status person) doing so? Indeed, Trump opponents exhibited decreased Muslim prejudice over time. Moreover, Ruisch and Ferguson found, “Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in [anti-Muslim] prejudice” even after controlling for 39 other variables, such as income, age, gender, and education. Trump support also predicted increases in other forms of prejudice, such as racial animus (“Generally, Blacks are not as smart as Whites are”) and anti-immigrant attitudes. Pew national surveys similarly find that the attitude gap between those voting for and against Trump widened from 2016 to 2020 (see the 2020 data below). The 57 percent of Democrat voters who, in 2016, agreed that it’s more difficult to be a Black American than a White American increased to 74 percent in 2020, illustrating the general historical trend toward more egalitarian attitudes. But no such positive shift occurred among Trump supporters, whose agreement with the concept of Black disadvantage actually declined slightly, from 11 percent in 2016 to 9 percent in 2020. Ruisch and Ferguson see shifting social norms at work. “Trump supporters perceive that it has become more acceptable to express prejudice since Trump’s election . . . and the perception that prejudice is more acceptable predicts greater personal prejudice among Trump supporters.” Their conclusion aligns with the earlier finding of a political science research team—“that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.” The happier news is that political leaders’ speech can work for better as well as for worse. In one month during 2021, a Stanford research team randomly assigned 1014 counties with low vaccination rates to receive 27-second YouTube ads (via TV, website, or app). Each featured Donald Trump’s expressed support for Covid vaccinations. After a Fox News anchor’s introduction, shown below, clips featured the Trumps getting the vaccine, with Ivanka saying, “Today I got the shot. I hope you do too” and Donald explaining “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it.” At a cost of about $100,000, the add was viewed 11.6 million times by 6 million people. When compared with 1018 control counties, the experimental treatment counties experienced an additional 104,036 vaccinations, for an additional cost of less than $1 each. The simple lesson: Under the influence of powerful leaders, social norms and behaviors can change. And social norms matter—sometimes for worse, but sometimes for better. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

“All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans.” ~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1926 Among psychology’s most reliable phenomena is the power of mere repetition. It comes in two forms, each replicated by psychological research many times in many ways. Repetition Fosters Fondness We humans are naturally disposed to prefer what’s familiar (and usually safe) and to be wary of what’s unfamiliar (and possibly dangerous). Social psychologists led by the late Robert Zajonc exposed the power and range of this mere exposure effect. In study after study, the more frequently they showed people unfamiliar nonsense syllables, Chinese characters, geometric figures, musical selections, artwork, or faces, the better they liked them. Repetition breeds liking. Mere exposure also warms our relationships. As strangers interact, they tend to increasingly like each other and to stop noticing initially perceived imperfections or differences. Those who come to know LGBTQ folks almost inevitably come to accept and like them. By three months, infants in same-race families come to prefer photos of people of their own (familiar) race. We even prefer our own familiar face—our mirror-image face we see while brushing our teeth, over our actual face we see in photos. Advertisers understand repetition’s power. With repetitions of an ad, shoppers begin to prefer the familiar product even if not remembering the ad. Indeed, the familiarity-feeds-fondness effect can occur without our awareness. In one clever experiment, research participants focused on repeated words piped into one earpiece while an experimenter simultaneously fed a novel tune into the other ear. Later, they could not recognize the unattended-to tune—yet preferred it over other unpresented tunes. Even amnesia patients, who cannot recall which faces they have been shown, will prefer faces they’ve repeatedly observed. Repetition Breeds Belief As mere exposure boosts liking, so mere repetition moves minds. In experiments, repetition makes statements such as “Othello was the last opera of Verdi” seem truer. After hearing something over and over, even a made-up smear of a political opponent becomes more believable. Adolf Hitler understood this illusory truth effect. So did author George Orwell. In his world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the population was controlled by the mere repetition of slogans: “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.” “War is peace.” And so does Vladimir Putin, whose controlled, continuous, and repetitive propaganda has been persuasive to so many Russians. Barack Obama understood the power of repetition: “If they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again . . . people start believing it.” So did Donald Trump: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” And he did so with just the intended effect. What explains repetition’s persuasive power? Familiar sayings (whether true or false) become easier to process and to remember. This processing fluency and memory availability can make assertions feel true. The result: Repeated untruths such as “taking vitamin C prevents colds” or “childhood vaccines cause autism” may become hard-to-erase mental bugs. But can mere repetition lead people to believe bizarre claims—that a presidential election was stolen, that climate change is a hoax, that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a scam to promote gun control? Alas, yes. Experiments have shown that repetition breeds belief even when people should know better. After repetition, “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” just feels somewhat truer. Even crazy claims can seem truer when repeated. That’s the conclusion of a new truth-by-repetition experiment. At Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, Doris Lacassagne and her colleagues found that, with enough repetition, highly implausible statements such as “Elephants run faster than cheetahs” seem somewhat less likely to be false. Less extreme but still implausible statements, such as “A monsoon is caused by an earthquake” were especially vulnerable to the truth-by-repetition effect. For those concerned about the spread of oft-repeated conspiracy theories, the study also offered some better news. Lacassagne found that barely more than half of her 232 U.S.-based participants shifted toward believing the repeated untruths. The rest knew better, or even shifted to greater incredulity. At the end of his life, Republican Senator John McCain lamented “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.” For psychology educators like me and some of you, the greatest mission is teaching critical thinking that helps students winnow the wheat of truth from the chaff of misinformation. Evidence matters. So we teach our students, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” And, after hearing it, “Don’t believe everything you think!” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

  “There are trivial truths and great truths,” the physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said. [1] “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” Light is a particle. And light is a wave. Psychology, too, embraces paradoxical truths. Some are more complementary than contradictory: Attitudes influence behavior, and attitudes follow behavior. Self-esteem pays dividends, and self-serving bias is perilous. Memories and attitudes are explicit, and they are implicit. We are the creatures of our social worlds, and we are the creators of our social worlds. Brain makes mind, and mind controls brain. To strengthen attitudes, use persuasion, and to strengthen attitudes, challenge them. Religion “makes prejudice, and it unmakes prejudice” (Gordon Allport). “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change” (Carl Rogers). Psychology also offers puzzling paradoxical concepts. Paradoxical sleep (aka REM sleep) is so-called because the muscles become near-paralyzed while the body is internally aroused. The immigrant paradox refers to immigrant U.S. children exhibiting better mental health than native-born children. And the paradox of choice describes how the modern world’s excessive options produce diminished satisfaction. Even more puzzling are seemingly contradictory findings from different levels of analysis. First, consider: Who in the U.S. is more likely to vote Republican—those with lots of money or those with little? Who is happier—liberals or conservatives? Who does more Google searches for “sex”—religious or nonreligious people? Who scores highest on having meaning in life—those who have wealth or those who don’t? Who is happiest and healthiest—actively religious or nonreligious people? As I have documented, in each case the answer depends on whether we compare places or individuals: Politics. Low-income states and high-income individuals have voted Republican in recent U.S. presidential elections. Happy welfare states and unhappy liberals. Liberal countries and conservative individuals manifest greater well-being. Google “sex” searches. Highly religious states, and less religious individuals, do more Google “sex” searching. Meaning in life. Self-reported meaning in life is greatest in poor countries, and among rich individuals. Religious engagement correlates negatively with well-being across aggregate levels (when comparing more vs. less religious countries or American states), yet positively across individuals. Said simply, actively religious individuals and nonreligious places are generally flourishing. As sociologist W. S. Robinson long ago appreciated, “An ecological [aggregate-level] correlation is almost certainly not equal to its individual correlation.” Thus, for example, if you want to make religion look good, cite individual data. If you want to make it look bad, cite aggregate data. In response to this paradoxical finding, Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Arthur Stone wondered: “Why might there be this sharp contradiction between religious people being happy and healthy, and religious places being anything but?” [2] To this list of psychological science paradoxes, we can add one more: the gender-equality paradox—the curious finding of greater gender differences in more gender-equal societies. You read that right. Several research teams have reported that across several phenomena, including the proportion of women pursuing degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, gender differences are greater in societies with more political and economic gender equality. In the February, 2022, issue of Psychological Science, University of Michigan researcher Allon Vishkin describes “the myriad findings” that societies with lower male-superior ideology and educational policy “display larger gender differences.” This appears, he reports, not only in STEM fields of study, but also in values and preferences, personality traits, depression rates, and moral judgments. Moreover, his analysis of 803,485 chess players in 160 countries reveals that 90 percent of chess players are men; yet “women participate more often in countries with less gender equality.” Go figure. Vishkin reckons that underlying the paradox is another curious phenomenon: Gender unequal societies have more younger players, and there’s greater gender equality in chess among younger people. Paradoxical findings energize psychological scientists, as we sleuth their explanation. They also remind us of Bohr’s lesson. Sometimes the seeming opposite of a truth is another truth. Reality is often best described by complementary principles: mind emerges from brain, and mind controls brain. Both are true, yet either, by itself, is a half-truth. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) [1] I first read this unsourced quote in a 1973 article by social psychologist William McGuire. Neils Bohr’s son, Hans Bohr, in his biography of his father, reports that Neils Bohr discerned “two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.” [2] For fellow researchers: The paradox is partially resolved by removing income as a confounding factor. Less religious places also tend to be affluent places (think Denmark and Oregon). More religious places tend to be poorer places (think Pakistan and Alabama). Thus, when we compare less versus more religious places, we also are comparing richer versus poorer places. And as Ed Diener, Louis Tay, and I observed from Gallup World Poll data, controlling for objective life circumstances, such as income, eliminates or even slightly reverses the negative religiosity/well-being correlation across countries. ... View more

If you live in one of 30 U.S. states with recently legalized sports betting, you’ve surely noticed: Your online media and television have been awash with sports betting ads from DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars Sportsbook, and more. For this, we can thank the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of the sports betting ban, which also led the NFL in 2021 to allow sports betting ads even during its broadcasts and live-streams. With the deluge of ads, which sometimes offer new customers free money to lure initial bets, the gaming industry hopes to hook new betters and expand its customer base from the current 50 million or so Americans who gamble on sports. For most, the few dollars wagered may be nothing more than a bit of exciting fun. But for some—those who develop a gambling disorder—the betting becomes compulsive and debilitating, as gamblers crave the excitement, seek to redeem their losses, and lie to hide their behavior. Family finances suffer. Bankruptcies happen. Divorces result. And with the sports betting floodgates now opened, problem gambling is increasing. “The National Problem Gambling helpline is receiving an average of more than 22,500 calls a month this year,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “up from a monthly average of about 14,800 last year.” Pgiam/E+/Getty Images It’s no secret that, over time, the house wins and gamblers nearly always lose. So how does the gambling industry manage to suck nearly a quarter-trillion dollars annually from U.S. pockets? Are state lotteries, like Britain’s National Lottery, merely (as one of my sons mused) “a tax on the statistically ignorant”? (My state’s lottery pays out as winnings only 61 cents of each dollar bet.) To remind folks of the power of psychological dynamics, and to prepare them to think critically about the allure of gambling inducements, we can ask: What psychological principles does the gambling industry exploit? Consider these: Partially (intermittently) reinforced behavior becomes resistant to extinction. Pigeons that have been reinforced unpredictably—on a “variable ratio” schedule—may continue pecking thousands more times without further reward. Like fly fishing, slot machines and sports gambling reward people occasionally and unpredictably. So hope springs eternal. The judgment-altering power of the availability heuristic. As Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown, people tend to estimate the commonality of various events based on their mental availability—how readily instances come to mind. Casinos have the idea. They broadcast infrequent wins with flashing lights, while keeping the far more common losses invisible. Likewise, gamblers, like stock day-traders, may live to remember and tell of their memorable wins, while forgetting their more mundane losses. Illusory correlations feed an illusion of control. People too readily believe that they can predict or control chance events. When choosing their own lottery number (rather than being assigned one), people demand much more money when invited to sell their ticket. If assigned to throw the dice or spin the wheel themselves, their confidence increases. Dice players also tend to throw hard if wanting high numbers, and soft for low numbers. When winning, they attribute outcomes to their skill, while losses become “near misses.” Losing sports gamblers may rationalize that their bet was actually right, except for a referee’s bad call or a freakish ball bounce. Difficulty delaying gratification. Those who from childhood onward have learned to delay gratification—who choose two marshmallows later over one now (as in the famous “marshmallow test” experiment)—become more academically successful and ultimately productive. They are also less likely to smoke, to commit delinquent acts, and to gamble—each of which offer immediate reward, even if at the cost of diminished long-term health and well-being. The gaming industry seeks present-minded rather than future-minded folks. They aim to hook those who will elect that figurative single marshmallow satisfaction of today’s desire over the likelihood of a greater deferred reward. Credible, attractive communicators exploit “peripheral route persuasion.” Endorsements by beautiful, famous, or trusted people can add to the allure. As former gaming industry marketing executive Jack O’Donnell notes, the sports gambling industry harnesses sports celebrity power when paying former all-star receiver Jerry Rice to dump Gatorade on a winning DraftKings bettor, when trusted sportscaster Brent Musburger encourages placing a bet, and when legendary quarterback and former Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees admonishes people to live your “Bet Life.” Each of these psychological dynamics has its own power. When combined, they help us understand the gaming industry’s lure, and, for some, its tragic addictive force. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

As members of one species, we humans share both a common biology (cut us and we bleed) and common behaviors (we similarly sense the world around us, use language, and produce and protect children). Our human genes help explain our kinship—our shared human nature. And they contribute to our individual diversity: Some people, compared with others, are taller, smarter, skinnier, healthier, more temperamental, shyer, more athletic . . . the list goes on and on. Across generations, your ancestors shuffled their gene decks, leading to the hand that—with no credit or blame due you—you were dealt. If you are reading this, it’s likely that genetic luck contributed to your having above average intelligence. Others, dealt a different hand and a different life, would struggle to understand these words. Andrew Brookes/Image Source/Getty Images Individual variation is big. Individuals vary much, much more within groups (say, comparing Danes with Danes or Kenyans with Kenyans) than between groups (as when comparing Danes and Kenyans). Yet there are also group differences. Given this reality (some groups struggle more in school), does behavior genetic science validate ethnocentric beliefs and counter efforts to create a just and equal society? In The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, University of Texas behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden answers an emphatic no. She documents the power of genes, but also makes the case for an egalitarian culture in which everyone thrives. Among her conclusions are these: We all are family. Going back far enough in time to somewhere between 5000 and 2000 B.C., we reach a remarkable point where “everyone alive then, if they left any descendants at all, was a common ancestor of everyone alive now.” We are all kin beneath the skin. We’re each highly improbable people. “Each pair of parents could produce over 70 trillion genetically unique offspring.” If you like yourself, count yourself fortunate. Most genes have tiny effects. Ignore talk of a single “gay gene” or “smart gene.” The human traits we care about, including our personality, mental health, intelligence, longevity, and sexual orientation “are influenced by many (very, very, very many) genetic variants, each of which contributes only a tiny drop of water to the swimming pool of genes that make a difference.” Individual genes’ tiny effects may nevertheless add up to big effects. Today’s Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) measure millions of genome elements and correlate each with an observed trait (phenotype). The resulting miniscule correlations from thousands of genetic variants often “add up to meaningful differences between people.” Among the White American high school students in one large study, only 11 percent of those who had the lowest GWAS polygenic index score predicting school success later graduated from college, as did 55 percent of those who had the highest score. “That kind of gap—a fivefold increase in the rate of college graduation—is anything but trivial.” Twin studies confirm big genetic effects. “After fifty years and more than 1 million twins, the overwhelming conclusion is that when people inherit different genes, their lives turn out differently.” Parent-child correlations come with no causal arrows. If the children of well-spoken parents who read to them have larger vocabularies, the correlation could be environmental, or genetic, or some interactive combination of the two. Beware the ecological fallacy (jumping from one data level to another). Genetic contributions to individual differences within groups (such as among White American high school students) provide zero evidence of genetic differences between groups. Genetic science does not explain social inequalities. Harden quotes sociologist Christopher Jencks’ illustration of a genetically influenced trait eliciting an environmentally caused outcome: “If, for example, a nation refuses to send children with red hair to school, the genes that cause red hair can be said to lower reading scores.”  Harden also quotes social scientist Ben Domingue: “Genetics are a useful mechanism for understanding why people from relatively similar backgrounds end up different. . . . But genetics is a poor tool for understanding why people from manifestly different starting points don’t end up the same.” Many progressives affirm some genetic influences on individual traits. For example, unlike some conservatives who may see sexual orientation as a moral choice, progressives more often understand sexual orientation as a genetically influenced natural disposition. Differences ≠ deficits. “The problem to be fixed is society’s recalcitrant unwillingness to arrange itself in ways that allow everyone, regardless of which genetic variants they inherit, to participate fully in the social and economic life of [their] country.” An example: For neurodiverse individuals, the question is how to design environments that match their skills. Behavior genetics should be anti-eugenic. Advocates of eugenics have implied that traits are fixed due to genetic influences, and may therefore deny the value of social interventions. Alternatively, some genome-blind advocates shun behavior genetics science that could inform both our self-understanding and public policy. Harden advocates a third option, an anti-eugenic perspective that, she says, would reduce the waste of time and resources on well-meaning but ineffective programs. For example, by controlling for genetic differences with a GWAS measure, researchers can more accurately confirm the actual benefits of an environmental intervention such as an educational initiative or income support. Anti-eugenics also, she contends, uses genetic information to improve lives, not classify people, uses genetic information to promote equity, not exclusion, doesn’t mistake being lucky in a Western capitalist society for being “good” or deserving, and considers what policies people would favor if they didn’t know who they would be. Harden’s bottom line: Acknowledging the realities of human diversity, and discerning the powers and limits of various environmental interventions, can enhance our quest for a just and fair society. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more