Us and Them: The Blog

Feeling Pure and Doing Bad (Part 2)

A while back I linked to an interesting study in which people who made themselves physically cleaner were less leery of being morally dirty. I suggested that rituals of purification and cleanliness can be a means to separate people from their intuitive moral sense -- to make them feel less bad about moral filth because they feel themselves to be clean.

Another bit of evidence that (I would argue) supports this idea: This report on a recent study about self-image and behavior. Two groups of people were asked how much they'd like to donate to their favorite charity, between $0 and $10. Some had been asked to write essays about their moral failings -- they had to use words like ``greedy'' and ``selfish.'' Others were asked to write about their own goodness -- they had to use words like ``generous'' and ``kind.''

People who had been primed to see their ethical failures gave much more money (an average of $5.30) to charity. Those encouraged to feel good about their behavior gave an average of $1.07.

Two possible take-aways: First, there is such a thing as too much self-esteem. Second, when our religious, political and cultural institutions encourage us to see ourselves as ``good,'' they may well be making it easier for us to be bad. Might be worth viewing our feel-good rituals with this skeptical eye.

The Enduring Power of Caste . . .

. . . has got Google in a lot of trouble in Japan.

By making old maps available online for comparison with today's satellite images, Google Earth makes it easier to tell who lives in villages once restricted to Japan's traditional caste of outcasts, the burakumin (roughly the equivalent of India's untouchables). As in India, caste prejudice in Japan is officially consigned to the past, but, again as in India, many people make an effort to avoid contact with the modern descendants of the stigmatized caste.

What's remarkable about this story is that Japan's officials, and apparently some burakumin too, are angry at Google. The problem is not the perpetuation of medieval prejudice in the 21st century -- the problem is this damn Internet company reminding us that we live this way.

Isn't Google Earth just doing what it's supposed to do, making more information available to more people? Surely Japan's embarrassment about its prejudices ought to be Japan's problem, not Google's.

Almost as surprising as being in the football preview . . .

I have been seen in many sections of the NY Times, from Science to Business to Local to Education etc etc. But I never thought I'd be in the Styles section. Here I am, though, in Pam Belluck's smart piece about Susan Boyle.

Are we short on attention?

My friend Maggie Jackson has an interesting book out on the question. It prompted this lively exchange over at Mind Hacks.

My take, which I wrote up last fall, is here. That essay explains why I don't think there are too many demands on our attention in the digital age. I think we feel that there are, because digital information comes wrapped in packages that blink, chime, beep, go red and shout ``Act Now!'' Our media is full of devices that short-circuit our natural abilities to ignore the unimportant.

So we don't have too little attention for the demands of life. We have too much anxiety about attention. Which is good news, actually, because anxiety is an emotion we can master.

Why ``racial profiling'' does not work

Profiling -- using people's apparent membership in an ethnic or cultural group as the basis for subjecting them to a search -- has its defenders, even among mind scientists. Their reasoning is that common stereotypes (of, say, young black men in cities, or of bearded Muslims in airports) are based on what Steven Pinker once called good statistics.

The argument goes like this: Yes, most members of all social groups are innocent -- but if, in group X, 2 percent of people are criminals while in group Y only 1 percent are, then it is a sound tactic to concentrate on X-ers when deciding who to search.

I think this is mistaken because I see no rational reason to assume our cultural categories can solve a non-cultural problem. The important category in law-enforcement is ``dangerous criminals,'' and people should be searched because they show signs that predict their likely membership in that group. As most people in all ethnic and religious groups are law-abiding, then membership in any group is a very poor predictor of criminality. We aren't using them because they fit the problem; we're using them because they're easy to spot and think about -- like the proverbial guy looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is best. Meanwhile, better tools exist, in the form of non-ethnic, non-religious categories -- among them, gender, age, and demeanor.

Two days ago, William H. Press published this mathematical analysis of the question, which comes to the same conclusion: As he puts it, the only effective method for finding bad guys is to spend a lot of time looking ``not under the lamppost.'' Racial profiling, he found, is no more likely than random searches to find the criminals.

Post-Rational Economic Man

Our social institutions are premised on the theory that individuals are rational, about themselves and their choices, if not about the larger world. As evidence mounts that this is not true, what happens to those institutions -- to courts, elections, markets, medical care?

I think a lot will happen. Many of us have no problem accepting the news that we don't really know what we're doing as we make our choices in life. The trouble will come when this account of the mind collides with presumptions that organize our world -- presumptions, for example, that voters, stock traders and shoppers know how and why they make their decisions.

So when John Brockman's annual question at Edge.org turned out to be ``What Will Change Everything?'' I nominated the new models of the mind emerging from behavioral economics, social cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines.

Twitch, baby, twitch

In the election platform of Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party (never won, always fun), there used to be a proposal to get electric power from gyms -- hook up all those steppers and runners-in-place to the grid.

Once a joke, now an earnest research question. Can we, Matrix-style, get electricity from people's muscles as they do the wave at a stadium, run around the playground at recess, shift from foot to foot as they chat at a party? Some nanotechnologists, including the inventors of the ``crowd farm'' at MIT, say yes, we can.

Pure rites and dirty deeds

Before they set out on their mission, the September 11 hijackers purified themselves, body and soul. According to instructions found after the attacks, they were told to shower, and ``shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne.'' They also were to read the Koran, ponder their spiritual life, and pronounce blessings over their clothes, knives, passports and other effects.

Why did they do this? Why, more generally, do religiously-motivated rites and enterprises often have a component of hand-washing, house-cleaning, clothes-laundering, and so on?

It's easy to imagine a simple-minded association: Bodily cleanness promoting the spiritual kind. But perhaps there's another explanation.

Perhaps the point of religious purification is merely to separate the believer from everyday hunches and impulses about his behavior.

Such a separation from common sense could, of course, cause a believer to be more attentive to moral principles and their associated emotions. But that's not the only possible consequence. A break with ordinary moral rules-of-thumb could be a license to ignore everyday politeness and everyday desires for safety -- not to speak of morally charged feelings like empathy, guilt and fear.

The grubby, dusty, incoherent moral life of an ordinary household's ordinary Tuesday is much disparaged by many religions. But that life leaves most people with the feeling that they should behave decently to others. That they should not kill strangers. That they have a right, if not a duty, to preserve their own lives. Soldiers have to be trained to set these hunches aside. So did the hijackers, to judge by another passage in their instructions:

Remind your soul to listen and obey and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from 100 percent obedience [...]

Religions demand that people do many things that don't automatically ''feel right.'' Perhaps cleaning up, with its attendant physical feeling of ``I'm all right,'' helps suppress psychic feelings of ``I'm doing something weird, even wrong.'' Feelings that can arise if one is called to murder innocent people. Or suppress one's natural human sexuality. Or refuse food made the ``wrong'' way. Or engage, on a Sunday morning, in a rite described as literally eating God's flesh and drinking his blood.

What brings all this to mind is this report in The Economist, about a new study (pdf) by Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth. Schnall is interested in the interaction of physical and moral emotion -- for example, the way, as Paul Rozin showed years ago, that physical disgust makes people more prone to moral disgust.

In that vein, Schnall and her students posed ethical questions to people split into two groups. One consisted of people who'd been told to wash their hands before the session. Those people were more accepting of violations of what I've called common-sense morality (among Schnall's examples were using a kitten for sexual purposes, or taking money found in a lost wallet) than were the unwashed group. The same contrast emerged even if the distinction wasn't about a physical act. A group primed with words like ``pure'', ``washed'' and ``pristine'' also proved more accepting of moral violations than did a group primed with neutral words instead.

Physical cleanliness, of course, protects a person from disgust with himself. Schnall's evidence suggests that this protection can extend from the physical to the psychic realm. Showered, shaved, sweet-smelling in their cologne and blessed shirts, the 9/11 hijackers illustrate exactly why this fact of human nature is no blessing.

Depression 2.0

This piece, about how a new Great Depression now would differ from the last one, seems to me to miss a key point. In place of last time's bread lines and hoboes visibly criss-crossing the landscape, Drake Bennett forecasts a lot of unemployed people staying home, watching television. Suffering will take place in isolation, hidden from the public sphere, because we're all habituated to filling our empty hours with 21st century media.

Here's the problem: How will we pay our cable bills, if we're all out of work? Accustomed as we our to information access, we forget easily that it costs money. Money, if we crash, will be very scarce. And vital as Google feels to us all, fast-search never will compel people to spend in the same urgent way that food does.

So I think access to information -- 700 TV channels, yes, but, more importantly, the Internet -- will be the most important casualty of a new Depression. Economic collapse in our time instantly creates a great digital divide. In Depression 21st century style, some Americans would continue to take part in the Google-YouTube-Twitter world we know now.The rest of our people would become be digital Joads, no longer participating in modern life. The effects of that division would reach far and last long.

One more reason to hope we dodge the bullet.

Logical, analytical, arrogant, impatient with people who need time to understand ...

That's the type of blogger I am, according to this analysis from an automated blog-anatomist, to which a lot of bloggers are linking today, for obvious reasons. I like the diagram of my brain that accompanies the prose.

Actually, it doesn't seem too off-base, especially for an algorithm that took perhaps a second to render its verdict.

It says Drudge is among bloggers who are ``conservative by nature [,] they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.'' OTOH Josh Marshall and company apparently have the same brain I do.