hold out, don't put out

Not that I would ever actively advocate for prudery, but this study suggests it ain't a bad idea - if you want to have a happy, stable marriage.

(Despite researchers being from Brigham Young, study looks legit.)

million, billion, whatever

It's not just my mother who has no sense of the difference between $1 million and $1 billion.

When Goldman announced its recent investment in Facebook, she exclaimed in wide-eyed disbelief "That Mark Zuckerberg must now be worth millions!"

That understatement is understandable for an English teacher born during the depression. But how can you explain the Daily Beast's wild overstatement in its email to me this morning proclaiming "$900 Billion Lost at Afghan Bank"?

It's true, with talk these days of the US hitting a $1.5 trillion deficit, $900 billion may not seem that large a sum - in the US, at least. But you'd wish the smart editors at the Daily Beast would understand that $900 Billion is the kind of sum Afghanistan will not see in current lifetimes - let alone misplace at a bank.

Just to put in perspective, Afghanistan's GDP (that is the value of everything it produces in a year) is about $15 billion, compared to the US's $15 trillion. The Daily Beast's headline would be the equivalent of saying a "US bank lost $900 trillion dollars."

Now, the Daily Beast if hardly the only one to make these extreme numerical errors; they pop up all the time in reputable news reporting. But each time I see haywire numbers like these, I have to stop and wonder - if America's journalists, with their top college degrees and obsession with public policy, can't grasp the difference between millions, billions and trillions, how can we expect "average" Americans to?

no satisfaction

It's not easy being king - or any leader.

Even though Lincoln never actually said it, his apocryphal quip that "You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time" seems apt.

Yet, the truth might be that you can't please any of the people any of the time.

As suggested in a 1990 Stanford study, we may just instinctively prefer any policy as long as it's not the one picked by our leaders.

The Stanford researchers asked students to rate a university proposal to divest from South Africa as well as an alternate plan (that, rather than divest from SA companies, would invest in companies that withdrew from SA). When the university plan was only a "proposed" plan, not yet officially rubber stamped, students gave it an average rating of "10", significantly higher than the "8" they gave to the alternate plan. However, if the university plan was presented as a fait accompli, a surprising thing happened: students' dropped their average approval to about an "8.8" while the alternate plan rose in popularity and edged out the university plan with an "8.9."

No wonder leaders say they're damned if they do or don't. As the researchers surmised, we may naturally value a policy when it's out of reach, but dis it when it's a done deal.

bringing out the civility in us all

In the wake of Rep. Giffords' tragic shooting, the political and punditry establishment may disagree on whether gun laws should be revised or if more unhinged Americans should be corralled before they turn violent, but everyone has bought the bipartisan line that American politics is due for a strong dose of civility.

But aside from a few legislators agreeing to buddy up with members from the opposite party during tonight's SOTU address, no one's really saying how - or if - we can turn the civility tide.

I don't have answers, but a study I bumped into yesterday gives me hope that it doesn't have to be hard to do.

In 1993, Lee Ross and Samuels brought together a group of undergrads to play the "prisoner's dilemma" game. A classic in ethics and game theory courses, the prisoner's dilemma sets up the following situation: You and a co-conspirator have just been arrested for murder. Now separated into different interrogation rooms at the local precinct, you're given a choice. You can either agree to cooperate with police and, in doing so, throw your friend under the bus - or you can stick to your story that the two of you are innocent. If you both stay silent, you'll probably get 3 years in prison. If, however, you rat out your partner, you'll walk away and he'll get 20 years. Your friend can, of course, also rat you out, in which case you're both screwed.

The researchers were looking at two things. First, they wondered if you could guess from a student's character how they'd play the game, and so they asked the students' advisors whether the each student was more likely to be a "cooperator" - that is, stay silent and so get the fewest years of combined prison time (6 years) - or a "defector" who'd fink out on their partner. Second, Ross and Samuels were curious if they'd get different results if they made one simple change in setting up the game; with half the students they introduced the study as the "Community Game" while the other half thought they were playing the "Wall Street Game."

The results were strikingly clear. There was virtually no difference between the students deemed more likely to be defectors and those thought to be natural cooperators (if anything the former groups were better cooperators). But regardless of their previous reputation, when playing the "Wall Street Game" 33% of students cooperated, while out of those students in the "Community Game" 66% cooperated. Remember, the "games" were identical; the only difference was the name.

Stark as those results are, they line up with tons of other research which suggests that few of us (if any) are always cooperative altruists; most of us will decide to be team-players only if we think others are chipping in. We take the temperature of the room and act accordingly. So if we're in a "community" game we're more likely to act like good community members. But tell us we're on Wall Street, and the shark in us tends to come out. (Unfortunately, that research also tells us that about 25% of us will "free-ride" on the community no matter how much the rest are pitching in.)

It may be that (for all us non-free-riders) we're waiting for the signs that it's safe to play nice. But Ross and Samuels' results could be explained by an even more pervasive influence: social proof. That is, when we're uncertain how to behave, we tend to follow everybody else's lead. So if most people in the village are helping to rebuild Farmer John's barn, we'll grab our tool belt and join up. But if all the guys on the trading floor are competing for the biggest bonus, no one's going to get leg up.

Whether people are choosing to play nice as a rational strategy or just because they're going with the flow, the prognosis is good: if you set the tone of "cooperation" or "civility", you'll get cooperation and civility.

media self-analysis

The media put itself on the analyst's couch this week - and may follow up with a little behavioral therapy.

After two years of obsessive co-dependency with Sarah Palin, Ross Douthat brilliantly announced that the "cross-hairs/blood-libel" was a turning point in the dysfunctional marriage between media and the governor-turned-lightning-rod. It was one of those low points in a relationship, Douthat suggests, that should make one pause and think "it's time to break up."

Dana Milbank, over at the Washington Post, has paused, admitted his compulsive obsession with Sarah Palin and vowed to go cold turkey for one month. He's pledged to make February Palin-free and asked his fellow co-dependents to do the same.

It's unlikely that the media's brief foray into self-reflection will amount to much; even if others do take up Milbank's call for a February purge, it may just result in a Palin binge in March to make up for lost time. But the spate of introspection - and Milbank's frankness - is a great reminder that journalists are people too.

Often when we think about the behavior of "the media" - or of any system - we think in terms of incentives and self-interest; for example, the media reports on sensational news because they know it sells, or the media avoids certain subjects for fear of losing advertisers. While there's tons of truth to the power of incentives (whether they play out blatantly or sub-consciously), it's also true that individuals in the media are as susceptible to irrational (and even non-self-serving) behavior as the rest of us.

As Milbank's honesty shows, it may be that journalists are serving us sensational news not just because they know we'll lap it up - but because they've been hooked too.

what happens when you do your job - or disappear

In a poll result that I never thought I would see, Hilary Clinton gets a thumbs up from a whopping 66% of Americans.

Looking back over the decades of venomous hatred for this woman, that's a stunning number.

Since it's impossible to imagine that Americans have been tracking Hilary's world tours and admiring her diplomatic finesse, there have to be other explanations for America's reversal of favor.

One likely answer is that Americans don't like politicians, but they do like civil servants, especially ones that shut up, follow orders and do their job. That partly accounts for why the US Military has consistently garnered higher approval ratings than any other federal institution (that, and perhaps because they sacrifice their lives for our protection).

But as my friend Truman points out, it's highly uncertain that those Americans polled even know that Hilary has been a loyal civil servant, let alone the Secretary of State, for the past two years. That begs for another explanation - that Americans (or all humans) simply get a rosier picture of people as time passes.

To anyone who has spent time with an elder reminiscing about the good ol' days, this will be self-evident. (Twenty five years after an acrimonious divorce my father couldn't even remember why his marriage to my "lovely" mother had ended.) In one of the longest - and most breath-taking - longitudinal studies, which followed the lives of 286 Harvard classmen from the 30s, 25% of veterans of WWII reported killing an enemy in a survey taken right after the war; 40 years later only 14% of those veterans remembered that they had taken a life.

But it's not just old people. Studies suggest that for all of us, negative memories tend to fade faster than positive ones. That might be why once reviled presidents like Nixon and Carter (or autocrats like Stalin and Mao) attain a haloed glow as time passes.

It may be that, sometimes, the best way to improve your popularity is to just disappear.

insensitive to mass suffering?

You know how people can be moved to tears by the tragic story of one person (like 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green) and at the same time seem utterly indifferent to the suffering of hundreds (say, the 663 killed by mudslides in Brazil a week later).

It turns out we may be as paradoxically emotional and callous as we seem.

Psychologists Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne guessed that what's going on is that, in the face of overwhelming suffering that would otherwise move us to help, our self-preservation defenses kick in. They test their theory by looking at the responses of test subjects when they are exposed to mass suffering; when the participants are lead to believe that they will be asked for money, their emotional responses drop (compared to a group where donations were not brought up).

It's as if our empathetic selves are at odds with our self-preservation selves. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. Having empathy for one or two suffering people may pay off in the long run; you help them out today and they - or their friends - help you out in the future. But having empathy for hundreds of sufferers would become a full-time job - leaving you no time to fetch roots and berries for you and your kids. You and your DNA would be gone before you could reap any of the returns.

Nature equipped us with empathy, but made sure we weren't all Mother Theresa's.

worlds apart

From the annals of Yes, You are Reading These Articles on the Same Day:

A high school in Memphis acknowledges it has a sex epidemic when it realizes that 90 of its 800 students (11%) are pregnant.

Japan, with a shrinking population, is worried that its teens aren't enough into sex. A shocking 36% of teenage boys are "indifferent or averse" to sex.

Perhaps an exchange program is in order?

a democracy in peril?

I am usually the first to spout off about the dangers of a partisan divisiveness and hyped political rhetoric. And I have been known to be despondent about the state of politics in America.

But after the tragic shooting of Rep. Giffords this weekend and the fearful calls to pipe down on extreme rhetoric, I had an uncomfortably comforting thought. It occurred to me for the first time that our seemingly unhinged democracy may not be slipping into a hyper-partisan purgatory: it might, rather, be functioning very well.

In spite of the initial fearful reaction of some on the left, Giffords' would-be killer was not a Tea Partier taking Palin's call to "reload" literally. He was just a nut (albeit a fascinating one). But even if he had been fired into action by Sarah Palin's cross-hairs, what occurred to me as remarkable is that there have been no other Tea Party-inspired violent acts, let alone assassination attempts, to date. For all the froth-at-the-mouth appearance of politics in the past decade, even our most rabid extremists have been all bark and no bite.

That's nothing to sniffle at - especially when you look across the Atlantic and see how much more violence can be infused into politics, whether as assassinations in the Netherlands or riots in France. It's true that most of Europe's political violence stems from racial and ethnic tensions, which the US (somewhat) worked out of its system up through the 1991 LA riots.

Even so, when you stop to think that our politically related violence in the past ten years has been limited to attacking abortion clinics and the IRS and the occasional anti-globalization riot - for a nation of 300 million with a reputation for vitriolic politics, that's pretty tame stuff.

You could come up with countless theories to explain our gentler-than-assumed politics, but two come to my mind. For one, we may still be benefiting from the kumbaya effects of 9/11; no matter how much we'd like to destroy the other party, memories of WTC keep us from crossing the line into real destruction. (The cynical view is that having an outside enemy is the best peace-keeper; after all there's almost no such thing as Israeli-on-Israeli violence.)

The other explanation is that, simply, our democracy works. That may sound like a radical idea. But regardless of what one thinks about special interest groups, the Tea Party, radical lefties, Fox TV or Keith Olbermann, Americans have somehow managed to take all their disparate views and political anger and channel them through the political process. We vote, rant on our blogs, sign petitions, post articles (and snarky remarks) on Facebook, show up to protests and sign checks to favorite political groups. We don't, generally, destroy property or physically attack each other.

Not killing each other may seem like a low bar to set "functioning democracy," but we shouldn't forget how recently we fell below that bar in our political life.

is good PR good governance?

Writing about Mayor Cory Booker's tweet-fest as he shoveled snow from Newark's streets last week, TechPresident asks is his "direct-services-by-tweet approach to being mayor more public relations than good governance?"

The question misses the point that good governance and good PR are, in many ways, one and the same.

To be fair, "good governance" is a loose term that sometimes refers strictly to how efficient and effective governments are at delivering services and protecting citizens' rights. But if that were the question TP was asking, it would already have an answer: in no universe is having the CEO of a city push cars out of snowdrifts the most effective way to deal with a storm. He should, as a local Councilman suggested, be directing the clean-up effort from command central.

But I think TP is asking a different question: how much was Booker's front-lines campaign "good PR?" Governing is not just about running a tight ship and doing your work. It's also about leadership, which is essentially PR.

TP knows this. One of its arguments for why Booker may have mis-stepped is that some residents perceived his tweeting as another sign of his elite status (along with his vegetarianism and meditation practice). That, of course, has nothing to do with effective service delivery.

a week of Cialdini - day one: commitment

Even though I live in the city of "MadMen," I had never known anyone in advertising. That changed New Year's Eve when I met my first marketing guy. We didn't have a long chat but he did confirm one thing I've heard about the marketing profession: it cares about psychology. Want ads for marketing jobs, according to my adman, are the only ones that consider it a plus to have an undergraduate degree in psych.

That stands to reason. In most other professions, the quality of your work has little to do with Freud or Piaget; you don't need to understand how the human brain works to successfully patch up an appendectomy, build a house or even win a lawsuit. But in marketing, your competitive advantage is "getting" the human brain.

Early advertisers knew this intuitively, but it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that psychology and marketing officially got hitched. So much so that in 1957 Vance Packard would write "the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry."

A couple of decades later, one psychologist - Robert Cialdini - would catalog advertising's methods of persuasion into his influential book "Influence," breaking them down into six themes: reciprocation, commitment, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the force of "reciprocation" and how it could be used and misused in the effort to strengthen democracy. This week I plan to pick off each of Cialdini's other five persuaders and ask the same question: knowing that we're susceptible to this type of influence, how can we leverage its force for the good of democracy while dampening its negative effects?

Cialdini's second influence - "commitment" or "consistency" - is one we can all probably recognize. Let's say you're in a conversation with a group when someone states an opinion and you casually nod your head. Then someone turns to you and says "oh, why do you agree?" You may not have even been conscious of nodding, but now you're on record as agreeing, so what do you do? Most of will go along with our head's nod and make up some reasons of why we agree. Then, a funny thing will happen: we'll believe our reasons. And most of the time we won't even be aware that we may not have agreed in the first place.

This is the funny force of commitment and consistency. Cialdini calls it "our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done." Once we've made a "commitment" to an idea, a cause or a person we have a strong hankering to stick to it.

That will be obvious for big "commitments" like a marriage proposal or starting a new job. But what's surprising is how powerful little commitments can be.

Freedman and Fraser were two psychologists that tested the power of such small commitments in the 60's. They wanted to see if they could get California homeowners to place large, garish "Drive Carefully" signs on their lawns. Most (that is 83%) who were approached by friendly canvassers understandably refused the eye-sores. But if residents had been asked two weeks earlier to display a small three-inch "please be a safe driver" sign (which most did) then, remarkably, 76% would later agree to the gargantuan signs. Even more surprising to the researchers was that if homeowners had been asked earlier to sign a "keep California beautiful" petition, half would later agree to the plant the hulking signs on their manicured lawns.

What was going on? Freedman and Fraser figured that by first taking the three-inch drive safely sign or signing the beautification petition, residents began to think of themselves as people who cared about safe driving or, more broadly as in the petition case, as "public spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles." When later asked to make a large civic sacrifice, those residents rose to the task because, after all, that's what a civic minded person would do.

Some psychologists have come to understand this "commitment" principle as a by-product of "cognitive dissonance." If you're like me, you use that term to describe moments when you experience two contradictory phenomena, but that's not what the professionals mean by it. In the psych world, "cognitive dissonance" is the experience of doing something that is not in line with what you believe. So if you consider yourself an honest person, but you find yourself lying to your friend, or if you're on a strict no-sweets diet and you sneak a late night brownie, you will experience cognitive dissonance. It is, apparently, an uncomfortable sensation - so much so that people will squirm until they relieve the dissonance in one of two ways, either by changing their behavior or by changing their mind. You can probably guess which way people usually go. Instead of going back to your friend and coming clean or finding a new way to keep you from cheating on your diet, you - like most - will more likely explain to yourself why it was okay to lie in that instance or tell yourself "it's okay if I cheat once in a while." Changing your mind, after all, is easier than changing your behavior.

In many ways this goes completely against how we imagine we live our lives. Most of us think "I decide what I believe or what I want and then I act accordingly." But psychologists tell us we may, in fact, act first and then decide what we believe based on our actions.

This commitment instinct happens whether or not we're the only ones who know we're being consistent. But if others are watching what we say and do, we become even more dogged in our consistency. Two other psychologists, Deutsch and Gerard, tested the difference between private and public consistency by asking three groups to "commit" to a estimate (the length of a line). One group picked a number in their head, and a second group privately wrote down the number, while the third publicly posted their guess. Next, all three groups were given more information about the line and asked to reassess their answers. Even though they had kept their guess "private," those that simply wrote down their guess were less likely to change their first answer than those who kept their guesses in their head. The "act" of writing, it seems, was enough to trigger the force of commitment. But those who went public with their answers were by far the least likely to change their first estimate. Even in the light of convincing information that they were wrong, the pull to appear consistent won out.

Our bent toward consistency is probably, all in all, a good thing. If none of us followed through with our commitments and we all changed our minds with the least whim, the world would be a scarily unpredictable place. Likewise, if we couldn't depend on our earlier beliefs but had to re-think our stance on every issue or decision, the world would come to a standstill as we all stood lost in deep thought. But as Emerson famously phrased, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Sticking with consistency for consistency's sake can lead us down treacherous paths.

Marketers aren't the only ones who know the power of manipulating minds through commitment. The Chinese during the Korean war, according to Cialdini, were masters of converting American POWs into communist supporters; by getting US soldiers to make even the smallest concessions (that "the United States is not perfect") and to copy out pro-Chinese sentences, they were able to slowly nudge the GIs into feeling more favorably about their captors. Back at home, activists use similar techniques to pull in new converts, as Ziad Munson describes in "The Making of Pro-life Activists."

But it doesn't take a skilled manipulator to make consistency a "hobgoblin." We'll lock ourselves into foolish consistencies without much assistance. Nowhere else is that more true than in politics.

There's a good reason why political campaigns only bother seeking out the votes of independents. They all know that when it comes to casting votes, the vast majority of us will vote for the party we voted for last election - which is probably the same party we voted for when we first visited the polls after our 18th birthday. People not only don't change their party; we rarely change our views. As touched on above, that's partly a time saver (rethinking your position takes work), but it's also because how we voted before tells us what we believe and who we are. Those are things we don't change easily.

And it's probably why campaigns don't bother with non-voters. Unlike the California residents mentioned above, non-voters probably think of themselves as decidedly not civic minded. You don't have to just convince them to vote for you, you have to convince them that they are people who vote.

But just as consistency can shackle us to our stubborn ways, like the skilled influencers above, we can also use the commitment principle to inch us toward more "democratic" ways.

As the Chinese wardens showed us, getting someone to abandon their beliefs and consider other points of view does not happen over night. In the US today, we're not going to get die hard pro-lifers to agree right off the bat that abortion should be a woman's choice, just like adamant pro-choicers are unlikely to agree that abortions should be restricted. You'll need to take baby steps, so to speak. This is obvious. But what might be less apparent is how small those baby steps need to be. Instead of starting off by trying to convince pro-lifers that maybe sometimes abortions are okay, you may want to start off by getting them to agree pro-choice activists are humans who share some similar concerns. That step may get them to commit to the idea that they can listen to pro-choicers even though they don't agree with them. Then you open the doors to possible conversation.

You could even get non-voters to the polls, using similar tactics to the "drive safely" study. Instead of encouraging people to vote, campaigns might get more mileage by asking residents to sign petitions to improve their community. That simple act of signing may flip the "i'm a civic minded person" switch and be the thing that gets them walking to the voting booth the following Tuesday.