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

Basketball players, coaches, and fans agree: Players are more likely to make a shot after they’ve successfully completed one or multiple consecutive shots than after they’ve had a miss. Players therefore know to feed the teammate who’s “hot.” Coaches know to bench the one who’s not. This understanding is dittoed for the batter who’s on a hitting streak, the poker player who’s drawing strong hands and the stock picker who has a run of soaring successes. In life, as in sports, it pays to go with the hot hand. But as psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky revealed in a seminal 1985 report, the basketball hot hand is one of those universally shared beliefs that, alas, just isn’t so. When they studied detailed individual shooting records from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and university teams, the hot hand was nowhere to be found. Players were as likely to score after a miss as after a make. When told Gilovich’s team’s cold facts about the hot hand in a July 27 interview, Stephen “Steph” Curry, an all-time NBA three-point shooter, looked incredulous. “They don’t know what they’re talking about at all,” he replied. “It’s literally a tangible, physical sensation of "all I need to do is get this ball off my fingertips, and it’s gonna go in....” There are times you catch the ball, and you’ve maybe made one or two in a row—and ... the rim feels like the ocean. And it’s one of the most rewarding feelings.” Sports fans concur with Curry. In an article published on the same day, sports writer Jack Winter counseled, “Don’t be fooled by numbers-driven naysayers. The next time you’re feeling it at your local pickup game, don’t hesitate to indulge the temptation for even the most brazen of heat checks. Why? Stephen Curry, the truest expert on the matter, knows the hot hand is real.” The scientific story did not, however, end in 1985 with Gilovich and his colleagues. Their analyses stimulated a host of follow-up studies of streaks in free-throw shooting, as well as in baseball, golf and tennis. Occasional examples of a slight hot hand have appeared, as in NBA three-point shooting contests—but nothing like the 25 percent increase in shots made following a make that was estimated by Philadelphia 76er players surveyed in Gilovich’s team’s study. In a January 2022 study, operations researcher Wayne Winston of Indiana University Bloomington and computer scientist Konstantinos Pelechrinis of the University of Pittsburgh analyzed some 400,000 shot sequences across all NBA players over the 2013 –2014 and 2014–2015 seasons. Their results showed the slight opposite of a hot hand: after making one or two field goals, the average player became slightly less likely to make the next shot. (This replicated an earlier study that analyzed 12 NBA seasons between 2004 and 2016: 45 percent of field goal attempts were successful after a make, and 46 percent were successful after a miss.) Nevertheless, some players analyzed in Winston and Pelechrinis’s January 2022 study were, to a varying extent, more likely to make a shot after making one or more. So I wondered, “Was Curry among them?” In their data, Curry “did not exhibit the hot hand phenomenon,” Pelechrinis wrote in an e-mail to me. The computer scientist elaborated further: “After a single make his FG% [field goal percentage] was almost identical to the one expected based on the shot quality.” “After two consecutive makes his FG% was slightly below expected (2.5 percentage units).” “After three consecutive makes his FG% was 7.5 percentage units below expectation.” I can hear you protesting, “Are Gilovich and the stats geeks denying the reality of amazing hot and cold streaks in sports and in other life realms?” Actually, they are saying quite the opposite: Streaks do occur. Indeed, random data are streakier than folks suppose. And when streaks happen, our pattern-seeking mind finds and seeks to explain them. Given enough data—from sports statistics, stock market fluctuations or death rates—some really weird clusters are sure to appear. Buried in the essentially random digits of pi, you can find your eight-digit birthdate. (Is that a wink from God or just a lot of digits?) To demonstrate the streaks in random data, I flipped a coin 51 times, with these results (“H” and “T” represent heads and tails.): HTTTHHHTTTTHHTTHTTHHTTHTTTHTHTTTTTTHTTHTHHHHTHHTTTT Looking over the sequence, patterns jump out. For example, on the 30th to 38th tosses, set in boldface above, I had a “cold hand,” with only one head in nine tosses. But then my fortunes reversed with a “hot hand”: six heads out of seven tosses. Did I mentally snap out of my tails funk and get in a heads groove? No, these are the sorts of streaks found in any random sequence. When I compared each toss outcome with the next, 24 of the 50 comparisons yielded a changed result—just the sort of nearly 50 percent alternation we would expect from coin tossing. Can you see a similar hot hand in one of the basketball shot sequences shown below? Both show a player making 11 successful shots out of 21 attempts. Which one has outcomes that approximate a random sequence? Player B’s outcomes look more random to most people. (Do they look that way to you, too?) But Player B has fewer streaks than expected. For a 50 percent shooter, chance shooting, like chance coin tossing, should produce a changed outcome about half the time. But Player B’s outcome changes in successive shots 70 percent of the time (that is, in 14 out of 20 shots). Player A, despite a six-of-seven hot streak followed by a one-of-six cold streak, scores in a pattern that is more like what we would expect from a 50 percent shooter: Player A’s next outcome changes 10 times out of 20 shots. So, like his fans, coaches and commentators, Curry is right to perceive hot and cold streaks. Basketball shooting, like so much of life, is streaky. We just misinterpret the inevitable streaks. After the fact, we describe the “hot” player as “in a zone.” The phenomenon is ubiquitous. Maternity ward staff notice streaks of births of boys or girls—such as when 12 consecutive female babies were born in one New York State hospital in 1997—and sometimes these events are attributed to the phases of the moon during conception or to other mysterious forces. Cancer or leukemia cases may cluster in neighborhoods, sometimes provoking a fruitless search for a toxin. My then 93-year-old father once called me from his Seattle retirement home, where about 25 people died each year. He wondered about a curious phenomenon. “The deaths seem to come in bunches,” he said. “Why is that? A contagion?” How odd that folks should pass en masse! The streaks are real; the invented explanations are not. Nevertheless, forced to choose between data science and personal observation, between the statistics and their lying eyes, players and fans prefer the latter, so the hot hand hype lives on. After hearing the late CBS basketball commentator Billy Packer admonish college coaches to recognize the hot hand phenomenon, a friend of mine sent him my textbook summary of Gilovich’s team’s facts of life. Packer replied: “There is and should be a pattern of who shoots, when he shoots, and how often he shoots, and that can and should vary by game-to-game situations. Please tell the stat man to get a life.” I smiled. So did my colleague Thomas Gilovich when I shared Steph Curry’s response to his work:.“Steph is one of my favorite players (how unusual is that!),” Gilovich wrote, “so to hear him say that we don’t know what we’re talking about is precious.” Moreover, we can understand the science of serendipitous streaks and still marvel at the fact that Curry made 105 consecutive three-point practice shots. We can realize the realities of randomness and yet find pleasure in life’s weird streaks and coincidences. As countless things happen, we can savor the happenstances—such as three of the first five U.S. presidents dying on July 4 or someone winning the lottery twice or discovering a mutual friend on meeting a stranger overseas. In 2007 the late psychologist Albert Bandura recalled a book editor who came to Bandura’s lecture on the “Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths" and ended up marrying the woman he happened to sit next to. As statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller observed in a 1989 paper, “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” And what fun when it does! This essay appeared earlier at ScientificAmerican.com as “Your Brain Looks for ‘Winning Streaks’ Everywhere—Here's Why.”  David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Photo permission: jeffmilner/Getty Images         ... 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“Of making many books there is no end.” Ecclesiastes 12:12 The National Museum of Psychology’s invitation to gift my textbooks to their archives prompts me to pause and reflect on my team’s long-term educational mission—to help spread the contributions of psychological science to human understanding, over 40 years, in 22 languages. My role began unexpectedly, after being invited to join seven other American social psychologists, and sixteen European colleagues, in a week-long research retreat at a castle near Munich. There I was providentially assigned to sit adjacent to University of Massachusetts professor Ivan Steiner. Six months later, in January of 1979, McGraw-Hill’s psychology editor, Nelson Black, called Steiner, circled at left, asking if he might help author a new social psychology text. Steiner demurred, but in the spur of the moment he gave them the name of a little-known social psychologist shown at right. Black’s ensuing out-of-the-blue phone call to me began months of conversation, which led to my agreeing—with considerable self-doubt—to risk the project (reasoning that even if the book flopped, I would at least become a more informed teacher). Fast-forward to 2024, and here are the fourteen editions of Social Psychology and nine editions of the brief Exploring Social Psychology (with recent editions now co-authored by Jean Twenge). Shortly after Social Psychology went into production, my editor, Alison Meerschaert, moved to Worth Publishers (now an imprint of Macmillan Learning). A week later, she called with an invitation to author an introductory psychology text. After more weeks of pondering, I accepted. Fast-forward 40 years, and here are the resulting 50 editions of varied length and format, including special editions for the mushrooming population—now 300,000+ annually—of AP Psychology students. (For recent editions, Nathan DeWall and June Gruber have joined our team as co-authors, as has Elizabeth Hammer for our new AP edition.) A word on behalf of oft-maligned textbooks: Textbooks are no substitute for caring teachers, who can personalize instruction with enthusiasm, give-and-take discussion, and engaging demonstrations. But compared with home-brewed or most free online materials, the best publisher-provided texts are more thoroughly comprehensive, meticulously edited, professionally reviewed, frequently updated, attractively illustrated, and accompanied by interactive resources and tested pedagogy. While reading and reporting on my discipline's fruits, I have occasionally felt an urge to share its wisdom with those outside the academic realm. I have fed that itch in these periodic TalkPsych essays, and also in general-audience books exploring topics such as the scientific pursuit of happiness, the powers and perils of intuition, the psychology of hearing loss, and the meeting ground between psychological science and faith. In The World’s Last Night, C. S. Lewis described “two sorts of jobs”: Of one sort, a [person] can truly say, “I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid while I do it.” The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is that of the earning of money; work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid. How blessed I am to have the first sort of job—to be tasked with discerning and communicating wisdom gleaned from the most fascinating subject on Earth, and hopefully, also, with expanding minds, deepening understanding, increasing compassion, arousing curiosity, cultivating critical thinking, and, as a gratifying by-product, with being philanthropic. How blessed, and fortunate: If I relived my life a thousand times—sans that providential castle seating assignment and name-dropping—I surely would never have become a textbook author. Moreover, I have been blessed to work on a creative team that loves its mission and loves one another. Although one name appears on most of these covers, the pack is greater than the wolf. For my introductory psychology texts, our pack has included many, some of whom I’ll mention: Jack Ridl. My books all acknowledge “the editing assistance and mentoring of my writing coach, poet Jack Ridl, a master writing teacher [Michigan’s 1996 Carnegie Professor of the Year]. He, more than anyone, cultivated my delight in dancing with the language, and taught me to approach writing as a craft that shades into art.” Phyllis Vandervelde and Sara Neevel, our meticulous manuscript developers until their premature deaths, Kathryn Brownson, my in-house project manager/researcher/editor of 25 years, Christine Brune, my Worth/Macmillan editor/guide of 37 years—surely one of the most enduring author/editor collaborations in American publishing (with 53,404 exchanged emails since 2000), Carlise Stembridge, our executive program manager of 19 years, Catherine Woods and Kevin Feyen, our senior publishers across decades, Tracey Kuehn and Won McIntosh, our managing (production) editors, Talia Green, our associate project manager, Charles Linsmeier and Shani Fisher, VPs who oversee us all, Betty Probert, our longest-serving team member, and painstaking editor of pedagogical supplements, Nancy Fleming, Danielle Slevens, Trish Morgan, and Ann Kirby-Payne, our gifted manuscript editors (Trish also edits this blog), and psychologist colleagues Tom Ludwig, Rick Straub, Martin Bolt, and John Brink who independently authored the highest quality text-accompanying teaching/learning resources . . . and, also, my supportive colleagues in the Hope College psychology department, who have offered for their gifts of space, freedom, and encouragement. Other team members have put our words into millions of student hands. These include our longtime marketing exec Kate Nurre (and her predecessors, including Kate Geraghty and Renee Altier). They supported the on-the-ground sales team, led by legends such as Tom Kling, Bill Davis, Rory Baruth, Guy Geraghty, Jen Cawsey, and Greg David. Our privilege of supporting AP Psychology teachers and their students has been enabled by the success of Janie Pierce-Bratcher, Ann Heath, Yolanda Cossio, and their many colleagues. Kudos also to Worth Publishers and its parent Macmillan Learning for investing in quality. As I first contemplated this project, publisher-owner Bob Worth explained that his simple aim was “to produce a few Mercedes rather than a lot of Chevys.” He made good on that promise, investing his resources in world-class talent, and in networking us all, as in our triennial book planning retreats: With more texts in the works, we have, God-willing, miles to go before we sleep. At age 81, still in my Hope College office, I look above my monitor at the encouraging onward nudge from Psalm 92:14: “They will still bear fruit in old age; they will stay fresh and green.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on X: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

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

Have you heard about the recent epidemic of shoplifting? Perhaps you’ve seen upsetting TV replays of flash-mob grabs in Nordstrom, Nike, or Macy’s stores? And perhaps you’ve read about stores abandoning their crime-prone urban locations or putting more goods under lock and key? Small wonder, given an Axios headline: “Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions.” What a disturbing trend, which in October provoked Donald Trump to support shooting shoplifters, and in January New York Governor Kathy Hochul to propose increased tough-on-crime shoplifting penalties. Image from Wikipedia Commons Is this just another example of a larger crime epidemic that each year since 2005 has been perceived by Americans (7 in 10 of whom have annually told Gallup that crime has increased in the past year)? “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable,” declared Trump. On that much, Florida governor Ron DeSantis agrees: “Crime infests our cities.” Yet the truth is the inverse of what most people are led to believe. Since the early 1990s, violent and property crime rates have fallen, by about half. The National Crime Victimization Survey confirms that we are much safer today. In the third quarter of 2023, violent crime fell by another 8 percent compared to a year earlier, and property crime dropped to its lowest level since 1961. But the shoplifting epidemic! Actually, despite a retail theft uptick in a few cities, the national rate indexed by retail “shrinkage,” is essentially unchanged over time (except for a downtick during the home-bound pandemic). Shoplifting is a significant business expense, but not newly so. As I documented in a prior essay, other examples of public misinformation abound: In a time of near record-low unemployment, rising stock markets, and real wages outpacing declining inflation, half of Americans in 2023 perceived the economy as worsening. In a time when the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has plummeted by two-thirds since 1990, 87 percent of folks surveyed across 24 countries believe global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. In a time when undocumented immigrants to the U.S. have a lower incarceration rate than U.S.-born Americans, politicians lament the influx of “vicious predators and bloodthirsty killers” and, Gallup has reported, “Americans are five times more likely to say immigrants make the [crime] situation worse rather than better.” So why do most of us sometimes believe what just isn’t so? Why, for example, was I dismayed to learn (incorrectly, as it turns out) about the supposed shoplifting epidemic? There’s a simple but powerful principle at work, note psychologists Eryn Newman (Australian National University) and Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California): Visual images often overwhelm representative data. Their new paper, “Misinformed by Images: How Images Influence Perceptions of Truth and What Can Be Done About It,” adds fresh evidence that photos and videos (1) seize our attention, (2) get remembered, (3) touch our hearts, and (4) sway our judgments. Attention. “Messages with images receive more attention and reach a wider audience,” they note. Images draw people’s “attention to a message that may be ignored without an image, they inflate message effects.” The news story of the mob invading the Los Angeles Nordstrom store would hardly have been noticed without the shocking images. Memory. We have excellent memory for visual images. If you were shown more than 2000 faces for 3 to 10 seconds each, you could later, with 80+ percent accuracy, pick out those faces when they were paired with previously unseen faces. Memory aids help us remember a grocery list by associating its items with visual images. Even imagined events get well-remembered when vividly pictured, which misleads people sometimes to misrecall actually experiencing them. Emotion. Images, more than statistics, speak to the heart. As Nathan DeWall, June Gruber, and I illustrate in Psychology, Fourteenth Edition, A viral photo of a Syrian child lying dead on a beach had massive impact. Red Cross donations to Syrian refugees were 55 times greater in response to that photo than in response to “psychically numbing” statistics describing the hundreds of thousands of other refugee deaths (Slovic et al., 2017). Dramatic incidents make us gasp (“four deaths!”); probabilities we barely grasp (“per million”). It’s so easy to scare people with a horrific happening and then harder to unscare them with representative data. Judgment. Thanks to the “availability heuristic” (our tendency to judge the likelihood of events by their recall availability), images power judgments. Place an image of a single violent act in a news story about an otherwise peaceful demonstration, and many readers will later recall mostly the violence. Moreover, the image may predispose how they interpret and remember complex or ambiguous information. These image-empowering dynamics are not applied evenly to good and bad news. Good news seldom is news. The media—and our own threat-detection system—are attuned to bad-news images—of crime, violence, and economic malaise. When did your news feed last display planes landing safely, hardworking immigrants living peaceably, or honest shoppers paying for purchases? So, for worse or for better, images—of shoplifters or violent immigrants attacking two New York City police officers, or of suffering children—come with the power to grab our attention, write themselves on our memories, touch our hearts, and bias our judgments. To see is to believe. In an era awash in disturbing news images, social media images, and AI-generated fake images, critical thinkers will strive to self-consciously resist being overly swayed by what they see, remembering that—however awful or wonderful—the image is but one data point. They will, ideally, respond with, “Yes, that shoplifting mob was terrible—but how representative is it? Please, show me the data.” P.S. 3/14/2024 afterword on shoplifting data: Brookings reports that "Shoplifting in major cities did not actually spike in the ways that media has reported. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, only 24 cities consistently reported shoplifting data over the past five years, and of those cities, shoplifting decreased in 17. Moreover, looking across all 24 cities, the prevalence of shoplifting in 2023 remained below 2018 and 2019 levels. Even San Francisco—which has often been cited as having a “shoplifting epidemic”—saw a 5% decline in shoplifting between 2019 and 2023." (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

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

Each year, millions of people, including half a million Americans, experience cardiac arrest. With no discernible heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, they have experienced the medical definition of death, notes Sam Parnia, the NYU Medical Center’s director of cardiopulmonary resuscitation research. Yet, with CPR, some 10 percent survive. Moreover, in Parnia-led interviews of 2060 survivors, about 1 in 10 recalled a “transformative” death experience, which often involved a peaceful out-of-body experience of being drawn toward a light. Two percent recalled “‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation.” Anticipating the next steps in his death-experience research, Parnia invited a dozen of us psychological and medical researchers for a day-long research consultation in 2019. There we offered advice regarding his plans for two unprecedented further studies of recalled experiences of death. In the first study, just published, a cardiac arrest at one of 21 participating hospitals alerted a trained researcher to rush to the patient with a small equipment bag. Without interfering with the resuscitation, the researcher attached an EEG recording cap and headphones, then activated a tablet computer. Across 567 cardiac arrests—defined as no heartbeat or respiration—53 patients (9.3 percent) survived. Twenty-eight did so with sufficient health to be available for volunteer interviews, yielding three take-home findings. First, most of the 53 survivors initially flat-lined on the EEG, but, with continued CPR, recovered brain activity up to 60 minutes later. This result not only encourages first responders to persist, it also suggests the possibility of to-be-recalled cognitive activity in comatose patients. Second, 6 of the 28 interviewed survivors (21 percent) had a “transcendent recalled experience of death.” This roughly accords with prior studies’ finding that 10 to 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report a memorable transcendent conscious experience (which Parnia labels a “recalled experience of death” rather than a “near-death experience”). The 6 survivors reported experiences such as: Separation from the body: “I found myself above my body.” “I knew that I had died.” “I felt so light and free.” “I was high up in the ceiling of the ward looking down upon the bed.” “I could see the doctors and nurses working over me.” “I perceived and saw everything around me, like in 360 degrees.” Perception of heading toward a destination: “I experienced going down a tunnel towards a huge bright shining light.” Reviewing and reevaluating life: “I saw my entire life in great detail.” “I felt so warm, safe, protected and deeply loved.” “My body was dead for two minutes; for me, the time passed as if it were many years.” Third, the study enabled an unprecedented objective test of survivors’ recall accuracy. Many have wondered: Have those who recall death experiences—even of happenings during the resuscitation—experienced hallucinations, such as commonly reported with oxygen deprivation or psychedelic drugs? Or are their out-of-body reports of cardiac arrest events factual and verifiable? Parnia and his three dozen collaborators creatively devised and implemented a plan to put claims of death-experience recollections to the test. As patients underwent CPR, a tablet computer displayed one of ten visual images, such as an animal, a person, or a monument. When later interviewed, could the 28 survivors report the image displayed during their death experience? If not, could they, when shown the ten possible images, guess which image had been displayed? The result: “Nobody identified the visual image." During 5 minutes of the CPR, patients also were repeatedly exposed through the headphone audio to the names of 3 fruits: apple, pear, banana. When the 28 survivors were later asked to guess the 3 fruits, how many correctly recalled them? One person. (A chance result? When a colleague invited his psychology students to name 3 fruits, a similar 2 of 50 named an apple, pear, and banana.) Although these new results are not what Parnia might have wished, his reporting models science at its best: proposing novel ideas, putting them to the test, and then, with integrity, placing the results in the public domain. Sometimes, as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple observed, the outcome is unexpected. “But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.” Yet science is a process, and this is but one study, with more to come. At our research consultation, Parnia proposed a second possible method for exposing temporarily brain-dead people to stimuli that might later be recalled. Aortic repair surgery sometimes puts patients under anesthesia, cools the body to 70 degrees, stops the heart, and drains the blood—with flat-lined brain activity for about 40 minutes. Will such functionally dead people sometimes later accurately recall events occurring in the room during their dormancy? What do you think? (Stay tuned: The results of this study are forthcoming, Parnia tells me.) Parnia knows of credible-seeming reports of resuscitated patients displaying accurate recall. including one Britisher who, after being left for dead, later recovered and recounted associated events. So he would not be surprised at some accurate recall. I, however, would be stunned, for two reasons: Parapsychology’s null findings. Parnia emphasizes that his scientific exploration of people’s experiences and recollections of death transitions are not parapsychology. Yet parapsychology experiments have also indicated that mind seemingly does not travel out-of-body. Would-be psychics cannot “see” remote happenings, such as cards being drawn in an adjacent room. Brain-mind science. The entirety of cognitive neuroscience links mind to brain. Every mental event is simultaneously a biological event. No brain, no mind. Nevertheless, the data are not done speaking, and sometimes reality surprises us. As even Miss Marple’s more rationalist counterpart Sherlock Holmes acknowledged, “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Psychological science has offered many surprising—even shocking—findings. And it surely has more to come. Afterword: Some may wonder, does the assumption and the evidence of embodied minds threaten various religious understandings of human nature and hopes for life after bodily death? Not at all, argue cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves (founder of Britain’s top-rated psychology department) and developmental psychologist Thomas Ludwig. They reflect on the deep implications of brain-mind science in their recent book, Psychological Science and Christian Faith, and offer an alternative to a death-denying dualism. A disembodied immortal soul is Plato’s thinking, they argue, and not the assumption of biblical religion. (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

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

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