2013-05-23T02:44:36-04:00 Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=lisa-kramer Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Lisa Kramer Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2286824 2012-12-13T00:48:31-05:00 2013-02-11T05:12:01-05:00

Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/
Let me start with the "IKEA monkey," whose proper name is Darwin. This poor juvenile rhesus macaque was found wandering through an IKEA parking lot in Toronto a few days ago, and he quickly became an international Internet sensation. In similar circumstances in recent memory, law enforcement agents have been known to shoot wayward animals, send them to zoos, or return them to their irresponsible human caretakers.

In this case, young Darwin happily found his way to Story Book Farm, a proper sanctuary for primates. His new home is an imperfect substitute for the wild where he really belongs, and Darwin will unfortunately have to grow up without his biological mother who must miss him a lot, but at least he will be surrounded by other monkeys and will never be forced to wear Halloween costumes or diapers for the amusement of humans.

Another great step for animals that took place in Canada this week was a 24-hour vigil to raise awareness about fur-bearing animals. LUSH cosmetics devoted one of their storefronts to be used for 24 hours by Fur-Bearer Defenders. For that period, an activist named Shannon Kornelsen put herself on display for shoppers while she was restrained in a leg-hold trap. She bravely went without food and water for that period and poignantly demonstrated the disappointment, pain, and confusion experienced by a trapped animal who is destined to become fur trim on a winter coat.

Finally, the new national not-for-profit organization Mercy For Animals Canada released footage from the first-ever Canadian undercover investigation of a factory farm that raises pigs. The investigation revealed cases of severe neglect and blatant cruelty, including workers slamming piglets against metal poles or concrete floors and leaving them to slowly suffer and die, piglets' testicles being removed and tails being sliced without benefit of pain relief, pregnant pigs restrained in tiny unclean metal cages that prevented them from turning or lying on their sides, and much more.

The footage went viral in Canada, leading to an exclusive expose on CTV's W5 and news stories on other major television networks, radio stations and newspapers. Greater awareness about the unsavory plight of animals on factory farms can only help guide consumers to make more informed and more compassionate decisions.

I sincerely hope Canadians keep their attention on animals in the weeks, months, and years to come. While animals may not hit the front page every day in our country, they continue to suffer by the millions every year. We live in a country that offers little legal protection for animals, and we need to work together to fix that by supporting animal protection groups with our wallets and our volunteer efforts. Meanwhile, we can each do our part by taking steps not to use animals in our daily lives -- not for our entertainment, our clothing, nor our food.



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Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/ University of Toronto graduation ceremony where business students from the Mississauga campus received their BBA and BComm degrees. These are the remarks I made to the Class of 2012:

Graduands, I offer my most heartfelt congratulations to each of you for your accomplishments. I also offer my sincere apologies to those of you who took my investments class and hoped you had heard my voice for the last time.

Depending on the courses you took while pursuing your undergraduate degree, I expect you have learned how to maximize shareholder value in your finance classes, how to balance the books in your accounting classes, how to sell products and maybe ideas in your marketing classes, how to negotiate positive outcomes in your organizational behavior classes, and how best to manage technology in your communication, culture, and information technology classes. These are all important lessons for the worlds of commerce and technology, but today I will focus on some different life lessons that you may easily have overlooked in the hustle and bustle of the journey you took to end up sitting in front of me now.

When I was receiving my last university degree, sitting among a sea of fellow graduands and looking forward to the rest of my life as you are now, I was two and a half years into cancer treatment, working hard to recover from a bone marrow transplant. I was completely bald under my convocation cap. And I was caught a bit off guard when the master of ceremonies instructed the entire graduating class to remove their caps! (It's OK, I'm told I have a very nicely shaped head. Well, it's my mother who told me that, but I'm sure she was telling the truth.)

As I sat in my convocation regalia all those years ago, with my uncapped bald head, I contemplated the next chapter of my life with, perhaps, a slightly different perspective than many of you may have right now. I faced less-than-ideal prognosis -- at that time, my odds of living five years were estimated to be one in four. Fourteen years later, I can gratefully say I beat those odds, but looking down the barrel of that gun, right then, I faced much uncertainty.

As I thought about what I wanted to do, and what I needed to do, with my remaining time, I realized in my heart that I could never measure success in life in dollars, any more than I could put a dollar value on the love and support I received from family, friends, and even kind strangers, strangers who volunteered their time in cancer-patient support groups, helped with cold feet before medical procedures, or sometimes just offered a knowing glance or a simple hug. What dollar value could I put on the absence of worry that comes with free health care, blood transfusions whenever needed, and even homecare assistance? What salary could compensate the countless individuals who gave more than could ever be measured to someone like me, just because I was in need?

In all that receiving, I learned, for myself, the importance of giving. I heard from many people who make volunteer work a cornerstone of their lives that giving, in fact, yields more reward for the giver than the receiver.

And so I'm here today to ask you to ask yourself what you can do to give back for the abundance you've received in your own life: to make your community better, to make your family stronger, to help a stranger just because they need your help.

Giving can take different forms for different people. For some, giving means being generous to their alma mater, an institution that helped them get where they are today and where they are going in the future. You can give back to your university by becoming a donor once you're on your feet financially, or by coming back to volunteer for special events, or by eventually providing career guidance to students hoping to follow in your footsteps. For some giving means helping the most helpless members of our community, by adopting an animal from the pound, providing foster care for a needy child, or serving meals at a shelter for the homeless. You can give back (and even save lives!) by putting your name on the bone marrow donation registry, or by donating blood or platelets.

You can give back to your community by volunteering for a charity, or at an arts festival. You can give back by pursuing your passion to solve a difficult problem that plagues humankind, maybe even a problem we have no hope of having the technology to solve today, but one that your drive and perseverance will help unravel. Heck, you can give back by smiling at someone who is having a bad day, or by holding a door open a few seconds longer to aid someone who isn't very quick on her feet.

Small or big, there are many, many ways to make a difference. And I hope you'll find ways to make a difference every day. You and your world will be better and happier for it.

So, to the Class of 2012, as you leave Convocation Hall and take your first steps toward the rest of your life, I wish you good health, I wish you good fortune, and above all else, I wish you profound happiness, the kind of happiness that spills over and brightens the whole world.

Congratulations!]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1224748 2012-01-24T10:26:51-05:00 2012-03-25T05:12:01-04:00

Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/
I had been married only a short time when the rug was pulled out from under me. The cancer was Hodgkin's Lymphoma: "the good cancer," well-meaning people took pains to reassure me. But I knew nothing good would have brought me so close to death. In fact many people continue to die from this so-called good cancer. And thanks to the many complications of my disease and my treatment, there were times when (I'm ashamed to admit) I wanted to die. Fortunately for me I did not die, though I recall one doctor gleefully telling me that my odds of being alive in a year were one in four, as if that should have made me happy.

During my illness, treatment and recovery (a three-year period of my life), I made dear friends in the chemo wards, transplant units and support groups. We shared pride over things we figured other people wouldn't understand -- for instance, the fact that we were trusted to draw our own blood samples through our Hickman tubes (and our belief that if we failed to re-cap said tubes, we would slowly bleed out -- perhaps not a bad way to go in a pinch). We saw beauty where it seemed others couldn't; we felt despair we hoped others didn't.

I remember the first time I watched someone receive a blood transfusion. My friend Gayle, 26-years-old, was dying of leukemia, and the transfusion converted her from a slumped, demoralized cancer patient to a smiling dynamo, full of life and hope, bouncing off the hospital furniture. The lift was short-lived -- she would need a booster again in a few days, but for those few days she felt a bit like her old self.

My own experience receiving transfusions was emotional. Knowing that someone had sacrificed some time and endured a needle poke all to help a stranger live another day brought me to tears every time. I cried a lot back then. Today I wish more people would make that sacrifice, not for me, because I don't need transfusions any more, but for all the anonymous cancer patients, accident victims, surgery patients and others who find themselves desperately in need of blood. A step beyond donating blood, which takes only an hour longer and a second needle poke, is to donate platelets. And a truly selfless act is to sign up for the bone marrow/stem cell registry. Some people have misguided fears that donating stem cells can be dangerous, but the life-giving cells can often be collected without surgery. Imagine spending a couple of hours enduring a couple of needles and saving an entire life! It happens every day when people donate bone marrow or stem cells in quantities so small relative to the body's full supply that the donor suffers no real adverse effects. To learn more, contact Canadian Blood Services.

I kept a blog of my cancer experience before I knew that activity was known as blogging. It still sits at www.ourfunlife.com/health. I find it hard to go back and read what I recorded during my illness, in spite of the fact that I didn't record many of the most painful experiences. Those experiences remain in my memory as a trigger to make the most of my life all these years later, to be grateful, to be serene and to be kind to all beings. I still sweat the small stuff some days, but mostly I know I'm extremely lucky to still be here, living a very full and happy life.
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Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/ "Why love one but eat the other?" The 1,000 poster-sized ads juxtapose pictures of pets such as cats and dogs with images of animals most people equate with food, namely chickens, pigs, and cows.

I am co-coordinator of this campaign, with friend and fellow animal advocate Kimberly Carroll. Together we conceived of and mounted the campaign to encourage thought and discussion, along with support from the Toronto Vegetarian Association and a whole community of people concerned about animals.

We expected strong reactions to the campaign and we got them. Some accused us of mounting a propaganda campaign, although all of the information we provide is factual. Some asserted that people need to eat animals to survive, although it has been medically proven they do not. The American Dietetics Association and the Dietitians of Canada have both endorsed a well-planned vegetarian diet as perfectly healthy. Some accused us of promoting false teachings according to the Bible or compared us to Muslim extremists, all in spite of the fact that the campaign makes no mention of religion.

One might ask why an ad on a subway is capable of eliciting such strong reactions. In my day job, I am a professor who specializes in behavioural finance, or how economic decisions are influenced by human psychology. Our ad campaign borrows a concept from this field of study: cognitive dissonance. When a random transit rider sees the images of cows, pigs, kittens, chicks, and dogs on our posters, his immediate impulse is likely to think "Aww, how cute! I love animals!" As his attention shifts lower down the poster, he is confronted with horrifying photographs of common practices on factory farms: for instance tail docking, beak cutting, and teeth clipping without anesthetic, cows with inflamed udders due to mastitis, pigs in stalls so small they cannot turn, and chickens stuffed so tightly into cages that they cannot spread their wings. Standard treatment of cows, pigs, and chickens in the Canadian agricultural industry would be illegal is applied to a cat or dog.

So the transit rider is confronted with two conflicting thoughts: "I love these cute animals!" and "When I eat animals, I am complicit in their cruel treatment!" This is cognitive dissonance -- simultaneously holding two conflicting thoughts in one's head. A common and sensible way for an individual to resolve cognitive dissonance is to change his actions. Extensive feedback on this campaign (in the form of video testimonials, emails, tweets, and Facebook comments) suggests many Canadians have decided to resolve their internal conflict by becoming vegetarian and vegan. We have scores of testimonials from people who have decided to stop participating in the exploitation of sentient beings after seeing the ads. Of course the campaign has its detractors as well, with some folks choosing to resolve their cognitive dissonance by adopting or maintaining the mistaken belief that cows, pigs, and chickens are somehow different from other animals and therefore unworthy of compassion. Our past experience with people transitioning to a vegetarian diet suggests that many of these folks will continue to ruminate over the conflicting thoughts and may eventually decide that changing their actions will lead to greater mental comfort than attempting to maintain a belief that flies in the face of the documented facts about animals and factory farming.

A different ad campaign might have invoked cognitive dissonance using a different set of facts, for instance by highlighting the adverse environmental or health consequences of eating animals. Our planet suffers greatly as a consequence of factory farming. Additionally, medical research strongly suggests that meat-eaters can face a significantly higher risk of life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

Overall, this campaign demonstrates the role behavioural economics and human psychology can play in shaping important decisions that ultimately help people, animals, and the environment. And what about the fact that the campaign unexpectedly led to us being called a few names? We won't let that ruffle our feathers.

You can learn more about the subway ad campaign, which runs through to the beginning of 2012, by checking out the campaign web site www.BeVeg.ca or the campaign video.
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Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/
A well-known psychological tendency that influences decisions is known as anchoring. The 'anchor' upon which a decision rests can heavily influence its outcome. One well-known example in behavioral economics comes from a study in which participants were asked to write down the last two digits of their social security number. Next they were asked how much they would be willing to pay for an item, such as a bottle of wine. Individuals whose digits were low were willing to pay significantly less on average for the bottle of wine than people whose two digits were high. This is in spite of the fact that those digits were completely random, and everyone was bidding on identical bottles of wine. Are you surprised to learn that the price you are willing to pay for an item may be influenced by completely arbitrary information? Well prepare yourself; the plot thickens.

This week a surprising new finding was published that extends what we know about anchoring. Researchers put study participants on a Wii balance board, which measures centre of gravity and captures whether an individual is leaning in one particular direction or another. While the participants were on the board, the researchers asked them to stand up straight; nonetheless, most happened to lean slightly in one direction or the other. Next, researchers asked participants to estimate quantities, such as the height of the Eiffel Tower or the number of hit records Michael Jackson had in the Netherlands. They found that people who leaned to the left tended to give lower estimates than people who leaned to the right. The researchers attribute this to the following subconscious anchor: when people count they typically think of small numbers to the left and large numbers to the right.

Why does this matter? The effects may be subtle, but your body's posture may actually affect the amount you are willing to pay for a consumer good, or even a financial asset!

The finding also raises some interesting questions. Is the tendency to think of small numbers to the left and large numbers to the right a consequence of the left-to-write reading standard in most languages? If so, would people whose mother tongue is a language read right-to-left, such as Arabic or Hebrew, exhibit the opposite tendency? Or is the tendency to associate small numbers with the left and large numbers with the right more biologically hard-wired, and perhaps tied to left- or right-handedness? Does the tendency extend to framing the left or right in other contexts, such as political affiliation?

The degree to which such human characteristics such as anchoring influence human decisions is the topic of a new book which has premiered at number three on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List: Thinking Fast and Slow, written by Daniel Kahneman. Professor Kahneman is the first psychologist to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Economists like myself, and increasingly members of the general public, are interested in such phenomena precisely because they have the potential to influence individual economic decisions and ultimately what happens in financial markets. And financial markets, are the anchor upon which our financial futures rest.
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Lisa Kramer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kramer/
Certainly there are profound fundamental economic factors contributing to the recent financial turbulence, but basic human psychology also plays a pivotal role, especially at this time of year. And the upcoming daylight savings time change in Canada and the U.S. may compound the problem.

With the amount of daylight diminishing in the fall, a substantial fraction of the population suffers annually from seasonal depression. Up to 10 per cent of people in North America suffer severely, and most of the rest of us experience winter blues to a milder degree. Careful research has established that depressed people are more risk averse. Consequently, as an investing public we are collectively less willing to bear financial risk in the fall. Combine this human tendency with a bit of bad economic news, such as we have seen come out of Europe recently, and the result can be plummeting stock markets, much more so than if the same news had emerged in the spring when daylight is becoming more abundant and our moods are more buoyant.

My co-authors Mark Kamstra, Maurice Levi, and I showed the impact this human characteristic has on stock markets around the world. (See "Winter Blues: A SAD Stock Market Cycle" American Economic Review 93(1), 324-343.) In countries located at more extreme latitudes, such as Sweden, where daylight fluctuates more dramatically through the seasons relative to North America, seasonal stock market fluctuations are relatively more dramatic. And in southern hemisphere countries such as Australia, where the seasons are six months out of phase, so are the seasonal effects in markets.

As if this wasn't enough to make your average investor more nervous about investing in the fall, there is also a market-wide effect that arises due to daylight savings time changes. With the disruption in sleep habits that arises from the time change, a phenomenon psychologists call 'sleep desynchronosis,' many of us experience a variety of cognitive changes (which have been shown to lead to increased car accidents) and we also become more anxious. With heightened anxiety can come a greater reluctance to bear financial risk, and the result is often a decline in stock markets on the Monday following the time change. Of course on any given day, markets may go up or down, but my co-authors Kamstra, Levi, and I showed that markets decline on average following the time change. (See "Losing Sleep at the Market: The Daylight Saving Anomaly" American Economic Review, 90(4): 1005-1011.)

Certainly with formerly arcane terms such as 'austerity measure' having become household expressions, we know there are important economic events occurring around the world. Such fundamental conditions are undeniably the primary driver of financial market performance. But human psychology plays a significant role as well.

The instinctive reaction at this time of year may be to want to curl up in a ball and sleep through the fall and winter seasons. Metaphorically, that is not a bad investment strategy. Once an individual has a carefully planned portfolio in place, the best response to unsettled market conditions is to look away. For individual investors, a buy and hold strategy has been shown to outperform an attempt to market time. So remember you are human and try not to lose any sleep over the matter.
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