The Questioning Christian

Category: Behavior

  • We just don’t know enough about human motivation

    In a Facebook thread, a conservative friend writes: "And yet, those economies where it was 'sink or swim' have thrived throughout history (in contradiction to those that were socialist)." I moved my response here.

    That's an oversimplification. Sink or swim does provide a certain motivation, but humans generally aren't willing to just let others sink, even when the others' problems are their own "fault."

    That's why we have laws requiring hospitals to treat emergency cases, even when the patients should have bought health insurance. That's why we have food stamps.

    For that matter, that's why first responders and volunteers risk their lives to rescue people from their Harvey-flooded homes and streets, even though those people had [fouled] up by ignoring earlier warnings to evacuate.

    We simply don't understand human psychology as well as we need to. In particular, we haven't developed a broadly-accepted, tested, general theory about what it takes to promote socially-desirable behavior.

    Sure, we have various notions along those lines. A lot of those notions, though, are no more evidence-based than, say, bleeding a feverish patient to (supposedly) reduce the fever, as physicians used to do centuries ago.

    In that vein, I thought this Kristof piece from a couple of months ago was quite thought-provoking:

    … Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.

    In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.

    What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay. "Higher inequality seemed to undercut the superstar players it was meant to incentivize, which is what you would expect if you believed that the chief effect of pay inequality was to reduce cooperation and team cohesion," Payne notes.

    Nicholas Kristof, What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness (NYTimes.com June 3, 2017) (emphasis added).

    This lack of a true understanding of human motivation, and how to apply that understanding to motivate "useful" behavior, is the basis of a lot of political disagreement. For example:

    • Today's GOP leadership thinks that tax cuts for the wealthy are a panacea for the economy; they think that such cuts will supposedly incentivize the wealthy to create jobs. Sure, the Laffer curve ~sounded~ good back in the 1970s. But from what I've read, most non-right-wing economists have concluded that, at the very least, the Laffer curve has been taken too far. ("If a little is good, then more would be even better — right?")
    • On the other side of the aisle, some leftists seem to think that we could solve all our social ills by imposing punitive taxes on the rich and giving everyone a universal basic income (UBI) and free health care. That strikes me as likely to be a fantasy, for several reasons I won't take the time to discuss.

    In sum: We just don't know where the sweet spot is for getting people to do useful things. Hell, we don't even agree that much on what we mean by "useful." And in any case, the sweet spot is likely to move around over time, just as weather patterns do.

    The best we can do, I submit, is to stay focused on seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves, and to face the facts as they are revealed to us.

  • Free will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — but it’s probably not nothing either

    The determinist viewpoint recounted in this article seems like unwarranted either-or binary thinking. That view appears to posit that either we're totally in control of ourselves, or we have no control at all. I suspect that doesn't square with most people's personal experiences.

    (Cf. Paul's letter to the Romans: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."  Rom. 7.15)

    One problem might lie in the nomenclature. The term "free will" is simply wrong. And it's not like "sunrise," which is likewise wrong but for everyday purposes the error is harmless.

    (Article: Steven Cave, There's No Such Thing as Free Will, The Atlantic, June 2016.)

  • Some Russians freak out over Mayan calendar end of the world

    Here we go again ….

  • Faith can arise through works — an example

    Educational researchers have shown that telling teachers to change their expectations about particular students was not nearly as effective as training the teachers to change their own behavior towards the students — which led to just the changes in expectations that the researchers had hoped to see. See this NPR Morning Edition story by reporter Alix Spiegel.  Money quote: "… to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors."

  • Israeli ‘settlers’ torch Palestinian property in retaliation for being evicted by Israeli troops

    When you and your friends and family are implacably convinced that you know God’s will beyond question, you can do some evil things:

    On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge — not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

    It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

    “It’s quite simple and smart but evil,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “They attack Palestinian property, people, and blockade roads every time the Israeli security forces do something they don’t like” — such as demolish outposts.

    Many settlers in the West Bank are religious hardliners who believe that they are fulfilling a biblical prophecy by taking over the land that they call Judaea and Samaria.

    * * *

    “It’s not a war, it’s our right,” he said, brushing aside the issue of what might happen to the Palestinians if his movement succeeds in settling the land.

    “It’s not my problem, it’s not something I have to solve. This is a land that was promised by God, that’s all I know,” he added.

    Mr Sfard said that there were anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred settlers using the violent tactic, which was proving to be effective.

    “It’s slowing down the security forces and demanding much larger and heavier forces,” he said. “It’s such a big headache that many of the relevant authorities give up without trying.” The outposts are rebuilt quickly by determined settlers once the army leaves.

    From James Hider, West Bank settlers use ‘price tag’ tactic to punish Palestinians, The Times [UK], Oct. 15, 2009 (bold-faced emphasis added.)

  • Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

    Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

    The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

    The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

    (It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

    Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

    1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
    2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
    3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

    Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

    This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

    Related post:

    [1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

  • A gene may make you ‘look on the bright side’ – or not; might that affect one’s faith?

    “[A] genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress. The absence of this protection in the other forms of this genotype is linked with heightened susceptibility to anxiety and depression.”

    So says University of Essex professor Elaine Fox, lead author of a paper published Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.”  (HT: Scientific American, May 2009, “Half Empty or Half Full,” Briefs, p. 28.)

    I wonder whether people having this genetic predisposition toward optimism are any more inclined to trust that in the end, all will be well.

    I’m also curious whether people having such trust are more inclined to believe in the existence of a Creator resembling, at least somewhat, the God of the great monotheistic religions.

  • Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

    From Eric Asimov, “Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” NY Times, May 7, 2008:

    But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

    The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

  • Emotion makes reasoned decisions possible

    “Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible.”

    — David Brooks, How Voters Think, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2008

  • The evolutionary pros and cons of promiscuity

    If you’re interested in the biological bases of morality, and in particular how pressures of natural selection have resulted in monogamy being more or less the norm for humans, you’ll want to read the discussion in the comments here.

    It seems that humans are by nature monogamous, more or less.  This suggests that perhaps the ‘laws’ of biology and sociology were set up in a way that happens to promote what we now regard as ‘morality’ — which is consistent with the concept of a Creator.

    Monogamy vs. promiscuity: Competing selection pressures

    In one respect, natural selection tends to favor promiscuity:

    • On average, promiscuous males are likely to have more children than monogamous ones.

    • Promiscuous females also have a certain evolutionary advantage:  As commenter Ross TenEyck points out, a female who is mated long-term to one male has the advantage of economic support from him, but she also bears the evolutionary risk that his genes will not be optimal for her own reproductive success. So it can be in her reproductive interest to cheat on her mate by secretly mating with another male to acquire his genes, if she can do that without jeopardizing her economic support.

    But that’s not the end of the natural-selection inquiry.

    The $64 question: Who is more likely to have grandchildren?

    Another, crucial question is: How many of a given male’s or female’s children will survive to reach reproductive age themselves?  In other words, are promiscuous males or females more or less likely to have grandchildren than monogamous ones?

    Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have noted that the children of monogamous males, whose fathers stay with their mothers, tend to have more economic resources devoted to their survival and well-being than the children of promiscuous males.  (We see traces of this even today in the poverty statistics concerning single mothers.)  As a result, on average the offspring of monogamous males have a greater chance of surviving to reproductive age and producing grandchildren.

    There’s another, related phenomenon:  males of many species tend to object, often violently, to supporting the offspring of other males.  (It’s said that a newly-dominant male lion in a pride often will immediately kill all the cubs, which were fathered by his predecessor.)  For a scriptural take on this type of phenomenon, see this comment by a sociobiologist, ‘Catholic Mom.’  Even unmated human females often had (and have) fathers and brothers who would kill males who ‘dishonored’ their daughters or sisters.  So a philanderer has a non-trivial chance of having his genetic contributions wiped out, suggesting that monogamy might be a safer evolutionary bet.

    ‘Social’ genetic pressures for monogamy: Group cohesion

    Natural selection doesn’t operate on a genetic basis alone. Group dynamics also create selection pressures, some of which favor monogamy. 

    Any group has a survival interest in preventing internal strife. A group that can keep the peace among its males is more likely to be able to collaborate successfully in, for example, hunting and warfare.  The members of such a group are more likely to successfully raise children who in turn produce grandchildren than a group that is constantly riven by internal strife between competing males.

    (I get the impression that in arguing about natural selection, a lot of people completely overlook the effects of kin- and group selection. The above-referenced sociobiologist agrees, but says that group selection is now thought of by most biologists as a type of kin selection; that may be true from a purely-genetic perspective, but it doesn’t seem to take into account the fitness implications of cultural practices, or ‘memes‘.)

    Net result: We’re naturally monogamous – well, mostly

    All these different, and sometimes conflicting, selection pressures, both genetic and cultural, have probably resulted in a real melange of motivations in our poor psyches.

    Scientists conjecture that during humanity’s evolutionary lifespan, men who happened — or could be persuaded —  to be monogamous, and females who preferred to mate with monogamous males, were more likely to have grandchildren than others. 

    We’re likely always going to have actual- or would-be philanderers. But there seems to be a strong case for thinking that monogamy as the norm — more or less — among humans is strongly influenced by biology.

    Where is God here?

    The above analysis doesn’t mean the Creator had nothing to do with our morality. Quite the contrary: Our biology and sociology appear to follow ‘laws’ that result in our being more or less monogamous.

    That’s quite a trick, if you ask me, and another reason for awe at the Creator’s handiwork.