Sen on Layard

Amartya Sen's forthcoming new book, An Idea of Justice, takes aim at Lord Layard's emphasis on subjective reports of how happy we're feeling as a guide to public policy.

He says, in an interview with The Times:

I do think that by concentrating on all Bentham and no Mill, he does make a mistake. Freedom has many dimensions that are not captured in the pleasure statistics. We are not pleasure machines.

The problem with “happiness” as sole measure is that you may think yourself happy, but in fact be stymied. You may indeed adjust to your deprivation, as some slaves might have been “happier” on the plantation than free in the difficult outside world.

In his book, Sen instances the contrast between the Indian states of Kerala and Bihar. In Kerala morbidity is lower but concerns about morbidity are higher. Ideas and education that help to reduce morbidity in Kerala make the population more aware of it, so ignorance is bliss of a kind.

And the notion of income inequality being per se almost the sole measure of justice is problematic too.

These statistics have all kinds of impurities. If you’re asked how happy are you, the answer is exactly informative as to what you would say if somebody asked you how happy you are. It doesn’t tell anyone whether you’re really happy or not.

People can get very discontented when they’re very successful. And the sad thing is that people actually do adjust if they’re very deprived. I spent 15 years working on famine and it’s amazing how happy famine victims are when they ultimately get a meal. But that doesn’t mean people are generally more deprived than a famine victim having a first meal.

Palmed off

This is a funny story sent by a friend, Silvie Musialova, about a recent visit to a palm-reader's.

Last summer I felt there was a string of bad luck following me around like a bad gas does after having eaten too many baked beans. One evening half a bottle of red wine inspired me to give our lovely cat a bath and the teeth prints of his self-defence actions got infected.

I emerged from hospital with a supply of antibiotics, and noticed a poster. It showed a large picture of a palm, and promised that inside, you could discover your future. I’d seen it before, but now it stood out and called to me. There couldn't be a better time to find out about my life, to get an answer to the "How did I deserve this" self-pity question, I thought. Ten quid to discover your destiny. Bargain.

I walked in and was told to go into the room at the back. I was nervous. I followed the strong smell of scented candles and joss sticks into THE room. Very tiny as it was, it was also cluttered with a lot of garbage: all sorts of little kitschy statues, vases, wall cloths or whatever they were supposed to be, a plastic Jesus hanging on the cross, a smiling Buddha and framed pages of the Koran. Truly something for everyone.

The Arab gentleman sitting behind the small table covered with all sorts of spiritually inspiring objects could hardly speak English. Somehow, I didn’t feel in good hands.

He embarked on a five-minute-long ritual of singing in Arabic and waving around with the burning scented sticks (he almost poked me in the face at one stage as his eyes were firmly closed and he seemed very, very concentrated). The something's-not-quite-right feeling was growing stronger. Then he asked me to write down on a piece of scrap paper what my name and date of birth was. Having seen "4th May" he asked me if I was a Gemini. Bad start – I’m a Taurus.

He started doing some maths which from a spectator's point of view seemed highly peculiar, however, being a blond woman, I don't assume I know everything. I was then asked to shuffle a handful of porcelain sea shells concentrating on what I'd like to find out (I think that's what he was saying but honestly I am not sure). He looked at them scratching his chin and picked up a phone. He spoke to someone in Arabic for about 10 minutes, pausing every time I got up to leave to let me know he'd only be another minute.

Then he passed me the phone and asked me to speak to his god-knows-who-it-was friend. It turned out they got my date of birth wrong so we had to go through the whole procedure again, the details, the shells and of course the 10 minutes phone conversation I could not understand a word of. At that stage I was becoming fairly amused and curious about what was I going to find out. I was given the phone again and the moment of prophecy was about to come.

Burning with curiosity, I learned: "At the moment your life isn't very good and we're not sure when it's going to get any better."

I raised my eyebrows and carried on listening as surely I was getting more than THAT for my £10! The phone was quiet. In disbelief I looked at the guy opposite me and he shrugged his shoulders with the face of a cocker spaniel puppy. I asked the stranger on the phone if there was anything I could do to make my life better and he said: "Hmmmm, I don't know. Maybe we could pray for you but that would cost you money and there is no guarantee it would work." Well at least he didn't want to rip me of.

I was furious. Funny enough, as angry as I was I felt some respect to these charlatans which stopped me from causing a scene. What if they were really capable of doing something if I pissed them off? Never argue people that handle your food or claim to have CONNECTIONS. So I just paid the £10 and walked out.

Back on the sunlight, having left all the strong scents behind, I felt like someone's had hit me with a baseball bat. I looked at the poster and realized that not once they'd ask me to show my palm. So I went to look for the truth about my life situation at the bottom of a wine bottle. Somehow it made more sense.

The Landmark Forum

I went to a friend's 'graduation ceremony' from the Landmark Forum this week. He'd done their entry level course, which runs from 9am to 10pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then the participants come back on Tuesday evening and bring guests to watch them graduate.

The Landmark is a self-help / self-transformation organization, which aims to strip away individuals of all their baggage via intensive three-day 'encounter sessions', where people are encouraged to share their hang-ups via confessional monologues in front of the group; to be brutally honest with themselves and others (including calling up people in their lives to apologise for being unfaithful or admit they're gay or whatever); and to remove any obstacles standing in the way of them being 'extraordinary'.

'Do you feel your life isn't all it could be? Do you want to get more from your relationships? Do you have the job you dreamed of having when you were a child?' asked the Landmark leader, an Australian with a deep voice, who paced the hall, making eye-contact with us all as he spoke. Hey, I thought to myself, you know what? No, my life isn't perfect. Maybe I should sign up...

In some ways, the Landmark offers spirituality without God. You have the trappings of a religious ritual - the preacher calling the flock to righteousness, the confession (to the group, not to God), you have the idea of discovering the 'real you', you have the emphasis on epiphanies (they call it 'popping' - the group leader says something, and suddenly you 'pop' and realise where you have been going wrong all this time), and you very much have the emphasis on the possibility of being born again, on suddenly, after a mere three days, being able to neatly sidestep all the problems of the past, and to march forward towards your goals with new, righteous purpose.

The goals, in the Landmark, may well be materialistic - getting promotion, winning the girl of your dreams, setting up your own business. We heard from one guy at the graduation ceremony who stood up and told the group he'd been transformed by the course and had set up a new business with a friend. Wow, he'd only finished the course on Sunday, must have been a busy Monday.

The Landmark, like much self-help, takes its ideas from many different philosophical and religious traditions - there's some Stoicism in there (the idea that things depend on the perspective from which you see them), some existentialism (the heavy emphasis on being authentic and having integrity), some Buddhism, some Dale Carnegie. Perhaps the movement it's closest to is the Erhard Seminars Training (est) fad of the 1970s, which flourished for around a decade, particularly in California. And it puts it all together into a non-denominational, non-metaphysical package which anyone can buy. Smart.

I came away from the session hugely impressed with the Landmark as a commercial organisation. Whether it really changes people - I don't know. But it provides an amazing product, and it markets that product amazingly hard.

Landmark has obviously formulated a very powerful format: the three day, super-intense encounter session. People want that sort of intensity. They want to feel they leave the outside world for a brief period, become cocooned in a place of intense and perhaps anguished self-scrutiny, and then emerge, battered but re-born, after epiphanies.

Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant description of the attraction of such sessions, in his essay, The Me Generation, which describes the joy of standing up in front of a large group, and talking about yourself:

The appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: 'Let's talk about Me.' No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through the encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me. Not only that, you also put Me up on stage before a live audience. The popular 'est' movement has managed to do that with great refiniement...just imagine...my life becoming a drama with universal significance...analyzed, like Hamlet's, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind...

Wolfe says the encounter sessions are distinguished by a common assumption:

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess babbage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me.

Landmark calls it being 'totally authentic'. The idea of somehow becoming authentic is, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, the defining trope of our age, even the replacement of traditional religion. The idea of discovering God, or obeying the rules of God, has been replaced with discovering the Real Me, even if God has nothing to do with it - though the idea of discovering one's 'true nature' of course has deep religious roots.

The second reason for Landmark's popularity is that the encounter session, I think, encourages a sort of group hysteria. The phrase 'popping' ( like popcorn), which the Landmark uses to describe epiphanies, is revealing. The graduates who spoke all said they were waiting for their 'pop' moment: 'I didn't pop until the third day. I was wondering if I was going to. And then, suddenly, I popped.' I think there's a group dynamic going on: people are popping all around you. Do you want to be the one corn that hasn't popped?

Another reason for its success: the charisma of the leader. One of the secrets of charisma in spiritual settings appears to be this: be horrible to the participants. Ridicule them. Abuse them. Point out all their flaws. They will love you for it. That seemed to be the case at the Landmark. One guy said 'This guy here [pointing at the Leader, smiling benevolently on stage] gave us a lot of shit. He shouted at us for three days. But you know, on the last day, he had tears in his eyes. Because he really believes in what he does and he really wants to help us. I want to thank you, man.'

And perhaps the biggest reason for the success of Landmark: its marketing. I thought the graduation ceremony was about celebrating my friend having done the course. But from the moment I entered the Holiday Inn in Great Portland Street, I realized it was all about getting the guests of the graduates recruited.

I went up to a desk, where eight Landmark people were sitting in a row, smiling, handing out cards to the guests to fill in. I took one and began to walk away. 'Sir, could you fill it in here, please', said the smiling man. It asked for my name, number, email, and then said 'We would like to contact you to ask you about your experience of the evening. Would you prefer we contact you before or after 6pm?' And there were two boxes - one for before, one for after. And, of course, no box saying 'I don't want to be contacted.' Not an option!

The graduation ceremony was absolutely designed to bring in new recruits. Various members of the group stood up and said how incredible, how amazing, how transformative their experience had been. Let's not sniff at this - it did sound like many of the group members had had an amazing experience, which they felt was life-changing. It was genuinely intriguing. You thought 'wow, what would it be like for me? would I 'pop'? how would I change?'

But at the same time, they'd only just finished the course. They were all pumped up after three days of group confessional, for which they'd paid £350. They were all pumped to be transformed. They were all pumped up to share their incredible experience. But should they be put on stage, as marketing material, so soon after their experience? How can we know if their lives have been genuinely transformed, one day after the course finished? And who would dare stand up to say 'actually, you know what, the course didn't really do it for me'?

The evening ran from 7.30pm to 10.30pm (I left at 8.30), with the graduates eventually going off to one room and the guests going off to another, to hear more about the Landmark. And the graduates were encouraged, at one point, to turn round to tell their guests why they thought they, in particular, would benefit from the Landmark.

Talk about the hard sell! Imagine if you went to a friend's wedding, and each guest had to fill in a card so the Church could contact you, and then during the wedding, the members of the Church turned round to tell you exactly what the Church could do for you, yes, you.

It's actually the most ruthless marketing campaign I've ever come across, religious or commercial. As one friend put it, 'it's a cross between self-help and a pyramid scheme'.

Still, not one but two of my friends now appear to be into it, both of whom I respect for their intelligence. And it does seem to have a very positive message - know what you want, and go out and get it. Does it work? Possibly. Is it a cult? Probably not. Is it a ruthlessly efficient, pushy commercial enterprise? Definitely.

Check out this vid to hear a guy's perspective after the 3-day initial course:

Interview with John Bargh

Further to my post below on John Bargh and automaticity, I got in contact with John through Yale University to ask for a quick interview with him about his ideas, and in the great tradition of brilliant yet accessible academics, he accepted.

Bargh is a professor of psychology at Yale, and one of the leading social psychologists of his generation. He is the leading thinker of a school known as the 'social intuitionists', who have challenged the idea that we are 'masters of ourselves' through our reason and free will, and suggested instead that a great deal of our judgements about and responses to the world are automatic and unconscious, and that our reason often acts as a sort of butler, or even a lawyer defending the decisions we have already automatically made.

This view obviously has great implications for philosophy and psychology, particularly Stoicism, which very much emphasizes our ability to become 'captains of our soul'. Now read on...

Thanks for your time, John. Could you give my readers a brief summary of what 'automaticity' means?

Well, the word itself has a long history. It comes from an engineering context of automatic guiding systems, things like thermostats, and from the idea of the obligatory nature of things: when x, then y, and so on.

In the 1980s, it was extended into social psychology, to the idea of humans' immediate, unintentional reactions to things. For example, our automatic racial stereotypes.

Tell us about your experiments in this area.

We did an experiment back in the early 1990s, where we flashed photos of African-Americans to Caucasian-Americans on a computer screen, for 13 milliseconds, so quickly they weren't consciously aware of them. We then put them into a mildly provocative situation, in a room with another Caucasian-American, where there was a chance of reacting hostilely, to test how they perceived that person and reacted to the provocation. And we discovered those that had been primed with the subliminal photo of the African-American were more likely to react with hostility in the following situation, though they didn't know why.

So it seems we have an automatic primer towards negative racial stereotyping?

Yes. Now, that primer could have come from different sources. It could be cultural, of course. It could also be evolutionary: there's new evidence, for example, that women are at their most racist when they're at their most fertile.

And automaticity is the idea that our minds are full of these sort of automatic primers?

Yes, they're ubiquitous. You expose someone to a subliminal stimulus, for example a picture of a clown, and they're primed to make more positive evaluations, it puts in an approach motivation, it even relaxes the muscles you use to approach something. And the person won't be conscious of why or how this evaluation has happened.

So if we agree that the mind does make all sorts of automatic evaluations and judgements based on primers, what's the theory to explain how and why this happens?

What we think is it's the default back-up system which existed in the days before consciousness. Alot of animals today still use this operating system. We also have a conscious, reflective system, but it's the automatic system that keeps us grounded in the present.

And is this older operating system the limbic system?

It's all over. I know very little about neuro-anatomy, so I'm not going to try and localize it.

So how much of our mind is the older system, and how much is the more recent conscious system?

The estimates are that 99% of all the things going on in body and brain are automatic. Gregory Bateson uses the example of a TV screen: consciousness is what's happening on the screen, but behind that you have all the machinery of the TV, and behind that you have the wires and cables connecting it to the TV station, and so on.

So we might have preferences - eating some potato chips, going for a run, calling a friend - but these preferences came from somewhere, it's not magic.

So what does this mean for free will?

Well, I'm in the middle of a big discussion about that with the psychologist Roy Baumeister, who does alot of work on self-control, on models of the self and so on. We debated each other at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tamba Bay, and we're now continuing that discussion on our blogs on Psychology Today.

Sounds like you have a good rivalry!

He and I have always done that for each other. It's sort of a dialectic. It makes both of our arguments better. He's a very worthy opponent.

So anyway, to get back to your question, what this means for free will. Personally, I don't believe it exists. But that's a personal belief. We can at least say that the scope, range and domain of it is much less than people thought 20 or 30 years ago, when people like [sorry, I didn't get the names of the people he mentioned] asserted that we're always aware of the reasons why we do things.

That's obviously not true. Clearly, through these primers, we're being played by the world.

And in some ways, the problem is this idea that we have free will, that we're the masters of our soul.

Tim Wilson has shown that people's theories of why they do what they do are pretty far off. People are worried about subliminal adverts playing them, for example, which have been shown to have a minimal effect, but they are not worried about the effect of regular TV on them, or of negative campaign adverts, for example, which do have a real effect on people.

OK. But the idea of being 'master of the soul' comes from ancient philosophy, from Plato and the Stoics in particular. And they never said that all humans were masters of their soul - on the contrary, they said the vast majority of humans sleep-walked their way through life. They said that we could become masters of our soul, but only through years of training, Socratic self-enquiry and struggle. The same idea is found in, for example, the idea of Buddhist or Christian monks, training themselves over years to become more aware of what they're thinking and whether their automatic responses make sense. So this idea that we can develop free will is at the heart of the spiritual aspirations that have guided humanity for millennia. What do you think of this idea?

I'm a social psychologist. I'm interested in the normal, the mundane. And the normal is for people not to challenge their automatic thinking. It doesn't mean people can't change it, but whether they will make the effort is debatable.

If you do change your automatic behaviour, it will take alot of training. Will most people do it? Probably not. Why? Because they're busy surviving, and it requires the realisation 'I'm not in full control'. Most people don't learn that theory.

So you accept we can consciously change our automatic responses?

It's not as simple as conscious versus automatic. We're often motivated by goals that can be unconscious. A lot of good things can come automatically, for example, pursuing goals or projects. We can do this outside of our own awareness.

But I'm interested in whether we can consciously change our automatic responses. Let's say you suffer from depression or anxiety, and your automatic responses to the world are obviously serving you badly. In that instance, do you accept you can consciously change your automatic responses?

Well, it could be your conscious thinking that is serving you badly in that instance - it could be your conscious thoughts and ruminations that 'I can't do it' which are making you depressed.

So let's say you have a belief - conscious or unconscious - along the lines of 'I can't do it': can we consciously change that belief?

Yes. This is the nice thing about the way we keep approaching the true nature of the will and agency. Thirty years ago, consciousness was seen as a bottleneck for everything. It was clearly too much for the system to do. By taking some things off the table, it helps us to know what it is for. There are only a few things left on the table. We're beginning to understand the ability of the mind to change, the plasticity, the ability to adapt to new circumstances.

So the mind can re-programme itself to some extent?

Well, often it comes from outside the mind. In earlier stages of our history, for example, we took our orders from the elders. We weren't free agents. Change came from top down. When we came out with our research on racist stereotyping, one psychologist tried to show how you can change people's negative stereotypes through cognitive training. But you can't cognitively change each individual. Change has to come from the top down. An African-American is elected president and then things change. [To which one might reply, yes, but the people elected him, so that was still the free choice of individuals.]

But at the individual level, do you agree that people suffering from emotional problems can learn to change their automatic responses?

Yes, I think that's definitely true. Beck and Ellis [the two inventors of CBT] gave us one of the original models of automatic thought. CBT really influenced me in the 1970s. Aaron Beck, for
example, talked about the chain of human thinking, how it moves too fast for us to follow it. It's like a rubber band snapping. But Beck insisted that, if you listen carefully, you can hear it. I actually tried this, in the 70s, and he's right, you can hear it, you can follow it, if you slow it down.

It's the speed that's the problem. You have to listen right after an external stimulus, and you can still hear it, and try to follow the chain.

Mindfulness, in a word.

Yes. Ellen Langer talks about this in her book, Counter-Clockwise - the idea of taking control over automatic things. It's even being made into a film, where she's played by Jennifer Anniston!

So this top down system of ours allows us to do this, to chart a course. We're still not sure where this ability comes from, or why. But we know how we can use it to adapt to circumstances.

It's been fascinating, John. Thanks very much for your time.

Thank you. It's useful for me too.

John Bargh and automaticity

The new issue of Edge has an interview with John Bargh, the Yale evolutionary psychologist, who is best known for his work on automaticity: his work basically suggests, and tries to prove, that much of our thought and behaviour, and even our higher cognitive processes, are automatic and intuitive, and happen without our free will or reason.

Reason, in his model, is reduced to what Jonathan Haidt called a 'post-hoc justifier' - we automatically or intuitively arrive at a conclusion about someone or something, and then our reason follows on behind and invents a rational justification for this gut feeling.

Worth reading, but I'd make one quick point in reply. In taking on the idea of free will and consciousness, Bargh is basically taking aim at traditional philosophy, and particularly Stoic philosophy, which has such a strong emphasis on our free will and the power of our freedom to control our decision-making.

I would say, in defence of Stoicism, that the Stoics understood earlier than most how automatic and habitual our thought processes were. That's precisely why they emphasized habits, and the need to repeat exercises over and over, until they became automatic.

The fact that we can change our automatic responses through repeated reasoning has been proved, by cognitive behavioural therapy. Someone may automatically react to situations with depression, or with panic attacks, and after a course of CBT, using rational philosophy, they will no longer react that way. They acquire new habits.

So this proves, to my mind, that we are to some extent the master of our own soul, we have an element of freedom. Put it this way - we are driving a car, and we are to some extent just cruising, not really focusing on our driving, doing it automatically. And then BAM, we hit the side of the road, scrape the paint off the door, put a dent in the fender. That will tend to jolt us out of our automaticity, and we may then try to consciously re-programme our driving, and then we may slip back into automaticity, and BAM again we have to re-calibrate. And eventually we may learn to be a better driver, and these new driving skills will in turn become more automatic.

Socrates was guilty!

Shock news from Cambridge University, reports the Telegraph:

The trial of Socrates was justified by the laws of the time, according to a new study from Cambridge University.

Through the centuries, historians have portrayed the 399BC trial as a travesty, with Socrates forced to face charges invented by his ignorant fellow citizens.

He was found guilty of "impiety" and "corrupting the young", sentenced to death, and then required to carry out his own execution by consuming a deadly potion of the poisonous plant hemlock.

But, in a new study launched today, Professor Paul Cartledge has concluded that the trial was legally just and Socrates was guilty as charged.

Prof Cartledge said: "Everyone knows that the Greeks invented democracy, but it was not democracy as we know it, and we have misread history as a result.

"The charges Socrates faced seem ridiculous to us, but in Ancient Athens they were genuinely felt to serve the communal good."

Historians have traditionally claimed that Socrates' open criticism of prominent Athenian politicians had made him many enemies, who used the trial to get rid of him.

Socrates was made a scapegoat for a series of disasters to strike Athens, including a plague and major military defeat, it has been claimed.

But Prof Cartledge pointed out that many citizens would have seen these events as a sign that their gods had been offended by undesirable elements.

He argued that Socrates, who had questioned the legitimacy and authority of many deities, fitted the latter description.

With the gods clearly furious and more disasters perhaps just around the corner, Prof Cartledge said that a charge of impiety was seen not only as appropriate, but in the public interest.

The professor's study also concluded that Socrates essentially invited his own death. Under the Athenian system, in this kind of trial a defendant could suggest his own penalty.

Socrates first joked that he should be rewarded, and eventually suggested a small fine but his jurors did not see the funny side and passed the death sentence.

"By removing him, society had in, Athenians' eyes, been cleansed and reaffirmed," Prof Cartledge concluded.

The study is included in the professor's new book, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice.

How To Be Good

I went to a discussion this week at the think-tank Demos on developing character in young people, called How To Be Good.

I admire Demos for its willingness to talk about 'the Good Life' and 'good character', in an era of moral relativism when we've grown uncomfortable with such terms, and, as the historian Darrin McMahon put it "the only people talking about values in the education system are sports coaches".

The problem is, neither Demos, nor any of the participants in the discussion, ever defined what they meant by 'good'. The media-friendly psychologist Tanya Byron, who gave an entertaining but rather empty short talk, began by saying 'I'm not going to get into a big discussion of what good means' before saying that children weren't actually as bad as most people thought. The kids are alright, in other words. Fine, but then if so the whole discussion of developing character through new education initiatives is pointless.

Professor Judy Dunn, the author of the new Good Childhood report, also didn't clearly define what she meant by good, but she seemed to take it to mean things like emotionally literate, capable of empathy, socially-skilled and tolerant.

So did the other participants, such as Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of the charity Beat Bullying, who concluded 'we can teach children to be good, whatever that means'. Well, how can you, if you're not sure what 'good' means?

Obviously social skills like empathy and tolerance are part of good character, but they're not all of it. I would say they are the character traits we particularly associate with women, and it was noticeable that all the panelists were women.

One problem with character development of young people at the moment, particularly of young men, it seems to me, is the absence of both father-figures, and of more paternal values.

Almost 40% of young people today grow up without their biological father present in their home. For African-Americans in the US, two thirds grow up without their biological father.

This often affects young people's moral and emotional development very negatively. A 2005 study of 3,400 middle schoolers in the US, for exmple, indicated that not living with both biological parents quadruples the risk of having an affective disorder. Around 40% of US prison inmates grew up in fatherless homes. 70% of rapists in the US grew up in fatherless homes.

Young men are growing up without being taught the values that fathers traditionally pass on, such as learning how to follow a career, learning to take risks in the world, learning how to compete, including learning how to cope with failure.

These skills are also absent from the feminised values of our education system, which instead focuses on teaching empathy, emotional literacy, tolerance, non-competition - which is all important, but misses out alot.

So we're leaving young people, particularly young men, to learn these skills on the streets, in gang culture, knife fights, and drug dealing.

We are trying to turn our young men into good little girls.