The Washington Post reports that money can buy happiness. To emphasize the joys of wealth, it displays this glamorous couple enjoying a sumptuous private jet meal. “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right,” proclaimed a famous Lexus ad. Extreme-Photographer/E+/Getty Images The Post draws from an excellent “adversarial collaboration” (when scientists partner to test their opposing views) by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman, facilitated by Barbara Mellers. Killingsworth had questioned Kahneman’s report of an “income satiation” effect, with well-being not much increasing above annual incomes of $75,000 (in 2008 dollars, or near $100,000 today). With the exception of an unhappy minority, happiness does, they now agree, continue rising with income. A figure from Killingsworth’s PNAS article (“Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year”) illustrates: But note that, as is typical with economists’ reporting of money-happiness data, the x-axis presents log income. (Unlike a linear income x-axis, which adds equal dollar increments, a logarithmic scale—as you can see—compacts the spread.) So what if we depict these data with an x-axis of linear dollars (the actual dollars of real people)? We then see what others have found in both U.S. and global surveys: happiness indeed rises with income, even beyond $100,000, but with a diminishing rate of increased happiness as income rises from high to super high. Multiple studies show the same curvilinear money-happiness relationship when comparing poor with wealthy nations (as illustrated in this report, again scaled with actual, not log, income). Moreover, an international survey of more than 2000 millionaires from seventeen countries found that, at net worths above $1 million, more wealth is minimally predictive of happiness (though millionaires enjoy more work autonomy and time for active leisure). And, as Ed Diener and I reported in 2018, economic growth has not improved human morale (and teen girls’ morale has plummeted). In inflation-adjusted dollars, U.S. adults, albeit with greater inequality, are three times richer than 65 years ago, with bigger houses, new technologies, home air conditioning, and more per person cars and dining out. We have more money and what it buys, but no greater happiness. Nevertheless, today’s undergraduates (in the annual UCLA American Freshman survey) continue to believe—entering collegians rate this #1 among 20 alternative life objectives—that being “very well off” matters, a lot. It’s the modern American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness. For low-income people, money does buy necessities and greater freedom. Money matters. And extreme inequality is socially toxic. But as the above data show, once we have income security and more than enough for life’s essentials, each additional $20,000 of income pays diminishing happiness dividends. Finally, we need to remember that these are correlational data. If higher-income people are somewhat happier, it may be not only because money matters, but also partly because happiness is conducive to vocational and financial success (a depressed mood is enervating). What U.S. President Jimmy Carter told Americans in 1979 remains true: “Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Carter echoed William Cowper’s words from 1782: “Happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.” Happiness depends less on gratifying our escalating wants than on simply wanting what we have. And it depends more on supportive social connections that satisfy our need to belong, and on embracing a meaning-filled sense of vocation and a spirituality that offers community and hope. Money matters, but it matters less than images of luxury private jet travel might lead us to suppose. What do you think: Might these facts of life inform our conversations about lifestyle choices, public income distribution policies, and inherited wealth? (For David’s 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

At its best, psychological science transparently puts big competing ideas to the test. With varied methods and with replication of noteworthy findings, it winnows truth from the haystack of mere speculation. If the evidence supports an idea, so much the better for it. If the idea collides with a wall of fact, then it gets rejected or revised. In reality, psychology often falls short of this ideal. A noteworthy finding doesn’t replicate. Confirmation bias drives a researcher to selectively attend to supportive evidence. In rare cases, researchers have stage-managed desired results or even faked data. Yet the psychological science ideal is achievable. My social psychologist colleagues Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge exemplify this ideal as they assemble evidence regarding social media effects on teen mental health, and invite others to critique and supplement their data. “It is amazing how much I have learned, and refined my views, just by asking people to make me smarter,” Haidt has told me. The stimulus for their work is a troubling social phenomenon: As smartphones and social media use have spread among teens, teen depression and suicide ideation have soared, especially among girls. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey report illustrates: Is this simultaneous increase in social media use and teen depression a mere coincidence? Given that plausible other factors such as economic trends, wars, or domestic violence seem not to account for the decade-long trend, Haidt and Twenge conjectured a plausible culprit: the shift from face-to-face relationships to screen-based relationships, with in-person time with friends dropping by more than half since 2010. More time online has also displaced sleep and play. And it has increased demoralizing social comparisons. As Cornell University’s Sebastian Deri and his colleagues found across eleven studies, most of us, in the age of selfies, perceive our friends as having more fun: Other folks seem to party more, eat out more, and look happier and prettier. Even teens not on social media are likely affected, Haidt notes. When friends are interacting online several hours a day, those not similarly engaged can feel left out and isolated. Halfpoint/iStock/Getty Images To assess their presumption of social media harm, and mindful of lingering skepticism, Haidt and Twenge assembled the available evidence from four psychological science methods: correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental. Correlational: First, they asked, do daily social media hours correlate with teen mental health? In a recent Substack essay, Haidt notes that 80 percent of 55 studies answered yes. The correlation is modest when summed across genders and all forms of screen time, but becomes telling when, as shown in these UK data, one spotlights girls’ social media exposure. Longitudinal: Second, they asked, does social media use at Time 1 predict mental health at Time 2? Among 40 longitudinal studies, Haidt reports, in 25 the answer was yes. For example, in a new study reducing social media use proved “a feasible and effective method of improving body image” among vulnerable young adults. Experimental: Third, they asked, do experiments that randomly assign participants to social media exposure produce a mental health effect? In 12 of 18 experiments, mostly done with college students and young adults, the answer was, again, yes. Moreover, among the six studies finding no effect, four involved only a brief (week or less) social media diet. Quasi-experimental: Finally, they asked, do quasi-experiments find that the timing of social media arrival predicts mental health? Was the rollout of Facebook on a campus or the arrival of high-speed internet in a community followed—at that location—by increased mental health problems? In all six studies, Haidt reports, “when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls.” Together, these correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental findings illustrate how psychological science explores life-relevant questions with multiple methods. Moreover, the diverse findings weave a compelling answer to the social media–teen mental health question. In the words of Haidt’s Substack title: “Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.” Would you agree with Haidt’s conclusion? If yes, would you also agree with recent bipartisan calls to restrict social media to those over 16? Would doing so be supportive of parents, teens, and schools—much as efforts to restrict teen smoking have effectively dropped teen smoking from nearly 23 percent in 2000 to 2 percent in 2021? Would you concur with researchers who advise parents to keep phones out of teens’ bedrooms at night? If you are a teen, does this research have any implications for your and and your friends' mental health? Should teens begin smartphone use with texting rather than with selfies and social media? Should they intentionally restrain their daily hours online? And if you don’t agree that social media are a “major cause” of teen girls’ increased depression, what would be your alternate explanation? The importance of these questions, for teens, families, and society, will drive further research and debate. In the meantime, the complementary insights gleaned from these correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies showcase, methinks, psychological science at its best. (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

It’s a big lesson of psychological science: Most of us exhibit a self-serving bias. On most subjective, socially desirable dimensions we see ourselves as better than average—as better than 90 percent of drivers, as more moral than most others, as better able to get along with others. When good things happen we accept credit, while we attribute our failures and bad deeds to external factors—to bad breaks or a situation beyond our control. In kindred research, more than a thousand studies show how a positive thinking bias produces illusory optimism. Unrealistic optimism is evident when, for example, most students perceive themselves are far more likely than their average classmate to attend graduate school, get a high-paying job, and own a nice home, while they see themselves as much less likely to suffer a heart attack, get cancer, or be divorced. The powers and perils of our self-serving pride and Pollyannaish optimism are a profound truth. But as a saying popularized by physicist Niels Bohr reminds us, “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” So now for the rest of the story. If you and I tend to overestimate our strengths and our potentials, we also tend to underestimate the good impressions we make when meeting others. In six new studies of more than 2000 university students, University of Toronto psychologists Norhan Elsaadawy and Erika Carlson found that “most people tend to underestimate how positively they are seen by the individuals they know well and by individuals they have just met.” That happy finding confirms a 2018 report by Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby and her colleagues. After meeting and interacting with someone, “People systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.” This was true for strangers meeting in the laboratory, first-year undergraduates meeting their dorm mates, and adults getting to know one another in a workshop. After all such get-acquainted conversations, people “are liked more than they know.” Elsaadawy and Carlson surmise that we underestimate the impressions we make because we, more than our conversation partners, focus on our blunders and imperfections. We’re painfully aware of what others hardly notice—our stumbling words, our nervousness, our talking too much or too little, even our bad hair that day. fjmoura/DigitalImages/Getty Images Our acute self-consciousness of our gaffes, shortcomings, and blemishes was amusingly evident in one of psychology’s elegantly simple and life-relevant experiments. At Cornell University, Thomas Gilovich and his co-researchers asked participants to wear an embarrassing T-shirt (of 1970s crooner Barry Manilow) before completing some questionnaires with several others. Asked afterwards how many of the other participants noticed their unfashionable attire, the average person guessed about half. In reality, only 23 percent noticed. The good news: Others notice our clothes, our blunders, our anxiety, even our bad hair, less than we suppose. Not only may our blunders and imperfections do us less harm than we suppose, in some situations they may help. In experiments, well-regarded people who commit a pratfall—who stumble, or spill coffee, or make a mistake—may become better liked. Our blunder can evoke empathy, humanize us, and make us seem more relatable. Perhaps, then, we can fret less about how others regard us. Assuming we are well-intentioned, the odds are that people like us, even more than we suppose. And, though painfully obvious to us, many of our flaws and failings are less obvious to others, or soon forgotten. (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

Have you ever, amid a group, found yourself caught up in something larger than yourself? Perhaps with other fans at a game? At worship? At a rock concert? With your emotions aroused and your self-awareness diminished, did you feel at one with the surrounding others? Did you experience what we social psychologists call deindividuation? In group situations, arousal + anonymity can power mob cruelty or vandalism, as in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. As one rioter lamented afterward, “I got caught up in the moment.” In other settings, socially produced arousal and loss of self enable moral elevation—a prosocial feeling of warmth and an expansion of self that bonds us to others. In Collective Effervescence, filmmaker Richard Sergay illustrates how diverse people in polarized cultures can bridge societal rifts and experience spiritual transcendence through singing. His 13-minute video, produced for the Templeton World Charity Foundation, focuses on Koolulam, an Israel-based “social-musical initiative centering around mass singing events.” In one such event, a thousand Jews, Christians, and Muslims gathered at midnight after the final day of Ramadan. Their mission: to learn and sing—in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and in three-part harmony—Bob Marley’s “One Love.” Film image courtesy Richard Sergay and Templeton World Charity Foundation Collective effervescence, so named by sociologist Emile Durkheim, engages group members in a self-transcending experience. When experiencing such behavioral and emotional synchrony, people not only feel at one with others, notes psychologist Shira Gabriel and her colleagues, they also, afterward, feel less stressed and depressed, and more purposeful. As strangers make music together, social psychological phenomena operate. These include not only the diminished self-awareness and lessened restraint that marks deindividuation, but also the reconciling power of realizing a superordinate (shared) goal. Moreover, the collective synchrony of bodies and voices engages embodied cognition—our bodily states influencing our mental states. With bodies and voices collectively forming one choral voice, participants’ emotions converge. Synchronized voices create, at least in the moment, harmonized spirits.  Even synchronous physical movements—such as walking together—facilitates conflict resolution, report psychologists Christine Webb, Maya Rossignac-Milon, and E. Tory Higgins. As walkers coordinate their steps, mutual rapport and empathy increase. The boundary between self and other softens. In some contexts, the embodied cognition experience is enhanced by combining collective singing and physical movements. “In the Western Isles of Scotland,” Scottish composer John Bell tells me, “there are tunes called ‘waulking-songs.’ These were sung as accompaniments to physical work, particularly spinning, weaving and waulking” (stretching and fluffing tweed fibers), much like sea shanty songs used by sailing ship crew members to focus and coordinate their efforts. In sub-Saharan Africa, music likewise connects voice with movement. Singing, Bell observes, is a full-bodied experience. “In South Africa, some of the ‘freedom songs’ now popular in the West, such as ‘We Are Marching in the Light of God,’ were sung by people carrying the coffins of their colleagues killed by the apartheid regime. When you look at videos of demonstrations during these years, there is a clear synchronicity between the song of the people and their physical movement. The one enables the other.” Singing the rhythmic “We Are Marching in the Light of God” (“Siyahamba” in Zulu) begs for movement, as illustrated by this Los Angeles community choir and this African Children’s choir. In the American folk tradition, Sacred Harp (a.k.a. “shape note”) music is similarly participant-centered and embodied—with a cappella singers facing one another around a hollow square, and each co-leading with hand motions, as here. So, psychological science helps explain the collective effervescence created by Koolulam events, and by other collective synchronous behaviors, from group singing to line dancing. When we synchronize our bodies and voices, we harmonize our spirits. (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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

In the United States, anti-Asian prejudice has resurged, with nearly 6,600 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year. Reports of harassment, vandalism, and brutal attacks on Asian Americans, from the very young to the very elderly, have made one-third of Asian Americans fear for their safety. An Asian-American friend last week recounted his fearful father getting a gun for self-protection. Women and girls reportedly endured two-thirds of these hostilities, including the horrific March, 2021 Atlanta shooting spree that claimed the lives of eight people—six of them Asian American women. One in four AAPI-owned small businesses has also faced pandemic-related anti-Asian words or acts. Today’s bigotry extends a long history, beginning with the 20th century’s ground zero event of anti-Asian prejudice: the World War II exclusion of 120,000 West Coast people of Japanese descent. As I have explained here and here, it was on my home island—Bainbridge Island, near Seattle—that the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans began. With only six days’ notice, Exclusion Order #1 ordered the evacuation of the island’s 276 Japanese American residents, each lugging nothing more than they could carry. (One government concern: The island’s south end overlooked a narrow passage to a naval shipyard and submarine base.) Today, that March 30, 1942 ferry departure point is the site of a national “Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.” On each visit home to Bainbridge, I return to the memorial, where a 276-foot wall with wood sculptures tells parts of the story. As my insurance agent father would later recall, it was a devastating day as the islanders bid farewell to their neighbors. His autobiography recalls the sadness, and also the lingering discrimination: “We had many Japanese friends and it was heartbreaking for us when the war started and the Japanese people on Bainbridge Island were ordered into concentration camps. . . . Most were educated here on the island [and] it was hard to believe that they were not as loyal Americans as we. I did all I could to keep the insurance on their homes in force. . . . The insurance companies that I represented were a bit prejudiced against insuring the Japanese people, particularly for liability insurance, for fear that lawsuits would be brought against them and the juries, being Caucasian, might be prejudiced in their jury awards. [One post-war returnee, wanting insurance on a car] named his four brothers and recited how all five of them had been in one or another of the American armed forces and had served in Italy, France, Germany and Japan. [When I showed the letter to the insurance manager] she said G___ D___ you, Ken Myers, for bringing me this letter. How can I say, ‘No’? So she wrote the first policy on a Japanese American after the war.” In contrast to the media-fomented bigotry that greeted other West Coast internees on their post-war return home, the Bainbridge internees were welcomed back by most. On my recent visit to the Memorial, I chanced to meet internee Lilly Kodama recalling her experience, as a seven-year-old, of being abruptly taken from her world. She presumed she was going with her family on a shopping trip, and was surprised to find her cousins and neighbors on the dock. But Kodama also spoke of the support of fellow islanders, including my father, but especially Walt and Millie Woodward, the heroic local newspaper owners who challenged the exclusion and then published news from the camps. The Bainbridge Island contrast illustrates what social psychologists have often reported: Social contact, especially between parties of equal status, restrains prejudice. In minimal-contact California, people of European descent and people of Japanese descent lived separately. Few people bid the departing internees goodbye. On their return, “No Japs Here” signs greeted them. Minimal contact enabled maximal prejudice. On high-contact Bainbridge, islanders intermingled as school classmates (as illustrated in this 1935 elementary school picture). Their homes, strawberry farms, and businesses were dispersed. In their absence, thirteen empty chairs were on stage at a high school graduation so all would remember who was missing. Internees returning after the war were greeted with food and assistance. Cooperative contact enabled minimal prejudice. Lincoln Elementary School photo courtesy Bainbridge Island Historical Museum This real-life social experiment has been replicated in our own time: People in states with the least immigrant contact express the most anti-immigrant antipathy, while those who know immigrants as neighbors, classmates, or fellow workers more often profess a welcoming attitude. Amid the anti-Asian prejudice of 2021, how can we replace incidents of closed fists and tight jaws with open arms? We can seek and facilitate intergroup contacts. We can travel and experience other cultures. We can welcome diversity into our communities and workplaces. We can challenge slurs. We can educate ourselves and others about our culture’s history. In such ways we can affirm the memorial’s closing words: P.S. Frank Kitamoto, after being taken from the island as a 2-year-old and later founding the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, recalled fellow islanders' support in this 2-minute video. For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

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

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

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

“I am among [Michigan’s] 300 plus ‘Juvenile Lifers,’” a prisoner known to his friends as Chan wrote me in 1994, kindly passing along a math error he had caught in one of my textbooks. More than half a lifetime ago, Chan, as a 17-year-old, had joined a friend in committing an armed robbery and murder. He expressed “great remorse and regret” for his crime, as well as his hope to learn and grow with the goal of contributing “something of substance and worth.” In the ensuing six years of our occasional correspondence, Chan—an intelligent and now deeply religious man—has been described to me by others, including the retired superintendent of his former prison, as a model prisoner. He is excelling in prison-taught college courses. After taking introductory psychology with my text, he alerted me that Aristotle’s Apothegems is actually spelled Apothegms. Chan, now in his mid-40s, would much rather be contributing to society and paying taxes than having his room and board funded by Michigan taxpayers, whose $2.06 billion prison budget impedes our governor’s fulfilling her campaign pledge to “fix the damn roads.” But does society somehow benefit from keeping those who have committed an impulsive juvenile crime endlessly locked up? Might Chan, if released, still be a risk? Hardly. Teens’ inhibitory frontal lobes lag the development of their emotional limbic system. With brains not yet fully prepared to calculate long-term consequences, the result is teen impulsiveness and emotionality. No wonder arrest rates for rape, assault, and murder soar during the teen years and decline after age 20—to a much lower level by the mid-40s. As psychologist David Lykken noted, “We could avoid two-thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.” By that time, the frontal lobes have matured, testosterone is subsiding, and men are mellowing. Middle-aged men are not just adolescents with inflated waistlines. But if the incarceration of juvenile lifers like Chan is costly to society, might it nevertheless deter future Chans from violent acts? Alas, when committing an impulsive act or a crime of passion, people seldom pause to calmly calculate the long-term consequences. (Even the threat of capital punishment does not predict lower state homicide rates.) Any deterrence effect lies less with the length of a punishment than with its probability—its swiftness and sureness. The immaturity of the teen brain and the diminishing risk of violence with age, as explained in Supreme Court briefs by the American Psychological Association and other health associations, contributed to the Court’s 2012 ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Even discretionary life-without-parole sentences were unconstitutional, it ruled, except for “the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.” Then, last week, the Court qualified that judgment by affirming the life sentence of Mississippian Brett Jones, who—when barely age 15, and after a lifetime of abuse—responded to his grandfather’s reportedly hitting him by impulsively stabbing his grandfather to death. Like Chan, Jones, now 31, is said to be “remorseful for his crime, hardworking and a ‘good kid’” who gets along with everybody. How ironic, commentators noted, that the majority opinion—that teens can forever be held responsible for their juvenile misdeeds—was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had argued during his confirmation hearings that holding him responsible for his high school yearbook page was “a new level of absurdity.” Moreover, responded Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this decision will prevent hundreds of other juvenile defendants, 70 percent of whom are people of color, from securing early release. zodebala/E+/Getty Images Nevertheless, there has been increasing bipartisan concern about the human and financial costs of lengthy mass incarceration for long-ago transgressions. The Smarter Sentencing Act, co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), responds to the reality that the seven-fold increased federal prison population since 1980 makes such incarceration “one of our nation’s biggest expenditures, dwarfing the amount spent on law enforcement.” Surely, we can say yes to public protection, but also yes to smarter sentencing—sentencing that holds the Chans and Brett Joneses accountable for their acts, while also recognizing that the impulsive, momentary act of an immature teen needn’t predict one’s distant future. Indeed, how many of us would like to be judged today by the worst moments of our immature adolescence? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more