Cognitive dissonance theory—one of social psychology’s gifts to human self-understanding—offers several intriguing predictions, including this: When we act in ways inconsistent with our attitudes or beliefs, we often resolve that dissonance by changing our thinking. Attitudes follow behavior.   That simple principle explains why smokers often dismiss health warnings, why racial attitudes improved following school desegregation and civil rights laws, and why we tend to dislike those whom we’ve harmed and to love those to whom we have been kind. Although we sometimes do persuade ourselves to act, we also can act ourselves into new ways of thinking. Our deeds forge our understandings.   The principle reaches into our political attitudes. Consider how U.S. attitudes followed U.S. behavior as events unfolded during the 2003 war with Iraq, which was premised primarily on the need to rid Iraq of its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Four in five Americans told Gallup they believed WMDs would be found, leading 4 in 5 also to support the war. Was the war justified even if Iraq did not have WMDs? Only 38 percent of Americans believed it would be; if there were no WMDs, there should be no war.   When no such weapons were found—and the war’s human, financial, and terrorism-enhancing costs became known—how did Americans resolve their dissonance? They changed their primary rationale for the war from eliminating WMDs to ridding the world of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Thus, three months after the war’s launch, the 38 percent who supported the war if there were no WMDs now had mushroomed to 58 percent. Despite the war’s discounted initial rationale, support for a war that didn’t eliminate WMDs had increased. Will such self-persuasion ride again in the 2020 American conflict with Iran? Prior to the January 3, 2020, killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani, Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of war with Iran: In June 2019, about 4 in 5 Americans (78 percent) approved of President Trump’s calling off a retaliatory strike after Iran downed a U.S. drone. Few believed that retaliation against Iran was a good idea. In July 2019, only 18 percent told Gallup they favored “military action against Iran.” In September 2019, only 21 percent responding to a University of Maryland survey said that, to achieve its goal with Iran, “the U.S. should be prepared to go to war.” I wrote the above words on January 8, 2020, and now await follow-up surveys—with the expectation that cognitive dissonance will ride again, as some Americans wrestle with the dissonance between their support for the president and their prior opposition to such military action—a tension that can be resolved by now thinking the retaliatory strike was warranted.   * * * * P.S. Initial post-strike surveys: A January 4-5, 2020, POLITICO/Morning Consult survey reported that “47% of voters approve of President Donald Trump's decision to kill top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani while 40% disapprove.” A January 6–7, 2020, post-assassination Reuters/Ipsos survey found that “a growing minority of Americans say they are now in favor of a ‘preemptive attack’ on Iran’s military.’ The poll found that 27 percent said ‘the United States should strike first.’” A January 7–8, 2020. USA Today/Reuters survey found Americans concerned about increased threats to U.S. safety, yet 42 percent supported the Soleimani assassination—far more than the 1 in 5 who favored such action in the summer of 2019. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

Part of my text-writing pleasure is interjecting playful thoughts and tongue-in-cheek one-liners that students seem to enjoy: “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” (If I don’t enjoy writing—assuming psychology teaching can offer both wisdom and wit—then who will enjoy reading?)   As part of my, um, “executive time,” I occasionally visit Reddit’s Showerthoughts —first for delight but also for inspiration. To quote the website, a showerthought is a spontaneous “miniature epiphany that makes the mundane more interesting. . . . Showerthoughts can be funny, poignant, thought-provoking, or even just silly, but they should always prompt people to say ‘Huh, I’ve never thought about it that way before!’”   Some Showerthought examples: Your stomach thinks all potato is mashed. We don’t wash our hands, our hands wash each other. Someone coined the term “coin the term.” If you are the best barber in town, you know you can't get the best haircut. The "b" in subtle is subtle. In a nutshell, an acorn is an oak tree. A lot of people die in their living rooms. The two worst prison sentences are life and death. If you swap the W’s in Where? What? and When? with T’s, you end up with their answers. Tea is just a fancy way of saying leaf soup. Everything in the entire universe either is or isn't a potato. For your further pleasure, here are some psychology-relevant examples, each from Showerthoughts or inspired by one-liners that I encountered there. Perhaps (after my editors trim the merely silly) some of these musings will leaven our future editions?   Sleep: To fall asleep, fake it till you make it.   Loneliness: The world is full of lonely people afraid to make the first move.   Relationships: All of your friends you made by talking to strangers.   Implicit cognition: The unconscious mind is like the wind: You don’t see it, but you can see its effects.   Aging: To age is to shift from a life of “no limits” to “know limits.”   Relationships: Marrying someone because they're attractive is like buying a watermelon because it's a really nice shade of green.   Memory via acronyms: The acronym of "The Only Day After Yesterday" is TODAY .   Eating behavior: When you're “biting down" on something, you're actually biting up .   Sensory adaptation: Nobody realizes how much noise their air conditioning is making until it abruptly shuts off.   Psychokinesis claims: More spoons have been bent by ice cream than by psychics.   Mind and brain: When you're thinking about your brain, your brain is just thinking about itself .   Death: You will be the last person to die in your lifetime.     (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

Climate change has arrived . Greenhouse gases are accumulating. The planet and its oceans are warming. Glaciers and Arctic ice are retreating. The seas are rising. Extreme weather is becoming ever costlier—in money and in lives. The warming Arctic and its wavier jet stream even help explain the recent polar vortex. If such threats came from a looming alien invasion, our response would be bipartisan and robust, notes Farhad Manjoo .   Even so, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, plans to lift CO 2 restrictions on coal-generated power, weakened auto fuel-economy and emissions standards, cut NASA climate monitoring, increased off-shore oil and gas drilling, and reduced clean-energy research and development. So why, given the accumulating science, is the Trump administration apparently unconcerned about climate change as a weapon of mass destruction?   Surely the availability heuristic—the coloring of our judgments by mentally available events and images—is partly to blame. Climate change is imperceptibly slow, without a just noticeable difference from one month to the next. What’s cognitively more available is our recent local weather. Thus, hot days increase people’s beliefs in global warming—as Australians understand after their recent scorching hot summer. And cold weather decreases concern—as vividly illustrated when U.S. Senator James Inhofe, during a 2015 cold spell, ridiculed global warming claims by bringing a snowball to the U.S. Senate. (Is it really so hard to grasp the distinction between local weather and global climate? We do manage, when feeling cold air on opening our refrigerator, not to misjudge our whole-house temperature.)    (C-Span [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.) President Trump has echoed Inhofe with dozens of tweets that similarly generalize from local weather:     Such wisdom brings to mind my favorite Stephen Colbert tweet:   The availability heuristic’s upside is that extreme weather experiences, as well as climate science, are driving growing public concern. Drought-caused wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves have a silver lining. After surviving Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey residents expressed increased environmentalism. And today, 74 percent of Americans say that the last five years’ extreme weather has influenced their climate change opinions.   Ergo, Americans by a 5-to-1 margin now agree that global warming is happening. By a 3-to-1 margin they believe it is human-caused. Seven in 10 now say that they are at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. And globally, across 26 countries, two-thirds of people see it as a “major threat” to their country. “The evidence the climate is changing is becoming so overwhelming people are seeing it in their regions and in their lives,” says the Obama science advisor, John Holdren. “We are really to the point where we’re seeing bodies in the street from severe flooding and severe wildfires.”   With vivid and mentally available weather tragedies occurring more often, more folks are noticing and caring. Last month, 3300 economists—including 27 Nobel laureates and all former Federal Reserve Board chairs— signed a consensus statement supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most effective climate change solution. Although the Green New Deal proposed by progressive Democrats may be more aspirational than achievable, its existence—together with the increasing climate concern of youth and young adults , and the growth in low-carbon energy sources—gives hope for a greener future.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

“I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” explained President Trump in stating why he believed Federal Reserve interest rate hikes were a mistake. “My gut has always been right,” he declared again in saying why he needn’t prepare for the recent trade negotiation with China’s president.   In trusting his gut intuition, Trump has much company. “Buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness that provides—if we allow it to—the most reliable guide,” offered Prince Charles. “I’m a gut player. I rely on my instincts,” said President George W. Bush, explaining his decision to launch the Iraq War.   Although there is, as I noted in another of these TalkPsych essays, a gut-brain connection, are we right to trust our gut? Does the gut know best about interest rates, trade policy, and climate change? Or, mindful of smart people often doing dumb things, do we instead need more humility, more checking of gut hunches against hard reality, more critical thinking?   Drawing from today’s psychological science, one could write a book on both the powers and perils of intuition. (Indeed, I have—see here .) Here, shortened to an elevator speech, is the gist.   Intuition’s powers. Cognitive science reveals an unconscious mind—another mind backstage—that Freud never told us about. Much thinking occurs not “on screen” but off screen, out of sight, where reason does not know. Countless studies—of priming, implicit memory, empathic accuracy, thin slice social judgments, creativity, and right hemisphere processing—illustrate our nonrational, intuitive powers. We know more than we know we know. Thanks to our “overlearning” of automatic behaviors, those of us who learned to ride bikes as children can intuitively pedal away on one decades later. And a skilled violinist knows, without thinking, just where to place the bow, at what angle, with what pressure. “In apprehension, how like a god!,” exclaimed Shakespeare’s Hamlet.   Intuition’s perils. Other studies—of perceptual illusions, self-serving bias, illusory optimism, illusory correlation, confirmation bias, belief perseverance, the fundamental attribution error, misplaced fears, and the overconfidence phenomenon—confirm what literature and religion have long presumed: the powers and perils of pride. Moreover, these phenomena feed mistaken gut intuitions that produce deficient decisions by clinicians, interviewers, coaches, investors, gamblers, and would-be psychics. “Headpiece filled with straw,” opined T. S. Eliot.   Intuition’s failures often are akin to perceptual illusions—rooted in mechanisms that usually serve us well but sometimes lead us astray. Like doctors focused on detecting and treating disease, psychological scientists are skilled at detecting and calling attention to our mind’s predictable errors. They concur with the novelist Madeline L’Engle’s observation : “The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”   The bottom line: our gut intuitions are terrific at some things, such as instantly reading emotions in others’ faces, but fail at others, such as guessing stocks, assessing risks, and predicting climate change. And so psychologists teach about intuition’s perils as well as its powers. We encourage critical thinking. We urge people, before trusting others’ gut intuitions, to ask: “What do you mean?” “How do you know?”   As physicist Richard Feynman famously said , “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” ( For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit www.TalkPsych.com ) ... View more

As I finished a recent presentation, “Thinking Smart in a Post-Truth Age,” a questioner’s hand shot up: “I understand the need to think with our heads as well as our hearts, by considering the evidence. But how can I persuade people such as the climate-change-denying folks meeting in my town next week?”   I responded by commending a gentle conversation that searched for common values. I also noted that advocates for any cause are wise to not focus on immovable folks with extreme views, but on the uncertain middle—the folks whose votes sway elections and shape history.   I should also have mentioned the consistent finding of nine new studies by University of Cologne psychologists Joris Lammers and Matt Baldwin: Folks will often agree with positions that are linked to their own yearnings. For example, might conservatives who tend to yearn for yesteryear’s good old days respond to messages that appeal to nostalgia? Indeed, say Lammers and Baldwin, that was the successful assumption of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” message.   But the same appeal to nostalgia can also promote progressive ideas, they report. For example, liberals were much more supportive than conservatives of a future-focused gun-control message: “I would prefer to make a change, so that in the future people may own hunting rifles and pistols, but no one will have assault rifles.” When the researchers framed the same message with a past-focus: “I would like to go back to the good old days, when people may have owned hunting rifles and pistols, but no one had assault rifles,” conservatives pretty much agreed with liberals.   Likewise, contemporary Germans on the left and right expressed much less disagreement about an immigration message when it focused on their country’s past history of welcoming of immigrants.   In earlier research, Lammers and Baldwin also found conservatives more open to nostalgia-focused environmental appeals—to, for example, donating money to a charity focused on restoring yesterday’s healthy Earth, rather than a charity focused on preventing future environmental damage. “Make Earth Great Again.”   Ergo, I now realize I should have encouraged my questioner to market her message to her audience. If it’s a political message pitched by conservatives at liberals, it’s fine to focus on making a better future. But if she is appealing to conservatives, then she might take a back-to-the-future approach: Frame her message as support for the way things used to be.   (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com) ... View more

Some years ago an NBC Television producer invited me, while in New York City, to meet in her office to brainstorm possible psychology-related segments. But a focused conversation proved difficult, because every three minutes or so she would turn away to check an incoming email or take a call—leaving me feeling a bit demeaned.   In today’s smartphone age, such interruptions are pervasive. In the midst of conversation, your friend’s attention is diverted by the ding of an incoming message, the buzz of a phone call, or just the urge to check email. You’re being phubbed—an Australian-coined term meaning phone-snubbed.   In U.S. surveys by James Roberts and Meredith David, 46 percent reported being phubbed by their partners, and 23 percent said it was a problem in their relationship. More phubbing—as when partners place the phone where they can glance at it during conversation, or check it during conversational lulls—predicted lower relationship satisfaction.   EmirMemedovski/E+/Getty Images Could such effects of phubbing be shown experimentally? In a forthcoming study, Ryan Dwyer and his University of British Columbia colleagues recruited people to share a restaurant meal with their phones on the table or not. “When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family.”   Another new experiment , by University of Kent psychologists Varoth Chotpitayasunondh and Karen Douglas, helps explain phubbing’s social harm. When putting themselves in the skin of one participant in an animation of a conversation, people who were phubbed felt a diminished sense of belonging, self-esteem, and control. Phubbing is micro-ostracism. It leaves someone, even while with another, suddenly alone. Screenshot courtesy Karen Douglas   Smartphones, to be sure, are a boon to relationships as well as a bane. They connect us to people we don’t see—enlarging our sense of belonging. As one who lives thousands of miles from family members, I love Facetime and instant messaging. Yet a real touch beats being pinged. A real smile beats an emoticon. An eye-to-eye blether (as the Scots would say) beats an online chat. We are made for face-to-face relationship.   When I mentioned this essay to my wife, Carol, she wryly observed that I (blush) phub her “all the time.” So, what can we do, while enjoying our smartphones, to cut the phubbing? I reached out to some friends and family and got variations on these ideas: “When we get together to play cards, I often put everyone's phone in the next room.” “When out to dinner, I often ask friends to put their phones away. I find the presence of phones so distracting; the mere threat of interruption diminishes the conversation.” Even better: “When some of us go out to dinner, we pile up our phones; the first person to give in and reach for a phone pays for the meal.” “ I sometimes stop talking until the person reestablishes eye-contact.” Another version: “I just wait until they stop reading.” “I say , ‘I hope everything is OK.’” Or this: “I stop and ask is everything ok? Do you need a minute? I often receive an apology and the phone is put away.” “I have ADHD and I am easily distracted. Thus when someone looks at their phone, and I'm distracted, I say, "I'm sorry, but I am easily distracted. Where was I?" . . . It's extremely effective, because nobody wants me to have to start over.”   Seeing the effects of phubbing has helped me change my own behavior. Since that unfocused conversation at NBC I have made a practice, when meeting with someone in my office, to ignore the ringing phone. Nearly always, people pause the conversation to let me take the call. But no, I explain, we are having a conversation and you have taken the time to be here with me. Whoever that is can leave a message or call back. Right now, you are who’s important.   Come to think of it, I should take that same attitude home. ... View more

How many of us have felt dismay over a friend or family member’s stubborn resistance to our arguments or evidence showing (we believe) that Donald Trump is (or isn’t) making America great again, or that immigrants are (or aren’t) a threat to our way of life? Sometimes, it seems, people just stubbornly resist change.   Recently, however, I’ve also been struck by the pliability of the human mind. We are adaptive creatures, with malleable minds.   Over time, the power of social influence is remarkable. Generations change. And attitudes change. They follow our behavior, adjust to our tribal norms, or simply become informed by education.   The power of social influence appears in current attitudes toward free trade, as the moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks illustrates: “As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.”   Those who love history can point out many other such shifts. After Pearl Harbor, Japan and Japanese people became, in many American minds surveyed by Gallup, untrustworthy and disliked. But then after the war, they soon transformed into our “intelligent, hard-working, self-disciplined, resourceful allies.”  Likewise, Germans across two wars were hated then admired then hated again then once again admired.   Or consider within thin slices of recent human history the transformational changes in our thinking about race, gender, and sexual orientation: Race. In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans approved of “marriage between Blacks and Whites.” In 2013, 87 percent approved. Gender. In 1967, two-thirds of first-year American college students agreed that “the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family.” Today, the question, which would offend many, is no longer asked. Gay marriage. In Gallup surveys, same-sex marriage—approved by only 27 percent of Americans in 1996—is now welcomed by nearly two-thirds. Consider also, from within the evangelical culture that I know well, the astonishing results of two Public Religion Research Institute polls. The first, in 2011, asked 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 30 percent of White evangelical Protestants agreed. By July of 2017, with President Trump in office, 70 percent of White evangelicals said they would be willing to separate public and personal conduct. An April 22, 2018, Doonesbury satirized this “head-spinning reversal” (quoting the pollster). A cartoon pastor announces to his congregation the revised definition of sin: “To clarify, we now condone the following conduct: lewdness, vulgarity, profanity, adultery, and sexual assault. Exemptions to Christian values also include greed, bullying, conspiring, boasting, lying, cheating, sloth, envy, wrath, gluttony, and pride. Others TBA. Lastly we’re willing to overlook biblical illiteracy, church nonattendance, and no credible sign of faith.” In a recent essay, I reflected (as a person of faith) on the shift among self-described “evangelicals”: The great temptation is to invoke “God” to justify one’s politics. “Piety is the mask,” observed William James.   This tendency to make God in our own image was strikingly evident in a provocative study by social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues.  Most people, they reported, believe that God agrees with whatever they believe. No surprise there. But consider: When the researchers persuaded people to change their minds about affirmative action or the death penalty, the people then assumed that God now believed their new view. As I am, the thinking goes, so is God.   But the mind is malleable in both directions. Many one-time evangelicals—for whom evangelicalism historically has meant a “good news” message of God’s accepting grace—are now changing their identity in the age of Trump (with Trump’s support having been greatest among “evangelicals” who are religiously inactive—and for whom the term has been co-opted to mean “cultural right”). Despite my roots in evangelicalism, I now disavow the mutated label (not wanting to be associated with the right’s intolerance toward gays and Muslims). Many others, such as the moderate Republican writer Peter Wehner, are similarly repulsed by the right-wing takeover of evangelicalism and disavowing today’s tarnished evangelical brand.   Times change, and with it our minds. ... View more

Originally posted on November 21, 2015. “So, what do you make of this?,” asked the woman in the airplane seat next to me this week, as she pointed to an article about corporations cancelling meetings in Paris in response to last week’s terrorist attacks. Eight guys with guns commit horrific evil and capture the world’s attention—leading to calls for revenge, proposals to ban Syrian refugees from the U.S., and fears of European travel. When terrorists kill people in bunches, they create readily available—and memorable—images that hijack our rational thinking. Meanwhile, I replied, even more people—some 200—die of homicidal gun violence in the U.S. each week. But they mostly die one by one, eliciting little or no national outrage or resolve. Is this (without discounting the likelihood of future terrorist acts) yet another example of our human tendency to fear the wrong things (as I’ve explained here, here, and here)? If terrorists were to kill 1000 people in such attacks in the USA in the next year, Americans would have reason to fear--albeit 1/30th the fear of riding in a motor vehicle, where more than 30,000 people a year die. The shared threat of terrorism further hijacks rationality, by triggering us/them thinking, inflaming stereotypes of the “other” among us, and creating scapegoats. Thus, although refugees have reportedly committed no terrorist acts—either in Paris or, since 2001, in the USA—more than half of U.S. governors are seeking to block Syrian refugees, and reported threats against Muslims and Mosques have increased. “We don’t know who [the Syrian refugees] are,” declared Donald Trump. “They could be ISIS. It could be the great Trojan Horse.” A personal note: U.S. politicians’ calls to effectively shut out Syrian refugees, and even (a la Donald Trump) to register all Muslims in a database, evoke a déjà vu. In 1942, while I was in my mother’s womb, a fear-filled American government gave the Japanese-Americans living on my Bainbridge Island, Washington, home six days to pack a suitcase and be at the ferry dock for that March 20th day that began the internment of 120,000 of our fellow Americans. Among their tearful friends and neighbors at the dock was my father (who for many of them was their insurance agent, and who maintained their insurance over objections from insurance companies who viewed the internees properties as at-risk). Sixty-two years later ground was broken for a national memorial at the historic site, with former internee and Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community president, Frank Kitamoto, declaring that “this memorial is also for Walt and Millie Woodward, for Ken Myers, for Genevive Williams . . . and the many others who supported us” and who challenged the forced removal at the risk of being called unpatriotic. The motto of the beautiful memorial, which I visit on nearly every trip home to Bainbridge: Nidoto Nai Yoni​—Let It Not Happen Again. As a Bainbridge resident, Washington’s current governor, Jay Inslee, knows that story well, and recalled it when standing apart from other governors wanting to exclude Syrian refugees: We are a nation that has always taken the path of enforcing our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our humanity, our relationship with the rest of the world. And we've hewed to those values, even in troubled times. And when we haven't, we've regretted it. I'll give you an example. I live on Bainbridge Island, this little island just west of Seattle. And it was the first place where we succumbed to fear in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. And we locked up Washington and American citizens, and we sent them to camps—Japanese-Americans. . . . So my neighbors were locked up by the federal government and sent to camps for years while their sons fought in the Army in Italy and were decorated fighting for democracy. We regret that. We regret that we succumbed to fear. We regret that we lost moorage for who we were as a country. We shouldn't do that right now. ... View more