David Ropeik2013-05-23T03:39:22-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=david-ropeikCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David RopeikGood old fashioned elbow grease.Fear, Good and Bad: Lessons From an Awful Week in Bostontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31542352013-04-25T17:51:52-04:002013-04-25T17:47:11-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
The other lesson is how naïve it is to suggest that we can simply decide to Keep Calm and Carry On, "or the terrorists win." Fear is not something we can turn off, something we can consciously control. President Obama said "The American people refuse to be terrorized. If you want to know who we are, how we respond to evil, that's it; selflessly, compassionately, unafraid." As laudable as those aspirations are, we simply can not refuse to be terrorized, or choose to be unafraid. That's not how human cognition and our perception of risk works. When we are threatened, our response to potential danger is far more a matter of feelings than facts, gut reaction than reason, and much more subconscious than under our purposeful conscious control. In fact, the more afraid we are, the 'dumber' we get, as neural wiring and chemistry literally diminish our powers reason in favor of more instinctive responses. As neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux and psychologists like Paul Slovic have found, as history has repeatedly taught us, and as current events are reminding us, fear readily trumps reason when safety and survival are truly on the line. The Friday shutdown of Boston and major surrounding cities, which many are now starting to question as an irrational overreaction, sure didn't feel that way when people were afraid.
To be sure, words like 'terror' and 'fear' are more dramatic than what many of us have been feeling. It's probably fairer to say that at times like these many people feel more 'unsettled', or 'worried' or 'on edge.' But make no mistake. Fear is definitely part of these emotions, probably at the heart of them; instinctive, protective fear, that we can't simply turn off because we are called on to do so.
So what do we do with that instinct for self protection. Or rather, what does it do to us? Harm, certainly. Consider the United Airlines flight out Boston, carrying marathoners home the day after the bombing. Some passengers heard two men speaking Arabic and became so upset they forced the plane back to the gate, where the Arabic speakers were escorted off and put on another flight.
Fear heightens our suspicions -- of people, packages, places. Many people may think twice about attending large outdoor civic celebrations. A TV reporter who was feet away from the bomb nearest the finish line, enjoying the civic celebration that is the Boston Marathon, said "It was the perfect day, a showcase of everything that is good. And then in that moment... it was a moment of the most terrible possibility realized. If this isn't safe, what is?" A mother wept as she watched her 12 year-old daughter place a pink teddy bear at the makeshift memorial near the finish line for the bombing victims. "Before, I felt safe. I didn't fear anything," she said. "But now, I can't trust people. We feel hopeless."
Psychologically, loss of trust and increased feelings of vulnerability interfere with our ability to comfortably live our normal lives. Biologically, such persistent worry translates into chronic stress, a Fight or Flight or Freeze response that turns up the systems we need to protect ourselves when peril is imminent -- heart rate and blood pressure, more cognitive focus on sensory inputs than careful rational thinking -- and turns down the ones that are not of immediate value -- our immune system, fertility, long term memory. Worrying is bad for our physical health in profound ways. (See Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky)
But in many ways our response to fear is positive (beyond the obvious truth that caution protects us). Shared vulnerability unites us in the desire for safety and protection. We evoke the broad tribal/human commonalities we all share -- by city, by country -- when we share the same fear of what Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley called "... the darkness that can lurk in the human heart," the ever-present possibility of wanton mass murder so unpredictable and unpreventable that we feel powerless to protect ourselves as individuals. We have learned to rely in part on our tribe(s) for our health and safety and in a desire for tribal acceptance and protection we do things that demonstrate our loyalty to the tribe, like caring for other members.
Consider the altruism of those who rushed toward danger to help the injured, even as most, quite naturally, fled. Consider those who shared their clothing with shivering runners, gave blood, or sheltered out-of-towners who couldn't get to their hotels. Consider the moving displays of unity with Bostonians and Americans coming from everywhere; messages of prayer and solidarity from governments around the globe, people laying roses at the gates of the U.S Embassy in Moscow, Afghanis holding a sign that reads "From Kabul to Boston with Love" , even the 'hated' New York Yankees honoring solidarity with Boston.
Certainly those are expressions of compassion. But they are also a classic response of social animals to fear. And they are the kind of thing that occur again and again, everywhere this sort of violence frightens us. These responses are so universal that they must be part of the innate human condition, and certainly not unique to any one city nor just to urban dwellers, as Maria Konnikova and others suggest.
There's potential danger in that too, of course. Because so many were worried, the public and businesses willingly went along with law enforcement requests to stay inside (they were voluntary, not mandatory), leaving streets eerily empty and reminding some of a police state. We rightly honor the first responders who protect us, and they were cheered by flag-waving crowds as they left the Watertown area after the arrest of the second suspect, but "Groupthink" deference to officials born out of fear has allowed governments to seize civil liberties, and has started many a war, even genocide. The widespread fear that 'the homeland" was under attack certainly helped the Bush Administration lie a frightened public into support for attacking Iraq.
But the point here is not to argue whether fear is good or bad. It can be both, depending on what we do with it. The point here is that simply declaring that we are unafraid, or that we should be, is not enough to make it so, and appeals like Bruce Schneier's in The Atlantic to "Keep Calm and Carry On", laudable as they are, are naïve, because we simply can not completely overpower our innate instincts for self-preservation. They are an inherent, automatic, protective part of who we are.
So instead of trying to be unafraid, the wiser course may be for us to simply try to keep our fears in check, and not allow excessive fear to become "the mind-killer" (Frank Hebert's Dune) that clouds our ability to behave intelligently, the kind of "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror", as Roosevelt put it, that makes us dumb and racist and paranoid and stressed out. Maybe the most realistic advice is captured by something Katherine Patterson wrote in Jacob Have I Loved; "To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another."]]>Fear Shuts Down Bostontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31177762013-04-19T17:58:03-04:002013-04-19T17:59:13-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
Make no mistake. The 19 year-old Chechnyan, who had lived with older brother Tamerlan in Cambridge for years and who had attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School and was studying at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, is thought to be a dangerous man. Police say last night he and his brother robbed a convenience store near MIT, shot dead an MIT police officer who stopped them, carjacked a car nearby (telling the driver they were the marathon bombers before letting him go) and led police on a 10 mile chase to Watertown, throwing explosives out of the car at pursuing police. The chase ended in a wild, long gunfire shoot out with dozens of shots fired, Tamerlan dead (police say they found explosives or a detonator on his body) and a police officer wounded. Some neighborhood houses are perforated, through to interior rooms and furniture, with bullet holes.
But make no mistake that the risk here is infinitesimal. Even for those who remain in the immediate 20 block area of Watertown where the suspect is believed to be trapped (most have been evacuated) -- at this writing police say they have gone through 60-70 percent of the area -- the risk that they will be hurt is tiny. Statistically. But not emotionally. The fear is very real. And in the name of that fear incredible things are happening.
Easily more than a thousand law enforcement and military personnel have turned the area into a heavily armed zone. Military helicopters hover overhead. SWAT teams and bomb trucks and armored vehicles are everywhere. (The photos are dramatic, frightening all by themselves.) The economy and civic life of one of the biggest cities in America has been shut down. The cost of this response could easily exceed a hundred million dollars.
But no one, yet, is seriously questioning whether this response is an overreaction. People are staying home. Businesses are closing. The public is complying with the response, because though the risk may be statistically tiny, the fear is HUGE and REAL and NOW. In these circumstances human cognition defaults to something called 'loss aversion', when the emotional power of danger and loss outweighs the more rational consideration of other factors. Another things happens when we are afraid. The fight or flight or freeze response to fear shifts neural chemistry and systems in the brain so we give way more weight to emotion and instinct than to careful cognitive rational reason. The question about whether this WAS an overreaction, which will probably come up after this all calms down, will sound logical LATER. It sounds absurd now, because we are afraid.
Yet another aspect of risk perception psychology is playing out at this moment. We are glued to our TVs and Twitter feeds and websites and radio stations... and not just because we're stuck inside with nothing else to do. Like moths to flame, we are drawn to information about potentially imminent risk, because knowledge is empowerment, and the feeling of control is reassuring. As one TV anchor person said, "I wish this would end. It's the beginning of the healing process. You want to know who did it and what their motivations were." Knowledge is power, and power is control, and without control we are more afraid. So we want to know.
Never mind that most of what is coming out of the media is a repetitious, constant rehash of the key facts, mixed with an awful lot of silly babble to fill the time between the last actual development and the next. We really could leave the TV or radio or computer for a while and come back, and not have missed anything that would help keep us safe.
In fact, it would keep us safe to step away from the coverage. Heightened awareness feeds heightened fear, and fear causes physical stress that, if it persists, does real harm to our health, from raised blood pressure, weakened immune systems, and other impacts. But the need for information -- the need for control -- turns us into 24/7 information victims, most of us at far greater risk from the stress caused by constant alarmist reports than from the killer on the loose himself.
Yet another critical aspect of risk perception psychology playing out in this incredible moment is the importance of trust, and in that sense, the overreaction of law enforcement and the military is a good thing, not only now but down the road. We can't protect ourselves from threats like this, the unpredictable wanton madness wrought by someone who has lived among us that springs up now and again to remind us of how vulnerable we really are. We need the government to do that. To the extent that we are confident in them, we fear these sorts of things less than if we didn't think they were doing all they could to protect us. For this event, and others in the future, across America, the heavy response is adding to a foundation of trust in the authorities to keep us as safe as they can.
Given the powerfully emotional nature of how we respond to danger, all the moreso the more real and imminent and "it could happen to me" the threat feels, it would be incredibly naïve and disrespectful to suggest that the response of the government, and ours as individuals, don't make sense. Of course they do. Because risk perception is not just a matter of the facts, but how they feel. Our responses may not make intellectual sense tomorrow, or whenever this calms down (hopefully with no or minimal additional violence), when we can look back at things in the cool calm of rational hindsight, but they make emotional sense now. Because we are afraid.]]>Survey: News Biz Shooting Itself in the Head Trying to Stay Profitabletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29160382013-03-22T10:23:27-04:002013-05-22T05:12:01-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
This retreat from the implicit promise of any news organization to help keep the public reasonably well informed, by shrinking staffs and content and re-defining 'news' as "whatever people are talking about around the water cooler," is the result of a new media marketplace in which there are many more competitors, so the pie of available listeners/readers/viewers is sliced into more, and thus much thinner, pieces. Profits drop (in the '80s, TV stations made a stunning 30-40 percent operating profit, newspapers an incredible 15-25 percent!) which leads to staff reductions, which lead to fewer and shorter/shallower stories. And the explosion of news media providers has turned the information marketplace into a 24/7 scream-a-thon in which newsrooms have to work harder and harder to attract viewers or readers, which leads to content that is more and more noise rather than news.
What's really amazing is how the supposedly smart people who run the news business don't realize that by reducing their staffs and dumbing down their content, they are shooting themselves in the head. A recent survey of American's news consumption confirms the self-defeating ignorance of abandoning news content in pursuit of news consumers.
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in The Media reports Many Americans Abandon News Outlets, Citing Less Information
Nearly one-third -- 31 percent -- of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.
Do you hear that, newspaper publishers and TV station managers and online newsroom owners? Less news = smaller audience = less profit. And 'less news' doesn't just mean fewer stories. The majority of those lost readers and viewers left not because there were fewer stories, but because the stories that did make the news had less news in them.
The Pew survey is both bad news, and good news, for the news industry. It casts a harsh light on the ultimately self-destructive way that the legacy 'Old Media" news operations are trying to reinvent themselves. But to be fair, the 31 percent of news consumers who expected more from their news provider and left when they stopped getting it were largely older, whiter and richer. It may well be that a 300-word story leaves a 60-year-old wondering where the rest of the information is, but satisfies a 30-year-old. Consumer expectations depend on which news consumer/demographic we're talking about. They're not all the same.
It may also be that quick shallow stories are less a problem for younger readers who are used to searching/clicking around for their news rather than getting it all in one place. As Matthew Yglesias rightly points out in "The Glory Days of American Journalism", the availability of information, including in-depth information, has never been greater.
But the Pew survey also notes that most news consumers still get their news from just one source, and for a majority of people, particularly those with less education, that source is local TV news, and that is not good news for an informed public, because in that Old Media slice of the information marketplace, the trends of shrinking staffs and shallow pandering content and 'let's fool 'em with fancy graphics and phony Live Shots" has been particularly bad for the better part of two decades. You know how they say good satire is only fun because it's true? Check out these spot-on take offs. KYOU News
and The Onion's nonpareil Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere
But even for local TV news, the Pew survey can be taken as good news, or at least good advice for news providers. It suggests that across the entire population there remains a market for news, a public hunger for information about what's going on out there in the world that is not only interesting but also relevant and useful, and reasonably thorough. The news organizations that figure out how to fulfill that hunger can prosper, each within the realities of their own medium and area of focus, of course. Those that follow the path of shrinking the news content down, and dumbing it down - no matter whether they are TV, newspaper, online, or a combination - will face the frustrated judgment of the market which was well-summed up by Bruce Springsteen in "57 channels (and nothin' on)"?
So I bought a .44 magnum it was solid steel cast
And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it blast
'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet
And they busted me for disturbing the almighty peace
Judge said "What you got in your defense son?"
"Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on."
]]>On the Cognitive and Historic Roots of Our Destructive Modern Polarizationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26269962013-02-11T10:22:41-05:002013-04-13T05:12:01-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
The angry us-against-them nature of our polarization suggests that the issues we're fighting over are just surrogates for a more primal conflict. Whether we're fighting about a current issue like abortion, gun control, climate change, or a more historic conflict, like the centuries-old dispute over the appropriate size and rights of government, the battles have become so mean-spirited and hostile, there must be something more profound at stake than just the issues themselves. Evidence from several fields of social science, and a review of recent American history, offers the following possible explanation.
Research on the theory of Cultural Cognition has found that our views on issues of the day are in fact only reflections of deeper worldviews about the basic way we prefer society to operate. We adopt views on various issues based not just on the facts but so our views align with those of the groups with which we most closely identify. This helps us feel safe, since as social animals we depend on our group, our tribe, literally for our safety and survival. Agreeing with the group maintains us as a protected member in good standing. And if everyone in our group agrees, that social unity increases our group's influence in the competition with other tribes for setting society's rules. The more powerful and successful our group is, the safer we feel.
Cultural Cognition identifies four basic groups;
Individualists, who prefer a society that maximizes individual freedom and choice and control. (They prefer less government, i.e. "socialism".)
Communitarians, who prefer a 'we're all in it together' society that sacrifices some personal liberty in the name of the greater common good. (They prefer a more active role for government.)
Hierarchists, who prefer a traditional and unchanging society operating by fixed and commonly accepted hierarchies of social and economic class. (They prefer less government butting in and making things fair.)
Egalitarians, who prefer a more flexible society, unconstrained by traditional fixed hierarchies. (They prefer more government, as an engine of social and economic equity.)
The influence of these underlying worldviews on how we feel about individual issues is profound. Cultural Cognition research has found that these basic group identities are more accurate predictors of our positions on many of the contentious issues of the day than political affiliation, education, religion, or any of the more common demographic identifiers.
By itself, Cultural Cognition does not explain why feelings have grown so fierce and minds so closed, why our disputes have become so nasty and angry and personal. But a related field of social science may add an important piece to the puzzle. Cultural Cognition plays a role in the psychology of risk perception, the way we perceive and respond to potential danger. This critical system helps keep us safe, so it triggers deep and powerful instincts, one of which is to look to our tribal affiliations for a sense of safety when we are worried. The more threatened and unsafe we feel, the stronger these instinctive behaviors become. The more we think the Indians are attacking, the more likely we are to circle the wagons, a black and white, us-against-them world in which everybody inside the circle is an ally, and anybody outside is the enemy.
This would explain the fierce combative nature of our tribal polarized society, if in fact people feel more threatened and worried now than they did 30 or 40 years ago, and a fair case can be made that, because of several recent events and trends, they do.
1. The '60s and '70s were a uniquely liberal period in American history, a time in which society moved sharply toward the kind of world preferred by egalitarian-communitarians and away from the kind of society preferred by individualists and hierarchists. The Supreme Court legalized abortion, expanded civil rights, established rights for accused criminals, and suspended the death penalty. Congress and the Johnson administration gave us The Great Society.
These sweeping government interventions, breaking down traditional rules in the name of egalitarian fairness and equity and 'we're all in this together' communitarianism, hardly made society 'great' to conservative hierarchists or individualists, who prefer a world in which there is less of a role for government, not more. Just how threatening can be seen in the way these liberal changes affected voting patterns in the "red' parts of the country where the population is predominantly more individualist-hierarchist (politically, more conservative and libertarian). (An interesting aside on this change. The red state-blue state distinction, an accepted icon in our modern polarized society, didn't even begin until NBC commentator Tim Russert popularized it in 2000.) When President Lyndon Johnson said, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "we (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation", his remark presciently captured how powerfully threatened people feel when society no longer works the way they want it to and another tribe's worldview is in control.
But the liberal '60s and '70s alone did not give us the nasty polarization of today. The conservative backlash against the liberal '60s and '70s helped elect Ronald Reagan and create modern conservatism, but, famously, Reagan and liberal Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill could still 'have a beer together' at the end of a hard day of political fighting. From the halls of Congress to the streets of America, political disagreements were plenty intense, but there were nowhere near as angry and hostile and closed-minded as they have become. So what else might have made modern times feel more threatening, and fueled the virulent rancor of today?
2. One possible cause might be something as fundamental as how much and how fast the world has changed in the past few decades. Research into the association between basic personality traits and political affiliation by Jonathan Haidt and others has found that, in their personal lives, conservatives tend to be less open to change and more comfortable with things that are familiar and orderly and done 'the way they've always been done' (note that many conservatives argue that marriage should only be heterosexual because 'that's traditional, the way it's always been'). Those personal preferences for predictability and stability are certainly consistent with the sort of society hierarchists prefer, a society that is stable and operating under a familiar, orderly, and unchanging traditional status quo.
But if anything has been constant in the past 30 years, it is change. Consider how sweeping and rapid the changes have been in our post-industrial techno/information age, in almost every phase of our lives, and how different our world is today than it was in 1980. For people whose personalities and underlying worldviews prefer more stability and less change, this can't help but be unsettling. A dynamic world is, after all, an inherently unstable and threatening world to someone who is comfortable when things change less, not more.
3. In a related piece of research just published, investigators found that people who by their general nature tend to be more fearful, also tend to hold more conservative positions. In "Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out-Group Political Preferences," Rose McDermott, lead author, said "People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don't know, and things they don't understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security." "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative." This finding speaks to the generally more hostile, vituperative closed-minded nature of how hierarchists and individualists express their polarization.
4. But while change may inherently feel threatening to hierarchists, and the liberal government intervention of the '60s and 7'0s may feel threatening to individualists, another profound trend in the past few decades has contributed to how threatened people feel in all the Cultural Cognition tribes; the growing income inequality gap in the United States, which began to grow in the late '70s.
Survey after survey shows that, across all the Cultural Cognition tribes, more and more people feel that they are 'have-nots', that their resources are dwindling, that they have less and less control over their lives and their futures. The loss of control -- powerlessness -- is profoundly threatening. Research into risk perception has found that loss of control is one of the major psychological factors that makes any circumstance feel scarier.
The evidence that the inequality gap is making people across the population feel powerless, and threatened, can be seen in the similarity between two seemingly disparate groups, the Tea Party movement and the "Occupy" movement. Both are angry at the loss of control over their lives. Tea Party members -- mostly individualists and hierarchists -- blame government for imposing limits on individual freedom and butting in with 'socialist' (egalitarian) rules and regulations. The Occupy movement, mostly communitarians and egalitarians, blame the rich one percent, the powerful who selfishly benefit by using their wealth to enforce the hierarchical status quo. But though each camp blames targets appropriate to their underlying preferences about how society should operate, the cri de coeur of both groups is the same, a sense of losing control, a modern version of "Don't Tread on Me!", the motto on an early American colonial flag as people in the colonies began to assert control over their lives. It is interesting that that 'Don't Tread on Me" (Gadsden) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag
flag features an image of a coiled rattlesnake, striking. Except to feed, rattlesnakes only strike when they feel threatened.
Certainly other factors are contributing to the severity of our modern divisiveness. Some are themselves manifestations of the way the deeper threats described above fuel the underlying passions of our polarized world.
5. The explosion of lobbyists since the '70s (a $100 million industry in Washington D.C. in 1976 - $2.5 billion in 2006), and countless new interest groups screaming their narrow passions, has made the combat over issues much more high profile and intense, which leaves the winners more pleased, and losers more angry and threatened when issues aren't decided their way.
6. The cynical 'appeal to the base' realities of modern primary elections is more and more being done by promoting fear of the other candidate or party. And firing up 'the base' means inflaming the passions of those true believers who are already more motivated by their inherent tribal identities and affiliations, and readier to circle the wagons.
7. The shallower/faster paced modern news media focus more than ever on the tribal conflict of politics rather than the ideas of policy. And within the newly democratized media, a new breed of opinion merchants can reach their tribes and preach their polarized version of the truth as never before, especially those who so angrily play directly to the fears of hierarchists and individualists,
The explanation of our modern polarization offered here is an admittedly speculative synthesis based on the interplay of diverse events and trends and elements of human psychology. And precisely because this thesis suggests that our ideological warfare stems from really deep parts of human cognition, it may not help much. The fundamental need for a sense of control in order to feel safe, and our instinct to turn to the tribe for that safety, are so deep, so intimately tied to survival, and so subconscious and beyond our free will, that considering them intellectually is not likely to change these feelings or undo this powerful, innate part of human cognition. Only changing the underlying conditions that trigger these feelings can do that, and that is a much taller order.
But maybe it might help a bit if we can see -- and honestly admit -- that the arguments we're having about the issues of the day really aren't about the facts at all, or about politics, but are really just reflections of more profound aspects of human behavior. Maybe that recognition can help us step back a bit from the hot front lines and begin to understand and respect the honest reasons for the depths of the passions of those with whom we disagree. And perhaps that can provide a basis for starting to temper our own behavior and talk with each other again, rather than at and past each other.
Maybe understanding the historic events and behavioral roots that have produced these venomously angry polarized times can help us let go of at least a little of our own deep instinct to align with the tribe in the name of safety and protection. And maybe, in the name of the very protection that we all seek, this can help realize how tribalism and ideological impasse make us more vulnerable the large scale risks that threaten us all, challenges that are far too big and complex for any one tribe to solve alone.]]>Here's Something to Really Worry About -- More of Us Are Worriedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25832302013-01-31T13:23:56-05:002013-04-02T05:12:01-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/Washington Post/ABC News survey taken in December found that increasing numbers of people are pessimistic about the future. 44 percent said they were fearful about what "the new year holds in store" for them personally, and 56 percent were fearful for what lies ahead for the world generally. And the pessimism is getting worse. The numbers are the gloomiest this survey has recorded in 11 years.
Regardless of whether you have traded your own rose colored lenses for grey ones, you, and all of us, need to worry about such pessimism, because worry does all sorts of harm, both personally and to society. Personally, worry/pessimism contributes to chronic stress, which is bad for our health in lots of ways. What's more, the response to stress includes hormonal changes that make you more sensitive to any subsequent threatening signal. So what might not have felt scary in better times now sets off alarms, and what was only a little threatening before now feels like more of a threat. We do have to fear fear itself. Biologically, it becomes a positive feedback loop.
Socially, worry changes our behavior in lots of ways. In the language of cognitive science, worry switches us from a default mode of Optimism Bias -- those rose colored lenses that let us believe "It Won't Happen To Me" or "My marriage/job/health/vacation will turn out better than average" -- to Loss Aversion, a default sense when comparing losses and gains, or risks and benefits, that gives the losses and risks more emotional weight than equivalent gains or benefits. When we are worried and Loss Aversion is shaping how the world feels, the glass looks more half empty than half full.
Our spending and investing behaviors change. Our travel and leisure behaviors change. But far ominously than any of those things, worry changes the way we treat each other. As worry and pessimism rise, we more readily adjust our views and values so they align with those in the groups we most closely identify with, and the more emotionally important our affiliation with those groups becomes. That's adaptive behavior for social animals like us, who have evolved to rely on our group -- our tribe -- for our own health and safety. So the more worried we feel about "what the new year holds in store," the more closely and fiercely we hold to the views common to our group and the more closed-minded we become to any view that conflicts with our own, because competing views threaten the tribal/ideological unity that is literally important to our sense of safety and well-being.
(This all happens way below consciousness, and for the most part, beyond our free will. It's part of the instinctive system of risk perception that our brain uses, mostly behind the scenes, to try and keep us safe.)
The survey, then, is grounds for pessimism about finding common ground and making progress on the huge challenges we face... all of us, regardless of which groups or ideologies we belong to; climate change, the federal fiscal crisis, looming insolvency of social support systems. In fact, the survey offers particularly bleak specifics about the polarized divide American has been spiraling down into for decades.
Look at how people answered the main Post/ABC survey question... by general ideology;
Seven out of every ten Republicans are worried about what the future holds for them, personally. That is frightening. But you might think that makes sense since a Democrat is president. Sadly, the results are not simply a matter of whose tribe is in charge. People's optimism/pessimism is shaped by larger trends and conditions that impact us all. In the chart below, covering years in which both parties have held the White House (the surveys are taken at the end of each year), note how, generally, optimism (the blue and green lines) is going down, and pessimism (the purple and red ones) is rising. For all of us.
It is hardly news that America has become more divided. But this survey offers fresh support that these divisions are not about gun control or abortion or any of the individual issues we fight about, but about deeper dissatisfactions and worries -- about the economy and/or the environment and/or whether society is getting too progressive or conservative -- which add up to a growing general pessimism that the future is more threatening than promising.
That is really scary, because they way the human animal responds to such a general sense of being threatened, is to grow even more tribal and divided, more closed minded and unable to cooperate, more and more locked into an ultimately destructive combat that is more about fighting for our own individual tribe than for solutions to the huge overarching problems we all face in a society that, like it or not, we share.]]>The Supreme Court Ruling on Guns; There Is Something for Both Sides in the Culture War Over Gun Controltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24876142013-01-16T15:34:42-05:002013-03-18T05:12:01-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
There is no question that District of Columbia v. Heller was precisely the sort of judicial activism the conservative justices of the Supreme Court promised not to do. In a 5 to 4 decision those justices ruled that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to own guns for personal self-defense, despite the amendment's opening language -- "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," -- which pretty clearly says that gun ownership was specifically preserved by the founding fathers in the interest of the common defense against a tyrannical government (remember, this was the issue on their minds back then). Gun rights advocates cheered. Gun control advocates cried foul.
But even though the 5-4 majority ruling makes an intellectual end run around the language of the Second Amendment to get to their ruling, they very clearly state that society (government, convened to collectively protect us from what we can't protect ourselves from as individuals) has the right to, and legitimate interest in controlling gun ownership, in several specific ways.
On pp. 54 and 55, the majority opinion, written by conservative bastion Justice Antonin Scalia, states: "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited..."
It is "... not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."
"Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
"We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller (an earlier case) said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those "in common use at the time". We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons.'"
The court even recognizes a long-standing judicial precedent "... to consider... prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons."
That language refers to many of the gun control ideas being discussed now. Prohibitions on carrying 'dangerous and unusual weapons' certainly might apply to assault rifles. Ammunition clips that hold 100 bullets... 30... even 10, are hardly 'usual', certainly not for self-defense, or hunting.
"... conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms" might include requiring that everybody who wants to own a gun has to get a permit, and have a background check, conditions and qualifications that already pertain to purchases through gun stores, but not through private gun shows.
"...laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings." That certainly seems to challenge the NRA's idea that more guns in schools is a good idea.
And perhaps most striking, the majority ruling in Heller specifically leaves open the question of whether the public has a right to carry "concealed weapons," a bedrock claim of gun rights advocates.
Despite these critical qualifications, gun rights advocates say they are protected by the 2008 Supreme Court ruling, yet selectively ignore the many ways the court allows for some forms of gun control. And despite the way the court enshrines gun ownership as a personal right, gun control advocates criticize the ruling, yet selectively fail to acknowledge or try to take political advantage of the ways it gives them the legal ammunition to accomplish much of what they want. Why is that?
First, of course, because few of us have read the ruling. We take our news in bits and bites from the media, and rarely dig any further. (I hadn't read the ruling until just the other day.) In fact, many of us don't really read or watch or listen to the news at all. We get our information from advocates, or friends, or social connections, sources who generally share and thus only reinforce our ideologies and basic values.
Those values are what the fight over gun control is really about, of course. It's not about weapons or self defense or even the specific right to own a firearm. It is a surrogate for the battle being waged in the United States over the basic way society should be organized and operate. The most adamant most closed-minded gun rights advocates want guns less to protect themselves against physical danger and more to fight back against the threat of a society they feel is taking away their ability to control their own lives. You can hear that message laced through the recent Alex Jones interview by Piers Morgan.
As I wrote just after the Newtown shooting,
"People with these concerns have been identified by research into the Theory of Cultural Cognition as Individualists, people who prefer a society that grants the individual more freedom and independence and leaves them more personally in control of their individual choices and values. Contrast that with the sort of society preferred by Communitarians, who feel most comfortable, and safest, in a 'We're all in it together' world of shared control and communal power, a society that that sacrifices some individual freedoms in the name of the greater common good. These deeply conflicting worldviews drive the central conflict in the fight over gun control."
Those deep underlying tribal affiliations are important to us social animals, since we depend on our tribes for our health and safety. Being a member of the tribe in good standing feels safe. Disagreeing with the tribe risks social rejection, which feels scary. So when a Supreme Court ruling supports an Individualist sort of society, Individualists celebrate, and selectively reject or ignore how the ruling also supports Communitarian goals. Communitarian gun control people do the same sort of selective perception, criticizing the ruling because it threatens their sort of society, and failing to acknowledging the parts that support them, because doing so would weaken their attack on the ruling's support of Individualist goals.
There is actually a ray of hope in all this. There's legal support in the Heller ruling for both sides. More than that, the ruling protects some of the underlying tribal imperatives of both Individualists and Communitarians. That allows each tribe to give some ground but maintain the vital self-identities that truly motivate this conflict. If more people were aware of the details of Heller, the ruling may provide grounds for some compromise in this battle, and undermine the credibility and impact of the people at the extremes (mostly the virulently closed-minded 'take no prisoners' gun rights folks, I have to say) who think their values matter more than playing by America's basic rules.
So may I humbly ask that you do society a small favor? No matter what side you're on, if you care about the gun violence issue, please send this blog around to anyone else you know who cares. Send it to your government representatives. By doing so, perhaps we can all see if this ray of hope for some compromise on gun violence, which more and more Americans want in the wake of the slaughter of those kids in Newtown, is more than just one person's naïve optimism that we can still find ways, on even the most contentious issues, to work together.]]>Genetically Modified Food: One Step Closer to Your Platetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23702612013-01-10T11:26:34-05:002013-03-12T05:12:02-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
This is a pretty big deal, close to the final approval for the first genetically modified (GM) food we would eat directly, as opposed to the GM grains that have been mixed into other foods for years.
Sure enough, the anti-GM folks reacted with almost knee-jerk predictability. The Center for Food Safety charged that the Obama administration 'snubbed' the risks, saying; "The G.E. salmon has no socially redeeming value. It's bad for the consumer, bad for the salmon industry and bad for the environment. F.D.A.'s decision is premature and misguided." Which, given how much research backs up the FDA decision, is the same sort of denial of science the right wing uses to contort itself into denying climate change. But then, the arguments about GM food, as is the case with climate change or any risk, are not just about the facts, but how those facts feel.
The facts here are reasonably clear. Scientists take a gene from a Chinook salmon, which grows really fast, and plug it into an Atlantic salmon, which is the principal salmon species sold today but which grows more slowly. Then they add a gene from an eel-like fish called the ocean pout that keeps the Chinook growth gene firing all the time, and, presto, you get the Atlantic to grow to maturity much faster. It's basically a modified hybrid salmon but hybridized in a lab rather than the old fashioned way, in a fish tank. More than a decade of research reviewed by the FDA says its safe to eat. And the GM fish are grown from eggs that grow into sterile female fish, so if they get out they can't mate and proliferate, which is why the FDA says they would not be an environmental risk.
The reasons why genetically modified food upsets people are pretty clear too. Research on the psychology of risk perception has identified more than a dozen characteristics that make some things feel scarier than others, several of which apply to the genetically modified salmon. It's human-made, and that makes it scarier than a risk that's natural (naturally hybridized food). We're more afraid of what we can't detect with our own senses, and what we don't understand, creating uncertainty that leaves us feeling powerless, and more worried. We more afraid of a risk if we're exposed involuntarily (which is why opponents of GM food demand labeling). And we depend on the government to keep us safe, but if we don't trust the government (the FDA), that lack of trust feeds greater worry.
On top of that, research into cultural cognition has found that we shape our views so they agree with the common opinion in the groups we most strongly identify with, and environmentalists usually belong to groups called Egalitarians and Communitarians. Egalitarians don't like a society that is controlled by a "One Percent" of a few rich companies and individuals that dictate a fixed 'traditional' hierarchy of social and economic class, limiting the freedom and social and economic mobility for "the 99%." Communitarians prefer a society that sacrifices some individual freedoms for the greater common good. They don't like a society that allows a few big companies to get rich while polluting the world for everybody else.
Cultural Cognition research helps explain Brian Dunning's Argumentum ad Monsantium, the way environmentalists oppose genetically modified food not on the merits alone but because it is the profit-making product of a huge polluting corporation that has too much control over society.
As valid as those emotional risk perception filters may be, and as scary as they might make GM food of any kind feel, they have nothing to do with the facts about the safety of the GM salmon to humans or the environment. The FDA is supposed to try to make a ruling based on objective evidence, which their scientific report does. But that report was issued last May, and according to a report by Jon Entine in Slate last week, was kept quiet under orders from the Obama White House for fear of offending environmentalists during the election campaign. (Entine claims his expose forced the FDA to go public.)
It wouldn't be the first time that public passions and politics about an emotionally controversial risk issue interfered with the objective consideration of science. But we live in a democracy, and the way a risk feels is as important, often more important, than the science as policy makers try to decide what to do. As a result, what we end up with, whether it's genetically modified food or so many other risk-related issues, is a decision making process that may feel democratic and right, but in the end it might not produce polices that provide the most public and environmental benefit.]]>The Gun Control Fight: It's Not About Guns as Weapons But Guns as Symbolstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23227592012-12-18T16:21:13-05:002013-02-17T05:12:01-05:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/subsiding without changing public opinion much, leaving us no closer to the safer world we all desire.
While guns don't kill people, they certainly do make killing easier. A meta-analysis of research on guns and homicides by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that more guns equal more murders. But guns do something else, too -- something emotional, something tied deeply to one of our most basic instincts, the instinct to survive. For millions of people, guns help them feel safe. They provide a sense of control and an ability to protect oneself from what feels like a threatening world. And guns provide this vital reassuring feeling of control in more ways than you might think.
Most obviously, they help people feel physically safe. Whether guns prevent more crime or cause more remains an open question, according to a National Academy of Sciences review of the research. But owning a gun certainly gives you the feeling that you are doing something... taking control... to protect yourself, and any risk is less frightening if you think have some control over it.
More importantly, and more relevant to the argument over gun control, fighting for the right to own a gun is a way of asserting control against a society that many feel is encroaching on their values and freedoms. Millions of people with such feelings want guns less to protect themselves against physical danger and more to protect themselves from the threat of a society they feel is eroding their their ability to control their own lives. That deeper loss of control fuels the disproportionately intense passion of gun rights advocates and explains the what the New Yorker calls the "conspicuous asymmetry of fervor" that energizes four million members of the National Rifle Association to effectively determine gun control policy for a country of 310 million.
People with these concerns have been identified by research into the Theory of Cultural Cognition as Individualists, people who prefer a society that grants the individual more freedom and independence and leaves them more personally in control of their individual choices and values. Contrast that with the sort of society preferred by Communitarians, who feel most comfortable, and safest, in a "We're all in it together" world of shared control and communal power, a society that that sacrifices some individual freedoms in the name of the greater common good. This is the central conflict in the fight over gun control, a worldview-level conflict that President Obama referred to in his remarks in Newtown Sunday night when he asked, "Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" About this core question, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy asked, "Where do we draw the line?"
This is about far more than guns. Since the progressive era of the '60s and '70s, Individualists have been reacting with growing passion against what they feel is a "socialist" Communitarian assault on individual liberties. Former NRA President Charlton Heston's "cold dead hands" speech makes inescapably clear that for millions of people, the gun control debate is not about the gun as weapon, but the gun as symbol.
"When freedom shivers in the cold shadow of true peril, it's always the patriots who first hear the call," Heston said. "When loss of liberty is looming, as it is now, the siren sounds first in the hearts of freedom's vanguard." He pauses, and accepts a revolutionary war musket, then continues "As we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away...", and, holding the musket up as if he was Moses holding up the staff of God to part the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, and in his best Moses voice, intones passionately, "...from my cold dead hands."
On the other hand, you can hear the Communitarian voice in those who favor gun control, who describe gun violence as "a public health crisis" (Nick Kristoff), or say that "we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics," as President Obama said in his moving response to the shootings last Friday.
The views of Heston and Kristoff give voice to what Cultural Cognition research about gun control has found; "More Statistics, Less Persuasion; A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions " makes clear that the fight about guns will not be won or lost on the battle ground of facts and figures. Gun rights are just another symbolic weapon in the deep and passionate conflict now tearing America apart, a fight over different views about the sort of society we want to live in. And that connects back to the importance of a sense of control to how safe or threatened we feel because, whether we are more Individualist or Communitarian, if our group and our philosophy are in control, our values and views have more power to shape how society operates.
That means the passions over gun control are driven by one the most powerful imperatives of all, the drive to survive, which is why the feelings of gun rights advocates are so fierce, and compromise hard to achieve. To move toward progress, rather than talking about how many guns we have compared with other countries, (way more) we first have to recognize that the feelings about gun control, particularly among Individualists, come from these deeper instincts, honest instincts over which we actually have little conscious control. Even more, rather than stubbornly trying to impose our view of what is moral and "right" on each other, we first have to respect the deep instinct we share to control and shape how our society operates, and the integrity and sincerity of the values and views people on all sides hold, and the even if we disagree with those values and views.
Without those admittedly difficult first steps, we won't be able to find solutions to the gun risk issue, and we will be no closer to the common ground we all shared, Individualists and Communitarians, gun rights advocates and gun control advocates, when we heard about the slaughter of children and our hearts broke, and universally we cried out for some way to reduce the chance of this ever happening again.]]>Why the Election Won't Be an Etch-A-Sketch Moment for Americatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20909742012-11-08T11:59:10-05:002013-01-08T05:12:01-05:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
A majority of political commentators seem to think so. Many say the election was a rejection of the extreme conservatism of the Republican party, a result that will force the party back toward the center and moderation. And in their post-election speeches, both candidates agreed on the need for bipartisanship "At a time like this we can't risk partisan bickering and political posturing," said the Republican standard bearer, Mitt Romney. "We are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people," said President Obama. Might this election at least in part clear the Etch-a-Sketch screen of partisan divisiveness and prove President Obama right when he claims, "We are not as divided as our politics suggest." Oh, sweet naïve hope.
No, no single election can resolve the underlying drivers of partisanship, the pressures and stresses and uncertainties of modern life that make people feel so threatened and angry and so little in control of their own lives and futures. These are the conditions that drive us into our partisan tribes, and, sadly, make President Obama sound naïve when he observes "... we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We remain, and forever will be, the United States of America." Reality challenges that hopeful belief. More and more, compelled by nothing short of the deep imperative for our very safety and survival, we are circling the wagons of our own unique groups -- our tribes -- and treating those with whom we disagree not merely as people with different ideas, but as the enemy, as a threat, as a danger that can't be compromised with and must be vanquished.
This runs far deeper than Red or Blue, or politics. That is just one current and obvious battle in a deeper and ancient conflict between tribes, social groups that are far more fundamental than which political party we belong to, a conflict which manifests in many ways. Where we choose to live, who we choose as friends, what we believe about things like climate change or abortion or the size and role of government... these are all shaped by the same phenomenon, a deep-seated and instinctive need as social animals to protect ourselves when we feel threatened by agreeing with the beliefs of our tribe. Agree with the tribe and you will be accepted as a member in good standing. The tribe will help protect you. And if everyone in your tribe agrees, that unity will make your tribe strong and more successful in competition with other tribes... for political power, for social and cultural influence... in shaping how overall society operates, and your tribe's dominance also helps keep you safe.
As noted, tribe is far more profound than party. These affiliations are organized around attitudes about how society should operate, the fundamental ways the world we live in ought to work. As identified by research in a field called cultural cognition, we fall into four basic tribes:
Individualists, who prefer a society that mostly leaves the individual alone and free to control their own lives. Communitarians, who prefer a 'We're all in it together' society in which people share decision-making and control and sacrifice some individual freedom in the name of the greater common good. Hierarchists, who prefer a society predictably and reassuringly constrained by unchanging rules and fixed hierarchies of social and economic class. Egalitarians, who prefer a society that is more flexible, less unconstrained by rigid 'the way it's always been' norms, people who oppose decision-making and control by a powerful few at the top of the ladder imposing their structure on everyone else.
The election hardly softened these underlying tribal identities. In fact, it forced us to choose, to pick sides, to support the party and candidate more closely aligned with our basic beliefs about how society should work. Individualists and Hierarchists manifest as Libertarians and Conservatives, and Republican. Communitarians and Egalitarians are generally Liberals and Democrats.
Nor has the election eased the broad underlying pressures and uncertainties and influences that are making so many of us feel more worried, insecure, and powerless (note that both the Tea Party and Occupy Movement are about 'taking back control'), feelings that make us feel threatened and motivate us to circle the tribal/partisan wagons and align ourselves more closely with our tribe's views.
Though he may not have realized these underlying cultural identities that motivate us all, President Obama instinctively captured this challenge when he said "... each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions, as a country, it necessarily stirs passion, stirs up controversy. That won't change after tonight." True. The underlying reasons for hyperpartisanship are deep and powerful, and the conditions that fuel these passions still exist. No amount of pleading for bipartisanship, nor hopeful interpretation of the election results, can overcome those underlying forces, and help "... end all the gridlock, or solve all our problems, or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward," as the president also said.
And, sadly, neither will his appeal that we come together around our 'common hopes and dreams... our common bond." It is unfortunately more likely that our separate tribal identities, sharpened and intensified by the threatening pressures of turbulent and troubling times, will continue to magnify separate values and hopes and dreams, and erode the common bonds we do all share, bonds to a greater tribe that is also vital for our well-being and our future.]]>The Baumgartner Jump: We Were All Afraid! Why?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19669082012-10-16T13:40:20-04:002012-12-16T05:12:02-05:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/OH MY GOD!!!!!),...AND JUMPED!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAIIIGGH!
What a thrill! For Felix, sure, but for us too... sitting safely on the ground in our kitchens or living rooms or offices or wherever, glued to a TV or computer screen, riveted by and connected to one of the most gripping fears humans experience, the fear of heights, as no human has ever experienced it, viscerally feeling the fear even as we sat safely, firmly on terra-thankfully-very-firma, watching. What a fantastic demonstration of the animal wiring of the human brain when it comes to fear.
When you ask people what scares them the most, fear of heights ranks high on the list. Endangering people by putting them at great heights is a common tool for evoking fear in movies and TV shows like Fear Factor. The toughest challenges in those personal development ropes courses are always the ones where you have to climb up a tree or tower (wearing a harness, but that doesn't matter) and jump off. Fear of heights makes tons of money, from bungee jumping, to that glass-floored walkway out over the Grand Canyon, to the millions that people are willing to pay to go to the top of the tall buildings of the world for a) the view and b) the scariness of being up that high. The CN tower in Toronto will charge you $175 for the Edge Walk thrill of edging out to the edge of the tower (!!!) and, tethered to a rail over your head, hanging your bottom backwards out OVER THE EDGE OF THE BUILDING!!! (No extra charge for looking down. It's unclear if there's a charge if you lose your lunch. Tip if you're in Toronto. Even if it's not raining, take an umbrella if you walk under the CN Tower.)
As common as acrophobia is, then, it's small wonder that tens, probably hundreds of millions of people just watched Felix Baumgartner to do what would scare the living BEJEEZUS out of most of us... jumping out of an ascent capsule at 128,000 feet/24.25 miles/39,014meters... literally the edge of space. The event was watched live on YouTube by 8 million people, almost 20 times more than had ever watched anything live on that global village before. I was one of them. Notes during the final moments;
He's going through final preparations for jumping. My palms are sweaty. Twitter friend; "I am more likely to pee my pants watching Felix jump, than he doing it.."
Mission control says "Item 14. Move seat to the forward position." My heart is racing. Another Twitter friend; "Group fear huddle. Engage!"
MC; "Okay we're getting serious now Felix." !!! Sound from the capsule of pressurizing his suit! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!???? (Wide shot of balloon from the ground. Looks like it's going to burst. AAIIGH! Heart pounds harder!)
MC "From now on...our Guardian Angel will take care of you...!" The global supply of human stress hormones is at an all time high.
OMYGOD THE DOOR IS OPEN!!!! Another Twitter friend "This is Excruciating"
MC: "Release seat belt." HOLY CRAP!!!!! Breathing noises from Baumgartner's microphone....breathing fast!!! Wish there was telemetry on his vital signs. WHAT IS GOING ON IN HIS BRAIN!? He's got to be one stressed animal!
Feet outside over the edge!!!! MY palms are dripping wet! Heart pounding.
Standing on the bar OUTSIDE !!!! His voice is thin, fast. Arms out, salutes. Lets himself fall. Takes off like a rocket!
YOU HEAR HIM breath!!!!!!!!! Twitter friend "WOAH. Hearing him breathing is so terrifying!"]
He's TUMBLING, falling like a toy!!!! OUT OF CONTROL!!!! More than 700 mph! OH My GOD! Twitter friend "Unreal. Hearts stopped in my house."
The PARACHUTE IS OPEN!!!!! Felix says "Gorgeous!!!!"" Applause in mission control. I am next to tears. Live feed shows his mom crying. I BURST into tears.
He touches down. More control room cheers, tears from Mom, and me.
Twitter messages.
"group hug of relief"
"WOW that was amazing"
From a friend watching in Florence "My friend Baumgartner you are one crazy dude. What a thrilling ride Love it."
"UnbeLIEVABLE!"
"snif. Bravo Baumgartner."
"Holy crap that was the most riveting & insane few minutes I've EVER seen. I think I must have held my breath the WHOLE time!"
What was all that emotion about? Those Twitter comments, by the way, came from bright, educated, science journalists who, like me and the immense global community that was joined together in this common intense experience, felt fear in precisely the same way. The amygdala, an area of the brain down near the brain stem that triggers the 'Fight or Flight"/fear response, knew there was danger in what we were watching, if not to us then to a fellow member of the human tribe, and his experience became ours. The amygdala triggered the release of glucocorticoids and other stress hormones that made our hearts race and our palms get sweaty. It turned down our immune systems, reduced production of sperm and bone cells, and literally increased the urge to void our waste; (Twitter comment: "I may pee my pants just watching!") These are all part of the autonomic response to any signal of potential danger, and you could literally watch these responses happening as people commented on what they were feeling as they watched.
We weren't in danger, of course, so it shouldn't have been scary to us rational beings, right? Nope. That's not how risk perception works. The way we perceive and respond to risk is a combination of the facts of the situation (We're on the ground. We're safe") and the feelings (We are watching a fellow human jump out of something 24+ miles high!). As is almost always the case with risk perception, the feelings win. Thank you, Felix, for reinforcing the lesson that we are hardly as smart/rational/cognitively in charge powerful as we'd like to think we are. Reason takes a backseat at times like these.
What a thrill it was to watch. How compellingly real it became for all of us, who are not members of Baumgartner's family or circle of friends, when the camera showed the faces of Baumgartner's mother and family, tense at first, raising our tension, then crying with relief, evoking our shared tears. That offers yet another important piece of evidence from this fabulous demonstration of risk perception... confirming that a risk is far more compelling/scarier when it is personified, than is a risk we experience only as an idea or a bunch of facts and figures (e.g. climate change). How terrifying it was to watch him tumbling out of control while falling at hundreds of miles an hour... reinforcing the finding from risk perception research that any risk evokes more fear the less control we feel we have.
When we catch our breath there will be many more lessons from this exciting human adventure. One of them certainly is how we are all connected, social human animals, by the neural architecture and chemistry... and emotional nature... of risk perception.
This piece originally ran on the website of Scientific American.
A fear post script. It turns out Felix had his own fears, that almost scrubbed the mission. He's claustrophobic, afraid of being confined in tight spaces... like his pressure suit, and his capsule, that he had to be in for hours. During the ascent he reported, with obvious consternation, that his face mask was fogging up. I bet that fired up Felix's amygdala just a tad, exacerbating his awareness of being confined, and may be why the the conversation between mission control and Felix was taken off the air. It also may be why it was calming for Felix to finally take off his seat belt and open the door, which freaked out the rest of us but GOOD!]]>The Debate: There WAS a Loser -- UStag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19422682012-10-05T16:57:36-04:002012-12-05T05:12:01-05:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/John Silber just passed away. He accomplished many things -- made Boston University into an internationally recognized academic institution, served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education -- but he also taught an important lesson about the real importance of televised political debates. Debates matter not for what the candidate says, nor even for the carefully rehearsed hand gestures and facial expressions and body language of how they perform. Like nothing else in a campaign, extensive unscripted live TV appearances can give the electorate a glimpse of who the person is that we are considering to be our leader.
Silber was brilliant, wise, funny, and caring to those close to him. He was also feisty. No... that's too gentle. He was often brusque. Rude. Harsh. Impatient. Dismissive and arrogant and mean. He treated many people very badly. Even his friends said so. All of this came screaming through during the televised debates as he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 1990, as a Democrat in a Democratic state. In the debates he occasionally snapped at the questioner, or his opponent, and sounded imperious and arrogant. Then came the unscripted (videotaped) interview with a beloved Boston TV anchor Natalie Jacobson (I was a reporter and colleague of hers at the time) who asked a softball question "What are your strengths, and forgive me, but if you think you have any, what are your weaknesses" (she even asked it politely, and tentatively, as Silber's sulfurous temper was widely known), to which Silber angrily snapped "YOU find a weakness. I don't have to go around telling you what's wrong with me. The media have manufactured about 16,000 non-existing qualities that are offensive and attributed them all to me. Let them have their field day. You can pick any one of them."
This was one week before the election. Silber, a Democrat in Democratic Massachusetts, was leading by 9 points. He lost by four, a 13 point swing in a week. And he lost on the merits, not of his policies, or his intellectual ability, but because the public got a glimpse of the person who was asking for their support as their leader -- not just a thinker, a leader, someone people could like and respect and trust and be inspired by. Silber revealed a side of himself that to the electorate was none of those things.
In a 1984 televised debate between President Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, Mondale derided Reagan's leadership, which had been widely criticized as more movie star style than policy making substance, saying "there's a difference between a quarterback and a cheerleader..." Mondale's suggestion that Reagan should be rejected because he was more the latter than the former was precisely wrong. We want our leaders to be both; smart able decision-making quarterbacks AND trustworthy, honest, on-our-side inspirational cheerleaders. In fact, Reagan's re-election proved that the cheerleader part -- the 'who they are as a person' part, the 'who would you want to have a beer with' part, probably matters more.
So may I humbly suggest that, as the post-debate punditry 'decides' the winner of these debate, that what matters most is whether the voters have won or lost, and the way to score that is simple. To what degree did the debate give us a look at this part of the candidates -- the human part -- the 'who they really are' part? All the debates that have played a meaningful role in the final vote have revealed those aspects of the candidates. Remember Michael Dukakis' emotionless reply in the 1988 debate to a question about how he'd feel about the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered? Remember Dan Quayle's deer-in-the-headlights response to Vice Presidential Candidate Lloyd Bentsen's line "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy"? The line got lots of play, but Quayle's stunned reaction didn't inspire confidence that he could be a leader.
It's not that we ever really know who these people are. The controls slapped on them by the handlers throughout the campaign deny us an honest look at this most important aspect of what need to know as we choose to lead us. In fact, those controls make the candidates stiff, and awkward, and that turns out to hurt them more than help. They say Mitt Romney is a really nice regular guy, off-camera. Al Gore, famous for being wooden as a candidate, is funny, self-effacing, relaxed, off-camera. John Silber was witty and wise and even warm, off-camera. In front of the cameras, the risk of making the slightest mistake the opposition can jump on has now made everything so managed that it's really hard for us to get an honest read on these people, as people...which matters a lot to who we want to lead us.
That's why these debates really matter. That's the role they can play. If we're lucky, and can stay awake through the policy talk and rehearsed lines and twisted half-truths or bald faced lies they sling at each other, the veil might lift in some unscripted moment and reveal something we really want to know -- need to know -- about the human being behind the candidate. That's what the moderator and questioners are really supposed to evoke, which Bernard Shaw did with his question to Michael Dukakis, and Jim Lehrer certainly did not with his wonky policy-heavy NewsHour questions of Obama and Romney.
Reviewers seem to think that Romney lied more but performed better than Obama, that he was more assertive and sharp, that the president seemed flat, tired. (Gore even suggested the thin air of the Mile High City setting of Denver might have contributed, noting that Romney prepped there and Obama arrived only late that afternoon!) But did the viewing voting public win or lose? Did anyone still trying to decide who to vote for gain any additional sense of the human beings behind the candidate masks? Maybe, but not much, I would say. In that sense, there was at least one clear loser last night. Us.]]>Barry Commoner, Social Revolutionary Dressed in Environmentalist's Clothingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19337162012-10-03T17:09:58-04:002012-12-03T05:12:02-05:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/"When I was young and bold and strong, / O, right was right and wrong was wrong! / My plume on high, my flag unfurled, / I rode away to right the world. / Come out you dogs and fight! said I, / And wept there was but once to die."
Dorothy Parker's wonderful poem about the simplistic passion of the young crusader comes to mind as I think back to the time I met Barry Commoner, one of the pioneers of the modern environmental movement who just passed away. It was 1971, at the height of the Vietnam protest movement, at the beginnings of the modern environmental movement, and I was a weed-puffing, long-haired college sophomore swept up in passionate outrage over "The War" and the National Guard killings of college students at Kent State. I was young and bold and, together with my protesting brothers and sisters, so very strong... and so sure about what was right and what was wrong.
Commoner came to Northwestern to proselytize the new concern about the environment. In those days of rivers that caught on fire (a stretch of Ohio's Cuyahoga burned in 1969 and made national news), smoke-belching factories, and growing post-Silent Spring concern about industrial chemicals, Commoner was no less than a minor prophet with his deep voice and thick white hair, bow tie and black-rimmed glasses. We showered him with wide-eyed adulation and were inspired to take up the cause. I subsequently rode away to right the world as a journalist, and inspired by that one interaction with Commoner (I don't recall even speaking with him, just listening), focused my reporting on environmental issues.
But what I've learned about Commoner recently also reminds me of the beginning of the next verse of Parker's poem: "But I am old; and good and bad are woven in a crazy plaid."
As time grants us the gifts of knowledge and wisdom and perspective, we learn that things are usually not as black and white as they first seemed. Commoner's environmentalism had hidden roots, and deeper goals, than he let on that day (though he spoke about them openly at other times). His concerns about the state of the air and water and biosphere were actually rooted in an original fear... of nuclear weapons. Commoner was one of many in the early '50s to launch the global protest movement against nuclear weapons and then the radioactive fallout from the atmospheric testing of those weapons. The fallout risk was actually tiny; the doses were infinitesimal, but fear of cancer and genetic damage from radiation served as effective emotional appeals to alarm people and fuel resistance to nuclear weapons generally. As Commoner once said, "I learned about the environment from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953." His organization's influential publication Environment Magazine actually began as Nuclear Information.
But after helping win international agreements in the '60s to curtail nuclear weapons programs and atmospheric testing, rather than retiring in victory Commoner transferred his concerns to the related and budding issue of the environment. He just kept fighting, because he was actually fighting for something else, something much deeper, a cause that he never mentioned that day at Northwestern -- nothing less than universal social and economic justice.
Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem. Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist "systems of production" in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences...
Those consequences included damage to the environment, a clearer and more universally appealing target for what was a much larger values battle against an economic and power system that Commoner and most of the other founders of modern environmentalism were really attacking.
This remains true today. As Commoner and Rachel Carson did then, Bill McKibben and Greenpeace and many environmentalists do now, rallying people with appeals about threats to the air and water and biodiversity and human health that are at heart values-based campaigns against an economic and social system they feel unfairly puts power in the hands of a few and leaves everybody else powerless and unjustly trapped in rigid hierarchies of social and economic class. (The theory of cultural cognition refers to these people as "egalitarians.") While it is absolutely true that the environmental damages produced by this system are real, and concerns about them are earnest and important, it is also true that many environmentalists are waging the same battle Commoner was really waging, a battle not about biodiversity or climate change or air and water pollution but about values and worldviews about how society should work. Environmental issues are just a face for that deeper fight.
Because those deeper values are the informing motivations of some environmentalists, some of them sometimes take positions that are counter to the very goals they profess. Consider opposition to genetically modified (GM) food. Along with safety concerns (essentially unsupported by any reliable evidence even after we've been eating the stuff for more than a decade), a prominent environmentalist argument against GM food is that Monsanto happens to make a lot of it, and Monsanto, the GM opponents charge, is a polluting big corporation that uses its riches to influence government and get its way, and is unfair to farmers who have to buy new seeds each year. What does any of that have to do with GM technology or why it should be rejected? Absolutely nothing. But it has everything to do with an underlying motivation of fighting a system in which a powerful few reap a disproportionate share of the benefits while burdening the majority with a disproportionate share of the risks, a system which imposes a rigid social and economic class structure that is not as flexible and fair as environmentalists want it to be.
Consider the effect this has. If GM foods were more widely used a lot of people would be still be alive, or be healthier, and agriculture to feed 7 billion people -- going on 9 billion -- would be more efficient, use less water, less land, destroy less soil, demand fewer pesticides... all of which would be good for the environment. But some environmentalists don't like Monsanto and the system they feel big companies are part of, so in pursuit of their underlying values, they act in ways that are counter to the goals for which they claim to be working.
When I was young, and bold and strong, and naïve and innocent and passionate, Barry Commoner inspired my abiding environmental concerns. But Commoner's passing reminds me that now I'm old, and the simplistic right and wrong/good and bad of my earlier environmentalist innocence has yielded to the crazy plaid complications of issues like GM food and nuclear power and so many other environmental issues, with tradeoffs that make things more grey than black and white and with their pesky but important qualifying details. And I'm reminded to think a bit more carefully when any advocate urges me to unfurl my flag for a cause, and to think cautiously about what that cause is really about before joining in the chant, "Come out and fight, you dogs."]]>Lying Politicians, and the Difference Between Being Lied TO, and Lied FORtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18451042012-08-31T12:19:34-04:002012-10-31T05:12:02-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
So why, if to kids Paul Ryan is, as are so many other politicians of all stripes, a "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire," do we hem and haw and call some of things Ryan said "factual shortcuts" or "spin"? It's not "spin" for Ryan to charge that President Obama failed to keep a manufacturing plant open that closed before Obama took office. It's a lie. It's not spin to blame President Obama for the loss of a AAA credit rating for the U.S., when Standard & Poor's specifically blamed the downgrade on the uncompromising stands of Congress (which includes Congressman Ryan), both Republicans and Democrats. It's a lie. Neither should it be politely called spin when a pro-Obama super PAC ad suggests that Mitt Romney killed a child because Romney's private equity company took over a business and reduced worker health care benefits an employee/mom needed for her sick child. Romney killed the kid? Please! That's not stretching the truth. That's first degree False Witness.
The question here is, why do liars who lie in the course of running for office get, at worst, a slap on the wrist, when lying lands you in jail if you do it to a jury, costs you a lot of money if you do it to regulators when you are a business owner, and even costs you your position in office if your lies get your elected and THEN you lie once you're there, as with President Richard Nixon, who ultimately was forced to resign not for overtly trying to subvert democracy itself, but for lying about his involvement. We shouldn't want liars in charge of government, should we? Well, when they are candidates, it depends on whether they are lying TO us, or FOR us.
Psychologists have lots of names for the mental tricks we use to hear what we want to hear, and trust and believe who and what we want to trust and believe; selective perception, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance. These are all subconscious mental tools that help us interpret information in order to make judgments and decisions that are good for us. And this subjective denial of reality is really powerful, so powerful that we can believe stupendous lies, like President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, or that Mitt Romney killed that child. Why? Because at its heart, this subjective 'reasoning' is tied to nothing less than our safety and survival.
In the case of the lying pol, if that pol represents our party or ideology, believing him/her allows us to remain a member in good standing of our tribe. Supporting the tribe by agreeing with the tribal view, as pronounced by the tribal leader (in campaigns we call our tribal leaders "nominees"), enhances tribal cohesion, and that helps the tribe win in combat with other tribes (we call some of these battles "elections"). Tribe matters to social animals like us. We have evolved to depend on our tribe literally for our health and safety. So we instinctively agree with our tribal leaders, even when they tell in-your-face whoppers, and we do all sorts of cognitive wiggling to see the facts the way they do, rather than objectively. Objectivity is not the goal. Social cohesion, and survival, are.
Why are we forgiving of some lies but not others? Well, it depends on whether we are being liked TO, or lied FOR. The candidate's lie, told in the name of party/tribal success, subconsciously feels like a lie told in the name of your well-being. Paul Ryan was lying FOR his tribe. The lie told TO you, that harms you or cheats you or treats you unfairly in the selfish best interest of the liar (and his tribe)... that sort of lie is a violation of the basic morality and honesty toward one another that social animals have to have in order to survive. Being lied TO, by somebody trying to get ahead at your expense... that's threatening.
When we are ALL being lied TO, by a company or government official or just a plain old crook, we all agree that's universally unacceptable and we toss them in jail or out of office. But a candidate isn't lying TO everyone, just TO the members of the other tribe. So this morning, Democrats are calling Ryan a liar (though they may use less harsh language). Republicans, those being lied FOR, don't think Ryan lied at all.
The more threatened we feel (about our financial welfare, health, how much control we feel like we have over our life and future), the more powerful this gets... the more we subconsciously rely on our tribe to help protect our health and welfare. These are unsettled, threatening times... which makes them more tribal/polarized times... and so they are times when our nominees/tribal leaders can tell more and more bold-faced lies, and inspire our support rather than offend our intelligence.
Political conventions are like the camp fire on the night before battle (or the day before the big game), when the chieftains rally the troops, impassion the tribe, fire up the true believers, or, as politicians might put it, appeal to the base. Neither conventions nor politics are for truth. They are about tribal divisions, conflict, victory in the name of power and control and safety, and if truth ends up as road kill along the way, so be it. So we roll our eyes and call dishonesty "spin" or "stretching the truth" or something less harsh than the out-and-out lying it is, because every side uses it, including ours, and winning keeps us safe, and that's what matters most.]]>The Aurora Shootings and the Mean World Syndrometag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17014452012-07-25T14:10:00-04:002012-09-24T05:12:25-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/massacred 35 and wounded 23 in 1996. What do those three mass murders, and so many others, have in common? The killers were all inspired to some degree by things they saw in movies.
Should there be talk about banning violent movies, as there is talk about controlling access to assault weapons with ammunition magazines that contain 100 rounds? No, although Andy Borowitz does a hilarious send-up of just that idea in a satire reporting that the National Rifle Association, claiming it's "high time to take action against the number one cause of violence in America," has proposed a ban on all violent movies. Movies don't make people murderers any more than guns do. But guns make murderousness much more feasible, and popular entertainment certainly plants ideas that sick minds can use as inspiration for deadly reality.
Does violence in media lead to violence in the real world? Yes, according to something called The Mean World Syndrome, the idea posited by communications theorist George Gerbner, that violent content in popular media -- Gerbner focused on the entertainment media but the concept includes the violent and alarmist nature of news content too -- makes people believe that the world is a more violent place than it actually is.
Actually, the implications of the Mean World Syndrome go far beyond what happened in Aurora or Columbine or Port Arthur, or even the idea that violence in the entertainment media might spur violence in the real world. It describes something far more insidious, and far more potentially harmful. The Mean World Syndrome is the byproduct of what Gerbner called Cultivation Theory, the idea that the more we watch the news and entertainment media and the more they depict the world as a violent and threatening place, the more we come to accept that those are the norms of society, and the more those norms shape how we live. A world that feels more violent and threatening than it is makes us more worried than we need to be. The implications of that are enormous, far broader than awful but thankfully rare mass murders by people who are clearly mentally unstable.
Gerbner's idea holds that if we think the world is a 'mean' and violent and unsafe place, the kind of world we see again and again in both the news and so much entertainment media, we live our lives accordingly. We buy guns to protect ourselves (guns purchased for self-protection are far more likely to go off in accidents, suicides, or in crimes against others). We live in gated communities. We support candidates who promise to keep us safe, and policies like the Patriot Act that cede civil liberties in the name of safety. A Mean and worrying world causes us to magnify our fears of anything, be it terrorism or industrial chemicals or economic uncertainty, sometimes prompting personal choices or social policies that feel right but do us more harm than good.
In a violent and threatening world we are readier to fear 'others.' We mistrust more, and polarize more fiercely into our groups in pursuit of the protection afforded to social animals by tribal unity and cohesion. A Mean World is a more divided world, less able to achieve compromise and progress. A Mean World makes us more prone to the profound ill effects of chronic stress. And as Gerbner put it, in "a society in which most people or many people already expect a higher degree of victimization, sooner or later they are going to get it."
Batman, Natural Born Killers, and thousands more movies that normalize violence; countless TV shows about killers and rapists and torturers and terrorists; news reports that so dramatically overemphasize violence and risk, depicting the world as a far more threatening place than it actually is. They all capture our attention, of course, because we are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might threaten us, and we are pruriently rewarded by watching cinematic violence and horror that we can tell ourselves is pretend, and walk away from, happy that "That didn't happen to me."
Except that a lot of people in that theater in Aurora didn't get to walk away. Sometimes the Mean World Syndrome turns us into actual victims, in dramatic ways, when the normalization of violence fostered by the entertainment and news media creates fertile soil for madness. Most of the time, though, the Mean World Syndrome victimizes us more insidiously, making us feel more worried and fearful, more defensive and mistrustful, more polarized and anti-'other', than we need to be. Sometimes, in the name of trying to protect ourselves against the threats of a violent and threatening Mean World, we end up as the victims we are trying not to be.
There is a wonderful film regarding the Mean World Syndrome, including extensive comments by Gerbner, the trailer for which can be seen here]]>Fear of Climate Change May Finally Be Trumping Ideological Denialtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16650192012-07-11T11:36:10-04:002012-09-10T05:12:03-04:00David Ropeikhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/
But the brain relies on several instincts to help us survive, and sometimes they conflict. One fear can literally contradict another. That's the case with climate change. The bad news is that at this point, the wrong ones are winning. The good news is, things may be changing.
The three players in this subconscious cognitive battle are:
1. Tribalism. We are social animals, and our survival depends on belonging to a tribe that helps protect us. So we do lots of things to remain members in good standing of our tribe(s). One of them is subconsciously shaping our opinions so they agree with those in the group(s) with which we most closely identify. (This phenomenon is known as Cultural Cognition. ) By adopting 'the party line', we are accepted as members in good standing of our tribe, and by reinforcing tribal solidarity we increase our tribe's influence in competition with other tribes for overall control of society. This survival instinct of tribalism grows more intense the more threatened we feel about how society is going - economically, morally, politically.
With climate change, you can see this in the strong correlation between those who deny the evidence and their conservative or libertarian political and ideological affiliations. A Republican who fails to deny climate change is labeled a RINO...a Republican In Name Only...and shunned by "the base", the self-anointed true believers. Jon Huntsman acknowledged an open mind on climate change, and for his admirable honesty was resoundingly rejected in the GOP primary. Open minds are bad for tribal solidarity.
2. The Hubris of Cartesian Reason. We think we can keep an open mind, and reason, and use the facts to make the 'right' decision, more than we actually can. This is particularly true of liberals, who generally score highly in one of the five major personality traits known as Openness, which "...reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety... sometimes called "intellect" rather than openness to experience." The problem is, this pretense of open mindedness is a dangerous deceit, because liberals are no different than other social human animals. They feel safer when their tribe wins too. So when liberals argue with climate change deniers, to a large degree they aren't really trying to change the deniers' minds. They're trying to WIN...to get the deniers not just to change their minds but in the process to abandon their tribe. But that feels threatening to the deniers, and in response their denial grows stronger. And that enrages the liberals, whose stridency grows. In the end, then, this survival instinct for tribal solidarity makes the whole fight about climate change an unwinnable battle over underlying worldviews, and counterproductively leaves us further from progress and solutions, and less safe.
3. Fear. Often the penultimate survival instinct of plain old fear - a direct worry about your physical health and safety - trumps almost everything else in human cognition. Think back to the frightening days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Remember how all the angry ugly divisive tribal polarization between so many groups in America just disappeared?! In an instant, the mantra became "We are ALL Americans". That fear (and don't forget the anthrax attacks that hit a month later) made a lot of liberals ready to believe the Bush Administration's lies about Saddam Hussein's biological weapons of mass destruction and his non-existent connection with Al Qaeda, and support the invasion of Iraq. Fear - 1, Tribal Cohesion - 0.
The problem with climate change, so far anyway, has been that for all its monstrous potential harm, very few people truly fear it, down in their gut. It just doesn't ring the right psychological risk perception alarm bells. (Those 'risk perception factors' are described in Chapter Three of "How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don't Match the Facts", available free here.) It is seen as delayed, not a current danger. It's abstract and global, not tangible and local. Most of all, the threat doesn't feel personal. Even among the those really worried about it, few can honestly say to themselves "I'm worried something really bad is going to happen to ME."
So climate change has yet to hit trigger our powerful self-protective instinctive fear response. Instead, climate deniers remain more worried about the social and political and economic changes that responding to climate change might mean, changes they see as a threat to the way their tribe wants society to operate. Deniers even use the word "threat" when they talk about climate change, but to them the greater threat is to freedom, and the free market, not to human and environmental health.
Sooner or later, that will change, and the bad things that climate change is likely to do...really bad things...will start happening. Fear of climate change...real, visceral, good old-fashioned in-the-gut "I'm in serious physical danger" fear...will start to kick in. When it does, it will likely supercede their ideological/tribal concerns. And that shift may already be underway. Heat waves and droughts and fires in tinder dry forests, torrential rains and flooding, storms that cut off power to millions...lethal extremes that experts say are consistent with how climate change is likely to alter local weather...are starting to make the threat of climate change more tangible, current, and personal, psychological characteristics that make any risk scarier. And not just for 'those poor people in Africa' but all across the developed world, including places that are home to concentrations of conservatives and climate deniers. Weather, after all, makes no distinctions based on local politics.
History teaches that fear trumps everything. Fear unites, and fear motivates, and fear for our physical health and safety dominates most other instincts. As the threat of climate change becomes big enough and real enough and 'now' enough, increased concern will first motivate the general public, the majority not caught up in the Climate Wars. At some point the fear of climate change will even trump the fear that divides us into tribes, and climate denialism will move even further into the fringe it is already heading towards (see the recent Heartland Institute embarrassment).
It is harsh to say, but more of the extreme weather we've been suffering may be just what we need to help trigger the fear - our deepest and most powerful survival instinct - that we need to protect ourselves from one of the biggest threats our species has ever faced.]]>
