How to keep New Year’s resolutions

“New year’s resolutions doomed to failure,” trumpeted a Guardian.uk headline this time last year. The article describes a study by psychologist Richard Wiseman, which found that not even one in four people “managed to stick to their resolutions.”

But we can learn from the minority who kept their resolutions. They “tended to have broken their goal into smaller steps.”  This echoes the advice of David Allen, author of the best seller Getting Things Done.

Those successful with resolutions also told friends about their resolutions and rewarded themselves when achieving goals, reported the Guardian. Economist Tyler Cowen offers an intriguing way to combine these practices. If you resolve to exercise, you can “post a bond with your friend, your spouse, your exercise partner, or someone you won’t (or can’t) lie to. You lose the money if you don’t exercise according to a pre-arranged plan with well-defined quantitative goals.” Cowen suggests that gyms can be the “enforcer” by collecting “a bigger upfront fee and they pay us each time we show up” and complete specified exercise program.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the success of similar strategies for smokers who want to quit.  Known as contingency management programs, participants receive a reward when they stop smoking. Summarizing a study published this month, Local Tech Wire reports that “smokers will quit if rewards are right.”

This was published in the Boulder Daily Camera on January 1, 2011.

Do today’s college students lack empathy?

Psychologists at the University of Michigan presented research on college students’ capacity to feel empathy over the past thirty years. It’s gotten significant amount of press coverage, e.g., for example,  in the USA Today, and PhysOrg, just to name two.  Ross Douhat has a good post on the subject at his New York Times blog. The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) also covered the story, and the Camera’s editorial advisory board weighed in on the subject.  Here’s my contribution, as printed in the June 5 edition:

Hold on. Before making broad statements about today’s college students and what erodes empathy, it’s important make sure there’s supporting evidence.

The study, summarized at Professor Sara Konrath’s website, focuses on how students answered surveys designed to measure factors associated with empathy. Over thirty years, scores on the two factors best associated with empathic behavior have declined.

Surveys are one way to measure empathy. But are survey results consistent with other methods, such as peer ratings, cleverly designed behavioral tests, and measures of mirror neuron activity? Outside the lab, students volunteer for or donate to charitable causes. Has this decreased over the years?

For sake of argument, say the various methods tell the same story, that today’s students are less empathic. Many factors can be involved. These may include trends in parenting styles, prevalence of single-parent households, and how many siblings the students have. The students’ majors may also be a factor. To stereotype myself, what if recent empathy studies attracted mostly physicists and engineers? If these are relevant factors, have they changed among students surveyed over the past thirty years?

Yes, time spent on-line or playing violent video games are reasonable suspects. Surely the surveys can gather such information about the students, if don’t already.  Are these and other factors correlated with how the students scored empathy-wise?

But don’t forget, correlation does not mean causation.  A student’s capacity for empathy may predict whether he buys Guitar Hero or Grand Theft Auto.

Thanks to my wife, a psychologist, for her insights and for pointing out an flawed argument in an early draft.

Regarding college students’ rates of volunteering over the past 30 years, I realize that this probably is not a measure of empathy, as psychologists use the term these days. After all, people can volunteer for causes for many reasons. Still, such trends would be interesting to know in light of such research

The virtue of gratitude

Published in last Saturday’s Daily Camera: (as printed)

I could go on and on about how I am grateful for my wife — and I’m sure she’ll ask me to “count the ways” when she reads this.  For now, I’ll thank her for showing me, and occasionally reminding of, the importance of gratitude.  Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday, as gratitude is about being thankful.

Recent psychological research has shown gratitude to be a fine virtue.  “There are really tangible, concrete benefits to being grateful,” says Professor Robert Emmons, a leading researcher in the field.  As the New York Times reports, “health improves, relationships get better, people are more active and enthusiastic. … Dr. Emmons said that even people who are lonely and isolated can become less so.” Check out his most recent book on the subject, simply titled Thanks!

Why Only Bush Could Bring Socialism to America

Writes economist Bryan Caplan at George Mason U.:

If a Democratic president were backing a $700B bail-out, I have to think that Republicans would be crying “Socialism!” But if a Republican president does the same, the bail-out’s natural enemies keep silent out of loyalty or ingroup bias. It’s a lot like the contemporary Republican reaction to Nixon’s price controls – if our boy is doing it, how bad can it be?

The scary thing is that once party Y gives the Inane a chance, party X may be able to finish the job without credible resistance. After party Y surrenders the rhetorical high ground by embracing the Inane, what’s to stop party X from making Inanity a way of life?

Read the whole post here.

Mistakes Were Made, but not by me

I recently finished reading this excellent book about cognitive dissonance by Carol Tavris and Elliiot Aronson.  The conclude:

Perhaps the greatest lesson of dissonance theory is that we can’t wait around for people to have moral conversions, personality transplants, sudden changes of heart, or new insights that will cause them to sit up straight, admit error, and do the right thing.  Most human beings and institutions are going to do everything in their power to reduce dissonance in ways that are favorable to them, that allow them to justify their mistakes and maintain business as usual.  They will not be grateful for the evidence that their methods of interrogation have put innocent people in prison for life.  They are not going to thank us for pointing out to them why their study of some new drug, into who development they have poured millions, is fatally flawed.  And no matter how deftly or gently we do it, even the people who love us dearly are not going to be amused when we correct their fondest self-serving memory … with facts.

I should keep this in mind.

Another fine quote about reducing dissonance is from former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres: “When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”  (See p. 226-227 of the book for the context of the quote.)

(I love the book jacket shown above.  Too bad the paperback doesn’t have the same one.)

Refuting arguments and then correcting them

Steven at Black Belt Bayesian writes:

If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.

A very good insight.  I should get to the Paul Graham essay he refers to.

(via OvercomingBias)

Infant voters & narcissist candidates

From George Will’s Newsweek review of The Cult of the Presidency, by Gene Healy:

If you can name it, presidents are responsible for it. The name for this is infantilization. “The average American,” said President Richard Nixon, “is just like the child in the family—you give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something.” Vice President Al Gore said the government should act like “grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role.”

Such demented talk encourages presidential candidates to make delusional promises—energy independence in eight years (Mike Huckabee), “an excellent teacher in every classroom” and “every school an outstanding school” (John Edwards, who presumably knows how every school can stand out when all are outstanding), a “perfect” nation (see above) and so on.

The last presidential candidate to talk sense about the office was fictional. In an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing,” the Republican candidate, who was not the hero, was asked, “How many jobs will you create?” “None,” he replied, adding: “Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The president’s job is to get out of the way.”

An occupational hazard of the inflated presidency is a hazard to the nation. It is what Healy (borrowing a term from psychiatry) calls Acquired Situational Narcissism. As repositories of absurd expectations, and surrounded by sycophants, presidents become deranged. Inevitably, the inflation of expectations causes what Healy calls an “arc of disillusionment” that diminishes one president after another.

For a summary of the book, see Healy’s article in Reason magazine.

Conservatives for hope and optimism?

Update to: What warrants explaining: equality or inequality?

Consider what Arthur Brooks wrote in his recent post at the Freakonimics blog:

In my book I argue that conservatives are more optimistic about the future than liberals are, and believe in each individual’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement.Liberals are more likely to see themselves and others as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help.

Via Arnold Kling at EconLog.

Psychological Biases and Investing

I recently finished reading a book about this called Investment Madness, by John R. Nofsinger, an Associate Professor of Finance at Washington State University. It’s very clear, well-organized, well-referenced, and a quick read. The publisher has put the first chapter on-line here. From the introduction:

We are all prone to having psychological preconceptions or biases that make us behave in certain ways. These biases influence how we assimilate the information we come in contact with on a daily basis. They also have an impact on how we utilize that information to make decisions.

Some of the decisions that are influenced by our psychological biases can have a large impact on our personal wealth—or the lack of it. I have written this book to try to show you how your own psychological biases can creep into your investment decisions and sabotage your attempts at building wealth.

In last chapter Nofsinger summarizes the biases in a handy table, which I reproduce here:

Psychological Bias	Effect on Investment Behavior	Consequence
Overconfidence	Trade too much	Pay too much in commissions and taxes
Overconfidence	Take too much risk and fail to diversify	Susceptible to big losses
Attachment	Become emotionally attached to a security and see it through rose-colored glasses	Susceptible to big losses
Endowment	Want to keep the securities received	Not achieving a match between your investment goals & your investments
Status Quo	Hold back on changing your portfolio or allocation and begin starting your 401(k)	Failure to adjust asset allocation & begin contributing to retirement plan
Seeking Pride	Sell winners too soon	Lower return and higher taxes
Avoiding Regret	Hold losers too long	Lower return and higher taxes
House Money	Take too much risk after winning	Susceptible to big losses
Snake Bit	Take too little risk after losing	Lose chance for higher return in the long term
Get Even	Take too much risk trying to break even	Susceptible to big even losses
Social Validation	Feel that it must be good if others are investing in the security	Participate in a price bubble which ultimately causes you to buy high and sell low
Mental Accounting	Fail to diversify	Not receiving the highest return possible for the level of risk taken
Cognitive Dissonance	Ignore information that conflicts with prior beliefs and decisions	Reduces your ability to evaluate and monitor your investment choices
Representativeness	Think things that seem similar must be alike. So a good company must be a good investment.	Purchase overpriced stocks
Familiarity	Think companies that you know seem better & safer	Failure to diversify and put too much faith in the company in which you work

Travis Morien (linked in the table) has a good section on investment psychology here. A book I read a few years ago, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, is also worthwhile. Cornell U. Psychology Professor Thomas Gilovich is a coauthor, and also wrote How We Know What Isn’t So, which I also enjoyed.

Derren Brown hypnosis for color-blindness, personal growth, and instant religious conversion

Last night Liz and I watched an episode of Darren Brown’s Mind Control on the SciFi Channel. There were three remarkable segments in this show. In one of them he used his skill in detecting lies to navigate an obstacle course, and (if you believe him) was confident enough in his ability to risk serious injury. Another involved his using “anchoring” techniques of Neuro-linguistic Programming to make a woman colorblind (watch it). A third involved him teaching a student how to play the piano is quite a remarkable way. I won’t spoil it, so just watch.

Browsing around YouTube, I found Derren Brown’s “Instant Conversion” videos where, apparently, he “converts” non-believers into believers (in some kind of religious belief.) Quite impressive, intriguing, and well, creepy! [watch part 1, part 2].