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

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

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” ~Attributed to Mother Teresa A college student, heading to a new school, leaves friends behind. A close relationship is severed by death or breakup. A remote worker loves skipping the commute but misses the convivial workplace. An ostracized teen stares at her social media feeds and feels utterly alone. In such ways, reports U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, about half of Americans—an increasing number—report experiencing loneliness. With support from Brigham Young University psychologist and social connections researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the Surgeon General documents Americans’ fraying social connections. Between 2003 and 2020, time spent alone increased from 142.5 to 166.5 hours per month; in-person time with friends decreased from 30 to just 10 hours per month. Consider this: How many close friends do you have? In 1990, 27 percent of Americans answered three or fewer. By 2021, the percentage answering three or fewer increased to 49 percent. Although COVID-19 accentuated these trends, they are long-term. Aloneness need not entail loneliness. Yet a possible loneliness source is our more often living alone. From 1960 to 2022 single-person households more than doubled—from 13 to 29 percent of all households. We are also more often working alone—with working from home (WFH) reportedly soaring from 5 percent of pre-COVID workdays to nearly 30 percent, and with the WFH trend projected to endure. The Surgeon General’s concern about social isolation and loneliness stems not just from associated depressed or anxious mood, but also the broader health consequences, which are bigger than you might have guessed: Framed positively, we live longer, as well as more happily, when supported by close, caring relationships. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, the late Harriet Hall (aka “SkepDoc”) cautioned that the loneliness-mortality relationship is correlational: “The cause might be some confounding factor.” But modern epidemiological studies do control for some plausible other factors. Moreover, self-reported feelings of “secure attachment” have been in decline. And as the Surgeon General summarizes, social isolation and loneliness are known to impact health via the biology of stress, the psychology of diminished purpose and hope, and related behaviors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and unhealthy nutrition and sleep: The report concludes by offering strategies for rebuilding healthy social connections. These include designing physical and social environments that bring people together, and prioritizing cultures that value kindness and connection. Happily for me, the report’s suggestions are embodied in my historic neighborhood, with its walkable location and sidewalk-facing front porches that (much more than our former backyard-oriented house) connect me with passing neighbors—and not just me, suggests new research on neighborhood design.  Likewise, my department designed our offices to foster faculty connections, by clustering our offices in a pod (rather than yoked with our labs)—with a traffic pattern that has us often walking by one another’s open doors (as I captured below, shortly after writing these words). And we begin each department meeting with a time of sharing personal and professional updates. In my experience, the Surgeon General is right: It’s uplifting to live and work, face-to-face, among people who like and support each other. (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.) Photo credit Comstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Images ... View more

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 has soared, especially among girls. Moreover, youth hospitalization for "attempted suicide or self-injury increased from 49,285 in 2009 to 129,699 in 2019." 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