Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. ~ from Mary Oliver’s “Messenger” Psychological science sometimes confirms our beliefs, and sometimes challenges them. My young adult self never would have guessed that: the home “shared environment” effect on our personality traits, sexual orientation, and intelligence is, apart from abuse or neglect, minimal. (Genes and peer influences matter more.) Although our values, politics, and religion are home-influenced, we would, notes behavior geneticist Robert Plomin, “essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.” repression rarely occurs. Experience a trauma—a disaster, a parent’s murder, or a battlefield terror—and we’re much more likely to be haunted by unforgettable flashbacks.  some therapies have disappointingly little long-term effect (think weight-loss programs) while others are surprisingly helpful (electroconvulsive therapy for intractable depression).  But perhaps the biggest revelation has been the enormity of our unconscious information processing. Given the scientific discounting of Freud’s seething unconscious mind, I have been amazed at the extent to which our lives are guided by automatic (unconscious) rather than controlled (conscious) information processing. Witness  blindsight: brain-damaged people processing visual stimuli that they do not consciously perceive—enabling them to intuitively navigate around unseen objects. problem-solving without conscious thinking: our still-working unseen mind spontaneously producing fresh insights after not-thinking (even sleeping).  implicit memory: learning new skills or conditioned associations without conscious effort or awareness. We know more than we know we know. subliminal priming: having our thinking and emotions “primed” by unperceived stimuli. When exposed to a fearsome animal on screen for one-fiftieth of a second, which is then immediately masked with a fuzzy screen, people will perceive only a flash of light—which may, nevertheless, arouse an emotion that influences their judgment of an ensuing perceived stimulus. Regarding this last nifty unconscious talent, researchers have wondered: If fear responses can be elicited and conditioned without our awareness, might they also be extinguished without our awareness? Malombra76/Getty Images For those with phobias, exposure therapy—repeatedly engaging your fears by seeing pictures of what one fears, or of having live exposure to such—helps. But it’s the psychological equivalent of a dental root canal. The result is that many decline the therapy, or drop out. So researchers have pondered: Might stress-free subliminal exposure to feared stimuli help extinguish phobias? Might repeated brief, masked exposure to, say, feared spiders weaken people’s automatic physiological arousal? In their new Psychological Bulletin analysis of 39 controlled experiments, SUNY Purchase psychologist Paul Siegel and University of Southern California psychiatrist Bradley Peterson report that “exposing phobic persons to their feared stimulus without conscious awareness” works. Those who experience the unconscious exposure therapy become less consciously fearful and less avoidant of the dreaded stimulus. Moreover, physiological measures confirm their decreased fear.  Siegel and his colleagues illustrate: Their controlled experiments exposed some arachnophobic (spider-fearing) people to spiders very briefly (and unconsciously). Afterward, they became less fearful of, and more willing to approach, a live tarantula. The phobia relief, confirmed by diminished physiological arousal, proved lasting. And it surpassed the relief from stressful conscious exposure therapy.  This “very brief exposure” research “positions unconscious exposure as a new treatment for specific phobia,” conclude Siegel and Peterson. Before appreciating unconscious information processing, I would not have predicted this result, and even now am surprised. But as Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple observed, “facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” The unconscious therapy effect also affirms one of the great insights of modern psychological science: our capacity for dual processing. Our conscious mind presumes that its intentions rule our lives. Yet much of our thinking occurs below the radar of our attention. We have a conscious thinking system, and another thinking system out of sight. Our memory, thinking, language, attitudes, and perceptions operate partly on an aware, deliberate “high road,” but also on a vast, unconscious, automatic “low road.” We are, as the Psalmist observed, “wonderfully made.” Our one amazing brain interweaves two magnificent minds.  (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.)   ... 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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

“Inches make champions.” ~Football coach Vince Lombardi In his 2024 Dartmouth University commencement address, tennis superstar Roger Federer illustrated how great achievements need not require great innate superiority. By developing just the slightest edge over one’s competitors, gratifying results may ensue. After acknowledging that he won nearly 80 percent of his 1526 tennis matches, he asked his audience, “What percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?” His answer: “Only 54%.” Natural talent matters. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you it doesn’t,” reflected Federer. But, he added, “it’s not about having a gift. It’s about having grit.” In another commencement address, NFL quarterback Tom Brady offered kindred advice: “If you want to be great at something, you’re going to have to put all your commitment and effort and discipline into doing just that.” That recipe—natural talent x disciplined grit --> slight advantage --> great achievement—is confirmed in research on human achievements. Let’s deconstruct the evidence. First, native talent forms the raw material beneath great achievements. Superstars (from Mozart and Einstein to Caitlin Clark) come gifted with exceptional potential. Children who score astronomically high on IQ or SAT tests (recall the Terman geniuses and the Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) later become greatly overrepresented among inventors, scientists, and high earners (Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga among them). In an era when grade inflation has diminished the predictive power of high school grades, some elite universities are, therefore, again using aptitude scores to assist their talent identification. Digital Vision./Getty Images Yet far more is needed. For cooking exceptional achievement, the recipe, as Federer appreciates, is talent times tenacity. Although Thomas Edison’s assertion that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” overstates the point, willpower has outperformed intelligence scores in predicting school attendance, performance, and graduation honors. “Discipline outdoes talent,” concluded researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman. With exceptional talent but ordinary motivation, most of the Terman whiz kids, though living happy lives, did not attain eminence or become professionals. In sports and music, tenacity refines natural talent. By their early twenties, top violinists have fiddled double the practice hours of the average violin teacher. Much the same is true for top-flight ballet dancers, chess masters, and, as Federer reminds us, tennis players. Superstar attainments arise when exceptional natural talent is married to extraordinary perseverance. Federer illustrates that if one has enough talent x tenacity to gain even a small edge, the result may accumulate to something special. (Mathematically, tennis players who win 54 percent of points can be expected to exceed Federer’s result, wining near 91 percent of matches.) Life experience offers many examples of small advantages feeding great accomplishment: Contemplate the mathematics of monthly compounding. Twenty-year-old Tom invests a $10,000 inheritance at 8 percent interest. When he retires at age 70, he can withdraw $538,781. Meanwhile, Tom’s clever twin sister Angela examines the options and invests her $10,000 at a smidgen greater rate—9 percent—and will withdraw much more: $885,182. In evolution, a trait that gives only a slight survival advantage can, over many generations, lead to a species’ dominance. An infinitesimal starting difference between two weather systems can produce, days later, two utterly different outcomes (known familiarly as “the butterfly effect”). C. S. Lewis glimpsed the phenomenon in everyday life: “Little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.” In the 2024 U.S. Open golf tournament, Bryan DeChambeau’s 274 strokes bested Rory McIlroy by a single stroke, giving DeChambeau a $4.3 million prize, nearly double McIlroy’s $2.32 million runner-up prize. And if little advantages matter, then tenacity can push the envelope: A gritty student who studies a difficult subject an extra 20 minutes a day will likely excel beyond an equally capable classmate—increasing future opportunities at better schools and jobs. Effortfully attracting one new customer a week can, over time, create a thriving business. If each day you set aside the amount of a $4 latte for stock market investing, in 30 years (if the S&P 500’s last 30-year return rate repeats) you’ll have about $248,000. Federer’s experience highlights how mighty oaks grow from little acorns—small advantages bred by tenacity enables talent to bloom. By harnessing the synergy between talent and tenacity, Federer achieved sustained excellence while winning just 54 percent of his points. We, too, by developing our natural talents with relentless perseverance, can similarly gain a slight edge that, over time, can compound to significant accomplishments. From sports to academia to finance, persistent gritty effort sets exceptional achievers apart from their equally talented compatriots. (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

“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

It’s one of social psychology’s most consistent findings: Those who feel good often do good. Happy people are typically helpful people. Even a temporary mood boost—finding money, a sunny midwinter day, recalling a happy time—has made folks more likely to give money, assist with dropped papers, or volunteer time. We call it the feel-good, do-good phenomenon. The converse is also reliably found: Doing good feels good. When given money, those assigned to spend it on others end up happier than those told to spend it on themselves. People who volunteer typically find increased meaning and happiness. Employees given “prosocial bonuses” to give to charities become happier workers. For those feeling morose, one antidote is, therefore, a daily random act of kindness. Perhaps you too—after donating blood, carrying someone’s groceries, mentoring a student, or even just giving directions to a stranger—have felt an ensuing warm glow? Might the do-good, feel-good effect extend to other virtuous behaviors? Was Aristotle right to suppose that virtuous living supports human flourishing? Malte Mueller/Getty Images Baylor University psychologist-philosopher Michael Prinzing, answering yes, proposed that “acting proenvironmentally... doing something good for the earth” would provide a lift to people’s subjective well-being. To test his presumption, he first sampled more than 7000 daily experiences of 181 people in 14 countries. He texted them 5 times a day, inquiring about their past-hour experiences and their current mood. As he predicted, people who more often engaged in earth-protective or anti-pollution behaviors tended to report better moods—especially immediately following an environmentally-supportive behavior. A follow-up randomized experiment engaged nearly 600 University of North Carolina students. After first reporting on their past-month happiness, the participants were variously asked on the next day to (1) not alter their normal routine (the control condition), (2) “do three good things for yourself” (such as relaxing in a bath or spending time on a hobby), or (3) “do three good things for the planet” (such as walking or biking instead of driving, reducing waste, or picking up litter). The result: When their happiness was reassessed on the third day, the groups who did something good for themselves and something for the environment were happier, while those in the control condition were not. So, “incorporating proenvironmental behavior into individuals’ daily activities increases their SWB [subjective well-being],” concluded Prinzing. Doing so “makes people feel good about themselves.” He added, “People flourish when they seek to cultivate virtue and do good in the world.” Aristotle was right! The moral of the story: Doing good really does feel good. In addition to preserving the earth, going green doubles as a tonic for the human spirit. Virtue carries its own rewards. So go ahead—recycle that waste, pick up that litter, eat that plant-based meal, bike to work—and enjoy the warm glow.  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

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

Macmillan Learning is honored to sponsor the PsychSessions podcast, a platform dedicated to insightful conversations about teaching and psychology. Today, we celebrate a monumental milestone—the 200th episode of the flagship series, PsychSessions: Conversations About Teaching N' Stuff. This episode features special guest host Chris Cardone as she joins Garth Neufeld to interview the esteemed social psychologist and author, Elliot Aronson. Listen here! Click here to receive a free PsychSessions discussion guide for this episode!      ... View more

As polite people, we know better than to raise political, religious, or “culture war” topics with acquaintances who we expect will disagree. Sometimes that is prudent. Rather than risk discomfiting disagreement with family members we love—and whose minds we are not going to change—we steer clear of discussing transgender kids, climate change, and the Trump trials. Or we may just dread confrontation, perhaps as an emotional expression of our natural loss aversion. We prioritize not risking pain over potential positive gain. Yet when we push beyond our comfort zone, by engaging those who differ, the outcome is often unexpectedly positive. Being too pessimistic about meaningful dialogue across divides, we avoid such—and thus miss out on opportunities to connect and to learn. That’s the conclusion of new research by Kristina Wald, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley. Their experiments build on earlier studies in which Epley and others induced people to reach out to strangers. Did striking up a conversation with a stranger feel a tad awkward? Yes, but the typical outcome was surprisingly positive, leaving both conversationalists feeling happier. Their new experiments first confirmed that people have low expectations of discussion with someone who embraces a differing view of abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration policy, etc. People therefore avoid conversing with those of an opposing view. Their second experiment matched people with someone of a kindred or opposing view on some hot topic. During a 10-minute discussion, each shared their position, why it was important to them, and why they felt as they did. The result: People expected they would dislike the conversation, yet afterward most felt much better about it than they had expected. In a third experiment, some participants experienced a video call with an agreeing or disagreeing partner. Other participants recorded and exchanged monologues explaining their respective views. Again, the relational two-way conversation proved surprisingly satisfying. Listening to a monologue less so. So why do we miscalculate the typically positive results of dialogue across differences? For at least three reasons, suggest Wald and colleagues: Focus on differences: We often underestimate our common ground, thanks to our acute sensitivity to how we differ from others. Civility: We seek to make everyday conversation a polite exchange, but fail to fully anticipate our civility when imagining a difficult conversation. Confirmation bias: By avoiding conversations about disagreements, we “miss having the very conversations” that could better inform our expectations. In other experiments, James Dungan and Epley found that roommates and romantic partners were similarly too pessimistic about the outcomes of hard conversations. Their conclusion: “Misunderstanding how positively others would respond to an honest conversation about a problematic relationship issue may leave people overly reluctant to have the kinds of difficult conversations that are important for their relationships to thrive.” The bottom line: We needlessly avoid constructive conversations with friends, fellow students, or family members. To our collective detriment, we isolate ourselves in silos with like-minded others. “People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams,” notes David Brooks. Communication experts advise us on how to optimize dialogue across differences: Before offering your own view, listen to and reflect what the other is saying, noting points of agreement and what you’ve learned. Acknowledge the other’s admirable motives. Such are among the aims of organizations such as Braver Angels, which have engaged tens of thousands of partisan “red” and “blue” Americans in civil conversation: “We state our views freely and fully, without fear. We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.” At the end of the process, “97% of Braver Angels participants say they found common ground with someone across the divide.” Braver Angels workshop participants seek to bridge their divide. “What’s interesting about our work isn’t that talking to folks you disagree with turns out well,” Epley tells me. That much they already knew, from the many confirmations of Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis, in which equal status contact reduces prejudice. “What’s interesting is that people’s expectations are overly pessimistic, on average, and that has the potential to keep us overly segregated.” Martin Luther King, Jr., understood. His 1962 remarks at Cornell College provide an epigraph for the new Wald-Kardas-Epley research: [People] hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication. 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

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

“Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian than their elders. Why?” headlined a recent Washington Post article. ’Tis true, as many surveys reveal. In a late October 2023 YouGov poll, 20 percent of adults under age 29, but 65 percent of those 65 and over, reported pro-Israel sympathies in the Israel-Hamas war. In a follow-up Pew survey, 18- to 29-year-olds were less than half as likely as adults ages 65+ to “favor the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.” Consider other attitudinal generation gaps: Politics. In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Biden won the support of most voters under age 30, while Trump was favored by a slight majority of those ages 65+. Climate concerns. In survey after survey, young adults express more concern for the future climate. They are, for example, more than twice as likely as adults ages 65+ to favor phasing out fossil fuels:  Same-sex marriage. In the latest Gallup survey, 60 percent of those ages 65+, and 89 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, favored gay marriage. Moreover, a generation gap exists worldwide. Religiosity. It’s no secret that worldwide, today’s young adults, compared with their elders, are less often religiously affiliated and engaged. They believe less, attend less, and pray less. These generational dissimilarities—with more documented by social psychologist Jean Twenge in Generations—have at least two possible explanations: A life-cycle explanation observes that attitudes can change with age. Our youthful progressivism may mutate into a more conservative later-life perspective. With life experience, people change. A cohort (generational) explanation observes that emerging adults form attitudes in response to their time, and then carry those attitudes throughout life? There is wisdom in both. We are not fixed entities. Over the last half century, most people, regardless of age, have become more accepting of same-sex marriage. With age, people may increasingly seek to conserve familiar traditions as values. Some agree with the old cliche, “Those who are not socialist by age 20 have no heart. Those who are not conservative by age 40 have no brain.” Yet, as Twenge and I explain in Social Psychology, Fourteenth Edition, the evidence more strongly supports the cohort/generational explanation. Attitudes form in youth and emerging adulthood, and then become more stable. In surveys of the same people over years, attitudes tend to change more from ages 15 to 25 than from ages 55 to 65. When asked to recall memorable life and world events, adults also tend to reminisce about happenings during their impressionable teens and young adult years. These are also the prime years for recruiting people into cults or to new political views. The teens and early twenties are formative. In Public Religion Research Institute data, below, depicting generation gaps in religiosity over time, I found more evidence of the cohort/generational effect. Note that in 1996, 20 percent of people in their 20s were religiously unaffiliated; 10 years later, 17 percent of people in their 30s were the same; and, 26 years later, 20 percent of people at roughly midlife, were religiously unaffiliated. But surely, you say, some people in each cohort will change as they age, by becoming religiously engaged or disengaged. And overall there has been a slight trend toward disaffiliation in each cohort. Yes, and yes. But what’s striking is each cohort’s overall stability over time. Today’s older generations were more likely, as youth, to have attended worship and religious education programs—the footprints of which they have retained into their later lives. In explaining the U.S. generation gap in attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, the Washington Post also offers a cohort explanation: Each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel, Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said. Beliefs about the world tend to form in our late teens and early 20s and often don’t change, he said. Older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews. . . . But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials. Evidence of cohort stability over time implies two important lessons. First, generational succession is destiny. Today’s older generation, with its ambivalence about gay rights, will be replaced by younger gay-supportive generations. Barring unanticipated events, support for climate change mitigation efforts will grow. In the absence of religious/spiritual renewal—which could happen (the proportion of religious “nones” does appear to have peaked)—secularism will increase. Second, there are few more influential vocations than educating, mentoring, guiding, and inspiring people during their formative teen and college-age years. To be sure, our entire life is a process of becoming and reforming. At every age, we are unfinished products. Yet the foundation of our future selves and of our deepest beliefs and values tends to be laid in the teachings, relationships, and experiences of those seminal years. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) *Photo credit Maskot/Getty Images   ... View more

Image generated by ChatGPT-4 “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. . . . No, not just for some, but for everyone.” Such was true in 1965, when that Burt Bacharach and Hal David song filled the airwaves. It is truer in today’s often angry world. And it was urgently true at Virginia Tech  on April 16, 2007, when the world was shocked by America’s worst school mass shooting, after a student shot and killed 32 classmates and faculty. In response to the resulting grief and anxiety, Virginia Tech Distinguished Professor E. Scott Geller and his students founded an “Actively Caring For People” (AC4P) Movement. Their aim: to spread “prosocial behavior and interpersonal gratitude across campus and beyond.” AC4P unites two disparate schools of psychology—humanism and applied behavioral science— into a “humanistic behaviorism,” at the heart of which lies the power of positive consequences. To strengthen a behavior, catch someone doing something good and reinforce it. Prioritize giving supportive feedback—praise, gratitude, admiration—for desirable behavior over giving corrective or punitive feedback for undesirable behavior. You nod your head knowingly. This is Psychology 101. Yet few of us routinely experience and practice the power of positive consequences. “Only one in three workers in the U.S. and Germany strongly agree that they received recognition or praise in the past seven days for doing good work,” reports Gallup. “And those who disagree are twice as likely to say they'll quit in the next year. Praise is that powerful.” Expressed praise and gratitude are powerful not only for the recipient, but also for the giver. Geller reports an experiment in which students were prompted to thank their  class instructors “with a sincere statement of gratitude for their positive learning experience.” Not only did every instructor appreciate the affirmation, but so did the initially nervous students: “It made my day so much better.” “Made me feel good and lifted my spirits.” “Feels good to make someone smile.” University of Pennsylvania researchers Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns confirmed the two-way power of positive consequences. In one experiment, they instructed compliment-givers to observe a stranger and find “something about them that you like” (often their hair or clothing), and compliment them on it. Were the compliment-receivers put off, as the compliment-givers expected? To the contrary, the micro praise was warmly received. And it also left the compliment-giver feeling uplifted. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has the idea. As part of his  concerted effort to combat epidemic loneliness, he paused during a recent talk and challenged audiences to take 45 seconds to send a text message of gratitude to someone—and to repeat the exercise on five ensuing days.  Moreover, sometimes exceptional gestures of actively caring for people can produce an unexpected outcome. The late billionaire Amway co-founder Rich DeVos made a regular practice of handwriting unsolicited appreciative notes to people, many of whom he didn’t know. In 2002, I received one such note, and then another, expressing appreciation for my locally publicized efforts to support people with hearing loss (by advocating the installation of hearing aid compatible assistive listening in auditoriums and worship places). In response to his second gratitude note, I invited him out for coffee, where we discussed my vision of a more hearing-accessible America. In response, he directed his philanthropy office to support installations at the Grand Rapids’ DeVos Convention Center and the DeVos Performance Hall, and then to co-fund, with my family foundation, a two-year national “Get in the Hearing Loop” initiative . . . which, along with the engagement of many other hearing advocates, has now led to more than 5,000 installations nationwide, including in several airports. The moral: Our small expressions of kindness and gratitude brighten others’ days. They brighten our own day. And sometimes they lead to good things happening. I therefore challenge myself to thank the barista for being there for us, to applaud my department chair’s supportive leadership, to salute my editors for  enabling and mentoring my writing, to let a colleague know how important her  research is, to look the flight attendant in the eye when saying thank you on departing the plane, to tell the window installer how much I appreciate him doing what I could not do myself. Imagine taking an opposite interpretation of the saying, “If you see something, say something.” Instead of looking for negative behavior to report to the proper authorities, look for positive behavior to recognize and appreciate. Says Geller, “Reciprocal expressions of positive gratitude between supervisors and employees, teachers and students, parents and their adult offspring, police officers and citizens” would be a game-changing step toward creating “an actively caring for people culture.” (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.) ... View more

Credit: Kitsap County, Washington If only folks would smoke less, eat healthier, vote more, achieve more, invest for their future, protect the climate, reduce gun violence, drive safely, and accept diversity. What a happier and healthier world that would be! Psychology mostly offers person-focused answers that reflect Western cultural individualism: Make individuals fearful of smoking. Persuade folks to exercise more and consume less. Remind citizens to vote. Help underachieving students adopt a growth mindset. Nudge employee retirement savings. Offer homeowners feedback on their carbon footprints. Change violence-inclined hearts. Conduct safe-driving campaigns. Mandate employee implicit bias training. Psychologists Nick Chater (University of Warwick) and George Lowenstein (Carnegie Mellon) understand the appeal of changing individuals’ thoughts and actions. They have studied the subtle power of “nudges”—of framing choices that gently induce people to make healthy, productive decisions. Compared with individuals who must choose to opt-in to a retirement savings plan, more people elect the retirement plan when enrolled by default, unless they choose to opt-out. Moreover, few object because everyone remains free to choose. So what’s not to like about this “libertarian paternalism”? Shouldn’t we applaud these efforts to persuade individuals to make healthy, smart choices that enhance their lives and protect their environments? Such individual-focused (“i-frame”) efforts have their place, note Chater and Lowenstein in several papers including a new review. But, they report, efforts to better the world by “bettering” individuals face three problems. 1. Ineffectual impact. Individual-change efforts often are ineffective. Chater and Lowenstein offer one analysis of 126 nudge trials with 23 million people, which found just a 1.4 percent average impact. In most cases, a nudge provides only a small budge. Likewise, note Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues, proponents overstate “weak evidence” that achievement rises after training in growth mindsets and gritty persistence. Even 10 years of deliberate practice is no guarantee of expert performance, they contend. 2. System-focused (s-frame) changes have greater impact. Some examples: Weight control. Despite varied weight-loss strategies, the U.S. obesity rate has tripled since the early 1960s. Individual willpower has been no match for modern high-calorie fast food and exercise-replacing technologies and transportation. What’s more effective are systemic factors—subsidies for healthy food, sugar taxes, and environments designed to support walking and biking. Climate change. Efforts to motivate individual climate support with smart meters, carbon footprint calculators, and extreme weather warnings help a wee bit. But systemic carbon pricing, green building codes, electric vehicle subsidies, and decarbonized power generation accomplish much more. Voting. Reminding individuals to vote helps. But what helps more is systemic support of voting with nearby polling places, short voting lines, and easy mail-in voting. Lessening gun violence. In response to a Maine mass shooting leaving 18 dead and dozens wounded, newly elected U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson offered an i-frame: “The problem is the human heart—it’s not guns.” If only Americans, like folks in Britain (where gun deaths are rare), had purer hearts! If only we could transplant British hearts into American bodies? Or offer mental health treatments to evil-hearted Americans? Alas, the U.S./U.K. gun violence divide is a difference not of human nature but of gun-enabling versus gun-restricting contexts. Reducing opioid addiction. Chater and Lowenstein quote Purdue Pharmaceutical’s Richard Sackler advocating an opioid epidemic i-frame solution: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem.” The epidemic—more than 80,000 U.S. opioid deaths in 2021—arose from easier access to painkilling drugs, for which the s-frame solution is litigation against opioid-promoting pharma companies and more restricted medical access. Minimizing implicit bias. The evidence is clear: Implicit biases are real. Yet efforts to date in implicit bias training for individuals have accomplished little. As my social psychologist colleague Charles Green explains, “Working for racial justice in your organization [requires] addressing unequal power distribution and creating opportunity for all. It is structural, not personal.” 3. “I-frame interventions may draw attention and support from crucial s-frame changes.” A great lesson of social psychology is the “fundamental attribution error”—our inclination to attribute responsibility to individual (i-frame) rather than situational (s-frame) influences. Moreover, i-frame understandings can “crowd out” s-frame understandings, say Chater and Lowenstein: When people consider individual green energy nudges, they become less supportive of alternative green policies such as a carbon taxes. Psychologists’ enthusiasm for i-frame efforts has therefore unwittingly “reduced the impetus for system reform.” No wonder, the researchers argue, “that public relations specialists representing corporate interests have effectively deflected pressure for systemic change by reframing social problems in i-frame terms.” Much as gun manufacturers blame the finger not the trigger, so companies that sell unhealthy foods, fossil fuels, and plastics offer ads that hold individuals responsible for healthy behaviors and environmental protection. In response to Chater and Lowenstein, famed nudge advocates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein each argue that both individual and systemic change matter. “Almost every policy problem has multiple causes,” notes Thaler. “I know of no behavioral economist, policy maker, or journalist who is on the record saying that nudges are a panacea, nor the appropriate tool to address every policy problem.” “Some nudges have quite large impacts,” adds Sunstein, though “for countless problems, nudges are hardly enough. They cannot eliminate poverty, unemployment, and corruption.” And the good news is that when society combines i-frame persuasion with s-frame reforms, real change can happen. From 1954 to 2023 the U.S. smoking rate plummeted from 45 to 12 percent thanks to i-frame cancer education and gruesome cigarette pack images, and also to s-frame cigarette tax increases, clean indoor air laws, tobacco litigation, and enforcement of age restricted sales. Or consider Edmonton, Canada, which combined a safe-driving campaign with traffic system changes— “protected bike lanes, connected sidewalks and high-visibility crosswalks, and ample room for people walking, biking and riding transit, as well as lowering speeds with traffic calming measures, such as road diets, speed humps, leading pedestrian intervals and retiming signal progressions for safer speeds.” The result: A six-year traffic-death decline of 50 percent. Without such system interventions, Dallas, with only 18 percent more people, had 228 traffic-related deaths in 2022. Edmonton, even with its more treacherous winter driving, had only 14. Credit: City of Edmonton https://twitter.com/VisionZeroYEG/status/1392963809136967681 Moreover, when s-frame changes such as traffic congestion zone charges or single-use plastic bag bans are introduced, initial public outcry typically subsides with surprising speed. Even charging people a token amount for single-use plastic bags “is remarkably effective in reducing their use.” If new carbon taxes charged producers and customers for the future environmental costs of climate change—but then redistributed that revenue in other beneficial ways—people would similarly adapt. So, to create a better world, should we seek to persuade, to nudge, to educate, to inspire? Yes! But simultaneously we should, all the more, work to create situations and incentives that will naturally engender sustainable human flourishing. We can better the world by changing individuals and systems. (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.) ... View more

It’s a “national youth mental health crisis.” So says U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy of post-2010 soaring teen depression. Today’s teens are sadder, lonelier, and (among girls) more suicide prone. It’s truly a tough time to be a teen. Image generated by Dall-E3 Converging evidence (as I summarized in a prior essay) points to a culprit: long hours on social media (4.8 hours per day, reports a new Gallup teen survey): Correlational evidence reveals not only the simultaneous increase in smartphones and depression, but also an association between daily social media hours and depression risk. Longitudinal studies have found that social media use at Time 1 predicts mental health issues at Time 2. Experiments that randomly assign people to more or less social media exposure verify causation. Quasi-experimental evidence confirms that the rollout of social media in a specific time and place predicts increased mental health issues. In hindsight, it’s understandable: Daily online hours entail less face-to-face time with friends, less sleep, and more comparison of one’s own mundane life with others’ more glamorous and seemingly successful lives. Others, it seems, are having more fun. As Theodore Roosevelt reportedly observed, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Still, this its-social-media claim has dissenters. In the latest of her lucid Substack essays, Jean Twenge—psychology’s leading teen mental health sleuth—identifies a baker’s dozen alternative explanations for today’s teen malaise, each of which she rebuts. To sample a few: Today’s teens are just more transparent about their bad feelings. But behavioral measures, such as emergency room self-harm admissions, closely track the self-report changes. The media/depression correlation is too weak to explain the crisis. But even a small .20 correlation can explain “a good chunk” of the increased depression—with “girls spending 5 hours a day or more on social media [being] twice as likely to be depressed.” The new Gallup survey confirms Twenge’s surmise, reporting that “teens who spend five or more hours per day on social media apps are significantly more likely to report experiencing negative emotions compared with those who spend less than two hours per day.” And Twenge is surely right: “If teens who ate 5 apples a day (vs. none) were three times more likely to be depressed, parents would never let their kids eat that many apples.” It’s because of school shootings. But teen mental health risks have similarly surged in countries without school shootings. It’s due to increased school pressure and homework. But today’s teens, compared to their 1990s counterparts, report spending less time on homework. It’s because their parents are more depressed. But they aren’t. The mental health “crisis of our time” is a teen/young adult crisis. Of the thirteen alternative explanations, Twenge concedes some credibility to but one—“It’s because children and teens have less independence.” Indeed, compared to yesteryear’s free-range children, today’s kids less often roam their neighborhood, play without adult supervision, and spend time with friends. But this trend, Twenge notes, dovetails with their increased online time. Moreover, the trend toward less teen independence predated the upsurge in both online hours and depression. Twenge’s conclusion: “If teens were still seeing friends in person about as much, were sleeping just as much, and were not on social media 5 hours a day—all things traceable to the rise of smartphones and social media, I highly doubt teen depression would have doubled in a decade.” (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.) ... View more

Many Americans are indifferent about marriage. In a 2019 Pew survey, 55 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, and nearly half of all adults, agreed that couples who want to stay together are “just as well off if [they] decide not to marry.” In 2007 to 2009 University of Michigan surveys, high school seniors expressed even less esteem for marriage, with only about a third agreeing that “most people will have fuller and happier lives if they choose legal marriage rather than staying single or just living with someone.” Yet it’s no secret among those of us who study such things that marriage is a major predictor of health and human flourishing. See, for example, these General Social Survey data which I extracted from more than 64,000 randomly sampled Americans since 1972 (showing, also, a COVID-related 2021 morale dip). So does marriage—what anthropologist Joseph Henrich says “may be the most primeval of human institutions”—make for happiness? Before assuming such, critical thinkers should wonder about two other possibilities. First, does marriage (especially when compared to divorce) predict health and happiness merely because it compares those in surviving happy versus failed marriages? To see if getting married predicts long-term health and well-being across all new marriages, Harvard epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele, with Ying Chen and colleagues, harvested data from 11,830 nurses who, in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, were unmarried in 1989. They identified those who married versus those who didn’t in the next four years, and then tracked their lives for 25 years. Even when including those who later divorced, those who had married were, 25 years later, healthier and less likely to have died. They were also happier, more purpose-filled, and less depressed and lonely. Ah, but what about the second possibility: Were the to-be-married nurses simply happier, healthier, and richer to begin with? Did happiness à marriage rather than marriage à happiness? Happy people do enjoy better and more stable relationships. Depressed people tend to be irritable, not fun to live with, and vulnerable to divorce. So surely happiness does predict marriage and marital stability. Yet even after controlling for preexisting health and well-being, reports VanderWeele, marriage remains “an important pathway to human flourishing. It increases physical health, mental health, happiness, and purpose.” And not just for straight folks, I would add (as Letha Dawsom Scanzoni and I explained in our 2005 book, A Christian Case for Gay Marriage). Marriage is one effective way to help fulfill the deep human need that Aristotle long ago recognized—the need to belong. Marriage mostly (though not always) works, VanderWeele suspects, because marriage provides companionship. It boosts health and longevity. And it offers sexual satisfaction. Thus, he reasons, societies’ tax, parental leave, and child-support policies should incentivize marriage. And marriage enrichment and counseling should be widely available. Indeed, mindful that all healthy close relationships support our human need to belong, society should support varied opportunities for companionship and attachment. Our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our worship places, our recreational facilities, and our schools can all work at being places of supportive connection—places where you and I feel like we belong. (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.) Photo credit: Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank/Getty Images ... View more

“Our country is in decline, we are a failing nation,” bemoaned the indicted Donald Trump. On that much, most folks concur, with 83 percent of Americans telling Gallup the country’s “state of moral values” is “getting worse.” The moral gloom is global. When psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert harvested survey responses from 12.5 million people across 60 countries and 70 years, they found that people always and everywhere have perceived morality (including kindness, honesty, and other virtues) in decline. This despite most manifestations of immorality—war, murder, child abuse, slavery—subsiding, and people reporting no change in their own morally relevant behaviors. While the world has in fact become more humane, an illusion of moral decline remains pervasive. This dark delusion of plummeting social and economic well-being crosses domains. But the truth tells a different story: Crime feels up, while crime rates have fallen. “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable,” bewailed Donald Trump. “Crime infests our cities,” echoed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.   Americans agree: Each year since 2005, 7 in 10 have told Gallup that crime has increased in the past year—a perception shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s not just Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who contends that “violent crime is at record highs.” Yet since the early 1990s violent and property crime rates have fallen by about half. And the National Crime Victimization Survey confirms that we are much safer today. Poverty seems up, while poverty has abated. In a Gates Foundation–funded survey, 87 percent of people surveyed across 24 countries believed global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. But the percent of humans living in extreme poverty has fallen by two-thirds since 1990. Life conditions seem to be worsening, while life has gotten easier. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans told Pew Research in April that “life in America today” is worse than it “was 50 years ago for people like you” . . . despite increased life expectancy, more than doubled real average income, decreased percentage of income spent on food, and today’s material blessings ranging from dishwashers and air conditioning to smartphones and streaming TV. The national economy is tanking, but my finances are okay. In a 2023 Federal Reserve survey, only 18 percent of Americans viewed the national economy as good or excellent. And nearly two-thirds told Gallup they had little or no confidence in President Biden’s management of the economy. Nevertheless, 73 percent say their own finances are doing “at least okay.” No surprise, given that unemployment is at a 50-year low, inflation has moderated, and job satisfaction and the nation’s GDP are at all-time highs. Undocumented immigrants seem a threat, despite their compartively low crime rate. “Criminal elements,” we’ve been told, are “pouring in,” while “sanctuary cities are unleashing vicious predators and bloodthirsty killers.” Half the public agrees, Gallup reports: “Americans are five times more likely to say immigrants make [crime] situation worse rather than better (45% to 9%, respectively).” This despite undocumented immigrants reportedly having a much lower incarceration rate than U.S.-born citizens. To be sure, some social and ecological indicators, such as teen mental health and the climate future, are worrisome. Nevertheless, excessive pessimism prevails. The modal American believes the Black incarceration rate increased between 2006 and 2018 (it decreased 35 percent), that the teen birth rate has been increasing (it has been decreasing), and that the high school dropout rate has increased (though it decreased). People’s dour outlook applies to the nation, but not to their own local experience. My neighborhood, my town, are safe, healthy, flourishing places, we mostly observe. But the rest of America—the America we see on TV—is a cesspool of immorality, crime, and poverty. Our national pessimism arises partly from what psychologist Cory Clark and his University of Pennsylvania colleagues call our natural “hypervigilance toward bad outcomes.” From a young age, we are attuned to possible harms and to threatening or negative information. A second, powerful contributor to our bleak outlooks is the famed availability heuristic—our human tendency to judge the frequency of events by the ease with which instances of them come to mind. Vivid, mentally available images of plane crashes, terror attacks, and school shootings lead us to fear too much the things that kill people in bunches, and too little the less dramatic threats that take lives one by one. Thus, many people fear air travel, though by distance traveled we were, in the last decade, 595 times safer on a commercial flight than in a passenger vehicle. Gut feelings, fed by vivid anecdotes, hijack evidence-based thinking. “Mass media indulge this tendency,” note Mastroianni and Gilbert, “with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly.” Journalists don’t cover planes that land, people behaving morally, or immigrants living peaceably. Moreover, say Mastroianni and Gilbert, biased exposure is compounded by biased memory: The negativity of past bad experiences fades faster than the positivity of past good experiences. Thus, relative to yesteryear’s Golden Age, we badly overestimate today’s dramatic risks, crime rates, poverty, and immorality. And believing this decline narrative, we become receptive to the politics of gloom—to demagogues who embrace dystopian pessimism and pour petrol on its festering flames. “Crime and inflation are rampant.” We are beset by “poverty and violence at home.” “Our country [is] rapidly going to hell!” “I alone can fix it.” Elect me, we hear, and I will make our nation great again. “What is the one thing wrong with the world that you would change?” the Harvard Gazette asked Steven Pinker, author of 2021’s Rationality. His answer: “Too many leaders and influencers, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and academics, surrender to the cognitive bias of assessing the world through anecdotes and images rather than data and facts.” If only we could fix that. David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.   ... View more