Us and Them: The Blog

It Walks! It Talks! The Link.

The Horgan-Berreby colloquy is now up on bloggingheads.

The Extremes of Teams

Bill Bishop in his excellent new ``Big Sort'' blog explains the argument that ``like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded,'' as he puts it. ``Group polarization'' experiments, he proposes, help explain the tone of people at McCain-Palin rallies lately.

The only problem with this idea is that Democrats -- though they're just as prone to hang around like-minded people as are Republicans -- haven't been prone to jeering, insults and threats that have emerged in Republican campaign stops. There are extremes of feeling on both sides, but cries of ``traitor!'' and ``liar'' and ``kill him'' don't boil out of Obama-Biden gatherings. I think that's evidence that certain kinds of like-mindedness are different from others.

Specifically, I think the imagery of death, disease, untrustworthiness and immorality makes a difference. That rhetoric is a license for emotions that other kinds of rhetoric would discourage. It's not like-mindedness about anything that leads to extreme behavior. It's like-mindedness about the other side's malicious, depraved or unsanitary nature.

Some leaders offer those images to their followers; others refuse. We shouldn't think all shared opinions have the same effect, regardless of their content. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, like-mindedness in the defense of decency is no vice.

It Walks! It Talks!

To mark this week's publication of Us and Them: The Science of Identity in a new edition by the University of Chicago Press, I just finished a long conversational interview with John Horgan that is going up tomorrow (Saturday, October 18th) on the bloggingheads website. John and I talk about the Us-Them aspects of the 2008 election, how much people understand why they do stuff, and our society's principles of human rights, democracy and individual autonomy. Are these genuine advances in human thought? Or the secular equivalent of Byzantine Christianity or eighth-century Islam -- widespread only because they're the creed of societies that have the strongest military for the moment? (That's the philosopher John Gray's p.o.v., from which Horgan and I demur, for different reasons.)

Check, as they say, it out.

Why ``divorce genes'' are a nonsensical distortion of science

In sea of idiotic coverage about the latest claims about a link between genes and behavior, only the guy at Wired gets it right.

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Poetic and Scientific Justice . . .

. . . about the genome of James Watson.

Our Far-Flung Correspondent

A bit of ornithological writing by yours truly appears in The New Yorker, issue of Nov. 5. You can read it online here.

A landmark of sorts

An archaeological discovery: one of the Western World's first gunshot victims.

Innateness weirdness

Two new studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ingeniously add to the evidence that the mind has built-in proclivities about where to put its attention. The first found that people are more attentive to movements by animals than by cars and trucks. Even people who grew up around vehicles, in urban environments, were more likely to notice an animal's roadside movement than a car's. In the second, people's decisions about another person were affected by what others said -- even when the ``gossip'' added nothing to what they already knew.

Trust, attention and identity: Animal edition

On a single page in the June 9 issue of the weekly New Scientist come two evocative reports about communication and trust. One recounts that elephant herds respond only to the alarm calls of familiar voices. If they hear a taped ``lion warning'' from a strange herd, they don't take the usual defensive action. It seems odd, as a lion is a lion, but it suggests that even in elephants communication is not just about information -- it's also about ``who'' is sending the message, and if s/he is ``one of us.''

The other brief story explains how magpie lark pairs sing duets better the longer they are together -- and the duets of the long-coupled evoke more responses in other birds than less skilled singing. Another instance in which the message tells about the messenger, and its relation to other members of its species.

And speaking of trust and identity, I was tempted to go to the original papers in these two instances, thus skipping any mention of New Scientist and making myself look better informed than I am. I think that's what New Scientist did to me recently with this piece on prejudice.

It reviews the issues I cover in my book, mentions a number of people I write about (few of whom are household names) yet gives me no mention. Could be a coincidence, but in my opinion it's an instance of a common journalist's dodge: Get information from a peer, but attribute it only to the experts and archives.

In our guild, there is a premium on information that comes from those who are not members. That is, after all, the job: Seek knowledge from the wide world. When we cite each other, we look as if we haven't done the work, and so we excise our colleagues -- in the same spirit that foreign correspondents seldom mention the local ``fixer'' who translates, locates and generates much of their material. In every journalistic job I have had, I witnessed this sort of trimming. One of the idols of our tribe, I guess.

Not having enjoyed being on the receiving end of the process (and recognizing the slim chance that I could, after all, be mistaken) I'll give NS the credit where it is due.