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Book review: Delusions of Gender

 Books, Male/female  3 Responses »
Oct 192011
 

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

I enjoy seeing images and reading descriptions of how people perceived the potential of the near future. For example, I recently saw an illustration from the 1900s that showed a room full of people in the year 2000 wearing full Edwardian dress and sitting around a radium fireplace. What is often amusing about these forecasts is that certain areas of life seem so set in stone that no one can imagine them changing. Clothing and hairstyles are certainly one good example. Gender roles are even more interesting: A 1967 vision of the future features a home computer that mom will use to shop for clothes and dad will use to pay the bills and see how much he owes in taxes. The technology is expected to develop, but the people are seen as fairly static.

The theme of Cordelia Fine’s latest book is that these unexamined assumptions help create the reality we study when we examine human behavior and also influence our interpretation of what we see. The first section of the book examines the way our assumptions about gender influence the very behavior we study when we look for inherent gender differences. For example, spatial reasoning is generally taken to be a particularly male skill. Fine cites a study where women outperformed men on a mental rotation task when it was presented in terms of stereotypically female activities (interior decorating, for example), but men did better than women when it was presented in terms of stereotypically male activities (nuclear propulsion engineering, say). This is just one example of many studies that revealed how responsive we are to social cues—even something as subtle as checking a box to indicate our gender before starting a test. Fine covers other aspects of how expectations color the ways that we perceive other people’s behavior, such as different reactions to more or less the same behavior in men and women in leadership positions.

To me, the chapter on stereotype threat seemed simultaneously the saddest and the most promising part of this section. Stereotype threat is what you’re under when you are performing a task that a social group you belong to is believed to be bad at, and it often has a negative effect on progress or performance. Fine writes, “It’s disconcerting to think that those who belong to negatively stereotyped groups might be pervasively hampered by stereotype threat effects in their academic life.” It seems like such a waste to me that thousands of capable brains, especially young brains, are not performing up to their potential because they are stressed by false beliefs along the lines of “Girls can’t do math” or “Guys are not good with words” (or beliefs about what people of your ethnicity are capable of or good at, for that matter). On the other hand, this does indicate that the human race has reserves of untapped, or inadequately tapped, potential on which to draw.

The second section is about the ways in which new results in neuroscience are often interpreted in terms of the same old gender stereotypes. It was surprising to me how many of the things that I thought I knew about gender differences are in fact not really well established. For example, you may have heard about (shoot, I may have written about) articles investigating the influence of fetal testosterone, which is supposedly the basis of some gender differences. I learned that no one has found a good correlation between any of the measurements made so far and any of the various supposedly masculine skills or behaviors that have been examined. (Fine makes an excellent point in the context of this discussion: Men are sometimes said to be better at science, but we haven’t even identified precisely which cognitive abilities make for a successful career in science, so it’s a bit premature to begin trying to identify the prenatal influences that produce the scientifically minded brain.) Another example: Females are said to have a larger corpus callosum, the band of nerve fibers connecting the brain’s hemispheres, but this finding is not cast in stone; in fact, it was rejected in a 2008 review article.

Furthermore, Fine makes the point that even when gender differences in brain activity are truly identified, they don’t necessarily represent something hardwired. We’re learning to understand the brain as a fairly plastic thing, and the effects of socialization surely show up there (where else would they appear?). She quotes neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier to the effect that “Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.” It almost seems to me that we are flexible creatures who for some reason really like to see each other in terms of fixed, either-or categories. Anyway, if you have read much in the way of popular science regarding gender differences in the brain, this section of the book may give you some surprises; it certainly provides a lot of valuable information. Chapter 14, “Brain Scams,” is particularly useful as a corrective to some of the pop psychology takes on gender differences.

The third section goes into how socialization occurs, and in particular how parents pass their beliefs about gender on to their children. For example, she has a fascinating discussion of gender-neutral child-rearing. This much-lauded concept is extremely hard to realize in practice; she describes the efforts one couple made to provide a truly gender-neutral background for their children, and it was a Herculean undertaking. People tend to overlook the many influences at work and attribute their children’s choices to genetics if they do not match what the parent is overtly promoting. (If I give a little girl toy trucks and a chemistry set but she wants dolls and a makeup set instead, it must be her hardwired femininity coming out, not all the advertising she sees, the trips down the toy aisle at the store, the television shows and books and movies that promote gender stereotypes, my own unconscious beliefs and behaviors, or the way her friends behave.)

It was almost amusing to read about some of the studies of supposedly gendered preferences measured in very young children. Six-month-old babies acted more interested in a pink doll or a blue truck depending on whether they were female or male, respectively, which is taken to indicate innate gender-based preferences. Has evolution really had time to teach human babies much about trucks (or the color blue, for that matter)? The people who care for them, on the other hand, have had time to teach them plenty, even at six months. (By the way, one interesting fact I picked up is that the current color-coding scheme using pink and blue is fairly recent; in fact, through the end of the 19th century, babies and young children of both genders generally wore white dresses, and when colors began to be used, pink was originally the color for boys.)

Fine has many other amusing but pointed observations about parent-child interactions. For example, even parents who want to stretch the gender boundaries for their daughters will be much more rigid about maintaining them in their sons. She quotes a mother whose son kept asking for a Barbie, so she and her husband “compromised” by getting him a NASCAR Barbie. (There are negative words for women that have no male equivalents—think of “slut,” for example, and words of that ilk—but males get the short end of the stick on this one: the word “tomboy” is, at least these days, attractive in a way that the rough male equivalent, “sissie,” is not.)

I highly recommend the book. The science of human behavior acquires various encrustations of half-baked or misunderstood sorta-facts as it works its way into the popular consciousness; aspects are emphasized or ignored for political or social reasons, and in some cases, the studies are over-interpreted or poorly done to begin with. Gender roles are one of the more touchy areas where science is easily misinterpreted or influenced by biases, although as Fine points out, “to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern.” Regarding that untapped potential I mentioned earlier in this review, Fine has this to say in the epilogue:

When a woman persists with a high-level math course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotion, values, interests, hormones, and brains—because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.

Notes for the curious:

I wasn’t making it up about the radium fireplace (you’ll need to scroll down to find it) or the 1967 vision of gender stereotyped computer commerce.

The mental rotation study is described in Spatial Cognition and Gender: Instructional and Stimulus Influences on Mental Image Rotation Performance, M. J. Sharps, J. L. Price, and J. K. Williams, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18(3), 413–425, 1994.

The study about toy dolls and trucks is described in Sex Differences in Infants’ Visual Interest in Toys, G. M. Alexander, T. Wilcox, and R. Woods, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38(3): 427–433, 2009.

For more on color-coded children’s clothing, see this Smithsonian Magazine article. Check out the slide show, which features Franklin Roosevelt as a little boy. Coincidentally, This Is Not Porn just posted a photo of a very young Ernest Hemingway.

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 Posted by at 8:49 pm

Science and Eastern spirituality

 Being human, Books  12 Responses »
Feb 282011
 

Although I do not believe in any of the gods proposed by the world’s religions, I do have feelings of wonder, awe, connectedness, and transcendence that might reasonably be described as “spiritual.” However, describing and sharing these feelings in the absence of belief in a deity can be difficult. For one thing, as soon as you use the word “spiritual” to describe yourself, the word “supernatural” comes to many minds. And in my experience, there is some reason for this: the word “spiritual” is too often connected with some kind of belief in the supernatural, AKA woo (or in the longer but in my opinion more descriptive version, mumbo-jumbo). It’s enough to make an atheistic primate wonder whether it’s time to stop using the word “spiritual” altogether.

I’ve long been interested in certain Eastern ideas of spirituality, which often seem to offer practical advice for living well without a lot of dogma (at least as they have been presented in the West). As a bonus, some of these approaches also treat the body gently, as something to be cherished, rather than as an enemy to be conquered or disciplined. (The word for this in the Catholicism of my girlhood was “mortified,” as in “the mortification of the flesh.” Ugh.) The problem is that you can generally only get so far into any reading on Buddhism or yoga before bumping up painfully against woo (reincarnation, karma as a true causative agent, levitation) or a renunciatory spirit (celibacy, avoiding alcohol) that is one of the more unfortunate aspects of religion, IMO. If enlightenment is attainable only on the mountaintop away from real life, it has little value for me. (I have found a few non-mumbo-jumbo books about Buddhism and mindfulness; see the list at the bottom of this post.)

So I was very interested in Philip Goldberg’s American Veda, which chronicles the spread of Eastern spiritual concepts in America, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to today. (He specifically investigates only the broader spiritual concepts of what he refers to as Vedanta-Yoga—e.g., “one truth, many paths”—rather than religious ceremonies, deities, and such.) I may have more to say on the book as a whole later. For now, I’m going to focus a couple of things that struck me for what they say about how science is related to Eastern spiritual ideas.

In a chapter on the founding of the Esalen Institute, the famed retreat center that explores humanistic spirituality, Goldberg quoted Jeffry Kripal as saying that Esalen offers

“a kind of secular mysticism that is deeply conversant with democracy, religious pluralism, and modern science.”

Sounds good, especially when compared to fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Islam, which are often opposed to religious pluralism and/or modern science. There are echoes elsewhere in the book of this suggestion that Eastern spirituality is suitable for a modern secular society. However, a little later, in a chapter on the influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru to the stars, most notably the Beatles), Goldberg quotes Harry Oldmeadow, a theorist of religion:

“The interest in Eastern spirituality met some deep yearning for a vision of reality deeper, richer, more adequate, more attuned to the fullness of human experience, than the impoverished world view offered by a scientifically-grounded humanism.”

I initially interpreted the first quote as implying that people were actively seeking a spirituality that was compatible with other things they valued, e.g., science and democracy. The second quote seemed contradictory: it seemed almost to imply that even if people accept science and humanism, despite the relatively shallow, less adequate world view they offer, they remain hungry for something more. I’ve encountered this attitude before, and I still find it discouraging. Some of my most powerful feelings of wonder, and some of the deepest, richest, most mind-opening thoughts I know, are profoundly connected with our scientific understanding of the world. To me, the quest for an adequate spirituality is about finding a way to make room in my life for those feelings and nurture the experiences that give rise to them (not getting too caught up in the daily round of work and chores) and trying to share them with others. It is not about supplementing the inadequacies of a scientific-humanist world view because I don’t find that world view inadequate.

Goldberg’s book is not specifically about science and Eastern spirituality (although he does have a chapter about that topic, which I’m just about to read), and he certainly doesn’t delve very deeply into what “compatibility with science” might really mean. The people and events he describes often seem to involve a fair amount of woo (e.g., after making a hit with transcendental meditation, the Maharishi went on in the 1970s to try to train people to levitate). The picture overall is fascinating but definitely not one of a mumbo-jumbo-free spirituality, and reading this book is leading me once again to question my use of the word “spiritual” in connection with myself. I’d love to hear what others think. Do you describe yourself as spiritual or as “spiritual but not religious”? Do you think it makes sense for atheists/agnostics to describe themselves as spiritual? I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who grew up with the original ideas behind Eastern spirituality and religion in these ideas’ native habitat.

Here are the non-mumbo-jumbo books on Eastern spirituality:

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Book review: Brain storm: Harnessing the power of productive obsessions

 Being human, Books, General  1 Response »
Aug 252010
 

Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions, by Eric Maisel and Ann Maisel.

Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist and a well-known creativity coach, with many books to his credit. His co-author is his wife Ann, who is, according to the jacket blurb, busy researching the productive obsessions of others. They’ve produced a book of advice and encouragement for how to engage your mind in a project that can help you find meaning and fulfillment.

This book follows up on Eric Maisel’s earlier The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, in which he encouraged depressed creative people to work through the depression by focusing on how they were creating meaning through their work. The basic idea was that depression is what fills your heart when the meaning has leaked out, so the key to keeping it at bay is to never take meaning for granted, but to cultivate it assiduously.

Brainstorm is more of a how-to manual for the care and feeding of projects that can give life meaning. The idea behind a productive obsession is that it gives your brain something to focus on, something that will help you channel your mental energies into something more productive than the hamster-wheel spinning of worries, fears, or regrets that can sap your energy. A productive obsession can be just about anything: writing a novel, creating a series of paintings, launching a business or a nonprofit, solving some scientific or technical problem, or resolving some vexing personal dilemma like how to balance your work and your family or how to care for an aging relative. The key thing is to find something to which you can commit yourself wholeheartedly and that will repay your sustained attention.

The introduction says this book could be read in an afternoon, and I think that’s a pretty accurate estimation. The chapters are short and the writing is engaging and approachable. However, the payoff really comes when you apply the ideas to your own productive obsession, whatever it might be. So in that sense, it’s a book for bookmarking and dipping into as your obsession unfolds.

The book is structured loosely around the progress of a typical productive obsession. It describes identifying the thing that will most happily occupy and focus your brain, clearing the decks for action, mustering the discipline to succeed, and dealing with rough patches. The successful completion of your project is then only the beginning of the next obsession. Each chapter closes with a few paragraphs of more specific counsel: suggestions for dealing with obstacles, bits of insight into the process, words of encouragement, success stories for inspiration. The book closes with an appendix about how to start your own productive obsession group online in which you can find and offer encouragement and swap stories.

My own productive obsession at the moment is a novel that I’m writing. The idea first came to me on New Year’s Day, 2007. I’ve written a lot of background and sketches, and this January 1, I resolved to finish a first draft by the end of the year. (I think I may make it.) I read the Maisels’ book with this project in mind. It struck me as containing advice of varying degrees of usefulness to me at the moment. As I read, sentences or paragraphs would leap out at me, telling me things that I either hadn’t known or had sensed only dimly. I suspect that in another reading at a different stage of my work, a different set of ideas would be highlighted. This time, I got a lot out of the parts about self-doubt, follow-through, and being patient with the process.

For example, one of the things that has bedeviled me the most about writing a novel is trying to get a handle on exactly how the process works. I figured most people don’t just sit down, like Snoopy, and type “It was a dark and stormy night,” and then move along, page after page, until “The end.” Foundations must be laid, preliminary sketches made—but how does this fit into the actual production of completed pages? I wanted someone to tell me what I was supposed to do every day. And being a mildly (or maybe moderately) obsessive type, I wanted to see results, to watch the number of words and the number of pages steadily increasing. However, that just didn’t seem to be how it worked, at least not in the beginning. I’m slowly figuring out my own process (at least for this book), but I still feel like I’m floundering sometimes. So I was brought up short by the following:

There is simply no paved road from here to there.

It was surprising how much this helped. My reaction seemed to exemplify something the book said a few pages earlier:

Yet people are convinced that there is some linear way to write a novel, build a business, or answer a scientific question. Holding to this false hope, when they enter into the turmoil of process and discover that it is messy, nonlinear, and not what they expected, they quit. If only they could accept that process is exactly this messy, they might grow calm—and enjoy themselves.

Oh. OK. Yeah, that does make sense.

Maisel talks about neuronal gestalts and uses other brain-centered language in what seems to be a largely metaphorical way. He has the experience to back him up in his observations on how brains work and what makes them happy and productive (or unhappy and stuck), but it might have been nice to have some footnotes or suggestions for further reading that address what brain science can tell us about focus, mindfulness, self-confidence, and self-doubt. With that minor caveat, though, I’d say that this book has some helpful advice and inspiration that can help you get from a vague feeling of wanting to do something big with your time and energy to actually doing something about it.

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Book review: Personality: What makes you the way you are

 Books, Psychology  3 Responses »
Jul 042009
 

Personality: What makes you the way you are, by Daniel Nettle.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007

I have to confess that I’ve felt an irrational attachment to the Myers-Briggs personality typology at the expense of other perfectly good systems, in particular the Big Five system that currently dominates research. This book remedied that, however, providing a fascinating grounding in the Big Five traits in terms of related brain areas or functions and genes.

Nettle begins with an overview of how the Big Five were determined (as clusters of correlated traits that emerged from studies of various aspects of personality) and how different behavioral patterns and personality traits might have evolved. Of particular interest is the question of why people have varying characteristics—in other words, why have different types persisted in the human population? why aren’t we all roughly the same? In a nutshell, the answer is that there is no single optimum personality that it is always advantageous to have.

One reason for this is that the environment changes and demands different things from different generations (interestingly, the environment includes other humans and their traits). Thus, the pressure of selection is usually not going to zero in on a particular level of any given trait or behavioral tendency and eliminate other levels from the mix. Nettle describes some studies of guppies, which showed that cautious behavior is linked to the presence or absence of predators in the environment, and there appears to be a heritable component to this behavior. Also, if naturally cautious guppies are placed in a predator-free environment, the level of cautiousness in the population drops after several generations, suggesting that there is survival value in both being wary and being relaxed, depending on environment. And there’s a continuum of wariness levels in a single species, rather than two species with different characteristics, because the populations mix and also because the level of predation in a particular environment can fluctuate. Nettle’s summary seemed to me to hint at some deep thoughts about diversity and individuality:

“No specific level of wariness is globally favored by selection, though for every individual guppy there is a level of wariness that it would be best to have.”

The heart of the book is five chapters that investigate each trait in turn: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to experience. Each is explained in terms of the brain mechanism or function that it expresses. Those high in Extraversion, for example, are particularly attracted to the evolutionary carrots that offer rewards, whereas Neurotics are more attuned toward the sticks that warn of danger; Extraversion is associated with happy moods and Neuroticism with negative feelings. Conscientiousness has to do with self-control, and Agreeableness with the desire for harmony with others. Openness to experience is associated with the propensity to make broader associations of meaning (i.e., being more likely to see or create connections between relatively disparate objects or concepts).

Each chapter explains what we know so far about the trait in terms of both behavior and its neural and/or genetic underpinnings, with a good number of references to papers describing current research. For some traits, we know more about the related brain structures than for others, and of course it’s impossible to list all the possible connections. I was hoping to see something about the temporal lobes and Openness, but maybe there’s not enough research on that yet to make it worth mentioning, or maybe there just wasn’t room.

In the case of every one of the Big Five traits, a single optimum level of the trait has not become dominant in humankind; i.e., there’s a considerable range of levels of Extraversion, etc. This suggests that the optimum level varies with the environment, which of course varies in time, sometimes favoring the bold and sometimes the cautious, for example, so that neither end of the spectrum is bred out of the population. Nettle’s descriptions of the pros and cons of each trait were for me some of the most interesting material in the book.

Conscientiousness might sound like a universally desirable capacity, for example, and the more the better. However, high levels of Conscientiousness can lead to rigidity and missed opportunities, and low levels can be advantageous in changeable situations where behavior needs to be fluid and responsive. The dangers of being disagreeable are fairly obvious, but being too agreeable and always putting others before yourself is not good either. Neuroticism certainly seems like the least desirable of the Big Five traits (alas, I scored high on that one), but even there, the capacity for caution and reflection can be useful, and a dissatisfaction with what is can spur you to achieve more.

Throughout, Nettle recommends that you not bemoan your level of any particular trait, but instead focus on its advantages and try to arrange your life so that you can use your strengths and protect yourself in areas where you’re weak. (To go back to that guppy quote, basically we have to find the place where the mix of traits we’ve inherited is most useful.) This may sound obvious, but it can take a long time to get a clear picture of your true strengths and weaknesses, separate from what you wish were so and what those around you are like or wish you were like. It’s only been in my late 30s and into my 40s that I feel like I’ve started to truly understand why some things are hard for me and why I’m drawn to other things, and to stop beating myself up for not being like more extraverted or ambitious people and try to structure my life so that I can function at my best.

The last chapter of the book focuses on how much you can change your life, given that your personality as measured by the Big Five traits remains fairly constant over the lifespan. There are small shifts, on average: “As adulthood progresses, people become slightly higher in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and slightly lower in Extraversion, Openness, and Neuroticism,” reflecting a shift from agency (the drive toward achieving things and expressing yourself) to communion (relating with others). But by and large, as the song says, what you’re born with is what you get.

However, Nettle did a really good job of presenting the flexibility of self-concept that’s possible within the relatively unchanging framework of predispositions that we’re born with, which I found both inspiring and comforting. For example, a personality trait can be manifested in a fairly wide range of ways: “…if your personality is causing you trouble and worry, you need to find alternative, and less destructive, outlets for the same characteristics. You don’t have to change yourself. You just have to change your self’s outlet.” Another option for changing your life is to change the story you tell about it, reframing events and characteristic behaviors in a different light.

By the end of the book, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea where you stand on each of the Big Five, but each of the five is divided into various subtraits, and if you’d like a more detailed look at how you score on some of those, you can take an online test. If you read the book or take the test, I hope you have fun exploring the range of human personality and where you fit in. As they say, it takes all kinds.

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Book review: iBrain

 Books  1 Response »
Jan 112009
 

iBrain: Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

If you are looking for a good book summarizing what we know about the effect of technology on our brains, I’d suggest you keep looking. This book provides a mixture of self-help, technical help, popular neuroscience, and a subtle but persistent deprecation of modern communication technology, without, in my opinion, doing any one topic justice. Furthermore, it’s mired in a fundamental confusion about the difference between evolution and the capability of individual brains to change their neuronal circuits in response to the environment (neuroplasticity). This leaves me dubious about how far I can trust the authors when they present scientific information.

The book addresses “Digital Immigrants”, those of us for whom current communication technologies are something we encountered after our formative years. This is fine, except for the fact that it is threaded with anti-technology bias. Although the authors don’t explicitly advise against technology use, instead counseling balance, the vignettes presented throughout the book deal only with the risks and down-side of technology. Loaded language is often used to deliver statistics: Young people don’t watch or use digital media, for example; they expose their brains to them.

The book does cover some interesting research in various relevant areas (e.g., addiction, ADHD), and tackles big topics like the effect of the Internet on politics, entertainment, and crime. These are all useful or important things to consider. However, it tends to cover these topics in a more or less cursory way, because it covers a lot of other turf as well, offering self-help exercises to bolster your interpersonal communication skills and information to help you survive in a digital world. This technology toolkit contains fairly basic advice about things like web searching, cell phone etiquette, and online privacy, most of which is not likely to be new to you if you read this blog. (And even your mother, no matter how old she is, could probably tell you to save only the email messages you are likely to have to refer to later.) In short, the book is a hybrid that, in my opinion, doesn’t provide significant new, useful, thoughtfully presented information on any one topic.

At the heart of my quarrel with this book is the first chapter, which assures you that your brain is evolving right now. That’s a questionable statement. Your brain changes into something different as you learn new things, no doubt about that, but that’s neuroplasticity, not evolution. You might charitably think that the authors are using “evolution” in its broader, nonscientific sense of developing into something more advanced. In fact, they offer this definition themselves, but it’s at the head of a section on Darwinian evolution, which talks about natural selection and survival of the fittest and even mentions DNA, but goes on to talk about brain evolution in terms of single-generation changes like the development of a shorthand for text messaging, rather than intergenerational changes in gene frequencies. OK, maybe they’re talking about cultural evolution, but in that case, why bring up Darwin and genes without making plain that biological and cultural evolution are analogous in some ways but not the same? Also, can a single brain even be said to evolve culturally, or does the culture itself evolve? All in all, I found this first chapter a grievous irritant.

The book goes on to discuss the brain gap; I remember the generation gap and the missile gap from my childhood, so maybe I’m not as excited about a new gap as I should be. One worthwhile question about the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants—as yet unanswered—regards the way that immersion in electronic worlds affects the social maturation of young brains. The research the book presents is suggestive, but inconclusive. Sometimes it seems like the authors are trying to argue it both ways: On the one hand, individual brains change to adapt to their environments; that’s why the brain gap arose, because Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants face different environments, to some degree. But the point of adapting is to cope with the environment better, and it’s possible that kids are developing the kind of social skills they need in the world they’re going to have to survive and mate in. If this is happening at the cost of losing ordinary garden-variety social interaction skills, that is worrisome, but it’s not really clear yet that that’s what’s happening, in my opinion. As far as I can tell, young people still go to school and have to interact with their peers and their elders face to face. And it’s worth mentioning that older communication technologies, like the book, have also been blamed for stunting social skills. (Hands up everyone who, as a child, was told by teachers or parents to get your nose out of that book and come play with the other kids.)

I get the feeling that part of what motivated the book is the unease that an older generation feels with the world that young people are creating. This has been a concern of the older generation for centuries. While there may sometimes be room for concern, the fact that the plaintive cry about young people who seem like they’re from another planet has been heard for generations does blunt the urgency for me. And while the authors seem to view online interactions as less desirable than those that take place face to face, they don’t say much about the social benefits of the Internet, like the way it connects far-flung communities that might otherwise never have found each other, or how email can revive old friendships and keep relationships alive, albeit in attenuated form, over long distances. If I communicated with my kids only via email or IM, that would be sad, but email is perfect for maintaining some friendships that would otherwise probably die away.

All in all, I’d say to save your money for a book that goes into a single topic of interest to you in more detail (and more even-handedly and rigorously) than iBrain does in its smorgasbord approach.

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Complex, sacred nature

 Books, Humans and Earth  4 Responses »
Nov 262008
 

One possible way to unify a big-history narrative is to use the theme of growing complexity in the universe. Stuart Kauffman studies complexity and self-organization; in particular, he believes that self-organization might play an important role in evolution, along with natural selection. He has recently written a book, Reinventing the Sacred, about his approach to moving away from a purely reductionist science and toward a science infused with meaning and even a sense of the sacred (a totally naturalistic sense, not a belief in a supernatural being). Kauffman talks about the book in this interview with Salon and has written an essay for Edge.org that’s excerpted from the book.

In the Salon interview, Kauffman says that having a shared sense of the sacred in nature might give the emerging global culture something to converge on (to counteract what he describes as a natural retreat into fundamentalism on the part of some people). This reminded me a bit of what David Christian said about a big-history narrative serving as a secular creation story. However, while what Christian said really resonated for me, Kauffman takes the idea much further, into places I’m not entirely comfortable with. For one thing, Christian noted that he wanted to draw a line between religion and what he was talking about with regard to big history, whereas Kauffman seems to be blurring that sort of line. (And I really don’t know what to think about his idea, mentioned in passing in the Salon interview, that there might be some connection between quantum physics and consciousness.) Still, he makes some good points and some provocative points, and I think the book will definitely be worth reading. (Anyone already read it and have any comments on it?)

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Book review: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

 Books, Psychology  Comments Off
Sep 042008
 

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, by Sam Gosling
New York: Basic Books, 2008

Until a couple of years ago, I lived in an apartment complex on the IU campus. There were two basic layouts (some apartments had balconies and some didn’t). It was always interesting to get a glimpse of what someone else had done with the same space that I had—for example, when I’d go to someone else’s apartment to buy yet another set of bookshelves from someone who was moving out, or sneak a glance through the open windows of a lighted apartment in another wing after dark. You can see the same thing in dorm rooms: a single basic spatial design, often very unimaginative, made distinctive by different occupants.

Examining dorm rooms in search of clues to their residents’ personalities is how Sam Gosling got his start in researching the connections between physical environment and temperament. Snoop is an entertaining look at how our stuff—for example, our bedrooms, bookshelves, offices, web sites, and email signatures—reveals who we are and what we value.

We drop various types of clues to the riddle of our selves. Some are there to tell the world who we are (identity claims), like bumper stickers or t-shirts. Others are there to help motivate, relax, or cheer us (feeling regulators), like religious icons, inspirational posters, and calming or energizing music. Placement for these two is important; something posted outside the cube or on the office door is probably meant to convey a particular image to others, while the family photos that are taped to the wall beside your monitor, where only you can see them, are more likely to be there for you. The third type of clue we leave is called behavioral residue: the candy bar wrappers on the floor of the car, the piles of half-read books next to the bed, the well-worn sneakers and like-new dress shoes.

People may try to manipulate their identity claims and even their behavioral residue to look like something they’re not, but usually it’s difficult to fully cover up your real self, and I gathered that often even if people plant clues that are misleading, they may not consciously be trying to deceive—their own vision of who they are may not entirely match reality. (Before you conclude that such people are crazy, consider whether you’ve bought or otherwise acquired for yourself something that you haven’t used/read/worn yet but that you mean to use/read/wear someday.)

To see how these various clues relate to what a person is all about, Gosling looks at research, including his own, that views personality based on the Big Five personality traits. He gives an overview of them (openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) near the beginning of the book. The Big Five system is a fairly broad framework; Gosling discusses the traits as fairly large categories, but if you like, you can get into a lot of fine-grained detail about different facets of each trait and how you score on each one. (E.g., see the International Personality Item Pool page, which links to a short and a long version of a test that will help you place yourself on each of the facets.)

After describing the Big Five traits, Gosling goes into an excellent discussion of something that I haven’t seen anyone else discuss in any detail before, even in books about personality: What does it mean to say you know someone? He uses an approach developed by Dan McAdams that considers three levels: traits (the sorts of descriptors that personality systems and personal ads use to summarize people’s personalities), personal concerns (the context and circumstances that shape the way traits are expressed and experienced), and identity (the deepest level of all, encompassing the elements that a person feels are essential to who he or she really is). The chapter contains some (often amusing) information about traits, including a description of a very thorough study of the words used to describe personalities, and a comparison of the words used to describe dogs and humans.

I need to read more of what McAdams has to say, because I enjoyed this discussion of his ideas, and in particular the important point that personality traits will only carry you so far in understanding a person because “[t]here are many ways to be extraverted or nervous or entertaining or dramatic or moody.” I’ve thought about this a bit in the context of introversion in particular. I have a friend who scores even more highly on tests for introversion than I do; he’s a university professor and a pianist, so an important part of his working life involves speaking or playing the piano in front of a room full of people. If my job required me to do either of those things, I think I’d be so miserable that I wouldn’t last long at it. On the other hand, when I’m with someone I know well and trust, I can be so talkative and emotionally open that people say they can’t believe I’m an introvert, and those kinds of heart-to-heart discussions, which I love, often make my friend uncomfortable. In short, we have two very different styles of introversion, based on experience, talent, and interests (and perhaps gender?).

When examining the links between these five traits and various things we surround ourselves with, Gosling’s approach is to look at two things: the relationship between the Big Five traits and different aspects of personal space or belongings (books, clothes), and how well people’s evaluations of personal spaces and belongings jibe with these relationships. In tables scattered throughout the book, he lists the characteristics people use to evaluate personality based on, for example, the appearance of an office or bedroom, and compares that with the characteristics that actually reflect the five personality traits. There’s often a disjunct between the two. For example, people tend to judge openness on the quantity and variety of books in an office or living space, when studies indicate that it’s really only the variety that correlates positively with the trait of openness. The tables are condensed into a single diagram near the end of the book that shows how much you can learn about a given trait in a given situation (e.g., Facebook page, bedroom, office, short interview, music top-10 list). Extraversion is the only trait that reveals itself to at least some degree in all the situations listed.

Gosling also goes into some of the potential pitfalls that can lead snoopers astray. For example, you must take into account whether an item in a space actually belongs to the occupant (one group of students analyzing a young man’s dorm room were misled by a pair of high-heeled shoes left behind by an overnight guest) and how much control the person had over its presence. (In another example, a company evidently gave all of its employees Filofaxes, reducing the weight an observer would give to the presence of this item in a person’s office. Having one didn’t mean you were particularly organized; it just meant you’d been there when they handed them out.)

I happened to be reading this book while also reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, and I was struck by how much overlap there was with Snoop, at least regarding the discussion of character. Fiction writers have to choose what to tell you about their characters so that you understand who they are; this means that the writer has to understand how people are likely to interpret the many details they combine to clothe their creations in something resembling reality. Therefore, they need to consider the same sorts of things that Gosling discusses in terms of snooping. For example, taking into account the timing can provide added clues (people may keep their personal spaces messier during a major project that consumes a lot of time, for example, or neater when they’re expecting company). Context is an even richer playground for an author, and a possible source of confusion to the snooper (when my younger son moved into his first apartment, the play sand in his shopping cart at Lowe’s had nothing to do with small children and sandboxes, and everything to do with the fact that he’s long been an enthusiastic herper who keeps snakes and lizards).

The book also gives some time to the much-misunderstood (in my opinion) concept of stereotypes. My own take on the subject is that yes, treating an individual person as if he or she were bound to be the sum of all the stereotypes about him or her based on race, gender, religion, etc., is demeaning, and probably logically impossible as well, but on the other hand, having quick heuristics by which to make an initial evaluation of new situations and new people can be a useful thing. As with many things in life, balance is crucial. Gosling discusses the possible utility and many pitfalls of stereotyping. He also talks about using the clues people present as only a starting point; if you truly want to know someone, ask about some of the more interesting clues you’ve spotted and see what you learn. He also warns against some common quirks (e.g., placing undue weight on first impressions) that can baffle our attempts at understanding others.

The book closes with a chapter about the Truehome system developed by Chris Travis. Travis designs houses for people based on their personalities and personal histories as much as on practical constraints. Obviously most of us don’t have the luxury of designing our own space at that level (although I gather the system can be used when altering existing spaces as well), but it’s a fascinating process to read about anyway. It made me think about the intertwining of practicality and psychological comfort that must have been part of building design from the days when humans first built permanent shelters. When you think about it, to some degree psychological comfort is practical.

All in all, I recommend this book if you’re at all interested in the topic of understanding personality. It’s witty, educational, and engaging, and it may make you look at your own living spaces, and those of others, with a new eye.

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A small slew of book reviews

 Books  1 Response »
Jul 102008
 

A number of book reviews on more or less Thinking Meat topics have crossed my radar lately, including these:

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