Some people live charmed lives. Some people endure persistent depression. Most people—likely including you—manage well enough, but with occasional heartaches. A relationship fails. A job is lost. An illness strikes. A war devastates. A nation regresses. And we are distraught.  Malte Mueller/GettyImages When struck by “the hurt we never hoped to find,” the pain feels like it might never end. The breakup, the disability, the defeat, the failure, the disaster, the layoff are loud bells that cannot be unrung. There’s no do-over for the paralysis, the divorce, or the loss of a beloved pet. The stomach knot cannot be willed away. And in extreme instances—the unfillable hole following a child’s death—the aching sense of loss endures. Yet amid most pain, there is a glimmer of good news in a stunning psychological science finding: Most of us are more resilient than we expect. Studies of people’s “affective forecasting” reveal that, when imagining or experiencing either bad or good events, most folks overestimate the intensity and the duration of their future emotions. They mispredict how good or bad they will feel some time after a romantic breakup, an election win or loss, or a sports victory or defeat. As the Scottish writer George MacDonald observed, “When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go.” The shorter-than-expected half-life of emotions even extends to extreme events. Faculty members up for tenure have predicted that a negative decision would be permanently deflating—yet 5 to 10 years later they experienced happiness equivalent to those who received tenure. People who suffered distress from proximity to the 9/11 terrorist attacks typically managed to recover good mental health. Even those experiencing the severe disability of complete paralysis—becoming “locked-in”—typically wish to continue living, with most regaining a reasonably “happy, meaningful life.”  At the other extreme, what do you suppose might be the emotional aftermath of your awakening tomorrow with all your wishes granted—to a world with no bills, no ills, and the endless holiday of your dreams? The available evidence from people such as lottery winners is that winning is great, but the immediate euphoria fades sooner than expected. U.S. economic growth—with a tripled average disposable income since 1957—has made us no happier. Mega-millionaires are no happier than “mere” millionaires.  The surprisingly transitory nature of our emotions is explained by what psychologist Harry Helson long ago called the adaptation-level phenomenon—our tendency to judge events relative to our recent experience. Our experiences of loud or soft, pleasant or unpleasant, hot or cold are all relative to that to which we’ve adapted. Perhaps you’ve noticed: A 60 °F (16 °C) day after a hot summer feels cooler than the same temperature after winter’s cold.  Our emotions similarly ride up and down with variations from our recent experience. As our achievements rise, we feel successful and satisfied. As our material acquisitions grow, we feel pleasure. But soon we adapt. What had felt good now feels merely neutral, and what formerly was neutral may feel like deprivation. As the impact of bad events dissipates, a silver lining may linger. Some have experienced “posttraumatic growth”—a greater appreciation for life, renewed relationships, or spiritual growth. After being struck down, they come back stronger. From the pain comes a gain. Sometimes the aftermath of temporary self-inflicted pain is more intense pleasure. A cold swim adds bliss to an ensuing hot shower. A religious fast enhances our savoring of the break-fast meal. Sexual abstinence enables a more ecstatic reunion. The aftermath of an uncomfortable hard workout is a relaxed glow. Through such experiential contrasts we can harness the power of “benign masochism”—the conversion of a negative into a positive experience.   More generally, life’s downs prepare us to appreciate life’s ups. The experience of night enables our appreciation of day. Illness renews our awareness of health. The dejection of the last defeat enhances our joy in the next victory. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts explained the phenomenon to his son’s ninth grade class: From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted . . . and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. I expect that for you as for me, life is a mix of pains and pleasures, of disappointments and delights, of sufferings and satisfactions. Knowing our human capacity for resilience doesn’t take the hurt out of pain or lessen our dismay over ignorance and injustice. But knowing that the pain seldom lasts forever can help us endure and glimpse a brighter future beyond our current angst. The Psalmist understood: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

Among the proffered explanations for Donald Trump’s 1.47 percent victory margin over Kamala Harris, the most prominent has been inflation. Pandemic-era inflation did outpace Americans’ earnings growth for a time. But since 2022, Americans’ incomes have outpaced today’s lower inflation rate—yielding a nominal net gain in median real (inflation-adjusted) income during the Biden presidency. So why in early 2024 did 57 percent of Americans perceive, to Harris’ detriment, that “over the past two years . . . the economy has gotten worse” (even with a record stock market and job growth)? Let’s reframe the question. Imagine the economies of two countries. Over the last four years, Country A has experienced a flat economy, with no inflation and no income increases—thus with stable purchasing power for the average citizen. Country B has experienced 20 percent inflation and 20 percent after-tax income increases—thus also with stable purchasing power for the average citizen. Question: In which country are people unhappiest with their economy, and most likely to vote out their current leaders? A simple, powerful social psychological principle suggests an answer. We humans have a natural self-serving bias. This bias leads us not only to overrate our virtues (nearly everyone thinks they’re better than the average driver) but also to attribute bad outcomes to external factors and good outcomes to ourselves. When athletes lose, they may blame bad luck or unfair officiating, while attributing wins to their superior skill and effort. “What have I done to deserve this?” is a question we more often ask of our troubles than our successes. Self-serving bias helps explain voters’ unhappiness. Drawing from other economists, Paul Krugman observes that people tend not to see inflation as lifting their incomes along with their grocery prices. Rather, they attribute inflation to government policy, while attributing income gains to their own efforts. Thus, people in Country B—which approximates the U.S. of the last four years—will be more displeased with their economy than will those in the economically equivalent Country A.   So, when prices and incomes rise together—preserving people’s purchasing power—they will tend to accept credit for their increased wages, while blaming those in charge for inflation . . . and thus to vote out the party in power. And, like it or not, that’s an example of the social psychology of everyday life. David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

Plans to detain millions of undocumented immigrants in “vast holding facilities” evoke déjà vu for us folks native to Puget Sound’s Bainbridge Island. We’ve heard that story before. Bainbridge was ground zero for an earlier mass exclusion, the World War II incarceration of 120,000 west coast Japanese Americans, citizen and noncitizen alike. Their removal began with Exclusion Order No. 1, giving our island’s Japanese Americans six days to settle their affairs before being transported to desolate camps for the war’s ensuing three years. At the March 30, 1942 ferry departure point—now the site of a national Japanese American Exclusion Memorial—other island residents (including my father, the insurance agent for many) gathered to say their heartbroken goodbyes.   Although differing, the two mass exclusions each illustrate two social psychological phenomena. Overblown fear. Our human fears are fed more by vivid (easily remembered, cognitively available) anecdotes than by representative data. Thus, fueled by widely-publicized immigrant crime stories, many Americans fear an “immigrant crime wave.” Nearly 6 in 10 agree that “the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. is leading to more crime”—despite the reality that immigrants (both legal and undocumented) have an incarceration rate well below that of U.S.-born citizens. World War II-era media similarly hyped a false threat of Japanese Americans as potential spies and saboteurs. Racist caricatures and dehumanizing language fueled hate crimes, including vandalism and vigilante violence. Contact matters.  One of social psychology’s great lessons is that prejudice decreases with friendly social contact between people of equal status, while minimal contact sustains prejudice. In today’s world, anti-immigrant sentiment in both Germany and the U.S. runs strongest in states with the fewest immigrants. West Virginians, whose state has the lowest proportion of undocumented immigrants, have been most likely to disagree that “the growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens American society.” Likewise, in World War II California, where people of European and Japanese descent mostly lived separately, fewer people bid the internees goodbye. On their return, many signs banning Japanese American customers made clear they were unwelcome. Separation makes the heart grow colder. On Bainbridge, where all islanders intermingled as school classmates, in neighborhoods, and in businesses, wartime camp news from the excluded Islanders was shared via the island paper. At the high school graduation, 13 empty chairs symbolized the missing friends. Post-war, the returning internees were greeted with food and support, and their descendants today operate some of the island’s thriving businesses. Contact works. The exclusion memorial and its motto offer a reminder that speaks to our present. It was created, states the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, “to instruct future generations about the injustices of the past and to be forever vigilant about the fragility of assumed rights.” It commemorates “the strength and perseverance of the people involved—both those exiled and their island neighbors,” and reminds us of our capacity “to heal, forgive and care for one another.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

In the face of good news, consider our head-scratching negativity: Soaring prosperity and souring assessments. In the last half-century, Americans have enjoyed more than doubled real incomes—and more than doubled per-person rates of so many things we enjoy—from cars to eating out, from home air conditioning to dishwashers, from color TV to channel and streaming options. A half-century ago, no one imagined laptops, smartphones, or even Post-it notes. And we had fewer human rights and a life expectancy 8 years briefer. Yet 58 percent of Americans responding to a Pew survey say “life in America” is worse today than 50 years ago; only 23 percent see it as better.  A thriving economy perceived as worsening. More recently, the U.S. output of goods and services (the GDP) reached an all-time high, as has the stock market and people’s retirement accounts. Post-pandemic inflation has plummeted, with wage increases outpacing inflation. Unemployment is near a 50-year low. Yet recent surveys find that “51 percent wrongly believe that unemployment is nearing a 50-year high,” that 72 percent believe inflation is increasing, and that 57 percent agree “over the past two years . . . the economy has gotten worse.” Crime is down, but feels up. Since the early 1990s, the rates of violent and property crime—as collected by the FBI and confirmed in the National Crime Victimization Survey—have fallen by half to two-thirds. Yet year after year, 7 in 10 Americans tell Gallup they believe crime has increased in the past year. Immigrants are less crime-prone, yet seem more so. “The likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60 percent lower than of people born in the United States,” reports the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (confirming other reports). Yet 57 percent of Americans tell Pew “the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. is leading to more crime.” In words and images, Donald Trump’s demonization of immigrants reflects and fans this fearful negativity: “The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Immigrants would “walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” This negativity bias—the tendency for bad or threatening news and images to hijack our thinking and responding—extends to our everyday life. Perhaps you have noticed that:  Criticisms outweigh praise. At work and in our relationships, criticism captures more of our attention and emotions than does praise. Cruel words hurt us more than kind words please us. It takes multiple compliments to offset the hurt of one hostile student evaluation, for example, or of a co-worker’s single disparaging remark. A happy, stable marriage is said to require five or more positive acts and words to offset each negative exchange. Negative acts dominate. A good reputation is more readily reversed with a single act of dishonesty or disloyalty than is a bad reputation by a single act of honesty or loyalty. Because negative information seems more diagnostic of character, voters are more responsive to negative information (and ads) than positive. Is it true of you? Is your voting driven more by intense opposition to the candidate you dislike than by intense support for the one you favor? Bad is more potent than good. Bad events of our lives evoke more misery than good events evoke joy. Losing money pains us more than gaining equivalent money thrills us. Children’s miseries provoke more parental empathy and rumination than do their successes. Thus, many a parent is only as happy as their least happy child. Negative words and news predominate. As psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues have noted, there are more negative emotion words than positive. When asked to think of emotion words, sadness, anger, and fear come to mind more quickly than words for positive emotions. In our daily news feeds, bad news prevails. The journalistic maxim: “We don’t cover planes that land.” Negativity drives news consumption. One analysis found that across 105,000 news stories, each additional headline negative word “increased the click-through rate by 2.3 percent.” Moreover, lies and misinformation spread faster than truth. As satirist Jonathan Swift recognized in 1710, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes.” Negativity bias isn’t the whole story. Unless depressed, people tend to be more positive—even excessively optimistic—about their own personal future. Students see themselves as more likely than their average classmate to progress to high educational attainment, to get a high-paying job, and to own a nice home. Adults see themselves as less vulnerable than others to future heart disease, cancer, or substance abuse.  And although only 18 percent of Americans said the national economy was good or excellent in a Federal Reserve survey, 73 percent said their own finances were doing okay or better. Likewise, while folks see crime as rampant and increasing in the nation, they see their own town and neighborhood as safe, healthy places. My part of America is fine, most think, while nevertheless often agreeing with Donald Trump that “our country is in decline, we are a failing nation.” When psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert collected survey responses from 12.5 million people across 60 countries and 70 years, they found the same perception of societal decline. People everywhere report no change in their own moral behaviors, yet see morality (kindness, honesty, etc.) in decline, even as the world has become more humane—with subsiding war, murder, child abuse, and slavery. There is biological wisdom beneath this pervasive negative bias. Our sensitivity to threats served our ancestors. Those who interpreted the sound of a cracking twig as a predator rather than the wind left more descendants.  Moreover, negative happenings often are accompanied by visual images, which can overwhelm more representative data like facts and statistics. Vivid anecdotes often eclipse facts and statistics. Images of murderous immigrants, crashing planes, and starving children seize our attention, get remembered, touch our hearts, and sway our judgments. Small wonder that while the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has plummeted by two-thirds since 1990, 87 percent of folks surveyed across 24 countries believe global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. To see is to believe.  So, given our attunement to negative news in a world awash in negative news, how might we restrain our natural negativity? How can we steer our minds between starry-eyed personal optimism that denies real threats (“People are basically good; everything will work out”) and societal dark despair (“It’s hopeless; why bother trying?”). How can we balance enough realism to fuel concern with enough optimism to provide hope? Here are four suggestions: Attend also to good news. We can expose ourselves not only to the world’s horrors but to its encouraging news. My recommendation: Subscribe to the weekly “Fix the News” email that identifies worldwide good news about human flourishing and environmental progress. Keep criticisms and bad news in perspective. In our house, when hit by bad news, we ask ourselves, “Will children die?” That’s our way of asking whether it’s that big a deal. I also remind myself that my response to today’s bad news will likely have a short half-life. People recover more quickly than they expect. As the late psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman observed in Thinking Fast and Slow, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” Count your blessings. Pause to be mindful of the positive people and events in your life. An old Gospel hymn had the idea (albeit overstated):  Are you ever burdened with a load of care? Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear? Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly, And you will keep singing as the days go by. 4. Think smart. News of a “healthy doctor” dying two weeks after a Covid shot (never mind that 8,000+ people die daily) fed anti-vax fears that contributed to a reported 234,000 needless Covid deaths. But we can think smarter. When a grim anecdote, photo, or video alarms you, pause to reflect: “Yes, that school shooting, that immigrant murder, that shoplifting spree, that police brutality was a terrible happening. But how representative is it? Show me the data—data that represent not isolated stories but countless people’s stories.” As we process the barrage of negative news and “failing nation” rhetoric, our great challenge is to base our politics and lives on facts rather than fears, on data rather than doom. Better an informed optimism than a naive negativity. (David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.) 11/13/24 P.S. Some Reuters/Ipsos pre-election survey insights: ... View more

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

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

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

Despite their differences, most of today’s U.S. Republicans and Democrats have one thing in common: They despise those in the other party, with many expressing physical disgust for their political opposites, whom they also regard as plainly stupid. In a recent Pew survey, partisans regarded one another as closed-minded, dishonest, and immoral. Nearly half would be upset if their child married someone from the other party, which fewer today—less than 4 percent—are doing. (Interracial marriages are now much more common than inter-political marriages.) Moreover, with young women increasingly identifying as “liberal”—today’s growing gender divide forms a barrier to heterosexuals looking for a kindred spirit to marry. Amid today’s mutual loathing—affective polarization, political scientists call it—two centrist social psychologist teams remind us that both sides have their virtues. In 2012, Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, argued that the right and left have complementary insights: Conservatives and liberals are both rooted in respectable moral values—with conservatives prioritizing loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and liberals prioritizing care for others and fairness. So before disparaging your political opposites, Haidt advises, consider their moral foundations. Now, in 2023, Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman concur that there is wisdom on both the left and the right: “Both left and right have valid insights and helpful policies.” Societies evolved to perform two crucial tasks, note Baumeister and Bushman: amass resources, and distribute them. Political conservatives, such as U.S. Republicans—draw their support primarily from those who produce resources: farmers and ranchers, businesspeople and merchants, bankers and contractors, real estate developers and fossil fuel producers. Political progressives, such as U.S. Democrats, care more about redistributing resources, and draw their support from government workers, educators, entertainers, and lower income people who have most to gain from egalitarian income sharing. For cultures to grow and their people to flourish, both resource accumulation and shared distribution are essential, Baumeister and Bushman argue. Thus, over time, flourishing democracies—including nearly all countries that the UN ranks at the high end of life quantity and quality—have valued both aims, and their governments have tended to alternate between center-right and center-left. Even so, this leaves practical issues for debate, they add: If incentives (via profits for innovation) increase resources, but also increase inequality, then where is the optimum point for redistribution (without depleting the motivation to produce)? Should incentives for resource production include the right to pass hard-earned fortunes down to privileged children and grandchildren who played no part in creating them? What structural changes might alleviate today’s partisan extremism? In gerrymandered congressional districts, for example, the primary election becomes the main hurdle to office—which leads to more extreme candidates who need offer no appeal to the other party. In my state, Michigan, a citizen-initiated ballot proposal ended gerrymandering by defining state and congressional districts that “shall not provide disproportionate advantage to political parties or candidates.” Other states and cities have embraced ranked-choice voting, which rewards candidates (often moderates) who appeal to a broad range of voters. Other social psychologists critique their colleagues who see equivalent wisdom in both right and left, or who report that “bias is bipartisan.” It’s a false equivalence, notes John Jost, to assume that U.S. Republicans and Democrats equally convey misinformation, conspiracy thinking, intolerance, political violence, and dogmatism. Even so, grant this much, say Baumeister and Bushman: Humankind has succeeded thanks to the evolution of human cultures, which have done “two things effectively: (1) amassing resources, and (2) sharing resources through the group. Back in the evolutionary past, most adults took part in both tasks but the two tasks have grown apart, and in the modern world they pull against each other. Nevertheless, both tasks are important, indeed essential, for a flourishing society.” As a political partisan myself, Baumeister and Bushman bid me to remember: There can be wisdom across the political divide. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) Cover image credit: Orbon Alija/E+/Getty Images ... View more

By now you’ve likely heard: Teen sadness, depression, and suicide attempts have soared since 2010, especially among girls. From 2011 to 2020, suicide-related issues rose fourfold, from 0.9 percent of U.S. pediatric emergency room visits to 4.2 percent. The teen mental health decline is unprecedented. And it is substantial. Although debate over causation continues, varied studies converge in pointing to social media as a likely major culprit. And legislators have taken note, by proposing bipartisan state and congressional bills that would limit teen social media access. The CDC’s new 100-page “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBS) samples 17,232 ninth to twelfth graders from all U.S. public and private schools, and documents the malaise of today’s teen girls. But another troubled, less-discussed group also caught my eye—what the report refers to as LGBQ+ teens (transgender teens were not separately surveyed). A CDC summary document portrays the significant mental health challenges of LGBQ+ high schoolers: Poor mental health in last 30 days: Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness: Seriously considered attempting suicide: Made a suicide plan in the last year: Attempted suicide: These data replicate findings in other reports. In 2022, the Trevor Project, which studies and supports the mental health of LGBTQ youth, collected more than 34,000 reports from 13- to 24-year-old LGBTQ youth and young adults. Although the respondents were self-selected, the online survey found, exactly as did the CDC, that “45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.” What explains the sexual identity–mental health correlation? The common presumption is that the stigma and stress faced by sexual minorities exacts a toll. “We must recognize that LGBTQ young people face stressors simply for being who they are that their peers never have to worry about,” observed Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley. Digging deeper into the CDC’s YRBS data, it appears that, indeed, even with the growing acceptance of people who are gay, the stigmatization and stressors remain. Kids—and society at large—can be cruel. More findings: Did not go to school because of safety concerns: Bullied online: Bullied at school: These data prompt our sobering reflection on the struggles of LGBTQ youth. They also make us wonder: Might sexual-minority youth be less vulnerable to depression, hopelessness, and suicidal thinking if given . . . more access to mental health services? . . . a support group in a safe space? . . . greater public education about the realities of sexual orientation? Or what would you suggest? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) Image credit: Thomas Baker/Alamy Stock Photo. ... View more

You’ll be told that your hearing’s so murky and muddy, your case calls for special intensified study. They'll test you with noises from far and from near and you'll get a black mark for the ones you can’t hear. Then they’ll say, “My dear fellow, you’re deafer than most. But there’s hope, since you’re not quite as deaf as a post.” ~Dr. Seuss in You’re Only Old Once! Dr. Seuss could be talking to me. Although not part of the signing Deaf culture, I am—without my cochlear implant in one ear and hearing aid in the other—deaf. With the technology removed, I experience the sound of near silence. I cannot hear my wife from the adjacent pillow unless I put my “good” ear 4 inches from her mouth. Not quite as deaf as a post! My loss, which began as an unusual low frequency loss that made me a case of special intensified study, is the least of my mother’s gifts, which she inherited from her mother. Our shared experience is the result of a single gene defect, which a University of Iowa hearing geneticist identified for me during our years together on the advisory committee of NIH’s National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: “You have DFNA6/14 hearing loss caused by a mutation in WFS1.” Yet I am really not so special, for there are some 38 million American, and 4 million Canadian, adults who experience some “trouble hearing,” or who have at least a 25 decibel loss in both ears. Hearing loss is one of the great invisible disabilities. In my workplace, I have many times experienced unintended exclusion—mostly unnoticed by others. In department meetings, I have missed much of others’ input. Attending lectures, I have sat trapped in the middle of an audience, missing most of the spoken word. Hearing worsens in auditoriums with distant ceiling speakers and in uncarpeted hard-surfaced rooms with reverberating sound. Facilities designers, take note! Had I been left out in such settings because of wheelchair inaccessibility, people would be aghast, and would engineer a remedy. Hearing loss, by contrast, is unseen and thus often unremedied. Moreover, Covid-era masking made things worse, both muffling sound and precluding natural lip reading. With thanks to cartoonist Dave Coverly (www.speedbump.com). Hearing loss does nevertheless have a few compensations. Normal-hearing folks have eyelids but no earlids. I have both. When working in a noisy coffee shop, I can turn down the sound distractions. Has your sleep been disturbed by hotel hallway noise? That’s no problem for people like me. Earlier this week, my wife’s sleep was disturbed by our bedroom’s phone ringing at 1:30 a.m. I was blissfully unaware. When hearing folks witness those with hearing loss not comprehending speech, they may misattribute the problem. During his Congressional testimony regarding possible Russian election interference, former special counsel Robert Mueller on 48 occasions asked to have questions repeated. Commentators, not appreciating that he is hearing-challenged, observed that he seemed “confused,” “uncertain,” and “forgetful.” And it was all so easily avoidable in one of three ways—each of which I have experienced as a godsend: A loudspeaker nearer his ears could have given him vastly clearer sound. Real-time captioning on a table screen, like the TV captioning we use at home, could have made the spoken words instantly clear. A hearing loop surrounding the room could have magnetically transmitted the voice from each microphone directly to the inexpensive telecoil sensor that comes with most modern hearing aids and cochlear implants. (See here, here, and here for more on hearing loops, which are now in thousands of auditoriums, worship places, and airports. Full disclosure: The first site is my own informational website, and the last describes our collective advocacy to bring this technology to all of the United States.) There are other ways to support people with hearing loss: Create quieter working and eating places, with materials that absorb reverberant sound. When beginning a talk, do not ask “Can everybody hear me?” and then put down the mic. (That question can elicit but one answer.) When offered a mic, use it, held close to the mouth: 4. When hosting a group meeting, cluster seating close together (to minimize speaker-to-listener distance). 5. Enable presenters to see their PowerPoint presentation in front of them, such as with a podium laptop--to minimize their turning their back to the audience when talking through their slides. Those of us with hearing loss can also act to give ourselves ear-opening experiences: We can be “out of the closet”: “I have hearing loss, so it would help me if we could be seated in a quiet corner [or] if we could turn the music down.” When attending talks, we can sit front and center. We can equip our ears with today’s “superfecta” digital hearing aids, offering both a Bluetooth link from smartphone to hearing aids and a telecoil for hearing loop reception. (Studies indicate that those with hearing loss who resist hearing aids—often because they are unaware of what they’re missing—are at increased risk for social isolation, depression, and eventual dementia.) We can harness other hearing technologies. For example, I love my hand-held directional remote mic, such as available here. When pointed at someone in a meeting or at a noisy reception, it zooms in on their voice. When connected to my laptop, my hearing aids become in-the-ear speakers. Hear ye! Hear ye! The happy news is that today’s technologies enable people like me to escape the deafness that caused Beethoven to lament living “like an exile” and to experience social encounters with “a hot terror.” I am also spared the isolation that plagued my deaf mother’s later years. No longer must our hearing be “so murky and muddy.” Hearing is not the only vehicle for communication. ASL is also a genuine language. But for those of us who have experienced hearing, how good it is. For we are, as Aristotle discerned, “the social animal.” We need to belong. We live in relationships with others—a feature of our human nature immediately recognized in the Old Testament creation story (“It is not good that the man should be alone”). As people who need people, we can therefore celebrate the wonder of hearing—of mind-to-mind communication via vibrating air molecules. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

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

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

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

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

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