Lightning Times

Building Successful Habits

"Winners never quit, quitters never win" is a cliché, but Loretta G. Bruening at Psychology Today gives it some substance:

As a teacher and a parent, I'm thinking of the students who give up trying because it hurts to get a bad grade. Instead of trying and failing, they choose not study, and tell themselves “I woulda done good if I studied.” This is the animal brain at work. It resists being vulnerable because weaklings are soon eaten in the state of nature. To rise above this primal fear, students must build a new mental habit. They must link their well-being to self-development rather than self-protection. ...

This is excellent advice. I can tell you from personal experience that I accomplish a lot more - AND feel better about myself - when I train myself to think of each new endeavor as a kind of training exercise, that will - whatever the immediate outcome - make me smarter and stronger for future challenges. That way it's a no-lose proposition.

Go read the whole article.

Psychology Today's Ben Hayden: Reject Neruopolitics

Psychology Today does the right thing with this blog post by neuroscientist Ben Hayden:

Political season is here again, and it's time for the quadrennial re-emergence of the neuropundits. It starts earlier every time, and this time it started in April of this year, with a new paper in Current Biology by Ryoto Kanai and colleagues.

The paper received attention because its third author is a movie star, Colin Firth, who played the King of England, won an Academy Award AND had a paper published in Current Biology. So he's having a good year.

But the content of the paper is interesting too. The authors compared the sizes of several brain structures in liberal and conservative students (in the UK, so we still have to wait for the most interesting results: brain size in tea party members). ...

Anyhow, the authors learned that liberals have larger anterior cingulate cortex than conservatives and that conservatives have a larger amygdala.

I have big no gripes with this paper, which is quite judicious in its conclusions. But I do have a gripe with the media coverage of the study, and with other neuropolitics studies more generally. The media like to pretend that we know what these effects mean. But neuroscience just doesn't really know.

Please go to the link and read the whole thing.

Political Evolution: My Original Response to Jay Dixit

Last August I was contacted by a member of Jay Dixit's staff for the forthcoming article in Psychology Today. My response to Dixit is reproduced in full below.

Actually I was a Democrat for about a year; prior to that I was a member of the Green Party for about seven years, and was very active with the Greens when I first moved to Oregon in early 2000.

As you can probably guess, September 11 changed things, but not as abruptly for me, I think as for some people.  Politically I've always described myself as  "liberal" (not conservative and not "progressive" either), and have never been a pacifist.  I was hawkish on both Afghanistan and Iraq, and did not attempt to conceal my views from my comrades in the local GP chapter.  To their credit, they never tried to pressure me to change my views (as much as they disagreed) or leave the party.  That decision was my own.

I could kind of "sit out" the Afghan campaign as a Green, but Iraq was different.  For one thing, the rhetoric was growing stronger, and the case for invading Iraq was harder to make for the general public (since there was no obvious connection with 9/11 as in the case of Afghanistan).  Mostly, though, it was because my feelings as a Desert Storm vet who knew something about Saddam's regime would not let me continue.

I became a Liebercrat for about a year, until Joe Lieberman dropped out of the Democratic primary.  (Er, the Democratic presidential primary, that is!)  I changed my registration to Republican on the day he dropped out.

Interestingly enough, many of the same things that bothered me about the Democrats as a Green, still bother me as a Republican.  Except for being able to form a consensus on a few issues, the Democrats have a hard time articulating what it is they stand for as a party.  What really turns me off, though, is what I see as an "entitlement mentality" in elections:  Democrats seem to think they deserve my vote simply because they are not Republicans.  

I was one of the 52% who voted for Bush in 2004, and I guess I'm one of the 29% who still support him now.  I support our campaign to transform the Middle East because it is fundamentally a liberal idea - and one that is both humane and necessary.  

This doesn't mean that I agree with Bush on everything.  Even so, though, the President's social conservatism strikes me as sincere and compassionate, and light-years away from the right-wing rhetoric of 70's figures like Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell.

My views on social issues have changed very little since, say, 10 years ago.  In fact, my basic beliefs about gender, sexism, and gay issues are largely identical to Ampersand's. [Dixit's aide had found me through a comment I posted in Alas, a Blog. - aa]  I am active in Oregon's gay rights group Basic Rights Oregon, and belong to the local gay-Jewish group.

On my political blog ("Dreams Into Lightning") I cover the War on Terror and gay and feminist issues.  I don't see this as a contradiction; to me it's the positions of the left-wingers and the right-wingers that seem contradictory.

My politics would be called "neoconservative" now, but I don't consider myself a conservative and I'm not "neo" anything.  I understand some things better than I did, but I've never had to radically change my belief structure.  So I've had a "political conversion" in the sense that my political affiliations have changed, but I don't feel like there's been any kind of "road to Damascus" experience.

Remarks. At the time, I assumed that a gradual evolution of views such as I had expreienced after 9/11 was the exception; in retrospect, I suspect it is more common than the sudden "conversion experience" Jay Dixit was so eager to find. This makes the article's claim to relevance all the more hollow. Perhaps Dixit went out looking for those wild-eyed born-again conservatives he was expecting, and not finding them, realized he'd have to change the focus of his article - which might explain why the finished article is such an incoherent mess.

RELATED: An open letter to Jay Dixit.
Psychology Today examines "the ideological animal".

An Open Letter to Jay Dixit

Dear Jay Dixit:

Last week I was having lunch with Cinnamon Stillwell and she mentioned that she'd been the subject of a Psychology Today article on political conversions. Turns out that this was the same article for which your intern contacted me last August. At the time, I wrote a somewhat lengthy response indicating that I didn't feel my politics had changed abruptly and that I didn't consider myself a case of "political conversion".

I'm curious, though, to know what it is exactly that your article is trying to establish. Because it looks as if you're trying very hard to find psychological, i.e. non-rational, explanations for cases where people adopt "conservative" political beliefs. There's no acknowledgment that such a political shift could come about as the result of a rational assessment of the relevant facts and arguments; nor, conversely, is there any discussion of fear-related psychology on the political left (dire warnings about global warming and the ever-impending American police state spring to mind). And instead of encouraging people to inform themselves on political issues while listening with an open mind to different points of view, your article prescribes the simple expedient of "reminding ourselves to think rationally", as if the fear itself, rather than its objective cause, were the real problem.

In fact, in an entire article devoted to what you call the "9/11 effect", there is not a single direct reference to the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans.

In this light, it's difficult for me to escape the conclusion that your article is ideologically driven. The agenda seems to be to encourage readers to dismiss precisely those fears which, in your analysis, lead to conservative politics. In short, you want to "cure" people of being conservative.

Is this a fair assessment of the goal of your article? Or am I missing something?

If I receive a reply from Jay Dixit, I will post it here.

Related:
Psychology Today examines "the ideological animal".
Political evolution: my original response to Jay Dixit.

Psychology Today Examines "The Ideological Animal"

"First, let me just say: Bullshit!" - Dr. Sanity

"This article tends to end up spouting nonsense." - Shrinkwrapped

"The author, Jay Dixit, is an idiot." - Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

The subject of these accolades is the article "The Ideological Animal" by Jay Dixit, which appears in the current issue of Psychology Today and may be read at the link. An audio interview program by The Sanity Squad, four political bloggers who are also practicing psychologists, produced the reactions quoted above.

Dixit's article featured an interview with Cinnamon Stillwell, who is presented as the prototype of a formerly liberal American who underwent a sudden "political conversion" on September 11, presumably (so the article suggests) as the result of an irrational, fear-based reaction.

Neo-Neocon, who has argued at great length precisely the opposite position - that is, that "A Mind Is a Difficult Thing to Change" - was also interviewed for the article by Jay Dixit, and she recalls that Dixit kept hammering her with questions about "fear", notwithstanding her insistence to the contrary. Her interview was not used for the article.

I was also contacted by Dixit's staff for this article; I replied that I didn't feel I'd undergone a "political conversion" but rather - at most - a subtle and gradual political evolution. But that wasn't what Jay Dixit was looking for.

Related:
An open letter to Jay Dixit.
Political evolution: my original response to Jay Dixit.