Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

From Kubin et al. in PNAS: 

Significance

All Americans are affected by rising political polarization, whether because of a gridlocked Congress or antagonistic holiday dinners. People believe that facts are essential for earning the respect of political adversaries, but our research shows that this belief is wrong. We find that sharing personal experiences about a political issue—especially experiences involving harm—help to foster respect via increased perceptions of rationality. This research provides a straightforward pathway for increasing moral understanding and decreasing political intolerance. These findings also raise questions about how science and society should understand the nature of truth in the era of “fake news.” In moral and political disagreements, everyday people treat subjective experiences as truer than objective facts.

Abstract

Both liberals and conservatives believe that using facts in political discussions helps to foster mutual respect, but 15 studies—across multiple methodologies and issues—show that these beliefs are mistaken. Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts. The respect-inducing power of personal experiences is revealed by survey studies across various political topics, a field study of conversations about guns, an analysis of YouTube comments from abortion opinion videos, and an archival analysis of 137 interview transcripts from Fox News and CNN. The personal experiences most likely to encourage respect from opponents are issue-relevant and involve harm. Mediation analyses reveal that these harm-related personal experiences increase respect by increasing perceptions of rationality: everyone can appreciate that avoiding harm is rational, even in people who hold different beliefs about guns, taxes, immigration, and the environment. Studies show that people believe in the truth of both facts and personal experiences in nonmoral disagreement; however, in moral disagreements, subjective experiences seem truer (i.e., are doubted less) than objective facts. These results provide a concrete demonstration of how to bridge moral divides while also revealing how our intuitions can lead us astray. Stretching back to the Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists have privileged objective facts over experiences in the pursuit of truth. However, furnishing perceptions of truth within moral disagreements is better accomplished by sharing subjective experiences, not by providing facts.

You've gotta watch this - A billion year journey of Earth's tectonic plates

The article by Andrews in the New York Times describes the history of tectonic plate theory and brings into vivid focus how us humans are just a transient eye blink in the history of our planet. I pass on a YouTube version of the fascinating animation in the article:

 

MindBlog keeps the blood pumping

Discussion of the therapeutic effects of exercise has been one of the topic threads in MindBlog since its beginning...reporting effects of different styles of exercise on metabolic health, gene expression, markers of aging, etc. Two recent fads have been the "7-minute exercise' and ever more brief forms of intense interval exercises. Parker-Pope now points out the perfect exercises for a 78 year old fart like myself who wants to get up from his computer every hour or so to move and get the blood stirring a bit, but doesn't want to be bouncing  up and down off the floor multiple times. Trainer Chris Jordan now offers the Standing 7- inute workout, suited to bodies of any age, size or fitness level. 

Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths

A fascinating open source article by Luhrmann et al. showing that what feels real to our senses is shaped by our culture.

Significance

The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history—in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of research involving thousands of people from diverse cultures and religions which demonstrates that two key factors—cultural models of the mind and personal orientations toward the mind—explain why some people are more likely than others to report vivid experiences of gods and spirits. These results demonstrate the power of culture, in combination with individual differences, to shape something as basic as what feels real to the senses.

Abstract

Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit—such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as “porous,” or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become “absorbed” in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.

How LSD tweaks our brain synapses to promote social behavior.

For the subset of MindBlog readers that is into the detailed Neuroscience of our behavior, I pass on an interesting article by De Gregorio et al. who use a mouse model to probe LSD's reported enhancement of empathy and social behavior in humans. Here is their significance statement, which is quite technical. If that's not enough for you, click on the link.

Social behavior (SB) is a fundamental hallmark of human interaction. Repeated administration of low doses of the 5-HT2A agonist lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in mice enhances SB by potentiating 5-HT2A and AMPA receptor neurotransmission in the mPFC via an increasing phosphorylation of the mTORC1, a protein involved in the modulation of SB. Moreover, the inactivation of mPFC glutamate neurotransmission impairs SB and nullifies the prosocial effects of LSD. Finally, LSD requires the integrity of mTORC1 in excitatory glutamatergic, but not in inhibitory neurons, to produce prosocial effects. This study unveils a mechanism contributing to the role of 5-HT2A agonism in the modulation of SB.

Timing matters when correcting fake news

 From Brashier et al.:

Countering misinformation can reduce belief in the moment, but corrective messages quickly fade from memory. We tested whether the longer-term impact of fact-checks depends on when people receive them. In two experiments (total N = 2,683), participants read true and false headlines taken from social media. In the treatment conditions, “true” and “false” tags appeared before, during, or after participants read each headline. Participants in a control condition received no information about veracity. One week later, participants in all conditions rated the same headlines’ accuracy. Providing fact-checks after headlines (debunking) improved subsequent truth discernment more than providing the same information during (labeling) or before (prebunking) exposure. This finding informs the cognitive science of belief revision and has practical implications for social media platform designers.

MindBlog's 15th birthday

Mindblog has been chugging along for 15 years, it's contents reflecting what I find interesting and am reading about at the moment. It seems a waste to not pass on stuff I like, in the hope that others find it interesting. A few of the posts are my own ruminations, but most are large re-tweets or clips from articles, sometimes with a few comments thrown in.

There have been 5,056 posts. I don't follow the analytics, but for the occasion of this post I've clicked "Stats" in the Blogger menu and see that ~1,000 people view MindBlog each day. Feedburner indicates ~1.8 million total views (but when I looked several years ago it said ~4 million, so go figure...). Every week I get several emails requesting advertisement, external article, or link placements -  to which I reply with my boilerplate 'no thank you' response.

In previous birthday posts I've occasionally gnashed my teeth over whether I should continue doing the blog, and focus my time on longer projects.  I realize, however, that even if readership dropped to zero I would probably continue to do postings, because this provides a disciplined and simple way to archive my thinking and reading over time.  I have found the search box in the left column to be an invaluable tool when I want to recall ideas or get background material relevant to starting up a new talk or project.

Moonstruck sleep: Synchronization of human sleep with the moon cycle

From Casiraghi et al.:

Before the availability of artificial light, moonlight was the only source of light sufficient to stimulate nighttime activity; still, evidence for the modulation of sleep timing by lunar phases is controversial. Here, we use wrist actimetry to show a clear synchronization of nocturnal sleep timing with the lunar cycle in participants living in environments that range from a rural setting with and without access to electricity in indigenous Toba/Qom communities in Argentina to a highly urbanized postindustrial setting in the United States. Our results show that sleep starts later and is shorter on the nights before the full moon when moonlight is available during the hours following dusk. Our data suggest that moonlight likely stimulated nocturnal activity and inhibited sleep in preindustrial communities and that access to artificial light may emulate the ancestral effect of early-night moonlight.

Underlying forces that are determining America's future governance.

I want to pass on clips from a few recent commentaries on current dissonances in U.S. politics and governance. I've collected these as background material for a meeting of the 'Austin Rainbow Forum' - a group that meets on the first Sunday afternoon of each month to discuss current topics and ideas. The discussion this Sunday is titled "So we've had the election. Now what?"  I'm hoping the discussion will focus on the underlying forces at play in determining our future style of governance. 

John Edsall collects numerous quotes from writers describing the Christian nationalism that drove the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol:

...It includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious. Understood in this light, Christian nationalism contends that America has been and should always be distinctively ‘Christian’ from top to bottom — in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values and public policies — and it aims to keep it this way.

...a certain narrative about American history. In rough outline: America was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians; the Nation’s laws and founding documents were indirectly based on “biblical” principles, or even directly inspired by God, Himself. America’s power and prosperity are due to its piety and obedience...Christian nationalists use a language of blood and apocalypse. They talk about blood conquest, blood sacrifice, and blood belonging, and also about cosmic battles between good and evil. The blood talk comes from the Old Testament; the apocalyptic talk from the Book of Revelation.

...as members of the Christian right have become angrier and more adversarial, some to the point of violence, their decline from dominant to marginal status has bred a provocative resentment that is serving to spur the very secularization processes that so infuriates them. If the evidence of the Capitol attack and its aftermath is any guide, this vicious circle does not bode well for the future.

Another column by Edsall presents ideas of several political scientists on why millions of Americans continue to actively participate in multiple conspiracy theories.

...nearly a fifth of American adults, 17 percent, believe that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Almost a third “believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.” Even more, 39 percent, agree that “there is a deep state working to undermine President Trump.”...The spread of these beliefs has wrought havoc — as demonstrated by the Jan. 6 assault on Congress, as well as by the overwhelming support Republicans continue to offer to the former president.

It is fascinating reading, and I like the evolutionary rationale provided by Van Prooijen, that:

...conspiracy theories evolved among ancestral humans to prepare for, and hence protect against, potentially hostile groups. What we saw here, I think was an evolutionary mismatch: some mental faculties evolved to cope effectively with an ancestral environment, yet we now live in a different, modern environment where these same mechanisms can lead to detrimental outcomes. In an ancestral world with regular tribal warfare and coalitional conflict, in many situations it could have been rational and even lifesaving to respond with violence to the threat of a different group conspiring against one’s own group. Now in our modern world these mechanisms may sometimes misfire, and lead people to use violence toward the very democratic institutions that were designed to help and protect them.

Charles Blow does an Op-Ed piece on how population shifts mean more political might for relatively fewer people, with the influence of black people increasingly diminished:

...By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent...If you think it has been hard to get this Senate to embrace policies like reparations or voting rights that stand to benefit Black people, imagine how much harder that task will be before a Senate that continues to tilt toward smaller states...Furthermore, a Pew demographic analysis has found that by 2065, Hispanics in America will nearly double the population of Black people, and Asians will overtake Black people as the nation’s second-largest minority...if Hispanics and Asians vote then the way they vote now — a third of each group voted for Trump — their combined votes for Republicans will eclipse the Black vote for Democrats.

Goldstone and Turchin argue that the elites are committing three cardinal sins:

First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded...Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts....Such selfish elites lead the way to revolutions. They create simmering conditions of greater inequality and declining effectiveness of, and respect for, government.

An interview of Sen. Rob Portman by Steve Hayes has comments on the role of the media in making it hard to get things done in Washington:

...the media plays a big role in this. I have a hard time; I do a press call every week, and I get through my 15 minutes of talking about all the policy things we’ve done, and usually I’ve got two or three bills I’ve either gotten introduced or gotten passed into law in a week. And they don’t care. Their questions are all about Donald Trump, and all about putting me on the spot between the Republican Party and Donald Trump. I mean, honestly, that’s been our pattern for the last four years, is that we’re talking about substantive policy, and the media only wants to talk about the latest Trump tweet and how to put me in a tight spot...I don’t have an answer to it in terms of the business model; I do have an answer to it in terms of journalism school or wherever people learn how to be a reporter or an editorial writer, is that there is an accountability here that ought to go with the media, that they’re accountable for actually helping to correct this problem by actually reporting on policy, and who is doing what. This year I’m the fourth-most bipartisan member, last time I was the second-most bipartisan member—no one in Ohio knows that, because no media will report it, because that’s not considered interesting or good, I guess.

I also point back to Monday's post describing an article by Zuboff that argues that we can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

And finally, to end on a less pessimistic note, I point to David Brooks' column "The Case for Biden Optimism"

A brief afternoon nap is probably good for your brain.

On some days I feel midafternoon drowsyness that makes it difficult for me to think or write. I lie down and do "a 10 minute naplet." After zonking out, I then suddenly awaken to find my watch reading exactly 10 min later. Over the next 30 seconds or so I completely awaken and feel mentally fresh, like a brain scrub has happened. There is debate, however, on whether brief day time napping is beneficial or detrimental to our health, especially as we age. Rich Harrity now points to a study of 2014 elderly Chinese suggesting that an afternoon nap of more than 5 min and less than 2 hours duration correlates with better overall cognitive function including orientation, language, and memory. Other studies have shown that more than 2 hours of napping during the day is detrimental to cognitive function. One speculation is that brief sleep during the day might lower the level of brain inflammatory markers know to compromise cognitive function.

The Coup We Are Not Talking About - an article of foundational importance

In a long, heavy, and scary article Shoshana Zuboff argues, in concert with similar sentiments in Harari's books, that we can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. I strongly urge MindBlog readers to get through his text, perhaps taking it in installments to prevent overload! Here is an attempt at some summary clips:

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.

In a leaked memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what engages you.

Principles for the Third Decade

Let’s begin with a thought experiment: Imagine a 20th century with no federal laws to regulate child labor or assert standards for workers’ wages, hours and safety; no workers’ rights to join a union, strike or bargain collectively; no consumer rights; and no governmental institutions to oversee laws and policies intended to make the industrial century safe for democracy. Instead, each company was left to decide for itself what rights it would recognize, what policies and practices it would employ and how its profits would be distributed. Fortunately, those rights, laws and institutions did exist, invented by people over decades across the world’s democracies. As important as those extraordinary inventions remain, they do not protect us from the epistemic coup and its anti-democratic effects.

The deficit reflects a larger pattern: The United States and the world’s other liberal democracies have thus far failed to construct a coherent political vision of a digital century that advances democratic values, principles and government. While the Chinese have designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their system of authoritarian rule, the West has remained compromised and ambivalent.

Unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions

Just as new conditions of life reveal the need for new rights, the harms of the epistemic coup require purpose-built solutions. This is how law evolves, growing and adapting from one era to the next.

When it comes to the new conditions imposed by surveillance capitalism, most discussions about law and regulation focus downstream on arguments about data, including its privacy, accessibility, transparency and portability, or on schemes to buy our acquiescence with (minimal) payments for data. Downstream is where we argue about content moderation and filter bubbles, where lawmakers and citizens stamp their feet at recalcitrant executives.

Downstream is where the companies want us to be, so consumed in the details of the property contract that we forget the real issue, which is that their property claim itself is illegitimate.

What unprecedented solutions can address the unprecedented harms of the epistemic coup? First, we go upstream to supply, and we end the data collection operations of commercial surveillance. Upstream, the license to steal works its relentless miracles, employing surveillance strategies to spin the straw of human experience — my fear, their breakfast conversation, your walk in the park — into the gold of proprietary data supplies. We need legal frameworks that interrupt and outlaw the massive-scale extraction of human experience. Laws that stop data collection would end surveillance capitalism’s illegitimate supply chains. The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.

Next, we need laws that tie data collection to fundamental rights and data use to public service, addressing the genuine needs of people and communities. Data is no longer the means of information warfare waged on the innocent.

Third, we disrupt the financial incentives that reward surveillance economics. We can prohibit commercial practices that exert demand for rapacious data collection. Democratic societies have outlawed markets that trade in human organs and babies. Markets that trade in human beings were outlawed, even when they supported whole economies.

These principles are already shaping democratic action. The Federal Trade Commission initiated a study of social media and video-streaming companies less than a week after filing its case against Facebook and said it intended to “lift the hood” of internal operations “to carefully study their engines.” A statement by three commissioners took aim at tech companies “capable of surveilling and monetizing … our personal lives,” adding that “too much about the industry remains dangerously opaque.”

Groundbreaking legislative proposals in the European Union and Britain will, if passed, begin to institutionalize the three principles. The E.U. framework would assert democratic governance over the largest platforms’ black boxes of internal operations, including comprehensive audit and enforcement authority. Fundamental rights and the rule of law would no longer vaporize at the cyberborder, as lawmakers insist on “a safe, predictable, and trusted online environment.” In Britain the Online Harms Bill would establish a legal “duty of care” that would hold the tech companies responsible for public harms and include broad new authorities and enforcement powers.

Two sentences often attributed to Justice Brandeis feature in the congressional subcommittee’s impressive antitrust report. “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” The statement so relevant to Brandeis’s time remains a pungent commentary on the old capitalism we know, but it ignores the new capitalism that knows us. Unless democracy revokes the license to steal and challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance, the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform democracy itself. We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. We have a democratic information civilization to build, and there is no time to waste.

Experienced well-being does increase above incomes of $75,000/year

A research report from Matthew Killingsworth that contradicts a generally accepted result of past research:  

Significance

Past research has found that experienced well-being does not increase above incomes of $75,000/y. This finding has been the focus of substantial attention from researchers and the general public, yet is based on a dataset with a measure of experienced well-being that may or may not be indicative of actual emotional experience (retrospective, dichotomous reports). Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it. This suggests that higher incomes may still have potential to improve people’s day-to-day well-being, rather than having already reached a plateau for many people in wealthy countries.

Abstract

What is the relationship between money and well-being? Research distinguishes between two forms of well-being: people’s feelings during the moments of life (experienced well-being) and people’s evaluation of their lives when they pause and reflect (evaluative well-being). Drawing on 1,725,994 experience-sampling reports from 33,391 employed US adults, the present results show that both experienced and evaluative well-being increased linearly with log(income), with an equally steep slope for higher earners as for lower earners. There was no evidence for an experienced well-being plateau above $75,000/y, contrary to some influential past research. There was also no evidence of an income threshold at which experienced and evaluative well-being diverged, suggesting that higher incomes are associated with both feeling better day-to-day and being more satisfied with life overall.

Why do our brains dream?

I want to point to a review by Nick Romeo of Zadra and Stickgold's new book "When Brains Dream". The review summarizes important theories about dreams and gives the authors' own model:

...Though they tour a broad range of contemporary research and theorizing, they ultimately propose that a primary function of dreaming is to detect and dramatize the possible meanings of information latent in memories and associations that we rarely access while awake...Their own theory proposes that dreaming extracts new information from memories by discovering and strengthening previously unexplored associations (they brand their model with the acronym NEXTUP: network exploration to understand possibilities). For this capacity to be a target of natural selection, however, the new information that dreaming discovers must provide at least some periodic survival benefit. They could be clearer in asserting this directly. They could also distinguish more precisely at points between the benefits of sleeping and the benefits of dreaming per se.

What Can Experimental Studies of Bias Tell Us About Real-World Group Disparities?

Because, in my dim and distant past, I wrote an article that appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (published by Cambridge University Press), I am still considered a potential commentator on forthcoming articles and receive information on forthcoming articles. I want to pass on the abstract of an article submitted by Joseph Cesario that has the title of this posts (motivated readers can obtain a PDF copy of the article from me on request). He describes three flaws in current research on racial bias, and suggests that current experimental approaches should be abandoned.

This article questions the widespread use of experimental social psychology to understand real-world group disparities. Standard experimental practice is to design studies in which participants make judgments of targets who vary only on the social categories to which they belong. This is typically done under simplified decision landscapes and with untrained decision makers. For example, to understand racial disparities in police shootings, researchers show pictures of armed and unarmed Black and White men to undergraduates and have them press "shoot" and "don't shoot" buttons. Having demonstrated categorical bias under these conditions, researchers then use such findings to claim that real-world disparities are also due to decision-maker bias. I describe three flaws inherent in this approach, flaws which undermine any direct contribution of experimental studies to explaining group disparities. First, the decision landscapes used in experimental studies lack crucial components present in actual decisions (Missing Information Flaw). Second, categorical effects in experimental studies are not interpreted in light of other effects on outcomes, including behavioral differences across groups (Missing Forces Flaw). Third, there is no systematic testing of whether the contingencies required to produce experimental effects are present in real-world decisions (Missing Contingencies Flaw). I apply this analysis to three research topics to illustrate the scope of the problem. I discuss how this research tradition has skewed our understanding of the human mind within and beyond the discipline and how results from experimental studies of bias are generally misunderstood. I conclude by arguing that the current research tradition should be abandoned.

The languages of human smell

Majid does an interesting review titled "Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology" that points out there are many languages across the globe that have much larger smell lexicons than English, which has relatively few words for smell qualities. Here is the beginning summary from the review, which also makes the point that the common view of human olfaction as vestigial and impoverished is incorrect, as is the claim that smell is ineffable (impossible to put into words).   

Highlights

The human sense of smell is far more acute than previously thought, yet it is still commonly believed that there is no language of smell.

In English there are, indeed, few words for smell qualities, smell talk is infrequent, and people find it difficult to name odors in the laboratory. However, the cross-cultural data show a different picture.

There are many languages across the globe that have large smell lexicons (smell can even appear in grammar) in which smell talk is also more frequent and naming odors is easy.

In different cultural and ecological niches odors play a significant role in everyday life.

These differences in smell language can have consequences for how people think about odors.

The human sense of smell can accomplish astonishing feats, yet there remains a prevailing belief that olfactory language is deficient. Numerous studies with English speakers support this view: there are few terms for odors, odor talk is infrequent, and naming odors is difficult. However, this is not true across the world. Many languages have sizeable smell lexicons — smell is even grammaticalized. In addition, for some cultures smell talk is more frequent and odor naming easier. This linguistic variation is as yet unexplained but could be the result of ecological, cultural, or genetic factors or a combination thereof. Different ways of talking about smells may shape aspects of olfactory cognition too. Critically, this variation sheds new light on this important sensory modality.

A broad approach to understanding emotions - Semantic Space Theory

I recently offered a 14-installment series of posts covering the ideas in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. It's content centered around the debate of essentialist versus constructivist views of how we generate emotional behaviors, with Barrett presenting overwhelming data supporting the constructivist view. Cowen and Keltner now offer a alternative perspective, "semantic space theory" that encompases and expands beyond the more rigid definitions of essentialist basic emotion theory (BET, that claims that emotional feelings associated with specific cognitive appraisals and behaviors are biologically prepared and modified by experience) and constructivism (which takes certain valence/arousal responses to be biologically prepared, while specific emotions involve valence and arousal but are artifacts of language). From Cowen and Keltner:

Although these perspectives diverge on what emotions are, they converge in assuming that emotions solve a biological dilemma: that our brains are adapted for survival and reproduction, but our daily decisions are often many steps removed from these goals. This makes the evolutionary calculus of daily life – risk-taking, courtship, and tribal politics – immensely complex. The cognitive priors that enable our brains to approximate this calculus are, in most any theory of emotion, at the root of emotional behavior.

Cowen and Keltner expand beyond the entrenched disagreements between essentialist and constructivist approaches to offer a more expansive and encyclopedic approach - semantic (def. meaning in language) space theory. Here is their description:

Our approach formalizes the study of emotion in the investigation of representational state spaces capturing systematic variation in emotion-related response (including experience and expression, as well as associated physiology, cognition, and motivation). We integrate computational studies of emotional experience, facial–bodily expression, and vocalization to visualize what one might think of as an emerging taxonomy of emotion. Next, we discuss how the brain represents these experiences in distinct configurations of activity across the default mode network and subcortical areas. Building upon these advances, we synthesize literatures on nonhuman emotion-like behavior and nervous system response, highlighting emerging evidence that emotional behaviors differentiated within a fine-grained taxonomy have animal homologies and evolved neural mechanisms. The implication of these developments is clear: moving beyond traditional models to a broad taxonomy of emotion (Figure 1) will provide for a richer, more comprehensive science of emotion.

The Figure 1 referenced is a real doozy. On request, I can send motivated readers a PDF of the whole article text. Here is the legend of Fig. 1 "Semantic Spaces of Experience and Expression" which contains links to many cloud based interactive maps showing an awesome amount of data. The actual six panel figure (A though F referred to in the legend) is too large to display in this post. Clicking the links below to go through the cloud based interactive graphics is interesting. One could spend a fair number of hours browsing the variety of emotional forms presented.

(A) The semantic space framework. A semantic space is described by (i) its dimensionality, or the number of distinct meanings of experiences or expressions within the space; (ii) the conceptualization of these meanings in terms of mental states, intentions, or appraisals; and (iii) the distribution of experiences or expressions within the space, capturing clusters or blends of states. (B) Semantic space of facial–bodily and vocal expression. A total of 3523 expressions are lettered, positioned, and colored according to 28 distinct emotions that people reliably attribute to them (28 in facial expression [42] and 24 in vocal expression [25]). Within the space are gradients in expression between emotions traditionally thought of as discrete, such as fear and surprise. To explore these expressions, see the interactive maps (face: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/face28/map.html, voice: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vocs/map.html). (C) Semantic space of emotion evoked by 2185 brief videos. At least 27 distinct affective states are reliably captured in reports of emotional experience evoked by video, best conceptualized in terms of emotion concepts such as fear [26]. Again, gradients bridge emotion concepts traditionally thought of as discrete, such as fear and surprise. Interactive map: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html. (D) Semantic space of emotional experience evoked by 1841 music samples in multiple cultures [36]. Music samples are positioned and colored according to 13 emotions with which they are reliably associated in both the USA and China. Within the space, we find gradients among these states. The similarities in affective response across cultures were most reliably revealed in the use of specific emotion concepts (e.g., desire and fear). Interactive map: https://s3.amazonaws.com/musicemo/map.html. (E) Semantic space of emotion conveyed by prosody in 2519 lexically identical speech samples. Across the USA and India, at least 12 kinds of emotion are preserved in the recognition of mental states from speech prosody, most reliably revealed in the use of emotion concepts [28]. Interactive map: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/venec/map.html. (F) Emotional expression in Ancient American art [58]. Ancient American sculpture was found to portray at least five distinct kinds of facial expression that accord, in terms of the emotions they communicate to westerners, with western expectations for the emotions that might unfold in the eight contexts portrayed. Colors of individual faces (letters) are weighted averages of colors assigned to each kind of perceived facial expression. Eight example sculptures are shown. (To explore all 63 sculptures, see online map: https://s3.amazonaws.com/precolumbian/map.html.)

This post is already much too long, so I only mention section headings of the text following Fig. 1, with fragments of text:

Semantic Spaces of Emotion

Semantic spaces of emotion are defined by three properties (Figure 1A). The first is their dimensionality: how many different kinds of emotion are distinguished within the space? The second is the distribution of states within the space: are there discrete boundaries between emotion categories, or is there overlap? The third is the conceptualization of emotion: what concepts most precisely capture people’s implicit or explicit differentiation of subjective experiences and expressive behaviors?

Emotional experience and expression is high dimensional, categorical, and often blended

People reliably distinguish at least 27 distinct subjective experiences associated with video [26], 24 distinct emotions in nonverbal vocalizations [25,28], and 28 distinct emotions in the face and body (Figure 1B,C) [42]. These findings were observed using both traditional rating methods and open-ended free response. The specific numbers here matter less than the more general point that emotion is at least four times more complex than that represented in studies of six emotions. This finding, replicated across response systems of emotion, is not anticipated by BET, and stands in contrast to assumptions of low dimensionality – that emotion is largely reducible to valence and arousal – found in constructivist accounts

Extensions of an emergent taxonomy: patterns of brain response and mammalizn behavior...The primacy of specific emotions in neural response patterning.

This section discusses data on the brain representation of emotion.

The paradox of pleasurable fear.

A study by Anderson et al. finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between fear and enjoyment, consistent with the theory that the pursuit of pleasurable fear is a form of play. Fear and enjoyment can coexist in frightening leisure activities that become enjoyable when they offer forms of arousal dynamics that are “just right.”. Here is their abstract:

Haunted attractions are illustrative examples of recreational fear in which people voluntarily seek out frightening experiences in pursuit of enjoyment. We present findings from a field study at a haunted-house attraction where visitors between the ages of 12 and 57 years (N = 110) were equipped with heart rate monitors, video-recorded at peak scare points during the attraction, and asked to report on their experience. Our results show that enjoyment has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with fear across repeated self-reported measures. Moreover, results from physiological data demonstrate that the experience of being frightened is a linear function of large-scale heart rate fluctuations, whereas there is an inverted-U-shaped relationship between participant enjoyment and small-scale heart rate fluctuations. These results suggest that enjoyment is related to forms of arousal dynamics that are “just right.” These findings shed light on how fear and enjoyment can coexist in recreational horror.

Most People are Good

You really should read Mark Manson's newsletter for this week. As usual, it makes three main points, I will pass on only a few chunks: 

1. One bad apple spoils the barrel.

People who are online all day, every day, likely believe humanity is one giant festering shitpool, while people who actually, you know, go outside and do things probably think most people are A-OK...Data scientists at Stanford recently found that 74% of the conflicts on Reddit were instigated by only 1% of the users...This dynamic isn’t new with the internet... Research finds that 1% of people are convicted of 63% of the violent crimes, and 3% of doctors are responsible for roughly half of medical malpractice cases. Similarly, it’s suspected that only a small minority of men commit the majority of sexual assaults and a new paper suggests that between 5% and 20% of people account for most overt acts of racism...Most people are good. It’s just the bad ones you hear about all the time. This is true and has likely always been true...What has changed is our level of exposure.

2. The Exposure Effect.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, 1 out of every 100 people is a raging asshole capable of ruining your day and causing you to lose faith in humanity. Twenty or thirty years ago, you would only be exposed to ten or twenty people each day, so you would go days without being exposed to a raging piece of shit...Now think, how many people are you exposed to on a daily basis on the internet? On social media? Via 24-hour news?...suddenly, you’re repeatedly and constantly exposed to the awfulness of humans multiple times per day, if not dozens...Yet, in reality, nothing fundamental about human society has changed. Only our awareness of each other has.

3. Never Forget: Most People Are Good.

...the number one rule of the internet is: manage your exposure. This is why step one of my Attention Diet is to block and unfollow anybody and everybody who is toxic online. This is why I have written tens of thousands of words urging people to read/watch less news..By cutting out that 1% you save yourself from 74% of the bullshit...once you do this, you start to remember something you have long forgotten: most people are good. You simply don’t hear from them very often...Whether it’s about news, politics, online business, scientific research or pop culture, there is often a “silent majority” of decent, relatively intelligent, well-meaning people lurking, waiting, feeling just as exasperated and freaked out as you are...And if we continue to forget that we are here, eventually we won’t be.

Data-driven solutions to U.S. polarization

Today sees the inauguration of Joe Biden as president of the United States, and seems an appropriate time to pass on in its entirety the following open source letter from Coleman to the editor of Science Magazine:

In their Policy Forum “Political sectarianism in America” (30 October 2020, p. 533), E. J. Finkel et al. summarize research on the multiple sources of the decades-long U.S. march to toxic polarization. However, the mitigation tactics they offer seem piecemeal and insufficient. To reverse a 50-year trajectory of runaway division (1), we need an evidence-based strategy tailored to structural change.

Research on how deeply divided societies change course (2) suggests that how leaders approach entrenched problems, especially early on in their tenure (3), can make the difference. Transformations are most likely to occur when leaders take office after a major political shock—like the COVID-19 pandemic or the 6 January storming of the Capitol by political extremists—has destabilized the status quo (4) and lead in a way that differs dramatically from the leadership that instigated the divisions (5). Moreover, in societies where distrust and suspicion reign (6), changes in political strategies are often best introduced with a public declaration of intention.

The Biden-Harris administration could apply such research by announcing a two-pronged strategy to defeat toxic division in America. First, given that many Americans feel left behind, the new leaders should begin by launching a listening tour during which they partner with local, trusted community groups to elicit grievances and proposed remedies (4). Research has shown that when members of disenfranchised groups feel heard by those in power, it can lead to constructive shifts in attitudes (7). Large-scale initiatives like these, when transparent and brought to completion, can begin healing (8).

Second, the new administration should seek to strengthen our national immune system. Research on international peace-building finds that many of the more sustainable initiatives helping communities transition out of intergroup strife come from within (9). These local initiatives (8) emerge in response to community challenges and manage to thrive under difficult circumstances. Today, there are thousands of bridge-building groups (10) across the United States that fit this bill, whose impact could be scaled up through federal funding, recognition, and coordination. They fight against the pathologies of hate and can help citizens build bipartisan alliances that take on the structural incentives that divide us. This is critical. We will never talk our way out of this division (11); we must aim for structural change (12).

References and Notes

1. ↵
   Pew Research Center, “Political polarization in the American public” (2014).

   Google Scholar
2. ↵
   1. R. R. Vallacher et al

   ., Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (Springer-Verlag, 2013).

   Google Scholar
3. ↵
   1. M. Macy et al

   ., Sci. Adv. 5, eaax0754 (2019).

   FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar
4. ↵
   1. C. Gersick

   , Acad. Manag. Rev. 16, 10.5465/amr.1991.4278988 (1991).

   Google Scholar
5. ↵
   1. C. Gersick

   , J. Change Manag. 20, 7 (2019).

   Google Scholar
6. ↵
   1. S. Lindskold,
   2. M. G. Collins

   , J. Conflict Resol. 22, 679 (1978).

   Google Scholar
7. ↵
   1. E. G. Bruneau,
   2. R. R. Saxe

   , J. Exp. Soc. Psych. 48, 855 (2012).

   Google Scholar
8. ↵
   1. J. Rothman

   , Ohio State J. Dispute Resol. 22, 105 (2006).

   Google Scholar
9. ↵
   1. A. Munroe

   , “‘Positive deviants’ point the way in peace-building master's program” (U.S. Institute of Peace, 2013).

   Google Scholar
10. ↵
    Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, “Organizations Transforming Polarization & Division” (2020); https://icccr.tc.columbia.edu/resources/organizations-bridging-divides/.

    Google Scholar
11. ↵
    1. E. Badger,
    2. K. Quealy

    , “These Americans tried to listen to one another. A year later, here's how they're voting,” The New York Times (2020).

    Google Scholar
12. ↵
    1. M. J. Barber

    , J. Polit. 78, 296 (2016).

    CrossRefGoogle Scholar

 

A third visual pathway specialized for social perception.

Fourty years after Ungerleider and Mishkin proposed our current model of the primate cortex as using two major visual pathway along its ventral and dorsal surfaces that respectively specialize in computing the 'what' and 'where' content of visual stimuili, Pitcher and Ungerleider now summarize evidence that this picture has to be expanded to include a third pathway specialized for moving social visual perceptions, especially of faces. Here are their core points, following by a descriptive graphic from their article.

The two-visual pathway model of primate visual cortex needs to be updated. We propose the existence of a third visual pathway on the lateral brain surface that is anatomically segregated from the dorsal and ventral pathways.

The third pathway exists in human and non-human primates. In humans, the third pathway projects from early visual cortex into the superior temporal sulcus (STS). In macaques the third pathway projects from early visual cortex into the dorsal bank and fundus of the STS.

The third pathway has distinct functional properties. It selectively responds to moving faces and bodies. Visual field-mapping studies show that the third pathway responds to faces across the visual field to a greater extent than the ventral pathway.

The third pathway computes a range of higher sociocognitive functions based on dynamic social cues. These include facial expression recognition, eye gaze discrimination, the audiovisual integration of speech, and interpreting the actions and behaviors of other biological organisms.

 

ADDED NOTE: Leslie Ungerleider died as 2020 drew to a close. She was a towering figure in the neuroscience community. This obituary by Sabine Kastner in Neuron pays her a fitting tribute.

Endorsement of dominant masculinity best predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations.

Vescio and Schermerhorn carry out studies of several thousand individuals showing that men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump better than other suggested causes: antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. I want to also point readers to the Thomas Edsall essay "White Riot", which makes some of the same points.

(I use the word 'dominant' rather than 'hegemonic' in the title of this post because hegemonic is frequently used in political discourse as a pejorative term, like other blanket terms such as hetero-normative.) 

Here is their significance statement and abstract, the  link above takes you to the whole text containing details of their studies and summary charts. .

Significance

Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been attributed to the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Based on the findings of seven studies involving 2,007 people, men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump over and beyond the aforementioned factors, even when controlling for political party affiliation. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond social identity–based conceptualizations of masculinity to fully consider how men’s and women’s endorsement of cultural ideologies about masculinity legitimate patriarchal forms of dominance and reify gender-, race-, and class-based hierarchies.

Abstract

This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men’s and women’s support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women’s and men’s endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, over and above political party affiliation, gender, race, and education. These effects held when controlling for respondents’ trust in the government, in contrast to a populist explanation of support for Trump. In addition, as conceptualized, HM was associated with less trust in the government (Study 3), more sexism (Study 4), more racism (Study 5), and more xenophobia (Study 6) but continued to predict unique variance in evaluations of Trump when controlling for each of these factors. Whereas HM predicted evaluations of Trump, across studies, social and prejudiced attitudes predicted evaluations of his democratic challengers: Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. We replicate the findings of Studies 1 through 6 using a nationally representative sample of the United States (Study 7) 50 days prior to the 2020 presidential election. The findings highlight the importance of psychological examinations of masculinity as a cultural ideology to understand how men’s and women’s endorsement of HM legitimizes patriarchal dominance and reinforces gender, race, and class-based hierarchies via candidate support.

How oxytocin enhances male sexual activity

An article by Oti et al. in Current Biology makes me want to buy an oxytocin inhaler (just google oxytocin nasal spray). I'll pass on the highlights and a graphic summary (click to enlarge), and you can see the technical summary by clicking on the link to the article. 

 • Oxytocin receptors are expressed in spinal ejaculation generator (SEG) neurons 

• Oxytocin directly activates SEG neurons and influences male sexual function in rats

 • Release of oxytocin in the lumbar spinal cord is not limited to conventional synapses

 • Released oxytocin acts by diffusion—a localized volume transmission—in the cord

How technology destroys bonding cultural narratives

I am on the mailing list of Mark Manson's weekly newsletter, find myself repeatedly annoyed by its arrogant tone and obscene prose, but then appreciate some episodes of his clear thinking, one of which describing his summary thoughts on culture I pass on here:

- A culture is defined by the shared values among a group of people. These values are represented and supported by shared narratives.

- Cultural narratives survive because they are repeated. The more they are repeated and believed, the more fundamental they become to the identity of the group.

- When cultural narratives cease to be repeated, they cease to be part of the culture, and the values they represent are dropped from the group’s identity and decision-making.

- In this way, culture frames the battles of economics and politics—as culture dictates what is valuable and important to the group and then politics and economics enact those values in the real world.

- Technology fundamentally alters culture because technology can unintentionally shape and determine what narratives are broadcast the furthest, loudest, and most frequently.

The whole problem with social media is that the narratives that spread the furthest and loudest on these platforms tend to be anti-establishment and contrarian. These are the narratives that get repeated the most often, and therefore these become the narratives that come to define our culture.

But these narratives are hollow. They tear down structures but build nothing back up in their place. They point out the flaws of our experts and institutions and disregard the many things they get right.

This is why we’ve seen so many grassroots protest movements around the world the past ten years with no real aim or policy ideas—from Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party all the way up to the shitlords and morons invading the US Capitol last week. The narrative is pure victimhood and destruction. There is no countervailing narrative for responsibility and creation.

This is the sense of growing nihilism that I wrote about in Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. The narratives that expose everything that is wrong in the world are repeated incessantly, while the narratives of everything that is right and going well struggle to find an interested audience. The result is a culture of fragility, where every group somehow simultaneously feels victimized and entitled to impose their narrative onto others.

How mice feel each other's pain or fear

The abstract from Smith et al, who show the brain basis of empathetic behaviors in mice that mirror those in humans:

Empathy is an essential component of social communication that involves experiencing others’ sensory and emotional states. We observed that a brief social interaction with a mouse experiencing pain or morphine analgesia resulted in the transfer of these experiences to its social partner. Optogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and its projections to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) were selectively involved in the social transfer of both pain and analgesia. By contrast, the ACC→NAc circuit was not necessary for the social transfer of fear, which instead depended on ACC projections to the basolateral amygdala. These findings reveal that the ACC, a brain area strongly implicated in human empathic responses, mediates distinct forms of empathy in mice by influencing different downstream targets. 

Here is a summary graphic from a perspective by Klein and Gogolla (click to enlarge):

Cults, cabals, white power, and Trumpism

The men of "all men are created equal" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence - white male property owners -  have remained the American ruling class for more than 200 years as voting rights have been extended to women and people of color who will soon account for more that half the population. The only means by which a white minority can maintain power is to suppress voting by minorities who are becoming majorities,  and to follow the scripts of Turkey, Poland, or Hungary in transitioning to an authoritarian rule that masquerades as democracy. (Fortunately Trump has been too inept to pull this off, but the next time we may not be so lucky.) 

The threatened white minority, particularly its fundamentalist christian faction that wants to impose a Taliban-like religious state,  forms the core constituency of the Trumpism cult (aka, the Republican party) and many of its members adhere to faith in fact challenged conspiracy theories that invoke hidden cabals actually running the show (QAnon, Pizzagate, the election theft conspiracy, etc.). 

Harari does a nice piece (you should read it) on the lure of cabal theories and their inherent falsehood. His core points:

The Structure - Cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface lurks a sinister group... the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control. 

The Lure - Cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes...if I believe some kind of cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything... this offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.  

The Flaw - Cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics...Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. ...Global cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to secretly puppet master nearly eight billion. 

The Reality - There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety...Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.

Environmental noise degrades learning and memory

Sobering observations from Zhang et al on our hippocampus-related learning and memory:

Significance

The noise pollution accompanying industrialization is a risk factor to human health. Here, we show in a rodent model that even moderate-level noise at ∼65 dB SPL that has little effect on stress status can substantially impair hippocampus-related learning and memory by altering the plasticity of synaptic transmission. It is possible that because moderately loud noise does not affect peripheral hearing per se, the negative impacts of chronic exposure to such noise are currently not well characterized. Our results indicate the importance of more thoroughly defining these possibly hitherto unappreciated hazards of noise pollution in modern human environments.

Abstract

The neural mechanisms underlying the impacts of noise on nonauditory function, particularly learning and memory, remain largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that rats exposed postnatally (between postnatal days 9 and 56) to structured noise delivered at a sound pressure level of ∼65 dB displayed significantly degraded hippocampus-related learning and memory abilities. Noise exposure also suppressed the induction of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP). In parallel, the total or phosphorylated levels of certain LTP-related key signaling molecules in the synapses of the hippocampus were down-regulated. However, no significant changes in stress-related processes were found for the noise-exposed rats. These results in a rodent model indicate that even moderate-level noise with little effect on stress status can substantially impair hippocampus-related learning and memory by altering the plasticity of synaptic transmission. They support the importance of more thoroughly defining the unappreciated hazards of moderately loud noise in modern human environments.

A reality-challenged America of echo chambers and cults

Following the recent drama of a mob motivated by a fraudulent theory briefly taking over America's capitol building I want to pass on a number of interesting pieces relevant to these times in which the behaviors of followers of Trumpism, QAnon and Election fraud conspiracies seem to mirror those of Wokeness and Critical Race Theory. Cults of the right and left provide motivation and reassuring 'theories of everything' to explain society's ills. 

Farhad MKanjoo writes on how the sprawling online conspiracy network QAnon is at the center of Trump's attempt to overturn the election. 

 A PNAS journal club article and a brief review by Wright, "Shouting in a Political Echo Chamber," describe work by Wang et al. on a model showing how polarization emerges on social media during political campaigns

 Edsall, in a typically scholarly piece, reviews debate on whether the sociopathic role of social media in spreading and reinforcing broad acceptance of lies has wrecked free speech enough to require a rexamination of the right guaranteed by the first amendment. A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

 LaFrance gets even more cosmic in her Atlantic article titled "Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine" (if you have time for only one of these articles, I guess this is the one I would recommend). Having resisted the temptation to pass on clips from the articles referenced above (the post would get to long), I will go ahead with one clip from LaFrance, who says that Facebook

...took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

The giants of the social web—Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram; Google and its subsidiary YouTube; and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—have achieved success by being dogmatically value-neutral in their pursuit of what I’ll call megascale. Somewhere along the way, Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

 

Are we the cows of the future?

One of the questions posed by Yuval Harari in his writing on our possible futures is "What are we to do with all these humans who are, except for a small technocratic elite, no longer required as the means of production?" Esther Leslie, a professor of political aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, does an essay on this issue, pointing out that our potential futures in the pastures of digital dictatorship — crowded conditions, mass surveillance, virtual reality — are already here. You should read her essay, and I passon just a few striking clips of text:

...Cows’ bodies have historically served as test subjects — laboratories of future bio-intervention and all sorts of reproductive technologies. Today cows crowd together in megafarms, overseen by digital systems, including facial- and hide-recognition systems. These new factories are air-conditioned sheds where digital machinery monitors and logs the herd’s every move, emission and production. Every mouthful of milk can be traced to its source.

And it goes beyond monitoring. In 2019 on the RusMoloko research farm near Moscow, virtual reality headsets were strapped onto cattle. The cows were led, through the digital animation that played before their eyes, to imagine they were wandering in bright summer fields, not bleak wintry ones. The innovation, which was apparently successful, is designed to ward off stress: The calmer the cow, the higher the milk yield.

A cow sporting VR goggles is comedic as much as it is tragic. There’s horror, too, in that it may foretell our own alienated futures. After all, how different is our experience? We submit to emotion trackers. We log into biofeedback machines. We sign up for tracking and tracing. We let advertisers’ eyes watch us constantly and mappers store our coordinates.

Could we, like cows, be played by the machinery, our emotions swayed under ever-sunny skies, without us even knowing that we are inside the matrix? Will the rejected, unemployed and redundant be deluded into thinking that the world is beautiful, a land of milk and honey, as they interact minimally in stripped-back care homes? We may soon graze in the new pastures of digital dictatorship, frolicking while bound.

Leslie then describes the ideas of German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno:

Against the insistence that nature should not be ravished by technology, he argues that perhaps technology could enable nature to get what “it wants” on this sad earth. And we are included in that “it.”...Nature, in truth, is not just something external on which we work, but also within us. We too are nature.

For someone associated with the abstruseness of avant-garde music and critical theory, Adorno was surprisingly sentimental when it came to animals — for which he felt a powerful affinity. It is with them that he finds something worthy of the name Utopia. He imagines a properly human existence of doing nothing, like a beast, resting, cloud gazing, mindlessly and placidly chewing cud.

To dream, as so many Utopians do, of boundless production of goods, of busy activity in the ideal society reflects, Adorno claimed, an ingrained mentality of production as an end in itself. To detach from our historical form adapted solely to production, to work against work itself, to do nothing in a true society in which we embrace nature and ourselves as natural might deliver us to freedom.

Rejecting the notion of nature as something that would protect us, give us solace, reveals us to be inextricably within and of nature. From there, we might begin to save ourselves — along with everything else.

Cuttlefish can pass the marshmellow test.

Cephalopod mullusks like octopuses or cuttlefishes show remarkable intelligence. My most engaged and soothing viewing experience during the pandemis has been watching "My Octopus Teacher" on Netflix. Now recent work pointed to by Greenwood shows that cuttlefish can pass the famous marshmellow test, forgoing immediate gratification if experience has shown that waiting produces a larger reward:

Decision-making, when humans and other animals choose between two options, is not always based on the absolute values of the options but can also depend on their relative values. The present study examines whether decision-making by cuttlefish is dependent on relative values learned from previous experience. Cuttlefish preferred a larger quantity when making a choice between one or two shrimps (1 versus 2) during a two-alternative forced choice. However, after cuttlefish were primed under conditions where they were given a small reward for choosing one shrimp in a no shrimp versus one shrimp test (0 versus 1) six times in a row, they chose one shrimp significantly more frequently in the 1 versus 2 test. This reversed preference for a smaller quantity was not due to satiation at the time of decision-making, as cuttlefish fed a small shrimp six times without any choice test prior to the experiment still preferred two shrimps significantly more often in a subsequent 1 versus 2 test. This suggests that the preference of one shrimp in the quantity comparison test occurs via a process of learned valuation. Foraging preference in cuttlefish thus depends on the relative value of previous prey choices.

The brains of friends have similar brain functional connectivities.

From Hyhon et al.: 

Significance

In what ways are we similar to our friends? Here, we characterized the social network of residents of a remote village, a subset of whom contributed personality and neuroimaging data. We demonstrate that similarity in individuals’ resting-state functional connectomes predicts individuals’ proximity in their real-world social network, even when controlling for demographic characteristics and self-reported personality traits. Our results suggest that patterns of functional brain activity during rest encode latent similarities (e.g., in terms of how people think and behave) that are associated with friendship. Taken together, integrating neuroimaging and social network analysis can offer novel insights into how the brain shapes or is shaped by the social networks that it inhabits.

Abstract

People often have the intuition that they are similar to their friends, yet evidence for homophily (being friends with similar others) based on self-reported personality is inconsistent. Functional connectomes—patterns of spontaneous synchronization across the brain—are stable within individuals and predict how people tend to think and behave. Thus, they may capture interindividual variability in latent traits that are particularly similar among friends but that might elude self-report. Here, we examined interpersonal similarity in functional connectivity at rest—that is, in the absence of external stimuli—and tested if functional connectome similarity is associated with proximity in a real-world social network. The social network of a remote village was reconstructed; a subset of residents underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Similarity in functional connectomes was positively related to social network proximity, particularly in the default mode network. Controlling for similarities in demographic and personality data (the Big Five personality traits) yielded similar results. Thus, functional connectomes may capture latent interpersonal similarities between friends that are not fully captured by commonly used demographic or personality measures. The localization of these results suggests how friends may be particularly similar to one another. Additionally, geographic proximity moderated the relationship between neural similarity and social network proximity, suggesting that such associations are particularly strong among people who live particularly close to one another. These findings suggest that social connectivity is reflected in signatures of brain functional connectivity, consistent with the common intuition that friends share similarities that go beyond, for example, demographic similarities.

The changing geography of social mobility in the United States

From Connor and Storper:

New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the 20th century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal and racial inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.