“Listen, we all hoped and prayed the vaccines would be 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but they’re not. We now know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch Covid, they can transmit Covid. So what’s the point?” ~U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, Fox News, December 27, 2021 “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” ~Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise, 1677 Many are aghast at the irony: Unvaccinated, unmasked Americans remain much less afraid of the Covid virus than are their vaccinated, masked friends and family. This, despite two compelling and well-publicized facts: Covid has been massively destructive. With 5.4 million confirmed Covid deaths worldwide (and some 19 million excess Covid-era deaths), Covid is a great enemy. In the U.S., the 840,000 confirmed deaths considerably exceed those from all of its horrific 20th-century wars. The Covid vaccines are safe and dramatically effective. The experience of 4.5+ billion people worldwide who have received a Covid vaccine assures us that they entail no significant risks of sickness, infertility, or miscarriage. Moreover, as the CDC illustrates , fully vaccinated and boosted Americans this past fall had a 10 times lower risk of testing positive for Covid and a 20 times lower risk of dying from it. Given Covid’s virulence, why wouldn’t any reasonable person welcome the vaccine and other non-constraining health-protective measures? How can a U.S. senator scorn protection that is 90+ percent effective? Does he also shun less-than-100%-effective seat belts, birth control, tooth brushing, and the seasonal flu vaccine that his doctor surely recommends? To say bluntly what so many are wondering: Has Covid become a pandemic of the stupid? Lest we presume so, psychological science has repeatedly illuminated how even smart people can make not-so-smart judgments. As Daniel Kahneman and others have demonstrated, intelligent people often make dumb decisions. Researcher Keith Stanovich explains : Some biases—such as our favoring evidence that confirms our preexisting views—have “very little relation to intelligence.” So, if we’re not to regard the resilient anti-vax minority as stupid, what gives? If, with Spinoza, we wish not to ridicule but to understand, several psychological dynamics can shine light. Had we all, like Rip Van Winkle, awakened to the clear evidence of Covid’s virulence and the vaccine efficacy, surely we would have more unanimously accepted these stark realities. Alas, today’s science-scorning American subculture seeded skepticism about Covid before the horror was fully upon us. Vaccine suspicion was then sustained by several social psychological phenomena that we all experience. Once people’s initial views were formed, confirmation bias inclined them to seek and welcome belief-confirming information. Motivated reasoning bent their thinking toward justifying what they had come to believe. Aided by social and broadcast media, group polarization further amplified and fortified the shared views of the like-minded. Misinformation begat more misinformation. Moreover, a powerful fourth phenomenon was at work: belief perseverance. Researchers Craig Anderson, Mark Lepper, and Lee Ross explored how people, after forming and explaining beliefs, resist changing their minds. In two of social psychology’s great but lesser known experiments, they planted an idea in Stanford undergraduates’ minds. Then they discovered how difficult it was to discredit the idea, once rooted.   Their procedure was simple. Each study first implanted a belief, either by proclaiming it to be true or by offering anecdotal support. One experiment invited students to consider whether people who take risks make good or bad firefighters. Half looked at cases about a risk-prone person who was successful at firefighting and a cautious person who was not. The other half considered cases suggesting that a risk-prone person was less successful at firefighting. Unsurprisingly, the students came to believe what their case anecdotes suggested. Then the researchers asked all the students to explain their conclusion. Those who had decided that risk-takers make better firefighters explained, for instance, that risk-takers are brave. Those who had decided the opposite explained that cautious people have fewer accidents.   Lastly, Anderson and his colleagues exposed the ruse. They let students in on the truth: The cases were fake news. They were made up for the experiment, with other study participants receiving the opposite information. With the truth now known, did the students’ minds return to their pre-experiment state? Hardly. After the fake information was discredited, the participants’ self-generated explanations sustained their newly formed beliefs that risk-taking people really do make better (or worse) firefighters. So, beliefs, once having “grown legs,” will often survive discrediting. As the researchers concluded, “People often cling to their beliefs to a considerably greater extent than is logically or normatively warranted.” In another clever Stanford experiment, Charles Lord and colleagues engaged students with opposing views of capital punishment. Each side viewed two supposed research findings, one supporting and the other contesting the idea that the death penalty deters crime. So, given the same mixed information, did their views later converge? To the contrary, each side was impressed with the evidence supporting their view and disputed the challenging evidence. The net result: Their disagreement increased. Rather than using evidence to form conclusions, they used their conclusions to assess evidence. And so it has gone in other studies, when people selectively welcomed belief-supportive evidence about same-sex marriage, climate change, and politics. Ideas persist. Beliefs persevere. The belief-perseverance findings reprise the classic When Prophecy Fails study led by cognitive dissonance theorist Leon Festinger. Festinger and his team infiltrated a religious cult whose members had left behind jobs, possessions, and family as they gathered to await the world’s end on December 21, 1954, and their rescue via flying saucer. When the prophecy failed, did the cult members abandon their beliefs as utterly without merit? They did not, and instead agreed with their leader’s assertion that their faithfulness “ had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” These experiments are provocative. They indicate that the more we examine our theories and beliefs and explain how and why they might be true, the more closed we become to challenging information. When we consider and explain why a favorite stock might rise in value, why we prefer a particular political candidate, or why we distrust vaccinations, our suppositions become more resilient. Having formed and repeatedly explained our beliefs, we may become prisoners of our own ideas. Thus, it takes more compelling arguments to change a belief than it does to create it. Republican representative Adam Kinzinger understands : “I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.” Moreover, the phenomenon cuts both ways, and surely affects the still-fearful vaccinated and boosted people who have hardly adjusted their long-ago Covid fears to the post-vaccine, Omicron new world. The only known remedy is to “consider the opposite”—to imagine and explain a different result. But unless blessed with better-than-average intellectual humility, as exhibited by most who accept vaccine science, we seldom do so. Yet there is good news. If employers mandate either becoming vaccinated or getting tested regularly, many employees will choose vaccination. As laboratory studies remind us, and as real-world studies of desegregation and seat belt mandates confirm, our attitudes will then follow our actions. Behaving will become believing. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

In Exploring Psychology, 12th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I report that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) “is now diagnosed in 1 in 38 children in South Korea, 1 in 54 in the United States, 1 in 66 in Canada….” Check that. A new CDC report on 2018 data raises the continually increasing U.S. proportion to 1 in 44 (23 per 1,000 among 8-year-olds in eleven representative communities followed by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network). The report also confirms that ASD diagnoses are four times more common among boys than girls. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen believes the gender imbalance is because boys tend to be “systemizers”: They more often understand things according to rules or laws, as in mathematical and mechanical systems. Girls, he contends, tend to be “empathizers”: They excel at reading facial expressions and gestures. And what racial/ethnic group do you suppose has the highest rate of ASD diagnoses? The answer: There are no discernible differences (nor across socioeconomic groups). In 2018, ASD was diagnosed equally often among all racial/ethnic groups. A final fact to ponder: 4-year-olds, the CDC reports , were “50 percent more likely to receive an autism or special education classification” than were 8-year-olds. So what do you think? Is the increasing ASD diagnosis rate—over time and of 4-year-olds—a a welcome trend? Is Karen Remley, director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities right to regard this “progress in early identification” as “good news because the earlier that children are identified with autism the sooner they can be connected to services and support”? Or does the increased labeling of children become a self-fulfilling prophecy that assigns children to a category that includes some social deficiency, and then treats them differently as a result? And does the trend reflect some relabeling of children’s disorders, as reflected in the decreasing diagnoses of “cognitive disorder” and “learning disability”? (The popularity of different psychiatric labels does exhibit cultural variation across time and place.) In this COVID-19 era of anti-vax fears, this much we know for sure: One thing that does not contribute to rising ASD diagnoses is childhood vaccinations. Children receive a measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccination in early childhood, about the time ASD symptoms first get noticed—so some parents naturally presumed the vaccination caused the ensuing ASD. Yet, despite a fraudulent 1998 study claiming otherwise, vaccinations actually have no relationship to the disorder. In one study that followed nearly 700,000 Danish children, those receiving the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine were slightly less likely to later be among the 6517 ASD-diagnosed children. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

Consider: If blessed with income and wealth beyond your needs, what would you do with it? If you decided to give away your excess wealth, would you focus it on present needs (by distributing it immediately) or future needs (by accumulating wealth for later distribution)? Consider two sample answers to the second question, both drawn from real life: Give for immediate use. In Bremerton, Washington, a generous anonymous donor is giving away $250,000 grants to local, national, and international nonprofits with a condition: They must spend it in the next 2 years. The seven recipients to date are gladly doing so by hiring new staff, giving scholarships, feeding people, and so forth. There’s no time like the present. Give today, but maximize future impact. The John Templeton Foundation, which I have served as a trustee, had a future-minded benefactor who grew his wealth by living simply and investing half his income from his earliest working years. Thanks to his investment success and the exponential mathematics of investment compounding, he was able, by his death at age 95, to endow the foundation, which today has nearly $4 billion in assets. Like all U.S. foundations, the foundation has a mandated 5 percent annual payout rate—meaning that they give today but with eyes also on more distant horizons. So, would you advise prioritizing the present (as the Bremerton donor has) or also focusing on the future (as most foundations do)? Dimitri Otis/Stone/Getty Images The Initiative to Accelerate Charitable Giving would appreciate the Bremerton donor. As the world recovers from Covid and strives for racial justice, the Initiative perceives that “demands for services from charities are greater than ever.” So, it argues, foundations should increase their giving now. The Patriotic Millionaires , co-led by Abigail Disney, have proposed doubling, for three years, the required foundation payout from 5 to 10 percent. The Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act , co-sponsored by Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), would incentivize a 7 percent foundation payout rate (by waiving the 1.39 percent investment income tax for any year in which payout tops 7 percent of assets). Do you agree with this strategy—is now the time to give? Should we take care of our time, and leave it to future people to take care of theirs? If so, consider: Prioritizing the present will likely diminish a foundation’s future effectiveness. Given that asset-balanced foundation endowments have tended to earn less than 7 percent on their total investments, [1] even a 7 percent payout mandate would, over time, likely shrink a foundation’s assets and giving capacity. Assuming a continuation of long-term stock market performance, the Templeton Foundation calculates that its 50-year total giving would be almost double under a 5 percent payout (nearly $20 billion) vs. a 10 percent payout (less than $12 billion). Given both current and future human needs, would you still support a mandate that foundations distribute more of their assets now? Are today’s crises likely greater than tomorrow’s? The present versus future ethical dilemma brings to mind three related psychological principles: Temporal discounting. Humans often value immediate rewards over larger future rewards—a dollar today over $1.10 in a month. The phenomenon is familiar to financial advisors who plead with clients to value their future, and to harness the magic of compounding by investing today. Being financially nearsighted, our governments also tend to spend public monies on our present needs rather than our and our descendants’ future needs. Some of this present-focus reflects our commendable capacity for empathy—our hearts responding to present needs that we see and feel. But temporal discounting is also manifest in today’s consumers who oppose carbon taxes and clean energy mandates lest their lifestyle be restrained for the sake of humanity’s future. Temporal discounting undermines sustainability. Self-control: The ability to delay gratification. We aim to teach our children self-control—to control their impulses and to delay short-term gratification for bigger longer-term rewards. Better (in Walter Mischel’s classic experiment) two future marshmallows than one now. Such self-control predicts better school performance, better health, and higher income. Personal time perspective: Past, present, or future. In a 6-minute TED talk , Phil Zimbardo compared people with past, present, or future orientations—those who focus on their memories of what was, on their present situation, or on what will be. Although the good life is a mix of each, a future orientation bodes well for adolescents. Living with one eye on the future enables bigger future rewards and minimizing risk of school drop-out, problem gambling, smoking, and delinquency. Patience pays. So, mindful of both today’s and tomorrow’s needs, would you favor or oppose the proposals to increase foundation payout requirements? Of course, you say, both the present and the future matter. Indeed. But to what extent should we prioritize poverty relief (or scholarships or art galleries) today versus in the future? Who matters more—us and our people, or our great grandchildren and their compatriots? Or do we and our descendants all matter equally? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) [1] Century-long U.S. stock returns have averaged near 10 percent, or about 7 percent when inflation-adjusted. But most foundations also have other assets that have experienced a lower rate of return—in cash, bonds, and, for example, emerging markets. ... View more

Steven Pinker’s books—How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and his latest, Rationality—offer a consistent and important message: Smart, critical thinking attends less to anecdotes that tug at the heart than to realities revealed by representative data. Year after year, 7 in 10 Americans, after reading the news, tell Gallup there has been more crime than in the prior year. In Better Angels, Pinker documents the reality: a long-term crime decline, along with other subsiding forms of violence, including wars and genocide. Enlightenment Now details other ways—from the environment, to life expectancy, to human rights, to literacy, to quality of life—in which, contrary to our news-fed sense of doom, the world actually is getting better. The same thinking-with-data theme pervades Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters . For my money, Chapter 4 (“Probability and Randomness”) alone is worth the book’s price of admission. It’s a chapter I wish I could assign to every AP and college introductory psychology student. Here, according to Pinker are some noteworthy outcomes of our flawed thinking: Statistical illiteracy. Our tendency to judge the likelihood of events by the ease with which examples come to mind—the availability heuristic—leads us to think folks are more often killed by tornados than by 80-times-deadlier asthma; to believe that America’s immigrant population is 28 percent (rather than 12 percent); to guess that 24 percent of Americans are gay (rather than 4.5 percent. And how many unarmed Americans of all races would you guess are killed by police in an average year? Sixty-five, reports Pinker (from reported 2015–2019 FBI data). Unwise public spending. In 2019, after a Cape Cod surfer became Massachusetts’ first shark fatality in more than eight decades, towns equipped their beaches with scary billboard warnings and blood hemorrhage-control kits, and looked into “towers, drones, planes, balloons, sonar, acoustic buoys, and electromagnetic and odorant repellants” . . . while not investing in reducing car accident deaths at a fraction of the cost, with improved signage, barriers, and law enforcement. Mitigating climate change. Compared with deaths caused by mining accidents, lung disease, dam failures, gas explosions, and fouled air, modern nuclear power, despite its vivid few failures, “is the safest form of energy”—and emits no greenhouse gases. Exaggerated fears of terrorists. Although terrorists annually kill fewer people than are killed by lightning, bee stings, or bathtub drowning, we have engaged in massive anti-terrorist spending and launched wars that have killed hundreds of thousands. Amplified dread of school shootings. “Rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides,” Pinker tells us. In response, “schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures . . . while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills.” “The press is an availability machine,” Pinker observes. “It serves up anecdotes that feed our impression of what’s common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.” By contrast, unreported good news typically consists “of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace.” And progress—such as 137,000 people escaping extreme poverty each day—creeps up silently, “transforming the world by stealth. . . . There was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping squalor [in the last 25 years]—has gone unnoticed.” This latest offering from one of psychology’s public intellectuals joins kindred-spirited data-based perspectives by Hans Rosling ( Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think ), Max Roser ( ourworldindata.org ), and William MacAskill ( Doing Good Better ), as well as my Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. Together, they help us all to think smarter by advocating reality-based, statistically literate, rational decisions that can help us spend and give more wisely, and sustain a flourishing world. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

Consider the great COVID irony: As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy   noted   recently, “Vaccinated people may overestimate their peril, just as unvaccinated people may underestimate it.” Murthy could omit “may,” for we now have a string of national surveys ( here ,   here ,   here , and   here ) showing that unvaccinated folks are   much   less likely to fear the virus. Moreover, those who are unvaccinated—and thus vastly   more   at risk of contracting and transmitting the virus—are also much   less   likely to protect themselves and others by wearing a mask. (If you see someone wearing a mask in your grocery store, they’re probably vaccinated.) Unvaccinated people’s discounting the threat, distrusting science, and prioritizing their rights to be unvaccinated and unmasked provide us social psychologists with a gigantic case study of unrealistic optimism, motivated reasoning, and group polarization. But looking forward, we can offer a prediction: As vaccine mandates increase, inducing more people to accept vaccination rather than being excluded from events or flights or bothered with weekly testing,   attitudes will follow behavior. As every student of psychological science knows, two-way traffic flows between our attitudes and our behavior. We will often stand up for what we believe. But we also come to believe in what we stand up for. When people are induced to play a new role—perhaps their first days in the military or on a new job—their initial play-acting soon feels natural, as the new actions become internalized. When, in experiments, people are induced to support something about which they have doubts, they often come to accept their words. And in the laboratory, as in life, hurtful acts toward another foster disparagement, while helpful acts foster liking. In short, we not only can think ourselves into action, but also act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Behaving becomes believing. The attitudes-follow-behavior phenomenon is strongest in situations where we feel some responsibility for our action, and thus some need to explain it to ourselves—resolving any dissonance between our prior thinking and our new behavior. But the federal mandate—get vaccinated   or   face weekly testing—does (smartly) preserve some choice. What is more, we have ample historical evidence of mandates swaying public opinion. In the years following the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, White Americans—despite initial resistance—expressed steadily diminishing prejudice. Some resisted, and hate lingers. Yet as national anti-discrimination laws prompted Americans in different regions to   act   more alike, they also began to   think   more alike. Seat belt mandates, which at first evoked an angry defense of personal liberty, provide another example of attitudes following actions. Here in Michigan, the state representative who introduced the state’s 1982 seat belt law received hate mail, some comparing him to Hitler—despite abundant evidence that, like today’s vaccines, seatbelts save lives. But time rolls on, and so did seat belt   acceptance,   with Michigander’s approval of the law rising to 85 percent by the end of 1985 and usage rising from 20 percent in 1984 to 93 percent by 2014. Ditto other government policies, such as Social Security and Medicare—once contentious, now cherished. So amid the rampant information there is good news: Mandates can work. They can get people to protect themselves and others, as  have nearly all United Airlines   employees   and New York health care   workers . And after doing so, people will tend to embrace the way things are. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit   TalkPsych.com . Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

In the United States, anti-Asian prejudice has resurged, with nearly 6,600 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year. Reports of harassment, vandalism, and brutal attacks on Asian Americans, from the very young to the very elderly, have made one-third of Asian Americans fear for their safety. An Asian-American friend last week recounted his fearful father getting a gun for self-protection. Women and girls reportedly endured two-thirds of these hostilities, including the horrific March, 2021 Atlanta shooting spree that claimed the lives of eight people—six of them Asian American women. One in four AAPI-owned small businesses has also faced pandemic-related anti-Asian words or acts. Today’s bigotry extends a long history, beginning with the 20th century’s ground zero event of anti-Asian prejudice: the World War II internment of 120,000 West Coast people of Japanese descent. As I have explained here and here , it was on my home island—Bainbridge Island, near Seattle—that the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans began. With only six days’ notice, Exclusion Order #1 ordered the evacuation of the island’s 276 Japanese American residents, each lugging nothing more than they could carry. (One government concern: The island’s south end overlooked a narrow passage to a naval shipyard and submarine base.) Today, that March 30, 1942 ferry departure point is the site of a national “Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.” On each visit home to Bainbridge, I return to the memorial, where a 276-foot wall with wood sculptures tells parts of the story. As my insurance agent father would later recall, it was a devastating day as the islanders bid farewell to their neighbors. His autobiography recalls the sadness, and also the lingering discrimination: “We had many Japanese friends and it was heartbreaking for us when the war started and the Japanese people on Bainbridge Island were ordered into concentration camps. . . . Most were educated here on the island [and] it was hard to believe that they were not as loyal Americans as we. I did all I could to keep the insurance on their homes in force. . . . The insurance companies that I represented were a bit prejudiced against insuring the Japanese people, particularly for liability insurance, for fear that lawsuits would be brought against them and the juries, being Caucasian, might be prejudiced in their jury awards. [One post-war returnee, wanting insurance on a car] named his four brothers and recited how all five of them had been in one or another of the American armed forces and had served in Italy, France, Germany and Japan. [When I showed the letter to the insurance manager] she said G___ D___ you, Ken Myers, for bringing me this letter. How can I say, ‘No’? So she wrote the first policy on a Japanese American after the war.” In contrast to the media-fomented bigotry that greeted other West Coast internees on their post-war return home, the Bainbridge internees were welcomed back by most. On my recent visit to the Memorial, I chanced to meet internee Lilly Kodama recalling her experience, as a seven-year-old, of being abruptly taken from her world. She presumed she was going with her family on a shopping trip, and was surprised to find her cousins and neighbors on the dock. But Kodama also spoke of the support of fellow islanders, including my father, but especially Walt and Millie Woodward, the heroic local newspaper owners who challenged the internment and then published news from the camps. The Bainbridge Island contrast illustrates what social psychologists have often reported: Social contact, especially between parties of equal status, restrains prejudice. In minimal-contact California, people of European descent and people of Japanese descent lived separately. Few people bid the departing internees goodbye. On their return, “No Japs Here” signs greeted them. Minimal contact enabled maximal prejudice. On high-contact Bainbridge, islanders intermingled as school classmates (as illustrated in this 1935 elementary school picture). Their homes, strawberry farms, and businesses were dispersed. In their absence, thirteen empty chairs were on stage at a high school graduation so all would remember who was missing. Internees returning after the war were greeted with food and assistance. Cooperative contact enabled minimal prejudice. Lincoln Elementary School photo courtesy Bainbridge Island Historical Museum This real-life social experiment has been replicated in our own time: People in states with the least immigrant contact express the most anti-immigrant antipathy, while those who know immigrants as neighbors, classmates, or fellow workers more often profess a welcoming attitude. Amid the anti-Asian prejudice of 2021, how can we replace incidents of closed fists and tight jaws with open arms? We can seek and facilitate intergroup contacts. We can travel and experience other cultures. We can welcome diversity into our communities and workplaces. We can challenge slurs. We can educate ourselves and others about our culture’s history. In such ways we can affirm the memorial’s closing words: (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

Friends matter. If psychological science has proven anything, it’s that feeling liked, supported, and encouraged by close friends and family fosters health and happiness. Having friends to confide in calms us, enables better sleep, reduces blood pressure, and even boosts immune functioning. Compared with socially isolated or lonely folks, those socially connected are at less risk of premature death. As the writer of Ecclesiastes surmised, “Woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.” But how many friends are enough? And for how many meaningful relationships do we have time and energy? Robin Dunbar, a recently retired Oxford evolutionary psychologist, offers an answer: about 150. He first derived that number—“Dunbar’s number”—by noting, in primates, the relationship between neocortex size and group size: the bigger the neocortex, the bigger the group. Extrapolating from his studies of non-human primates, he predicted that a manageable human group size would be around 150. Many evolutionists and animal behavior observers find Dunbar’s number amusing but, at best, simplistic. They note, for example, that primate group sizes are also influenced by diet and predators (see here and here ). As one primate-culture expert told me, “We humans are too complicated to expect these simple numerical approaches to work.” In response, Dunbar—who seems not to suffer his critics gladly—vigorously defends his number. In his new book Friends (now available in the U.S. on Kindle in advance of a January, 2022 hardcover), Dunbar itemizes examples of 100- to 250-person human groups, including Neolithic, medieval, and 18th-century villages; Hutterite communities; hunter-gatherer communities; Indigenous communities from Inuit to Aboriginal; military companies; wedding invitees; and Christmas-card networks. “Every study we have looked at,” he emphasizes, “has consistently suggested that people vary in the number of friends they have, and that the range of variation is typically between 100 and 250 individuals.” But surely, you say, that number (which includes both family and nonfamily friends) varies across individuals and life circumstances. Indeed, notes Dunbar, it varies with age. The number of our meaningful relationships forms an inverted U-shaped curve across the lifespan. It starts at birth with one or two, and rises in the late teens until plateauing in our 30s at about 150. After the late 60s or early 70s, it “starts to plummet.... We start life with one or two close carers and, if we live long enough, we end life that way too.” personality. Extraverts are (no surprise) social butterflies, with lots of friends. Introverts accumulate fewer friends, but invest in them more intensely. family size. If you live surrounded by a large clan, you likely have fewer nonfamily friends than someone from a small or distant family. Have a baby, and—with less time for other relationships—your friendship circle may contract for a time. (Perhaps you have felt a diminished connection with friends after they had a baby or fell intensely in love?) Dunbar also describes people’s friendship layers. On average, he reports, people have about 5 intimate shoulder-to-cry-on friends—people they’re in touch with “at least once a week and feel close to.” Including these, they have, in sum, 15 close friends whom they’re in contact with at least monthly. The 50-friend circle incorporates our “party friends”—those we are in contact with at least once every six months. And the 150 totality incorporates those we’re in touch with at least annually—“what you might call the wedding/bar mitzvah/funeral group—the people that would turn up to your once-in-a-lifetime events.” Dunbar’s layers: Our friendship circles are of increasing size and decreasing investment/intensity (with each circle including the numbers in its inner circles). As on Facebook, “friends” include family. Our friendship circles vary in the time and concern we devote to them, says Dunbar. From studying people’s time diaries and friendship ratings and from analyzing big data on phone texting and calls, he found that we devote about 40 percent of our total social time to the 5 people in the innermost circle, and a further 20 percent to the additional 10 people in the 15-person “close friends” circle. Think about it: 60 percent of our total social effort is devoted to just 15 people. The remaining ~130 have to make do with what’s left over. Do Dunbar’s numbers resonate with your experience? Do you have a small inner core of friends (including family) who would drop anything to support you, and vice versa? Are these supplemented by a somewhat larger group of close-friend social companions? And do you have further-out layers of good friends and meaningful acquaintances that you would welcome to significant life events? Even if, as critics charge, Dunbar’s numbers are too exact, two conclusions seem apt. First, as Aristotle long ago recognized, we humans are social animals. We flourish and find protection and joy in relationships. Second, close relationships are psychologically expensive. Life requires us to prioritize, allocating our limited time and mental energy among our relationships. Friendships feed our lives—but, as with food, we’ve only got room for so much. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.)     ... View more

Psychological science has taken some body blows of late, with famous findings challenged by seeming failures to replicate. The problem isn’t just that prolific researchers Brian Wansink and Derek Stapel faked data, or that David Rosenhan (of “On Being Sane in Insane Places” fame) and personality researcher Hans Eysenck have been accused of doing likewise. Every discipline has a few self-promoting deceivers, and more who bend the truth to their side. And it’s not just critics arguing ( here and here ) that a few celebrated findings, such as the tribalism of the Stanford Prison and Robbers Cave experiments, were one-off, stage-managed happenings. Or that some findings of enormous popular interest— brain training for older folks, implicit bias training programs, or teaching to learning styles— all produce little enduring benefit. The problem is that other findings have also not been consistently reproducible.  The effects of teachers’ expectations , power posing , willpower depletion , facial feedback , and wintertime depression (seasonal affective disorder) have often failed to replicate or now seem more modest than widely claimed. Moreover, the magnitude and reliability of stereotype threat , growth mindset benefits, and the marshmallow test (showing the life success of 4-year-olds who can delay gratification) are, say skeptics, more mixed and variable than often presumed. Hoo boy. What’s left? Does psychology’s knowledge storehouse have empty shelves? Are students and the public justifiably dismayed? As one former psychology student tweeted : “ I took a [high school] psychology class whose entire content was all of these famous experiments that have turned out to be total horse**bleep**. I studied this! They made me take an exam! For what?” To which others responded: “I'm putting all my chips on neuroscience, I refuse to listen to psychologists ever again, they had their chance.” “Imagine if you'd spent 10 years getting a PhD in this stuff, going into $200k in debt.” “You can learn more from life never mind a psychology lesson just take a look around fella.” “I have a whole damn degree full of this @#$%.” But consider: How science works. Yes, some widely publicized studies haven’t replicated well. In response to this, we textbook authors adjust our reporting. In contrast to simple common sense and to conspiracy theories, science is a self-checking, self-correcting process that gradually weeds out oversimplifications and falsehoods. As with mountain climbing, the upward march of science comes with occasional down slopes. Some phenomena are genuine, but situation specific. Some of the disputed phenomena actually have been replicated, under known conditions. One of my contested favorite experiments—the happy pen-in-the-teeth vs. pouting pen-in-the-lips facial feedback effect—turns out to replicate best when people are not distracted by being videotaped (as happened in the failure-to-replicate experiments). And stepping back to look at the bigger picture, the Center for Open Science reports that its forthcoming analysis of 307 psychological science replications found that 64 percent obtained statistically significant results in the same direction as original studies, with effect sizes averaging 68 percent as large. The bottom line: Many phenomena do replicate. What endures and is left to teach is . . . everything else. Memories really are malleable. Expectations really do influence our perceptions. Information really does occur on two tracks—explicit and implicit (and implicit bias is real). Partial reinforcement really does increase resistance to extinction. Human traits really are influenced by many genes having small effects. Group polarization really does amplify our group differences. Ingroup bias really is powerful and perilous. An ability to delay gratification really does increase future life success. We really do often fear the wrong things. Sexual orientation really is a natural disposition that’s neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Split-brain experiments really have revealed complementary functions of our two brain hemispheres. Electroconvulsive therapy really is a shockingly effective treatment for intractable depression. Sleep experiments really have taught us much about our sleeping and dreaming. Blindsight really does indicate our capacity for visual processing without awareness. Frequent quizzing and self-testing really does boost students’ retention. But enough. The list of repeatedly confirmed, humanly significant phenomena could go on for pages. So, yes: Let’s teach the importance of replication for winnowing truth. Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff. Let’s encourage critical thinking that’s seasoned with healthy skepticism but not science-scorning cynicism . And let us also be reassured that our evidence-derived principles of human behavior are overwhelmingly worth teaching as we help our students appreciate their wonder-full world. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

In their new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein introduce two kinds of error. Bias (systematic error) “is the star of the show.” The biases that skew our judgment captivate our science and our news. Noise (variable judgments) plays off-Broadway, with no marquee. Yet its contribution to inaccuracy and misjudgment is scandalously big. Noise pervades medical judgments. In an ideal world, all physicians would correctly diagnose medical conditions. In the noisy real world, physicians presented with the same symptoms vary markedly in their diagnoses of cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and especially mental disorders. Physicians also more often prescribe quick-fix opioids if tired and time-pressed at the day’s end, rather than at its beginning. political asylum decisions. Asylum seekers face a “refugee roulette,” their fates  determined by the luck of the draw as a judge becomes 19 percent less likely to approve asylum if two prior cases have been approved, or as one judge admits as few as five percent of applicants while another admits 88 percent. hiring and promotion decisions. Interviewers vary widely in their assessments of candidates, as do supervisors in their assessments of employees. There is more unreliability in assessment—more noise—than evaluators realize. sentencing and parole decisions. Criminal sentences for the same crime vary across judges. They also vary if a judge is hungry (sentencing before vs. after lunch), if the judge’s football team won or lost the day before, and if it is the defendant’s birthday. To experience the bias/noise distinction—or to teach it to students—Kahneman et al. suggest a simple demonstration. Pull out your phone and open up its clock or stopwatch. Use its “lap” function to check your accuracy in estimating consecutive 10-second time intervals. After you hit “start” and look away, let your finger hover over the “lap” button. When you sense that 10 seconds has elapsed, touch “lap” and repeat, until you have five trials. The difference between your averaged elapsed intervals and the actual 10.0 seconds reveals your bias—toward over- or underestimating the time interval. The variation among your estimates, represented by their range, is your judgmental noise. I launch my basketball free-throw shots with little bias—they average center of the net—but with more noise than I’d wish. So, how might we reduce unwanted noise? Kahneman et al. offer suggestions: Compile the wisdom of the crowd. In 1907, Francis Galton invited 787 villagers at a country fair to guess the weight of an ox. Galton had little regard for individual people’s judgments, which displayed considerable noise (variation). Yet their average guess—1200 pounds—nearly hit the bull’s eye (the ox weighed 1,198 pounds). Likewise, a crowd’s average answer typically bests most individual judgments when estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar, the temperature one week hence, the distance between two cities, or future stock values. A large foundation that I serve recognizes the wisdom of the crowd when judging grant proposals: When much is at stake in a decision, they aggregate many expert opinions. Harvest the wisdom of the crowd within. When researchers Edward Vul and Harold Pashler asked individuals what percent of the world’s commercial airports are in the U.S., they hazarded a very rough guess. Three weeks later, the researchers asked them to guess again. The average of their two guesses (on this and other questions) tended to be closer to the truth (for airports, 32 percent). We are, after all, different people at different times. For example, our momentary moods affect what we notice, how we interpret it, what we recall, and even how gullible we are. Thus, just as it pays to combine the wisdom of multiple people, so it pays to combine the wisdom from across our varying states of mind. Sleep on it, and decide again. Harness the powers of statistical prediction and machine learning. Whether predicting suicide risk, GPA, criminal recidivism, employee success, or mental disorders, statistical models outperform noisy professional intuition (as I also explained in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils). Likewise, artificial intelligence now enables machines to excel by reducing judgmental noise when recognizing faces, generating driving directions, spotting breast cancers, and detecting impeding cardiac collapse. Assess job candidates with structured interviews and create behavioral scales for assessing employee performance. Replace informal hiring interviews with work sampling and structured interviews that assess candidates on each work dimension. When evaluating employees, break a complex judgment into specific, behaviorally-described components. To reduce noise from some raters being lenient graders and others being tough, ask each rater to rank those being assessed. Eliminate sequencing noise. First impressions often matter, coloring ensuing interpretations. Likewise, the first person to speak when assessing an idea or a candidate, and the first person to rate an online product, often gain added influence. Control for such sequencing noise by having people independently record their judgments. Eliminating noise is usually, but not always, a good. The three-strikes life imprisonment policy reduced sentencing noise. But it did so with frequent injustice (when the offenses were minor, the life circumstances tragic, or the rehabilitation prospects promising). Algorithms that predict criminal risk may minimize noise yet be racially biased, as when the underlying crime data reflect over-policing in certain neighborhoods, over-reporting of certain offenses, or greater conviction rates for less affluent people. But more often, noise entails unfairness. When decisions become arbitrary—a matter of who does the judging, or their mood, or the time of day, or who speaks first—Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein recommend decision hygiene. Aggregate multiple judgments. Think statistically; discount anecdotes. Structure decisions into independent tasks. Constrain premature hunches. Welcome dissent. In sum, think smarter, judge more reliably, and decide more wisely. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.)   ... View more

Which of these worldviews (from an Economist—YouGov poll ) comes closest to your view? “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated.” “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.” Yaorusheng/Moment/Getty Images Psychological science offers support for both the humans-are-basically-good view and the humans-are-prone-to-evil view. Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers recognized cruelty but did “not find that this evil is inherent in human nature.” Instead, he argued, evil springs from toxic cultural influences. Fellow humanistic psychologist Rollo May disagreed, noting that “The culture is evil as well as good because we, the human beings who constitute it, are evil as well as good.” Several research streams support May’s acknowledgement of our human capacity for evil: Selfish genes (to use the title of Richard Dawkins’ famous book) predispose what social psychologist Donald Campbell called our “self-saving selfishness.” Self-serving biases lead people to perceive and present themselves as relatively superior—a phenomenon that also feeds ingroup favoritism and prejudice, which then often gets amplified by group polarization. Evil situations can overwhelm good intentions, inducing people to conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty. (Psychology students: think Asch and Milgram.) But if our minds of late are filled with images of evil—senseless police killings; anti-Black, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic sentiment and violence; anti-vax conspiracy spreaders—we also have abundant images of human generosity: of anti-racism initiatives and self-sacrificing health care workers. Our capacity for selfless altruism also appears in psychological science: Group selection. Some evolutionists contend that in competition with other groups, groups of mutually supportive altruists will survive and spread their group-serving genes. Compassionate acts. Altruism researchers explore our unhesitating willingness to offer directions, give blood, donate money, and volunteer time. Empathy. Observing someone’s suffering, we naturally empathize. And if we can do something, we’re often willing to help even when our helping is anonymous. We are not just selfish animals; we are social animals. Still, on balance, is the world “mostly full of good people”? Or does the threat of terrorists, criminals, and immigrants loom larger? Our answer to that worldview poll question matters. Of Biden voters, 77 percent saw a “big, beautiful world” mostly populated by good people. Of Trump voters, only 21 percent saw that world; 66 percent perceived a more threatening world. Our worldview can foretell our politics. Now consider a second question: How large is the circle of people with whom you identify and about whom you care? Does it include the people in your community? Your country? The whole world? As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, a University of Washington research team put that issue to people from 80 nations, asking various questions to gauge their identification with their community, their country, and all of humanity: “How much would you say you care (feel upset, want to help) when bad things happen to people in my community? My country? All over the world?” Then, they investigated: What best predicted people’s willingness to follow pandemic public health guidelines? To engage in prosocial behaviors, such as donating from their own household mask supply to a hospital? To come to the aid of someone with COVID? The striking finding: Compared with identification with one’s own community and nation—as well as other predictors, such as age, gender, and education—identification with all humanity was the runaway winner. Psychologist Andrew Meltzoff explained : “Our research reveals that a crucial aspect of one’s world view—how much people feel connected to others they have never met—predicts people’s cooperation with public health measures and the altruism they feel toward others during the pandemic.” Social psychologists offer many examples of how specific attitudes (toward exercise, toward religion, toward one’s workplace) predict behavior. As these studies demonstrate, our larger worldview matters, too. So what do you think? Is human nature, at its core, mostly good or mostly evil? And how wide is your circle of care and concern?" (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

The Coming Post-Pandemic Fear Extinction A recent YouGov U.S. survey produced a startling result. Of folks fully vaccinated against COVID-19, 54 percent nevertheless remain “very” or “somewhat” fearful of catching the virus—as do only 29 percent of those who “refuse to get vaccinated.” Asked about their comfort levels with various activities, 51 percent of vaccine refusers believe it’s safe to travel, as do only 29 percent of those vaccinated. You read that right: Most protected folks still feel unprotected. And most of those unprotected by choice feel safe. Fear Conditioning and the Pandemic It’s no secret that the two groups differ in many ways, including politics. In Dalton County , Georgia, 9 in 10 people voted for Trump and, as of early May 2021, 4 percent were vaccinated. In San Francisco, 1 in 10 voted for Trump and 2 in 3 are vaccinated (and the COVID case rate is approaching zero). As much as the vaccinated and vaccine-refusers differ, they seemingly share one thing in common: In their gut, neither fully trusts the vaccine efficacy science. “No! Not social reëntry!” ~ Cartoon https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a24198 by Julia Suits Some vaccine refusers discount the pandemic as overblown. As one said , “The coronavirus is a wildly overrated threat.” (Never mind its causing more U.S. deaths than the sum of all its wars except the Civil War.) But many also discount or suspect the vaccine science: They distrust the government, doubt the need, worry about side effects, perceive a conspiracy, assert their liberty, or question the benefit. Therefore, they agree with Senator Ron Johnson : “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?” Ironically, they are joined by fully vaccinated people who still fear a devastating COVID-19 infection and so continue to wear a mask when walking outdoors, to eschew socializing with other vaccinated friends, or to travel on planes with virus-filtered air. Never mind that among the 74,000 people in clinical trials receiving the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Astra-Zeneca, or Novavax vaccines, the total who died of COVID during the trial period was zero. And the number hospitalized with COVID was also zero. The vaccines are amazingly protective. Fear Extinction after the Pandemic Yes, a very few vaccinated people have contracted the virus (nearly all without becoming seriously sick). And among the millions now vaccinated, many will die—because even with no COVID-19, some 8,000 Americans and 800 Canadians die each day. Thus, there will be alarming stories of vaccination + death for media reporting. And the ready availability of those stories will, for many people, override the statistics of risk. Thanks to their automatic use of the availability heuristic (judging the frequency of things by their availability in memory), most folks display probability neglect: They fear the wrong things. They fret about massively publicized remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities. So it is that most folks fear commercial flying more than driving (which, per mile, is 500 times more dangerous). So it is that many parents who don’t bother strapping their child into a car seat fear letting their child walk alone to school. And so it is that vaccinated people, after habitually living with pandemic fear for more than a year, have difficulty embracing the good news of vaccine efficacy. After 14 months, habitual fear is slow to subside. But the good news: Subside it will. As exposure therapy has demonstrated, people who repeatedly face fear-arousing situations—starting with minimally anxiety-arousing settings—gradually become desensitized. Over time, their fear response extinguishes. Life will return to normal. Meanwhile, for us educators, there remains an ongoing challenge: to help people think smart—to think critically, enlightened by evidence (and, yes, statistics). Between fearlessness and paralysis lies wisdom. Between cynicism and panic lies courage. Between recklessness and reticence lies informed prudence. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

“I am among [Michigan’s] 300 plus ‘Juvenile Lifers,’” a prisoner known to his friends as Chan wrote me in 1994, kindly passing along a math error he had caught in one of my textbooks. More than half a lifetime ago, Chan, as a 17-year-old, had joined a friend in committing an armed robbery and murder. He expressed “great remorse and regret” for his crime, as well as his hope to learn and grow with the goal of contributing “something of substance and worth.” In the ensuing six years of our occasional correspondence, Chan—an intelligent and now deeply religious man—has been described to me by others, including the retired superintendent of his former prison, as a model prisoner. He is excelling in prison-taught college courses. After taking introductory psychology with my text, he alerted me that Aristotle’s Apothegems is actually spelled Apothegms. Chan, now in his mid-40s, would much rather be contributing to society and paying taxes than having his room and board funded by Michigan taxpayers, whose $2.06 billion prison budget impedes our governor’s fulfilling her campaign pledge to “fix the damn roads.” But does society somehow benefit from keeping those who have committed an impulsive juvenile crime endlessly locked up? Might Chan, if released, still be a risk? Hardly. Teens’ inhibitory frontal lobes lag the development of their emotional limbic system. With brains not yet fully prepared to calculate long-term consequences, the result is teen impulsiveness and emotionality. No wonder arrest rates for rape, assault, and murder soar during the teen years and decline after age 20—to a much lower level by the mid-40s. As psychologist David Lykken noted , “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.” By that time, the frontal lobes have matured, testosterone is subsiding, and men are mellowing. Middle-aged men are not just adolescents with inflated waistlines. But if the incarceration of juvenile lifers like Chan is costly to society, might it nevertheless deter future Chans from violent acts? Alas, when committing an impulsive act or a crime of passion, people seldom pause to calmly calculate the long-term consequences. (Even the threat of capital punishment does not predict lower state homicide rates.) Any deterrence effect lies less with the length of a punishment than with its probability—its swiftness and sureness. The immaturity of the teen brain and the diminishing risk of violence with age, as explained in Supreme Court briefs by the American Psychological Association and other health associations, contributed to the Court’s 2012 ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Even discretionary life-without-parole sentences were unconstitutional, it ruled, except for “the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.” Then, last week, the Court qualified that judgment by affirming the life sentence of Mississippian Brett Jones, who—when barely age 15, and after a lifetime of abuse—responded to his grandfather’s reportedly hitting him by impulsively stabbing his grandfather to death. Like Chan, Jones, now 31, is said to be “remorseful for his crime, hardworking and a ‘good kid’” who gets along with everybody. How ironic, commentators noted, that the majority opinion—that teens can forever be held responsible for their juvenile misdeeds—was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had argued during his confirmation hearings that holding him responsible for his high school yearbook page was “a new level of absurdity.” Moreover, responded Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this decision will prevent hundreds of other juvenile defendants, 70 percent of whom are people of color, from securing early release. zodebala/E+/Getty Images Nevertheless, there has been increasing bipartisan concern about the human and financial costs of lengthy mass incarceration for long-ago transgressions. The Smarter Sentencing Act , co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), responds to the reality that the seven-fold increased federal prison population since 1980 makes such incarceration “one of our nation’s biggest expenditures, dwarfing the amount spent on law enforcement.” Surely, we can say yes to public protection, but also yes to smarter sentencing—sentencing that holds the Chans and Brett Joneses accountable for their acts, while also recognizing that the impulsive, momentary act of an immature teen needn’t predict one’s distant future. Indeed, how many of us would like to be judged today by the worst moments of our immature adolescence? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

Meet Jack and Jill as they march up the hill to buy a new vehicle. Hoping to save gas costs and benefit the environment, they are wavering between two options: trading their 34-mpg sedan for a 56-mpg Toyota Prius Eco. trading their hefty 12-mpg pickup truck for a 14-mpg Toyota Tundra. Question: Assuming they drive both vehicles the same number of miles, which purchase would most reduce their gas consumption? Most folks—you, also?—think the Prius would save more. After all, a 34- to 56-mpg jump is a 65 percent improvement, whereas a 12- to 14-mpg jump is but a 17 percent improvement. I thought so, too, until a  mutual friend alerted me to social psychologist (and Duke business professor) Richard Larrick’s studies of the MPG illusion (see here and here ). To see the MPG illusion in action, let’s do the math, assuming that Jill and Jack drive each car 15,000 miles a year and pay $3.00 per gallon for gas: The 34-mpg sedan now consumes 15,000 ÷ 34 = 441 gallons; the new 56-mpg Prius would consume 15,000 ÷ 56 = 268 gallons. That’s 173 gallons and $519 saved. The 12-mpg pickup presently scarfs 15,000 ÷ 12 = 1250 gallons, compared with the Tundra’s 15,000 ÷ 14 = 1071 gallons. That’s 179 gallons and $537 saved. The bottom line: A 2-mpg increase when purchasing or replacing a low-mileage car is hugely more beneficial—to the environment and to one’s pocketbook—than a 2-mpg increase when purchasing a high-mileage car. As Larrick says (but most folks don’t appreciate), “small MPG improvements on inefficient cars can save a lot of gas.” We can cure the MPG illusion by reframing reported fuel efficiency as GPM—gallons per mile, rather than MPG—miles per gallon. When buying, isn’t that what we need to know: not how far can we drive on a gallon, but rather how many gallons must we buy to drive this car? MPG is also useful—it tells us whether we can make it home before needing to refuel. But when purchasing a car, it’s gas consumption, not MPG, that matters most. In recognition of the MPG illusion—the perception that equal MPG increases will represent equal gas savings—the U.S. Department of Energy now includes, albeit less prominently, GPM information on fuel economy labels (#5, below). Larrick and his colleague Jack Soll report that when people stop to consider the GPM framing, most do then make fuel-smart judgments. And when people think smarter about fuel savings—when, for example, they realize that increasing fuel efficiency from 10 to 20 mpg will save twice as much as a 20 to 40 mpg increase—public energy conservation policies can become smarter as well. GPM framing helps us prioritize getting the most fuel-inefficient vehicles out of sales rooms and off the road. P.S. For fellow data geeks, U.S. “Miles per hour” are increasing: (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

We live wonder-full lives. How blessed I am to be tasked with reporting on those wonders, and, on most days, to learn something new. Last week’s reading brought news—previously unknown to me, and also to you?—of an intriguing phenomenon, numbsense. But first, some background. One stunning psychological science revelation concerns how much more we know than we know we know. We operate with two minds—one conscious, the other below the radar of our awareness. An illustration of this dual processing comes from brain-injured patients who, though consciously blind (unable to perceive their surroundings visually), act as if they see. Walking down a hall, they avoid an unseen chair. Asked to slip an envelope into a mail slot, they—despite being unable to see or describe the slot’s location and angle—can do so. These “blindsighted” individuals suggest that the brain’s “visual perception track” is—surprise!—distinct from its “visual action track.” Even normally sighted people, when their visual cortex is deactivated with magnetic stimulation, may display blindsight—by correctly guessing the nature of unseen objects. And now the week’s news: City University of New York researchers Tony Ro and Lua Koenig have also used magnetic stimulation to deactivate people’s sense of touch, leaving them unaware of whether or where someone has touched them. Yet, like some patients who have suffered sensory cortex damage, they can display a blindsight-like “numbsense.” They can guess the location of the unfelt touch. The big lesson of blindsight and numbsense: The unconscious mind sometimes knows what the conscious mind does not. Moreover, the out-of-sight mind is the bigger workhorse. Much as a cruise ship’s work mostly happens without its captain’s attention, so most of what sustains us is accomplished by our mind’s unseen workers below decks, without engaging our conscious mind’s attention. We are smarter than we know. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

The history of Americans' health is, first, a good news story. Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, better nutrition, and diminished infant mortality, life expectancy-at-birth has doubled since 1880—from 38 to 79 years. For such a thin slice of human history, that is a stunning achievement. Even amid a pandemic, be glad you are alive today. The recent not-good news is that, despite doubled per-person health-care spending compared to other rich countries, U.S. life expectancy is lower—and has been declining since 2014. Can you guess why Americans, despite spending more on their health, are dying sooner? Our World in Data founder, Max Roser, sees multiple explanations. Smoking. While the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed 2.4 million lives in the past year, cigarette smoking kills 8.1 million people annually—and it kills more in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. Of those people who are still smokers when they die, two-thirds die because of their smoking. Still, there’s some good news: The plunging smoking rate is reducing both smoking-caused deaths and the smoking fatality gap between the U.S. and other rich countries. Obesity. While smoking has declined, obesity—a risk factor for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some cancers—has increased: 36 percent of Americans are now obese. Compared to the other rich (but less obese) nations, the U.S. has a much higher rate of premature deaths attributed to obesity (five times that of Japan, more than double that of France, and nearly 60 percent greater than Canada). Homicides. As a gun-owning culture, Americans much more often kill each other—four times more often than the next most murderous rich nation (peaceful Canada). Opioid overdoses. Like homicides, America’s much greater opioid overdose death rate, though causing less than 2 percent of all deaths, affects life expectancy because so many victims are young. Road accidents. A surprise to me—and you?—is the U.S. having, compared to other rich nations, a roughly doubled rate of vehicle-related accidents (again, often involving the young, and thus contributing to the life expectancy gap). Inequality and poverty. Although the U.S. enjoys higher average income than most other rich countries, its lower-income citizens are poorer. This greater inequality and poverty predicts less access to health care and also greater infant mortality, which, among the rich nations, is highest in the U.S. And how might we expect the pandemic to affect the U.S. life expectancy standing? The half-million U.S. COVID-19 deaths in the pandemic’s first year have, per capita, been matched by the UK and Italy, but are roughly double those of other European nations, and many times more than collectivist East Asian countries.   For its often mask-defying rugged individualism, the U.S. has paid a heavy price. Moreover, as Nathan DeWall and I report in our forthcoming Exploring Psychology, 12th Edition (with data from Carnegie Mellon University), there has been a striking -.85 correlation across states between mask wearing and COVID-19 symptoms. Less mask wearing—as in the mask-resisting Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, and the Southern states—predicts more COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control observed the same correlation across U.S. counties during 2020: COVID-19 cases and deaths increased in U.S. counties that reinstated in-person dining or not requiring masks.   As Max Roser notes, the factors that predict Americans’ dying sooner—smoking, obesity, violence, opioids, poverty, and likely COVID-19—are less about better healthcare for the sick than about averting health problems in the first place. As Benjamin Franklin anticipated, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.)   ... View more