A recent Templeton World Charity Foundation conference, Character, Social Connections and Flourishing in the 21st Century, expanded my mind, thanks to a lecture by famed evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. This much about him I had known: His multilevel selection theory argues that evolution favors survival-enhancing group as well as individual behaviors. Within groups, selfishness beats altruism. Yet altruistic groups triumph over selfish groups.   What I learned from his lecture and our ensuing dinner conversation was that his passion has shifted to understanding and enabling effective real-world groups—from nonprofit organizations to schools to faith communities to businesses. How might people in such groups more effectively work together to accomplish goals?   To enhance work team effectiveness, Wilson and his colleagues suggest implementing a group of basic principles. They point out that groups that effectively manage shared resources, such as irrigation, forests, and fisheries, follow principles that (a) integrate evolutionary principles of group selection with (b) “core design principles” identified by political scientist and economics Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, seasoned with (c) behavior-change insights articulated by psychologist Steven Hayes. The resulting eight principles for success: Strong group identity and purpose. Groups know who they are and what sets them apart from other groups. Fair sharing of benefits and costs. Proportional sharing (without some members benefiting at the expense of others) advances group over individual advancement. Fair and inclusive decisions. Consensus decision-making, with uncensored input, enables smart decisions, and, again, safeguards against some benefiting at others’ expense. Tracking results ensures that agreements are honored. Graduated sanctions. Accountability for misbehaviors ranges from gentle reminders to expulsion. Conflict resolution mechanisms. When disagreements occur, the group implements fair and fast resolution procedures. Authority to self-govern. In larger societies and organizations, subgroups are empowered to organize and operate. Appropriate coordination with other groups. In larger social systems, operating subgroups must integrate with other subgroups.   How striking it is, notes Wilson, that the principles Ostrom identified from successful commons resource-managing groups are so similar to “the conditions that caused us to evolve into such a cooperative species.” These principles—when implemented by effective leaders—build a group’s moral foundation, protect it against self-serving behaviors, and allow its members to freely express themselves. To assist groups in implementing the core design principles drawn from evolutionary, political, and psychological science, Wilson and colleagues have authored a book (Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups), developed a websitethat offers training and resources, and produced an online magazine that tells implementation stories.   Wilson’s life journey—from son of a famous author (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) to science theorist to social entrepreneur—is unique. Yet in other ways, his professional pilgrimage is similar to our own . . . as our lives have unfolded in unanticipated ways—sometimes with false starts leading to brick walls, sometimes with gratifying new directions. Little did I expect, when first encountering Wilson’s work, that it would later produce practical resources for helping groups “learn about and adopt design principles to improve their efficacy.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Caring parents understandably want to protect their children from physical harm and emotional hurt. We do this, we presume, for their sakes. And, if the truth be told, we do it for our own as well. Many of us knowingly nodded when Michelle Obama shared the common parental experience: “You are as happy as your least happy child.”   But as my friend and fellow social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, recently explained to a large West Michigan audience, sometimes parental good intentions prepare kids for failure.   Haidt began by documenting what I’ve previously described—the stunning recent increase in teens’ (especially teen girls’) depression, anxiety, suicidal thinking, and self-harm (as documented in ER visits). This tsunami of mental health problems has now also reached college campuses, as evident in collegians’ increased depression rates and visits to campus mental health services.   What gives? What accounts for this greater fragility of today’s youth? Teen biology hasn’t changed. They’re not drinking more (indeed, they’re drinking less). They’re not working more (they’re less often employed).   What has changed, Haidt observed, is, first, technology—the spread of smart phones, the explosion of social media, and the addition of social comparison-promoting social media features, such as visible likes and retweets of one’s posts. Haidt offered correlational studies that associate teens’ social media use with their mental health, and experiments that reveal the emotional benefits of a restrained social media diet. (For more, see this prior blog essay, and Haidt’s recent Atlantic essay, with Tobias Rose-Stockwell: “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.” See also this new response by his collaborator, Jean Twenge, to skeptics of the social media explanation.)   As an antidote to social media’s emotional toxicity (and diminished sleep and face-to-face relationships), Haidt offered three practical family guidelines for healthy media use: He also attributes the increase youth mental health issues to a second cultural change: Today’s parents often fail to appreciate the “antifragility” principle—that children’s emotions, like their bones and immune systems, gain strength from being challenged. Bones and muscles gain strength from exercise. Immune systems develop protective antibodies from challenges (soaring peanut allergies are a sorry result of routinely protecting infants from peanut exposure). And children’s emotional health and resilience likewise builds through their unpleasant experiences. There is truth to Nietzsche’s aphorism, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”   Alas, as Haidt demonstrated by surveying his audience, members of Generation Z (people born since 1996) have grown up more protected—with parents restraining their roaming free until later childhood. Their grandparents, by contrast, and to some extent their parents, were experienced a less restricted “free range childhood.” (And no, today’s world is not more dangerous—it’s actually much safer than the 1970s.)   Moreover, he argued (also in The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, and in a new essay with Pamela Paresky), schools are ill-serving students by protecting them from uncomfortable speech. Colleges ill-prepare students for life outside the campus when they suppress unpopular perspectives and offer “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” that insulate students from “micro-aggressions.”   As an alternative approach, Haidt welcomes viewpoint diversity—the thrust of the Heterodox Academy. He and his colleagues also offer resources for open-minded engagement at the new OpenMindPlatform.org.   Haidt’s case for viewpoint diversity and open dialogue remind me of the long-ago wisdom of social psychologist William McGuire, whose experiments taught us an important lesson:  Unchallenged beliefs existing in “germ-free ideological environments” are the most vulnerable to later being overturned. To form one’s beliefs amid diverse views is to become more discerning, and ultimately more deeply grounded in less fragile convictions.   Ergo, concludes Haidt, to support teen mental health be intentional about screen time and social media, and remember: character—like bones, muscles, and immunity—grows from challenge.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

“Do something!” shouted a lone voice at Ohio’s governor during a post-massacre candlelight vigil in downtown Dayton. Others soon chimed into what became a crowd chant, which has now challenged Congress to, indeed, do something in response to the repeated mass shootings. In response, politicians and pundits offered varied diagnoses and remedies. Some blamed mental illness or violent video gaming or White nationalist hate speech. Others noted that such do not set the United States apart from countries that also have mental illness, video game enthusiasts, and hate speech—yet have vastly fewer homicides and virtually no mass shootings. What distinguishes the United States is, simply, guns. Despite broad and growing public support for strengthened background checks and assault weapon bans, America’s nearly 400 million guns are not disappearing soon. So what, realistically, is something effective we can do? Might “red flag” gun laws, which aim to take guns away from dangerous people, be a remedy? If someone expresses suicidal or destructive fantasies, or is mentally ill, could we save lives by confiscating their weapons? The idea of identifying at-risk individuals is not new. Former Speaker of the U.S. House Paul Ryan had the idea in 2015: “People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings.” In the wake of the 2018 slaughter of 17 people at a Parkland, Florida high school, Florida’s Governor (now-Senator) Rick Scott went a step further, urging stronger rules to red-flag high-risk people: “I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has mental issues to use a gun. I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who is a danger to themselves or others to use a gun.” President Donald Trump suggested opening more mental hospitals that could house would-be mass murders: “When you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution.” After the El Paso and Dayton massacres, he declared that mass killers are “mentally ill monsters.” At an August 15th New Hampshire rally he added that "These people are mentally ill. I think we have to start building institutions again." The general public has supported red-flagging. In a 2012 Gallup survey, 84 percent of Americans agreed that “increased government spending on mental health screening and treatment” would be a “somewhat” or “very” effective “approach to preventing mass shootings at schools.” While we psychologists welcome the expressed high regard for our supposed powers of discernment, the hard reality is otherwise. Extremely rare events such as mass shootings are inherently difficult to predict, even by the best psychological science. One analysis reviewed 73 studies that attempted to predict violent or antisocial behavior. Its conclusion: Using psychology’s risk assessment tools “as sole determinants of detention, sentencing, and release is not supported by the current evidence.” Moreover, among the millions of troubled people who could potentially murder or commit suicide, it is impossible to identify in advance the infinitesimal fraction who will do so. And it would surely be unfair to stigmatize all “mentally ill” people. Most mentally ill people do not commit violent acts, and most violent criminals are not mentally ill. Violent acts are better predicted by anger, alcohol use, previous violence, gun availability, and young-male demography. (The El Paso and Dayton shooters were 21 and 24-year-old males.) As the late psychologist David Lykken once observed, “We could avoid two-thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.” Suicide is likewise hard to predict. One research team summarized 50 years of research on suicide’s unpredictability: “The vast majority of people who possess a specific risk factor [for suicide] will never engage in suicidal behavior.” Moreover, our ability to predict suicide “has not improved across 50 years.” Even given our inability to offer accurate predictions of who will commit murder or suicide, we do know some risk factors. As every psychology student knows, one of the best predictors of future behavior is past behavior:  Prior violent acts increase the risk of future violent acts--and prior suicide attempts raise the risk of a future suicide. This was seemingly illustrated by the death of convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, after he was removed from suicide watch, which the New York Times reports would normally be decided by the chief psychologist at a federal prison facility after “a face-to-face psychological evaluation.” Shortly after apparently being deemed not at risk, despite his prior attempt, Epstein reportedly died by hanging in his prison cell. But even without knowing who will commit suicide, we can modify the environment to reduce its probability. For example, fences that negate jumping from bridges and buildings have reduced the likelihood of impulsive suicides. Reducing the number of in-home guns has also been effective. States with high gun ownership rates are states with high suicide rates, even after controlling for other factors such as poverty. After Missouri repealed its tough handgun law, its suicide rate went up 15 percent; when Connecticut enacted such a law, its suicide rate dropped 16 percent. And we can reduce, even if we cannot predict, mass shootings. As my psychologist colleague Linda Woolf wrote after a 2018 massacre, and again after El Paso and Dayton, it is time “to focus on the evidence—mass shootings occur, and guns make these atrocities all too easy and frequent.” Our politicians, she adds, should initiate gun safety reforms including “a ban on assault weapons, ban on large-capacity magazines, universal background checks, stiffer licensing laws, red flag laws, and lifting of all Federal restrictions on gun violence research.” Although we cannot predict the next tragedy, we can act to reduce its likelihood. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. An earlier essay also reported some of the evidence on the unpredictability of mass shootings.) ... View more

How you and I feel about our lives depends greatly on our social comparisons. We feel smart when others seem dimwitted, and grateful for our health when others are unwell. But sometimes during social comparisons our self-image suffers, and we feel relative deprivation—a perception that we are worse off than others with superior achievements, looks, or income. We may be happy with a raise—until we learn that our co-workers got more. And it’s better, psychologically, to make a salary of $60,000 when friends, neighbors, and co-workers make $30,000, than to make $100,000 when our compatriots make $200,000.   Relative deprivation helps us understand why the spread of television—and exposure to others’ wealth—seemingly transformed people’s absolute deprivation (lacking what others have) into relative deprivation (feeling deprived). When and where TV was introduced to various American cities, larceny thefts (shoplifting, bike stealing) soon rose.   Relative deprivation also helps us understand the psychological toxicity of today’s growing income inequality. In communities with large inequality—where some people observe others having so much more—average happiness is lower and crime rates and other social pathologies are higher.   So should we assume it’s always better to be content and happy than to be frustrated by seemingly unreachable expectations? No—because relative deprivation can also be a force for positive change. People in the former East Germany had a higher standard of living than their counterparts in some other European countries, but a frustratingly lower one than their West German neighbors—and that helped spark their revolt.   At a recent gathering of the Templeton foundations, I heard grantee Thor Halvorssen explain how his Human Rights Foundation is working to unite the world against the tyrannies that underlie poverty, famine, war, and torture. One  “Flash Drives for Freedom” project responds to the North Korean people’s mistaken belief—enabled by strict censorship and the absence of Internet—that the rest of the world is worse off than they are.   This project is collecting tens of thousands of used and donated USB drives, erasing their content, and refilling them with books, videos, and an off-line Korean Wikipedia that counter Kim Jong-Un’s misinformation. (Yes, Wikipedia can fit on a flash drive—see here—and, yes, most North Koreans have access to devices that can read flash drives.) Finally, it is delivering the goods via drones and balloons with a timing device that ruptures the balloon over North Korean cities, raining down flash drives.   The implied psychological rationale: Lay the groundwork for a transformed and free North Korea by harnessing the positive power of relative deprivation. From hrf.org From FlashDrivesForFreedom.org (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com) ... View more

What virtue is more needed in today’s contentious and polarized world than humility? We need deep-rooted convictions to fuel our passions, but also humility to restrain bull-headed fanaticism. Along with curiosity and skepticism, humility forms the foundation of all science. Humility enables critical thinking, which holds one’s untested beliefs tentatively while assessing others’ ideas with a skeptical but open mind. To accept everything is to be gullible; to deny everything is to be a cynic. In religion and literature, hubris (pride) is first and foundational among the seven deadly sins. When rooted in theism—the assumption that “There is a God, but it’s not me”—humility reminds us of our surest conviction: Some of our beliefs err. We are finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. So there’s no great threat when one of our beliefs is overturned or refined—it’s to be expected.  In this spirit, we can, as St. Paul advised, “test everything, hold fast to what is good.” Humility also underlies healthy human relations. In one of his eighteenth-century Sermons, Samuel Johnson recognized the corrosive perils of pride and narcissism: “He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them.” Even Dale Carnegie, the positive thinking apostle, foresaw the danger: “Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism—and wars.” Unlike pride and narcissism, humility contributes to human flourishing. It opens us to others. Show social psychologists a situation where humility abounds—with accurate self-awareness + modest self-presentation + a focus on others—and they will show you civil discourse, happy marriages, effective leadership, and mental health. And that is the gist of this new 3.5 minute animated Freethink video, “The Joy of Being Wrong.” Note: The video was supported by the Templeton Foundation (which I serve as a trustee) as an expression of its founder’s science-friendly motto: “How little we know, how eager to learn.” The Foundation is also supporting a University of Connecticut initiative on “Humility and Conviction in Public Life,” including blog essays, a monthly newsletter, podcast interviews, and videos of forums and lectures.  (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

“Self-consciousness [exists] in contrast with an ‘other,’ a something which is not the self.” ——C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940 We are, always and everywhere, self-conscious of how we differ. Search your memory for a social situation in which you were the only person of your gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or body type. Perhaps you were the only woman in a group of men, or the only straight person at an LGBTQ gathering. Recalling that situation . . . Were you self-conscious about your identity? How did others respond to you? How did your perceptions of their responses affect your behavior? Differences determine our “spontaneous self-concepts." If you recalled being very aware of your differences, you are not alone. As social psychologist William McGuire long ago noted, we are conscious of ourselves “insofar as, and in the ways that” we differ. When he and his co-workers invited children to “tell us about yourself,” they mostly mentioned their distinctive attributes. Redheads volunteered their hair color, foreign-born their birthplace, minority children their ethnicity. Spontaneous self-concepts often adapt to a changing group. A Black woman among White women will think of herself as Black, McGuire observed. When moving to a group of Black men, she will become more conscious of being a woman. This identity-shaping phenomenon affects us all. When serving on an American Psychological Association professional task with 10 others—all women—I immediately was aware of my gender. But it was only on the second day, when I joked to the woman next to me that the bathroom break line would be short for me, that she noticed the group’s gender make-up. In my daily life, surrounded by mostly White colleagues and neighbors, I seldom am cognizant of my race—which becomes a prominent part of my identity when visiting my daughter in South Africa, where I become part of a 9 percent minority. In the U.S., by contrast, a new Pew survey finds that 74 percent of Blacks but only 15 percent of Whites see their race as “being extremely or very important to how they think of themselves.” Our differences may influence how others respond to us. Researchers have also noted a related phenomenon: Our differences, though mostly salient to ourselves, may also affect how others treat us. Being the “different” or “solo” person—a Black person in an otherwise White group, a woman in a male group, or an adult in a group of children—can make a person more visible and seem more influential. Their good and bad qualities also tend to be more noticed (see here and here). If we differ from others around us, it therefore makes adaptive sense for us to be a bit wary. It makes sense for a salient person—a minority race person, a gay person, or a corpulent person—to be alert and sensitive to how they are being treated by an interviewer, a police officer, or a neighbor. Although subsiding, explicit prejudices and implicit biases are real, and stereotypes of a difference can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes our perceived differences not only influence how others treat us, but also how we, in turn, respond to them. In one classic experiment, men students conversed by phone with women they mistakenly presumed (from having been shown a fake picture) were either unattractive or attractive. The presumed attractive women (unaware of the picture manipulation) spoke more warmly to the men than did the presumed unattractive women. The researchers’ conclusion: The men’s expectations had led them to act in a way that influenced the women to fulfill the belief that beautiful women are desirable. A stereotype of a difference can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our acute self-consciousness of our differences can cause us to exaggerate or misinterpret others’ reactions. At times, our acute self-consciousness of our difference may have funny consequences. Consider of my favorite social psychology experiments demonstrating the influence of personal perception of differences. In the first, which showed the “spotlight effect,” Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky asked university students to don a Barry Manilow T-shirt before entering a room with other students. Feeling self-conscious about their difference, those wearing the dorky T-shirt guessed that nearly half of their peers would notice the shirt. Actually, only 23 percent did. The lesson: Our differences—our bad hair day, our hearing loss, our dropping the cafeteria plate—often get noticed and remembered less than we imagine. In another favorite experiment—one of social psychology’s most creative and poignant studies—Robert Kleck and Angelo Strenta used theatrical makeup to place an ear-to-mouth facial scar on college women—supposedly to see how others would react. After each woman checked the real-looking scar in a hand mirror, the experimenter applied “moisturizer” to “keep the makeup from cracking”—but which actually removed the scar. So the scene was set: A woman, feeling terribly self-conscious about her supposedly disfigured face, talks with another woman who knows nothing of all this. Feeling acutely sensitive to how their conversational partner was looking at them, the “disfigured” women saw the partner as more tense, patronizing, and distant than did women in a control condition. Their acute self-consciousness about their presumed difference led them to misinterpret normal mannerisms and comments. The bottom line: Differences define us. We are self-conscious of how we differ. To a lesser extent, others notice how we differ and categorize us according to their own beliefs, which may include stereotypes or unrealistic expectations. And sometimes, thanks to our acute sensitivity to how we differ, we overestimate others’ noticing and reacting. But we can reassure ourselves: if we’re having a bad hair day, others are unlikely to notice and even less likely to remember. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

It’s a core lesson of introductory psychology: Intergroup contact reduces prejudice (especially friendly, equal-status contact). As hundreds of studies show, attitudes—of White folks toward Black folks, of straight folks toward gay folks, and of natives toward immigrants—are influenced not just by what we know but also by whom we know. Prejudice lessens when straight people have gay friends or family, and native-born citizens know immigrants. As I write these words from the place of my childhood—Bainbridge Island, Washington—I am moved to offer a family example of the power of social contact. First, consider a large social experiment—the World War II internment and return of Japanese Americans from (a) California, and (b) Bainbridge, a Manhattan-sized island across Puget Sound from Seattle. In minimal-contact California, Japanese-Americans lived mostly in separate enclaves—meaning few Caucasians had Japanese-descent friends. When the California internment ensued, the Hearst newspapers, having long warned of “the yellow peril” celebrated, and few bid the internees goodbye. On their return, resistance and “No Japs Here” signs greeted them. Minimal contact enabled maximal prejudice. Bainbridge was a contrasting high-contact condition—and was also the place where (at its ferry dock on March 30, 1942) the internment began. As an island community, all islanders intermingled as school classmates. Their strawberry farms and stores were dispersed throughout the island. The local paper (whose owners later won awards for journalistic courage) editorialized against the internment and then published internee news from the camps for their friends back home. The internees’ fellow islanders watched over their property. And when more than half the internees returned after the war, they were greeted with food and assistance. A history of cooperative contact enabled minimal prejudice. I can personalize this. One of those saying a tearful goodbye on the dock that 1942 day was my father, the insurance agent and friend of many of them. After maintaining their property insurance during the internment, and then writing “the first auto policy on a Japanese American after the war,” his support was remembered decades later—with a tribute at his death by the island’s Japanese American Community president (a former internee): My father provides a case example of the contact effect. His support did not stem from his being socially progressive. (He was a conservative Republican businessperson who was treasurer of Washington State's Nixon for President campaign.) His opposition to the internment of his fellow islanders was simply because he knew them. He therefore believed it was colossally unjust to deem them—his friends and neighbors—a threat. As he later wrote, “We became good friends … and it was heartbreaking for us when the war started and the Japanese people on Bainbridge Island were ordered into concentration camps.” This great and sad experiment on the outcomes of racial separation versus integration is being replicated in our own time. People in states with the least contact with immigrants express most hostility toward them. Meanwhile, those who know and benefit from immigrants—as co-workers, employees, businesspeople, health-care workers, students—know to appreciate them. It’s a lesson worth remembering: Cordial and cooperative contact advances acceptance. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

There’s bad news and good news about Americans’ race relations and attitudes.   The bad news: People perceive race relations as worsening. In a 2019 Pew survey of 6637 Americans, 58 percent said that U.S. race relations are now “generally bad,” and 69 percent of those folks saw race relations as “getting worse.” The Trump effect? In the same survey, most (65 percent) said it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Donald Trump’s election. Hate groups are proliferating. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 1,020 hate groups—up 30 percent in four years. Such groups feed off dehumanizing views of other races (see here, here, and here). Hate crimes are rising. Although some criticize the SPLC’s hate-group definition, their report coincides with the FBI’s reported 17 percent increase in hate crimes just in 2017. Widely publicized hate crimes, such as the burning of three Louisiana Black churches in March and April of 2019, not to mention the recent synagogue attacks, will surely sustain the perception that Trump-era race relations are worsening.   But there is also good news: You likely already know that since the mid-twentieth  century, support for school desegregation, equal employment opportunity, and interracial dating and marriage has soared to near-consensus—enabling a 2008 presidential election that Abraham Lincoln probably never imagined. Although most metropolitan areas remain substantially segregated, neighborhood integration has modestly increased since the century’s turn. But the even better news is that both explicit and implicit race prejudice have continued to decline.   This good news is reflected in Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin Banaji’s new report of nearly 2 million U.S. adults’ explicit and implicit racial attitudes. Since 2007, people’s explicit race attitudes—the extent to which they acknowledged preferring White to Black people—“moved toward neutrality by approximately 37 percent.” Implicit race attitudes—people’s faster speed when pairing negative words with Black faces (and positive words with White faces)—also moved toward neutrality, but with a slower 17 percent shift. (Charlesworth and Banaji also reported changed attitudes toward other social groups: Attitudes toward gay people made the swiftest progress toward neutrality, while negative implicit attitudes toward overweight people have actually increased.) Are these hate-up, prejudice-down findings paradoxical—or even contradictory? Not necessarily. Much as extremes of income—both crushing poverty and excessive wealth—can rise even while average income is stable, so also can extremist racial attitudes increase while overall prejudice does not. Even within healthy communities, a viral disease can spread.   Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, was prescient: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

“The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.” ~C. S. Lewis, “Membership,” 1949 It’s one of life’s curiosities: Taking in food is, everywhere, a common communal activity. For families and friends, eating together is a social event. For creatures with a need to belong, group meals provide the pleasures of both food and friendship.   Eating eases meeting. When people share an eating pleasure, such as tasting chocolates, they find food more flavorful. When families sit down for a shared dinner, they eat not only healthier but happier—their lives pausing for connection. And when workers come together for a meal, team-building friendships grow. Such is my experience, as when my psychology text publishing team gathers over a meal (shown here from our recent book-planning meeting in New York City). Yale psychologist Irving Janis and his colleagues observed long ago that persuasive messages associated with good feelings—such as experienced while eating snacks—are more convincing. Fund solicitors and salespeople understand that when they treat us to a meal, good feelings often generalize to the host. The bonding power of a shared meal is especially great, report Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach, when people—whether friends or strangers—eat from shared bowls. After eating chips and salsa from shared rather than separate bowls, people in their experiments became more cooperative in negotiating wages. Their findings remind me of the convivial spirit I experienced when treated to group dinners with my Chinese hosts on visits to Beijing and Shanghai—with each of us sampling from shared dishes placed around a center-table Lazy Susan (or as the Chinese would say, in translation, a “dinner-table turntable”).       Free image from Pixaby. Those of us who are North Americans have our own family-style-dinner counterparts —shared fondue pots, tapas dinners, and communal hors d'oeuvres. As Woolley and Fishbach conclude, shared plates → shared minds. Such is the social power of shared meals.   Food matters. Perhaps the rapport-building power of breaking bread together can nudge us to prioritize time for sharing more family meals, for offering hospitality to our friends and colleagues, and for welcoming new acquaintances. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Perhaps you, too, feel it like never before—intense contempt for your political opposites. National Election Surveys reveal that U.S. Republicans and Democrats who hate the other party each soared from 20% in 2000 to near 50% in 2016. Small wonder, given that 42 percent in both parties agree that those in the other party “are downright evil.”   Should the government “do more to help the needy”? Is racial discrimination a main reason “why many Black people can’t get ahead these days”? Do immigrants “strengthen the country with their hard work and talents”? The partisan divergence in response to such questions has never been greater, reports the Pew Research Center. The overlap between conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans has never been less. And fewer folks than ever hold a mix of conservative and liberal views. Americans are polarized. There seems no bridge between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, between MAGA red-hatters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admirers. We are a nation of opposing hidden tribes. “Some people’s situations are so challenging that no amount of work will allow them to find success,” agree 95 percent of “progressive activists.” But no, say “devoted conservatives,” who are 92 percent agreed that “people who work hard can find success no matter what situation they were born into.” Do we exaggerate? But I overstate. Although the political extremes are inverses, studies (here and here) show that most liberals and conservatives exaggerate their differences. On issues such as immigration, trade, and taxes, they overestimate the extremity of a “typical” member of the other party. And for some ideas—higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, Medicare negotiation of lower drug prices, background checks on gun sales—there is bipartisan supermajority support. Differences, we notice; similarities, we neglect It’s a universal truth: Differences draw our attention. As individuals, we’re keenly aware of how we differ from others. Asked to describe themselves, redheads are more likely to mention their hair color; the foreign-born, their birthplace; and the left-handed, their handedness. Living in Scotland, I become conscious of my American identity and accent. Visiting my daughter in South Africa, I am mindful of my race. As the sole male on a professional committee of females, I was aware of my gender. One is “conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different,” observed the late social psychologist William McGuire. Likewise, when the people of two cultures are similar, they nevertheless will attend to their differences—even if those differences are small. Rivalries often are most intense with another group that most resembles one’s own. My college has what is widely acclaimed (by ESPN and others) as the greatest small college sports rivalry with a nearby college that shares its Protestant Dutch history…rather like (in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) the war between the Little-Endians who preferred to break their eggs on the small end, and the Big-Endians who did so on the big end. Our similarities exceed our differences As members of one human family, we share not only our biology—cut us and we bleed—but our behaviors. We all wake and sleep, prefer sweet tastes to sour, fear snakes more than snails, and know how to read smiles and frowns. An alien anthropologist could land anywhere on Earth and find people laughing and crying, singing and worshiping, and fearing strangers while favoring their own family and neighbors. Although differences hijack our attention, we are all kin beneath the skin. Nearly two decades ago, the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni identified “core values” that are “embraced by most Americans of all races and ethnic groups.” Eight in ten Americans—with agreement across races—desired “fair treatment for all, without prejudice or discrimination.” More than 8 in 10 in every demographic group agreed that freedom must be tempered by personal responsibility, and that it was “extremely important” to spend tax dollars on “reducing crime” and “reducing illegal drug use” among youth. A more recent study of nearly 90,000 people across world cultures and of varying gender, age, education, income, and religiosity confirmed that “similarities between groups of people are large and important.”  Believing that there is common ground, the nonprofit Better Angels movement aims “to unite red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America.” They do this in several ways: “We try to understand the other side’s point of view, even if we don’t agree with it.” “We engage those we disagree with, looking for common ground and ways to work together.” “We support principles that bring us together rather than divide us.”  We will still disagree. We do have real differences, including the social identities and values that define us. Nevertheless, our challenge now is to affirm both our diversity and our unifying ideals, and thus to renew the founding idea of America: diversity within unity. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.  (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

In the aftermath of the New Zealand massacre of Muslims at worship, American pundits have wondered: While the perpetrator alone is responsible for the slaughter, do the expressed attitudes of nationalist, anti-immigrant world leaders increase White nationalism—and thus the risk of such violence?   Consider Donald Trump’s rhetoric against supposed rapist, drug-dealing immigrants; his retweeting of anti-Muslim rhetoric; his saying that the Charlottesville White nationalists included some “very fine people”; or his condoning violence at his rallies and against the media. Do these actions serve to normalize such attitudes and behavior? Is the Southern Poverty Law Center right to suppose that hatemongering is “emboldened [and] energized” by such rhetoric? Is the New Zealand gunman’s reportedly lauding Trump as “a symbol of White supremacy” something more than a murderer’s misguided rantings?   In response, many people—particularly those close to Trump—attributed responsibility to the gunman. The President’s acting chief of staff argued that the shooter was a “disturbed individual” and that it is “absurd” to link one national leader’s rhetoric to an “evil person’s” behavior. We social psychologists call this a “dispositional attribution” rather than a “situational attribution.”   As I noted in a 2017 essay, two recent surveys and an experiment show that dispositions are shaped by social contexts. Hate speech (surprised?) feeds hate. Those frequently exposed to hate speech become desensitized to it, and then to lower evaluations of, and greater prejudice toward, its targets. Prejudice begets prejudice.   To be sure, leaders’ words are not a direct cause of individuals’ dastardly actions. Yet presidents, prime ministers, and celebrities do voice and amplify social norms. To paraphrase social psychologists Chris Crandall and Mark White, people express prejudices that are socially acceptable and suppress those that are not. When prejudice toward a particular group seems socially sanctioned, acts of prejudice—from insults to vandalism to violence—increase as well. Norms matter.   The FBI reports a 5 percent increase in hate crimes during 2016, and a further 17 percent increase during 2017--and reportedly more than doubled in counties hosting a Trump rally. The Anti-Defamation League reports that 2018 “was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders: Every single extremist killing—from Pittsburgh to Parkland—had a link to right-wing extremism.” Again, we ask: Coincidence? Or is there something more at work? If so, is there a mirror-image benevolent effect of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s saying of her nation’s Muslim immigrants, “They are us”?    (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

What are today’s U.S. teens feeling and doing? And how do they differ from the teens of a decade ago?   A new Pew Research Center survey of nearly a thousand 13- to 17-year-olds offers both troubling and encouraging insights (here and here).   The Grim News   Screen time vs. face-to-face time. Today’s teens spend about half their nearly six daily leisure hours looking at screens—gaming, web-surfing, socializing, or watching shows. Such activity displaces leisure time spent with others, which now averages only an hour and 13 minutes daily (16 minutes less than a decade ago).   Increased depression, self-harm, and suicide. My Social Psychology co-author, Jean Twenge, reports that teen loneliness, depression, and suicide have risen in concert with smart phones and social media use. She notes, Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Indeed, reports Pew, 3 in 10 teens says they feel tense or nervous every or almost every day, and 7 in 10 see anxiety and depression as major problems among their peers. Other studies confirm that teen happiness and self-esteem have declined, while teen depression, self-harm, and suicide have risen.   The Good News   Sleeping more. The teens’ time diaries found them sleeping just over 9 hours per night (and 11 hours on weekends). Although other studies have found teens more sleep-deprived, these teens reported sleeping 22 minutes more per night than their decade-ago counterparts.   Doing more homework. Teens also are spending more time—16 minutes more per day—on homework, which now averages an hour a day. The increased sleep and homework time is enabled partly by 26 fewer minutes per day in paid employment—fewer teenagers today have jobs.   Minimal pressure for self-destructive behaviors. Relatively few teens feel personally pressured to be sexually active (8 percent), to drink alcohol (6 percent), or to use drugs (4 percent)—far fewer than the 61 percent feeling pressure to get good grades.   The Gendered News   Time use. Do you find it surprising (or not) that girls, compared with boys, average 58 fewer daily minutes of screen time, spend 21 minutes more on homework, average 23 minutes more on grooming and appearance, and spend 14 minutes more on helping around the house?   Emotions. Girls (36 percent) are also more likely than boys (23 percent) to report feeling anxious or depressed every or almost every day. But they are more likely each day to feel excited about something studied in school (33 vs. 21 percent). And they are more likely to say they never get in trouble at school (48 vs. 33 percent).   Aspirations. Girls are more likely than boys (68 vs. 51 percent) to aspire to attending a four-year college. And they are less materialistic than boys—with 41 percent of girls and 61 percent of boys reporting that it will be very important to have a lot of money when they grow up.    To sum up, (1) aspects of teen time use and emotions have changed, sometimes significantly. (2) Gender differences persist, though the differences are not static. (3) In this modern media age, adolescence—the years that teens spend morphing from child to adult—come with new temptations, which increase some dangers and decrease others.   What endures is teens’ need to navigate turbulent waters en route to independence and identity, while sustaining the social connections that will support their flourishing. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com) ... View more

In hindsight, almost any finding (or its opposite) can seem like plain old common sense—a phenomenon we know as hindsight bias (a.k.a. the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon). Likewise, the outcomes of most elections, wars, and sporting events seem, in hindsight, explainable and predictable. As Dr. Watson said to Sherlock, “Anything seems commonplace, once explained.” It may therefore seem unsurprising that new studies—reported in a forthcoming article by Florida State psychologists Jessica Maxwell and James McNulty—reveal a “bidirectional relationship” between relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. A loving relationship enhances sex. And good sex, with a lingering “afterglow,” enhances a loving relationship. Even if the love-sex interplay does not, in hindsight, feel surprising, it does seem a lesson worth teaching in an age of sexual hook-ups and delayed marriage. As I explain in an upcoming essay for the Association for Psychological Science Observer, When a romantic relationship is sealed with a secure commitment—when there is minimal anxiety about performance, and when there is an experience-rooted sensitivity to one another’s desires and responses—intimacy can flourish. “Satisfying relationships [infuse] positive affect into sexual experiences,” say Maxwell and McNulty. And when confident of a partner’s acceptance, low body self-esteem is a diminished barrier to sexual frequency and satisfaction. The researchers’ evidence comes from tracking relationships through time. Higher marital satisfaction today predicts increased sexual satisfaction seven months later. And higher sexual satisfaction today predicts increased marital satisfaction seven months later. Moreover, it’s true for both newlyweds and long-term couples, and for both men and women. Earlier studies found that when sex begins after commitment, couples win twice—with greater relational stability and better sex (see here and here). (In hindsight, we surely could rationalize an opposite finding: Perhaps test-driving sexual compatibility prior to commitment would make for better sex, and thus better relationships? But this does not seem to be the case.) And when sex happens in the context of a committed relationship, there is more pleasure and less morning-after regret (see here). The take-home lesson: Our romantic bonds both enable and feed off sexual intimacy. We humans have what today’s social psychologists call a “need to belong.” We are social creatures, made to connect in close relationships. We flourish when embracing and enjoying secure, enduring, intimate attachments. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

This  www.TalkPsych.com entry offers three news flashes—samples of research that have captured my attention (and may wend their way into future textbook editions).   NEWS FLASH # 1:Intergroup contact makes us “less inward looking and more open to experiences.” As any social psychology student knows, friendly contact with other sorts of folks engenders positive attitudes. For example, as an earlier TalkPsych essay documented, regions with more immigrants have more welcoming, positive attitudes toward immigrants. Places without immigrants fear them the most.   But intergroup contact does more than improve our attitudes toward others. Research by Brock University psychologist Gordon Hodson and his British colleagues reveals that intergroup contact  affects our thinking—it loosens us up, promoting cognitive flexibility, novel problem solving, and increased creativity. This observation complements earlier research that demonstrated, after controlling for other factors, that students who studied in another culture became more flexibly adept at creative problem solving (see here and here).   NEWS FLASH # 2: More than we suppose, other people like us. Do you sometimes worry that people you’ve just met don’t like you very much? Actually, recent studies by Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby and her colleagues found that people rate new conversational partners as more enjoyable and likeable than the new partner presumes. Despite our shared self-serving bias (the  tendency to overestimate our own knowledge, abilities, and virtues), we tend to underestimate the impressions we make on others. Moreover, the shyer the person, the bigger the liking gap—the underestimate of others’ liking of us.   Ergo, the next time you fret over whether you were too quiet, too chatty, or too wrinkled and rumpled, be reassured: Others probably liked you more than you realize.   NEWS FLASH # 3: The youngest children in a school class are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. The current psychiatric disorder manual broadens the criteria for diagnosing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), thus increasing the number of children so diagnosed. Some say the diagnosis enables helpful treatment and improved functioning. Skeptics say the broadened criteria pathologize immature rambunctiousness, especially among boys—whom evolution has not designed to sit passively at school desks.   Support for the skeptics comes from a New England Journal of Medicine study that followed 407,846 U.S. children from birth to elementary school. ADHD diagnoses were a stunning 34 percent higher among those born in August in states with a September 1 cutoff for school entry—but not higher among children in states with other cutoff dates. This massive study confirms earlier reports (here and here) that the youngest children in a class tend to be more fidgety—and more often diagnosed with ADHD—than their older peers.   Such findings illustrate why I feel privileged to be gifted with the time, and the responsibility, to learn something new most every day. For me, the primary job of writing is not making words march up a screen, but reading and reading, searching for insights—for gems amid the rocks—that educated people should know about. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit www.TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

As Pope Francis has said, “Everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others.” We are social animals. We need to belong. We flourish when supported by close relationships. Finding a supportive confidante, we feel joy.   Longing for accep­tance and love, Americans spend $86 billion annually on cosmetics, fragrances, and personal care products—and billions more on clothes, hair styling, and diets. Is that money well spent? Will it help us find and form meaningful relationships?   Consider one of social psychology’s most provocative, and simplest, experiments. Cornell University students were asked to don a Barry Manilow T-shirt (at the behest of researcher Thomas Gilovich and colleagues) and were then shown into a room where several others were completing questionnaires. Afterwards they were asked to guess how many of the others noticed their dorky attire. Their estimate? About half. Actually, only 23 percent did.   Other experiments confirm this spotlight effect—an overestimation of others’ noticing us, as if a spotlight is shining on us.   The phenomenon extends to our secret emotions. Thanks to an illusion of transparency we presume that our attractions, our disgust, and our anxieties leak out and become visible to others. Imagine standing before an audience: If we’re nervous and we know it, will our face surely show it? Not necessarily. Even our lies and our lusts are less transparent than we imagine.   There’s bad news here: Others notice us less than we imagine (partly because they are more worried about the impressions they are making).   But there’s also good news: Others notice us less than we imagine. And that good news is liberating: A bad hair day hardly matters. And if we wear yesterday’s clothes again today, few will notice. Fewer will care. Of those, fewer still will remember.    If normal day-to-day variations in our appearance are hardly noticed and soon forgotten, what does affect the impressions we make and the relationships we hope to form and sustain?   Proximity. Our social ecology matters. We tend to like those nearby—those who sit near us in class, at work, in worship. Our nearest become our dearest as we befriend or marry people who live in the same town, attend the same school, share the same mail room, or visit the same coffee shop. Mere exposure breeds liking. Familiar feels friendly. Customary is comfortable. So look around.   Similarity. Hundreds of experiments confirm and reconfirm that likeness leads to liking (and thus the challenge of welcoming the benefits of social diversity). The more similar another’s attitudes, beliefs, interests, politics, income, and on and on, the more disposed we are to like the person and to stay connected. And the more dissimilar another’s attitudes, the greater the odds of disliking.  Opposites retract.   If proximity and similarity help bonds form, what can we do to grow and sustain relationships?   Equity. One key to relationship endurance is equity, which occurs when friends perceive that they receive in proportion to what they give. When two people share their time and possessions, when they give and receive support in equal measure, and when they care equally about one another, their prospects for long-term friendship or love are bright. This doesn’t mean playing relational ping pong—balancing every invitation with a tit-for-tat response. But over time, each friend or partner invests in the other about as much as he or she receives.   Self-disclosure. Relationships also grow closer and stronger as we share our likes and dislikes, our joys and hurts, our dreams and worries. In the dance of friendship or love, one reveals a little and the other reciprocates. And then the first reveals more, and on and on. As the relationship progresses from small talk to things that matter, the increasing self-disclosure can elicit liking, which unleashes further self-disclosure.   Mindful of the benefits of equity and mutual self-disclosure, we can monitor our conversations:  Are we listening as much as we are talking? Are we drawing others out as much as we disclosing about ourselves? In his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie offered kindred advice. To win friends, he advised, “become genuinely interested in other people. . . . You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.” Thus, “Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.”   So, looking our best may help a little, initially, though less than we suppose. What matters more is being there for others—focusing on them, encouraging them, supporting them—and enjoying their support in return. Such is the soil that feeds satisfying friendships and enduring love. (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit www.TalkPsych.com) ... View more