Mechanisms of our current political polarization.

I want to point to three sources that provide complimentary perspectives on the origins and maintenance of the extreme Red versus Blue divide in the U.S.:

The first is a freakonomics podcast, with a text version also offered,  describing how Republicans and Democrats form a duopoly analogous to Coke and Pepsi, Intel and AMD, Boeing and Airbus, etc.

"America's Hidden Duopoly - We all know our political system is “broken” — but what if that’s not true? Some say the Republicans and Democrats constitute a wildly successful industry that has colluded to kill off competition, stifle reform, and drive the country apart.  So, what can we do about it?

A second perspective is offered by Yang et al., who provide a "Satisficing" Dynamical Model of why U.S. political parties are so polarized. Here is a summary by Clint Sprott of the Univ. of Wisc. Chaos and Complex Systems Discussion Group:

Basically, it contends that when the parties are too centrist and too inclusive, voters with extreme views find little reason to choose one over the other and either abstain from voting or vote randomly. Thus it is advantageous for the parties to move off center to pick up more of these voters. In the coming election, most people long ago decided which side they are on. Thus all the parties can hope to do at this point is to induce those who lean in their direction to get out and vote. Would mandatory voting reduce polarization? Why is the popular vote usually so close to 50/50?

And finally, a book by Achen and Bartels, "Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government." From the book description:

Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens.

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters―even those who are well informed and politically engaged―mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.

The active grandparent hypothesis - an evolutionary explanation of why and how exercise delays senescence and death.

I recommend that you read an interesting article by Daniel Lieberman in the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Here are a few clips:

The evidence that hunter-gatherers stay physically active for several decades after they stop having children is fundamental for understanding the nature of human aging. Most especially, our uniquely cooperative system of intergenerational cooperation and food-sharing postpones Medawar’s grim shadow. Instead of becoming obsolete, middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers bolster their reproductive success by provisioning children and grandchildren, doing childcare, processing food, passing on expertise, and otherwise helping younger generations. Once this novel cooperative strategy—the essence of the hunting and gathering way of life—started to emerge during the Stone Age, natural selection had the chance to select for longevity. According to this theory, hard-working and helpful grandparents who looked out for others and who were blessed with genes that favored a long life had more children and grandchildren, thus passing on those genes. Over time, humans were evidently selected to live longer to be generous, useful grandparents. One version of this idea is known as the Grandmother Hypothesis in recognition of the evidence that grandmothers play especially important roles.

In order to elucidate the links between exercise and aging, I propose a corollary to the Grandmother Hypothesis, which I call the Active Grandparent Hypothesis. According to this idea, human longevity was not only selected for but was also made possible by having to work hard during old age to help as many children, grandchildren, and other younger relatives as possible survive and thrive. That is, while there may have been selection for genes (as yet unidentified) that help humans live past the age of 50, there was also selection for genes that repair and maintain our bodies when we are physically active. As a result, many of the mechanisms that slow aging and extend life are turned on by physical activity, especially as we get older. Human health and longevity are thus extended both by and for physical activity.

While exercise restores most structures (what biologists term homeostasis), in some cases it may create stability by making things even better than before (allostasis). For example, demanding physical activities can increase the strength of bones and muscles, increase cells’ abilities to uptake glucose from the blood, and both augment and replace mitochondria in muscles. In addition, repair mechanisms sometimes overshoot the damage induced by exercise, leading to a net benefit. It’s like scrubbing the kitchen floor so well after a spill that the whole floor ends up being cleaner. All in all, the modest physiological stresses caused by exercise trigger a reparative response yielding a general benefit, a phenomenon sometimes known as hormesis.

Changes as MindBlog's autonomic nervous system ages 11 years

Actually, the original title of this MindBlog post on June 11, 2013 was "Changes as an autonomic nervous system ages 11 years - The "Wild Divine" is a bit less wild." - I'm reviewing old MindBlog posts (very slowly, as it turns out) and in most cases resisting the temptation to re-post even ones I thinks are quite interesting. This personal one really hit me, owever, so I pass it on, wondering how much further the noted decrease in my ability to regulate autonomic nervous system parameters has progressed by age 78:

Just after I retired from being a Univ. of Wisconsin department chair in 2001 I bought a set of finger sensors that fit on one's three middle fingers to report skin conductance and heartbeat to a PC or MAC via an A/D converter. These were part of a package with several CDs that installed a new age game on the computer that lead you through a rich environment of classical greek temples and waterfalls, attended by soothing music, that presented tasks in which you dinked with your own heart rate variability and sympathetic (arousing)/parasympathetic (calming) balance, going alternatively through periods of calm and arousal. I thought it was a hoot, and took the time to go through the "Journey to Wild Divine: passage" and "Journey to Wild Divine: Wisdom Quest."

Some of the current incarnations of these programs have moved to web browsers. Over the years a number of heavy weight new age gurus have signed on with their wares - Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, and Andrew Weil (Weil was in my Harvard graduating class...I'm tempted, but I won't burden you with my jaded opinion of this class of entrepreneurs, particularly Mr. Chopra.)

The main point of this post is note my experience on pulling out the finger sensors after 11 years trying the same exercises in their new presentation. What's the difference when this 71 year old tries the same manipulations of calm and arousal that the 60 year old played with with 11 years earlier? In a nutshell, I have less command over heart rate variability, which is lower, as the swings between calm and arousal have less amplitude.

And indeed, this fits with the literature on changes in the autonomic nervous system that occur on aging. If you simply do a google search for "autonomic nervous system and aging" numerous references appear that document how healthy aging is associated with lowered heart rate variability, elevated basal sympathetic nervous activity, and reduction of overall autonomic reactivity of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Here is a very recent review, from which I pass on one figure:

Schematic of proposed features associated with the imbalance in the autonomic nervous system during aging. During aging there is a shift in the balance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) towards the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). This may be influenced by circulating or local brain levels of angiotensin (Ang) II and leptin. The lower activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is proposed to result at least in part from an age-related decline in Angiotensin-(1–7). Lower Angiotensin-(1–7) and higher Ang II or leptin in the brain medulla would predispose to a decline in baroreceptor reflex sensitivity (BRS) for control of heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), both of which are associated with aging. Moreover, impairments in BRS and HRV can contribute to target organ damage, including metabolic dysfunction, with or without an increase in blood pressure. 

If you're inclined, like Mr. Dylan Thomas, to not "go gently into that good night" you can find numerous sources (example here) on slowing these aging changes, usually by some sort of physical movement or stimulation.

Reconsidering the value of believing in free will.

Nadelhoffer et al. fail to replicate 2008 experiments suggesting that a belief in determinism increases cheating:

A key source of support for the view that challenging people's beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests.

A brief history of risk

Li, Hills, and Hertwig do an open access review with the title of this post. From their introductory paragraph:

...First, we examined how the frequency of the word risk has changed over historical time. Is the construct of risk playing an ever-increasing role in the public discourse, as the sociological notion of a ‘risk society’ suggests? Second, we investigated how the sentiments for the words co-occurring with risk have changed. Are the connotations of risk becoming increasingly ominous? Third, how has the meaning of risk changed relative to close associates such as danger and hazard? Is risk more subject to semantic change? Finally, we decompose the construct of risk into the specific topics with which it has been associated and track those topics over historical time. This brief history of the semantics of risk reveals new and surprising insights—a fourfold increase in frequency, increasingly negative sentiment, a semantic drift toward forecasting and prevention, and a shift away from war toward chronic disease—reflecting the conceptual evolution of risk in the archeological records of public discourse.

Getting the rhythm to suppress Alzheimer's

An interesting brief open source review by Lynne Peeples in PNAS describes experiments on mice and humans showing that visual and sound stimulation in the e.e.g gamma frequency range (30-80 Hertz, or cycles/sec, peaking at 40 Hz) elicits gamma frequency brain oscillation, enhance cognition, and diminishes levels of the amyloid plaques and tau protein tangles associated with Alzheismer's. The article is worth a read, and I pass on just a bit of a background paragraph:

Brain rhythms are known to participate in all forms of cognition. And changes of brain rhythms appear to be implicated in all forms of neurological disease...Growing evidence indicates that neurons in many animals, including humans, can strongly synchronize in the gamma range of frequencies—between 30 and 80 hertz, and peaking around 40 hertz. As far back as a 1955 study of meditating yogis, researchers have associated gamma waves with peak concentration and high levels of cognitive functioning. Studies in the last decade that manipulated brain rhythms in lab animals and humans have confirmed the impact of those rhythms on cognition and disease. Researchers have also found that fewer neurons fire together at this rate in patients with Alzheimer’s disease or other neurological conditions, suggesting that gamma rhythms may play a role in the cognitive impairments associated with such disorders.

Rice-farming predicts tigher social norms, less innovative thinking, worldwide

From Talhelm and English (open source):

Data recently published in PNAS mapped out regional differences in the tightness of social norms across China [R. Y. J. Chua, K. G. Huang, M. Jin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 6720–6725 (2019)]. Norms were tighter in developed, urbanized areas and weaker in rural areas. We tested whether historical paddy rice farming has left a legacy on social norms in modern China. Premodern rice farming could plausibly create strong social norms because paddy rice relied on irrigation networks. Rice farmers coordinated their water use and kept track of each person’s labor contributions. Rice villages also established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labor demands that were twice as high as dryland crops like wheat. In line with this theory, China’s historically rice-farming areas had tighter social norms than wheat-farming areas, even beyond differences in development and urbanization. Rice–wheat differences were just as large among people in 10 neighboring provinces (n = 3,835) along the rice–wheat border. These neighboring provinces differ sharply in rice and wheat, but little in latitude, temperature, and other potential confounding variables. Outside of China, rice farming predicted norm tightness in 32 countries around the world. Finally, people in rice-farming areas scored lower on innovative thinking, which tends to be lower in societies with tight norms. This natural test case within China might explain why East Asia—historically reliant on rice farming—has tighter social norms than the wheat-farming West.

Stable isotopes in hair reveal dietary divergence related to socioeconomic status and health

From Ehleringer et al.:

Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in hair sampled from 65 communities across the central and intermountain regions of the United States and more intensively throughout 29 ZIP codes in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, revealed a dietary divergence related to socioeconomic status as measured by cost of living, household income, and adjusted gross income. Corn-fed, animal-derived proteins were more common in the diets of lower socioeconomic status populations than were plant-derived proteins, with individual estimates of animal-derived protein diets as high as 75%; United States towns and cities averaged 57%. Similar patterns were seen across the socioeconomic status spectrum in the Salt Lake Valley. It is likely that corn-fed animal proteins were associated with concentrated animal-feeding operations, a common practice for industrial animal production in the United States today. Given recent studies highlighting the negative impacts of animal-derived proteins in our diets, hair carbon isotope ratios could provide an approach for scaling assessments of animal-sourced foods and health risks in communities across the United States.

Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes

Here is a fascinating bit from Colombatto et al.:  

Significance

We report an empirical study of gaze deflection—a common experience in which you turn to look in a different direction when someone “catches” you staring at them. We show that gaze cueing (the automatic orienting of attention to locations at which others are looking) is far weaker for such displays, even when the actual eye and head movements are identical to more typical intentional gazes. This demonstrates how gaze cueing is driven by the perception of minds, not eyes, and it serves as a case study of both how social dynamics can shape visual attention in a sophisticated manner and how vision science can contribute to our understanding of common social phenomena.

Abstract

Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences—which we will call gaze deflection—the “deflected” gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer’s attention when they are seen as deflected in this way—even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the “mind” behind the eyes.

Effects of lockdown on human sleep and chronotype during the COVID-19 pandemic

An open source article in Current Biology from Leone et al., the summary:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries imposing a lockdown, which in turn reduces sunlight exposure and alters daily social schedules. Since these are the main entrainment factors for biological rhythms, we hypothesized that the lockdown may have affected sleep and circadian rhythms. We indeed show that participants slept longer and later during lockdown weekdays, and exhibited lower levels of social jetlag. While this may seem to be an overall improvement of sleep conditions, chronotype was also delayed under the lockdown. This signature of a weaker light–dark cycle should be monitored attentively since it may progressively cause disruptive effects on sleep and circadian rhythms, affecting human performance and health.

A model shows herd immunity to COVID can be achieved at a population-wide infection rate of ~40%

I pass on the editor's summary and the abstract for a open source article by Britton et al.:  

Heterogeneity and herd immunity

In response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), some politicians have been keen to exploit the idea of achieving herd immunity. Countering this possibility are estimates derived from work on historical vaccination studies, which suggest that herd immunity may only be achieved at an unacceptable cost of lives. Because human populations are far from homogeneous, Britton et al. show that by introducing age and activity heterogeneities into population models for SARS-CoV-2, herd immunity can be achieved at a population-wide infection rate of ∼40%, considerably lower than previous estimates. This shift is because transmission and immunity are concentrated among the most active members of a population, who are often younger and less vulnerable. If nonpharmaceutical interventions are very strict, no herd immunity is achieved, and infections will then resurge if they are eased too quickly.

Abstract

Despite various levels of preventive measures, in 2020, many countries have suffered severely from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. Using a model, we show that population heterogeneity can affect disease-induced immunity considerably because the proportion of infected individuals in groups with the highest contact rates is greater than that in groups with low contact rates. We estimate that if R0 = 2.5 in an age-structured community with mixing rates fitted to social activity, then the disease-induced herd immunity level can be ~43%, which is substantially less than the classical herd immunity level of 60% obtained through homogeneous immunization of the population. Our estimates should be interpreted as an illustration of how population heterogeneity affects herd immunity rather than as an exact value or even a best estimate.

Philanthropy—or tax-exempt lobbying?

I pass on this piece by Brad Wible from the Editors' Choice section of the current issue of Science Magazine:

Major corporations appear to fund their charitable foundations in part to cater to politicians who are important to the firm's profitability. Integrating corporate tax returns, lobbying data, and data on U.S. congressional committee assignments, Bertrand et al. show that donations from a given corporate-funded foundation to charities in a particular congressional representative's district, or for which a congressional representative is a board member, ebb and flow according to whether the representative sits on a committee that is of interest to the corporation. The patterns parallel spending by political action committees (PACs). Around 7% of charitable giving (∼$1.2 billion annually) appears to be politically motivated, amounting to about 2.5 times the annual PAC spending and one-third of the total federal lobbying spending—and it is tax exempt and thus subsidized by taxpayers.

Am. Econ. Rev. 110, 2065 (2020).

Our default-mode network contains nine subnetworks serving different cognitive tasks.

Our brains are organized into large networks that can be identified during brain scanning. The default mode network, which has been the subject of many MindBlog posts (try the Blog's search function in the left column), engages a large number of inwardly directed cognitive functions such as mind-wandering, autobiographical and social thinking, memory, and reward. Gordon et al. now do resting-state functional connectivity studies distinguishing nine subnetworks with different specializations:

Significance

The human brain is organized into large networks. One important brain network is the Default network, which enables cognitive functions such as social thinking, memory, and reward. In group-averaged data, this network emerges as a unitary whole, despite its involvement in multiple cognitive functions. Here, we tested whether Default networks found in individual humans, rather than group-average networks, contain organized substructure. In individuals, we consistently found nine subnetworks within the Default network. These subnetworks matched brain activity patterns during cognitive tasks. Some subnetworks resembled brain circuits involved in specific Default functions. Others linked Default network to other large networks. In summary, this study describes a set of brain circuits within the Default networks of individual humans.

Abstract

The human brain is organized into large-scale networks identifiable using resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). These functional networks correspond with broad cognitive domains; for example, the Default-mode network (DMN) is engaged during internally oriented cognition. However, functional networks may contain hierarchical substructures corresponding with more specific cognitive functions. Here, we used individual-specific precision RSFC to test whether network substructures could be identified in 10 healthy human brains. Across all subjects and networks, individualized network subdivisions were more valid—more internally homogeneous and better matching spatial patterns of task activation—than canonical networks. These measures of validity were maximized at a hierarchical scale that contained ∼83 subnetworks across the brain. At this scale, nine DMN subnetworks exhibited topographical similarity across subjects, suggesting that this approach identifies homologous neurobiological circuits across individuals. Some DMN subnetworks matched known features of brain organization corresponding with cognitive functions. Other subnetworks represented separate streams by which DMN couples with other canonical large-scale networks, including language and control networks. Together, this work provides a detailed organizational framework for studying the DMN in individual humans.

The Neurobiology of Social Distance

Bzdok and Dunbar (open source) do a definitive review of evidence that psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationship is crucial for survival. Dunbar is well known for his demonstration of the correlation between the size of social groups and the brain size of their members, which places the natural size of groups of humans at ~150 (roughly the size of human hunter gatherer groups whose isolation has permitted them to survive into the modern era. The number of friends and family relationships we can manage at any given time is limited by our cognitive constraints to ~150). Their summary:

From babies to the elderly, psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationships is crucial for survival.

Insufficient social stimulation affects reasoning and memory performance, hormone homeostasis, brain grey/white matter connectivity and function, as well as resilience to physical and mental disease.

Feelings of loneliness can spread through a social network, causing negatively skewed social perception, escalating morbidity and mortality, and, in older people, precipitating the onset of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease).

Placebos without deception reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress

Interesting work from Guevarra et al. (open source):

Several recent studies suggest that placebos administered without deception (i.e., non-deceptive placebos) can help people manage a variety of highly distressing clinical disorders and nonclinical impairments. However, whether non-deceptive placebos represent genuine psychobiological effects is unknown. Here we address this issue by demonstrating across two experiments that during a highly arousing negative picture viewing task, non-deceptive placebos reduce both a self-report and neural measure of emotional distress, the late positive potential. These results show that non-deceptive placebo effects are not merely a product of response bias. Additionally, they provide insight into the neural time course of non-deceptive placebo effects on emotional distress and the psychological mechanisms that explain how they function.

Here is a description from their text of the EEG signals measured:

The LPP is an electroencephalogram (EEG) derived event-related brain potential (ERP) response that measures millisecond changes in the neural activity involved in emotional processing. The early-time window of the LPP (400–1000 ms) indexes attention allocation34; the sustained time window (1000–6000 ms) indexes conscious appraisals and meaning-making mechanisms involved in emotion processing34,35 and is consistently downregulated by cognitive emotion regulation strategies. Consistent with its role in immediate attentional orienting responses to emotional stimuli and later appraisal processes, neural sources of the LPP include both the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex41. Thus, the LPP is ideally suited to help examine the neural mechanisms and time course of non-deceptive placebo effects on emotional distress.

And, conditions presented to participants:

In both experiments, we randomly assigned participants to either a non-deceptive placebo group or a control group. Participants in the non-deceptive placebo group read about placebo effects and were then asked to inhale a nasal spray consisting of saline solution. They were told that the nasal spray was a placebo that contained no active ingredients, but would help reduce their negative emotional reactions to viewing distressing images if they believed it would. Participants in the control group read about the neural processes underlying the experience of pain and were also asked to inhale the same saline solution spray; however, they were told that the purpose of the nasal spray was to improve the clarity of the physiological readings we were recording in the study. The articles were matched for narrative structure, emotional content, and length

Personality dimensions are predicted by cell phone usage data

From Stachi et al.:  

Significance

Smartphones are sensor-rich computers that can easily be used to collect extensive records of behaviors, posing serious threats to individuals’ privacy. This study examines the extent to which individuals’ personality dimensions (assessed at broad domain and narrow facet levels) can be predicted from six classes of behavior: 1) communication and social behavior, 2) music consumption, 3) app usage, 4) mobility, 5) overall phone activity, and 6) day- and night-time activity, in a large sample. The cross-validated results show which Big Five personality dimensions are predictable and which specific patterns of behavior are indicative of which dimensions, revealing communication and social behavior as most predictive overall. Our results highlight the benefits and dangers posed by the widespread collection of smartphone data.

Abstract

Smartphones enjoy high adoption rates around the globe. Rarely more than an arm’s length away, these sensor-rich devices can easily be repurposed to collect rich and extensive records of their users’ behaviors (e.g., location, communication, media consumption), posing serious threats to individual privacy. Here we examine the extent to which individuals’ Big Five personality dimensions can be predicted on the basis of six different classes of behavioral information collected via sensor and log data harvested from smartphones. Taking a machine-learning approach, we predict personality at broad domain and narrow facet levels based on behavioral data collected from 624 volunteers over 30 consecutive days (25,347,089 logging events). Our cross-validated results reveal that specific patterns in behaviors in the domains of 1) communication and social behavior, 2) music consumption, 3) app usage, 4) mobility, 5) overall phone activity, and 6) day- and night-time activity are distinctively predictive of the Big Five personality traits. The accuracy of these predictions is similar to that found for predictions based on digital footprints from social media platforms and demonstrates the possibility of obtaining information about individuals’ private traits from behavioral patterns passively collected from their smartphones. Overall, our results point to both the benefits (e.g., in research settings) and dangers (e.g., privacy implications, psychological targeting) presented by the widespread collection and modeling of behavioral data obtained from smartphones.

Conversational primes influence choices - a magic trick example

From Pailhès and Kuhn:

Abstract

Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people’s decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians’ forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person’s speech and gestures effectively influenced people’s decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.

From the text of the article:

Magic tricks provide a valuable tool to investigate psychological processes within a highly natural environment. Most magic principles rely on tightly structured action and language scripts, which allow researchers to investigate psychological processes (e.g., priming, attention, and perception) under controlled, yet realistic conditions. Forcing refers to conjuring techniques that allow magicians to covertly influence a spectator’s choice, and they provide unique tools to investigate how primes unconsciously influence people’s decisions when there is a broad range of alternatives (i.e., 52 playing cards). Many of these forces are commonly used within a magic performance context, but only a few have been empirically investigated. In this paper, we examine a forcing technique that relies on subtle conversational nonverbal and verbal primes: the mental priming force. This force was created by British illusionist Derren Brown, and uses subtle verbal and nonverbal primes to influence the spectator to think about the three of diamonds (see figure).

We recruited 90 participants (62 women) who were randomly allocated to the video or live performance groups. After watching the performance, participants were asked to write down the card they chose ...Overall, 17.8% of the participants chose the three of diamonds, 38.9% chose a three (all suits combined) and 33.3% chose a diamond (all numbers combined). The three of diamonds was the most commonly chosen card, closely followed by the three of hearts. To carry out statistical analyses, we compared these results to a condition in which participants were asked to choose a card after watching a video of the same performer and script without using any specific prime (0 out of 23 named the three of diamonds.)

Our results illustrate that the mental priming force significantly influenced participants’ choice among a large number of alternatives, and it works just as effectively when presented on video compared to when it is performed by a real person. Eighteen percent of our participants chose the target card, and most were oblivious to the force itself. Indeed, even though the force resulted in a ninefold increase chance of participants choosing the three of diamonds, participants reported that their choice was free and that they were in control of it. Investigating the way implicit cues unconsciously influence people’s thoughts provides important insights into the nature of human cognition.

The Paradoxical Role of Social Capital in the Coronavirus Pandemic

I suggest you read an insightful article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker with the title of this post. He begins with an interesting comparison of the King James Version of the Bible having the angels proclaiming "On earth peace, goodwill toward men" versus more militant Bibles that render the Greek phrase as "Peace on earth to men of goodwill" and asks "Is the happy news that of Heaven's dispensation of ever-increasing trust toward all people? Or is it a special favor restricted to those already possessed of good will toward us?" He goes on to examine:

...the relationship between the perniciousness of the plague and the presence or the absence of social capital in the places that suffer it. Are places that have high levels of social trust and strong institutions of civil society doing any better than those that don’t? Does good will toward men help fight the virus, or does it make no difference what the angels sing?

...the empirical results so far seem at least to suggest an intriguing paradox: that places with a great deal of social capital got hit worst by the virus, and then recovered fastest. This is reportedly the case with the secular, social-democratic countries of the European Union, none of them particularly religious, but many of them rich in shared networks of trust.

It’s a paradox of place: people who were not socially distanced at the start of the plague had an easier time learning to social-distance by its end. A striking study in Italy, for instance, found that places with high existing “civic capital” tended to “display greater mobility”—that is, people travelled around more—than places without it. But, “as soon as the threat of the virus became real, communities with high civic capital started to self-restrain and to internalize the risk of propagating the infection through social contacts.” Translated from the academese, people who are used to going out a lot stopped when people they trusted told them that doing so was a good way to get sick. That’s a process familiar to New Yorkers... We had, through nearly all of April, above a twenty-per-cent positive-testing rate; now, by living behind our masks and (mostly) staying out of bars, we have driven the number below one per cent.

In America, we have been undergoing a kind of four-year experiment in what happens to a country when social trust and social capital are not merely badly maintained but actively corroded. In Donald Trump’s government, favor flows from the head of state only to men of good will, i.e., those whom he considers to be on his side. We have been living a four-year exercise in destroying social trust and replacing it with gangster values: loyalty to the capo at all costs, and vengeance on his competitors and enemies taken at his direction.

The results are already clear. The rush to reopen in the so-called red states was motivated partly by commercial impatience but also largely by a kind of irrational rage at the “élitist” social networks that depend on the diffusion of scientific expertise. If instructed that scientific medicine is one more opinion on the spectrum of political grievance, then social distancing and mask-wearing become, like gun control, an imposition on liberty.

The disasters that have left America with far more COVID-19 deaths and a far higher per-capita infection rate than other rich countries have many causes and many lessons, acting, as they do, as an X-ray of our social inequality. But the seemingly unstoppable spread of the illness shows the cost, too, of actively looting our already diminished supply of social capital. Destroy our commonplace civilization, and the larger civilization around it will collapse, too. Where we struggle to create good will toward our fellow-citizens, illness rises and then abates. Where we encourage it only toward our kind, illness increases. It is a simple formula, though, by now, so much a matter of life and death that it would leave the angels, all of them, weeping to watch it.

Working memory capacity predicts individual differences in social-distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic

Xie et al. suggest that non-compliance is associated with limitations in people's mental capacity to simultaneously retain multiple pieces of information in working memory (WM) for rational decision making that leads to social-distancing compliance.:

Significance

Before vaccination and other intervention measures become available, successful containment of an unknown infectious disease critically relies on people’s voluntary compliance with the recommended social-distancing guidelines. This involves a decision process of prioritizing the merits of social distancing over its costs, which may depend on one’s ability to compare multiple pieces of potentially conflicting information regarding social distancing in working memory. Our data support this hypothesis, highlighting the critical role of one’s working memory capacity in social-distancing compliance during the early stage of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. This observation reveals a core cognitive limitation in one’s response to a public health crisis and suggests a possible cognitive venue for the development of strategies to mitigate this challenge.

Abstract

Noncompliance with social distancing during the early stage of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses a great challenge to the public health system. These noncompliance behaviors partly reflect people’s concerns for the inherent costs of social distancing while discounting its public health benefits. We propose that this oversight may be associated with the limitation in one’s mental capacity to simultaneously retain multiple pieces of information in working memory (WM) for rational decision making that leads to social-distancing compliance. We tested this hypothesis in 850 United States residents during the first 2 wk following the presidential declaration of national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that participants’ social-distancing compliance at this initial stage could be predicted by individual differences in WM capacity, partly due to increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing among higher WM capacity individuals. Critically, the unique contribution of WM capacity to the individual differences in social-distancing compliance could not be explained by other psychological and socioeconomic factors (e.g., moods, personality, education, and income levels). Furthermore, the critical role of WM capacity in social-distancing compliance can be generalized to the compliance with another set of rules for social interactions, namely the fairness norm, in Western cultures. Collectively, our data reveal contributions of a core cognitive process underlying social-distancing compliance during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting a potential cognitive venue for developing strategies to mitigate a public health crisis.

The coming de facto world government?

David J. Lynch does a fascinating description, which I strongly suggest that you read, of

How a little-known company kept Apple products on the market — and previewed a future less dependent on China...The little-known, Singapore-based company had to improvise when the coronavirus started spreading in China to make sure their operations didn't collapse. Its journey through the pandemic illuminates how globalization could evolve.

The main force for stability in the emerging world order may be the vast global network of buyers and suppliers that continually shifts its loci of operations as competing nation states flail about, imagining that they are running the show, while the distributed intelligence of smaller more local units of function, integrated by cloud-based systems analyzing supply and demand, is actually what matters. Lynch's article describes the remarkable ability of Singapore based Flex Ltd. (160,000 workers, 100 facilities in 30 different countries, annual revenue over $24 billion) to adapt to the sudden shut down of its China operations (50,000 workers) supplying Apple. (Flex has been making Mac Pros in an Austin TX plant since 2013 - the plant Trump claimed to have opened on a Nov. 2019 visit, proving he was bringing back high paying jobs to America.)

...as Flex’s evolution demonstrates, the pandemic did not — and likely will not — end globalization. Instead, it turbocharged trends that already were in motion when the virus first flared, including a diminishing reliance on China...Armed with data and facing a perilous world, more companies recalculated the balance between cost and resilience, between efficiency of production and certainty of delivery, and imagined a less-China-centric economy.

From a Flex command post in Milpitas, Calif., Lynn Torrel, the company’s chief procurement officer, monitors 16,000 suppliers and more than 1 million individual items using a data analytics tool called Pulse. Introduced in 2015, the cloud-based system gobbles data from 88 sources, providing a cohesive view of the multinational’s operation. Arrayed on a wall, 22 video screens provided near-real-time information on every .0005-cent screw and each integrated circuit costing hundreds of dollars...Each weekday on a 5:30 a.m. conference call, Torrel and the logistics team juggles priorities as the virus disrupts their tightly choreographed network.

The subsequent text describes the amazing flexibility and resilience of Flex's response to constantly shifting patterns of travel restrictions and country specific shutdowns and openings.