Generally Thinking

Category: Wider Issues

  • Beyond money: towards an economy of well-being (Diener and Seligman, 2004)

    Beyond Money: Towards an economy of well-being is a 2004 paper by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. Here are the key points.

    Overview

    Economic indicators like GDP and the employment rate are dominant when it comes to making policy decisions. Such statistics are important and relevant, especially when it comes to the fulfilment of basic needs – wealthier countries are more likely to provide food, shelter, and security to their citizens. However, economic indicators have a number of of shortfalls. Not only do they fail to provide the full picture of well-being in a society, but in some respects they may actually be misleading in that regard.

    Economic indicators should be balanced out with a wider range of statistics that give a clearer picture of how well a society is flourishing. These include well-being and mental health measurements, social capital, and human rights.

    Not only will this give governments a better idea of how to create effective policies, but improvements in these non-economic indicators will likely lead to improved economic performance in any case.

    Details

    A number of countries have developed their own national well-being index. The EU runs regular surveys measuring well-being, the UK introduced well-being measures under David Cameron’s government, and Bhutan was a trail-blazer in this regard.

    A lot of this has to do with psychologists putting a lot more effort into studying happiness around the turn of the century. A paper in 2004 by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman entitled “Beyond Money: Towards an Economy of Well-Being” summed up the research that was available at that time, making a case for such well-being indices.

    Here’s an overview of the key points in the paper.

    Key argument

    Economic measures give an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate indication of how well a society is flourishing. Policy makers should make the development of valid well-being measurements a priority, and use the data to inform policy.

    What is well-being?

    Psychologists define well-being as people’s “positive evaluations of their lives”, taking everything into account. These evaluations are affected by things like the amount of positive emotion people experience, how engaged they are in what they regularly do, how satisfied they are with their life situation, and how much meaning they get from their lives.

    More info on how happiness is measured here.

    What’s wrong with economic indicators then?

    They have their uses, of course, but they are perhaps over-used. The news tells you how the economy is doing every day. How often do they tell us how satisfied, engaged, or depressed people are?

    And what’s the point of a strong economy anyway? Ultimately, it’s to improve well-being – at least to a large extent. In many ways, then, economic indicators are a stand-in for happiness.

    That makes some sense. The richer you are, the more options you have. The easier you can meet your basic needs like food, shelter, and warmth. And the more options you have in general in your life.

    Centuries ago, when these basic needs were not as well met as they are today, a concern with the economy made a lot of sense. But today, we’ve basically got that covered.

    That’s not to say we should throw them all out. It’s just that they don’t correlate as strongly with well-being as they perhaps once did.

    For example, Diener and Seligman argue that in the 50+ years before the paper was published in 2004, GDP had increased steadily. At the same time, however:

    • Measures of well-being had remained relatively flat
    • Rates of depression had increased 10-fold
    • American children experience more anxiety
    • The amount of social connections people have had decreased
    • People report less trust in both other people and governments

    So why not measure and report on well-being directly?

    Limitations of measures of well-being

    But it’s not all rosy in the world of well-being measurement. There are some problems here too.

    • Multiple constructs: researchers measure different “forms” of well-being: satisfaction, positive emotion, negative emotion, depression – these are not necessarily equivalent.
    • Single answer questionnaires: a lot of well-being research just asks one question (How happy are you on a scale of 1-10?). The researchers argue that these are less reliable.
    • Data is usually cross-sectional: This basically means a measurement taken at one time. It’s better to measure the same people over time to track trends.

    They argue that we need more carefully thought-out measures, perhaps even different measures used with different populations (e.g., a different questionnaire for teenagers than adults receive).

    Relevant findings in well-being research

    Diener and Seligman then go on to summarise some of the relevant well-being research that could be relevant to policy decisions.

    National wealth and well-being

    There is a correlation between the two – richer countries tend to be happier. However, Diener and Seligman argue that there are diminishing returns – after around $10k GDP per capita, money makes much less of an impact.

    Governance and well-being

    Human rights correlate with well-being, as you’d expect. But since richer countries tend to have better human rights on average, it’s hard to say how much of an impact they have by themselves.

    Democracy, and greater involvement in the political process, also predict well-being.

    The perceived effectiveness and trustworthiness of governments was correlated with well-being.

    Political stability is also important, and in the short-term can be more important than the impact of having a democratic government system at all.

    Social capital

    Social capital in a society means high levels of trust and helping between people.

    Community boosts well-being – this can mean volunteering, club memberships, church attendance, and people socialising in general. Basically whenever people get together with positive intentions towards each other.

    Trust in a society is linked to higher well-being and lower suicide rates. Recent studies (at the time: 2004), showed declining trust in the United States.

    Religion and well-being

    Religious people tend to be happier than the non-religious, on average, both across and within nations

    Church attendance plays a role here – religion ties into the social capital effect.

    Money and well-being

    Higher income is linked to well-being, but it’s a slightly more complex situation than the mere correlation implies.

    Generally speaking, the poorer the country, the stronger the correlation. For example in the US, the correlation is .13 – it exists, and when we’re talking about policy decisions affecting 300 million people, it matters. But it’s not worth writing home about (about 1.7% of the variance in well-being accounted for by income).

    In the slums of Calcutta, however, the correlation is .45 (about 20% variance explained).

    Again, this probably comes down to the basic needs issue I mentioned earlier.

    The correlation probably goes both ways, also – a number of studies show that happier people do better in the workplace:

    • Job satisfaction and positive meed contribute to productivity
    • Happier employees change jobs less often and take less time off
    • Happier employees are more helpful and have better work relationships
    • The well-being of employees can predict customer satisfaction

    More on the impact of happiness on work success here.

    Materialism and well-being

    Also, there might be a negative impact of income on well-being. When people put too much focus on money and material possessions at the expense of other values, they may experience lower self-esteem and well-being.

    More on materialism here.

    Physical health and well-being

    Well-being correlates with health, not surprisingly. Better health means higher well-being.

    However, people tend to adapt to health conditions, and once they are used to them and able to cope, their well-being moves towards where it was before they got the health condition, sometimes all the way. However that’s not always the case, especially with illnesses that affect daily life, or which are/could be terminal.

    As with money, the health link might also work both ways, to some extent.

    • Lifespan is longer in countries with higher well-being and optimism
    • The outcome of certain illnesses can be predicted by well-being measures, especially optimism
    • People with higher well-being tend to report feeling less pain
    • Well-being measures are linked to better immune responses

    More on the link between happiness and health here.

    Mental health and well-being

    As noted earlier, mental health problems in wealthy countries had been increasing, even though they were becoming wealthier.

    Depression, in particularly, had increase 10x in the 50 years before the study was published. This is despite much better GDP, better living conditions, the internet, more music and pop culture, better education, and other benefits.

    This is the point of a well-being index – economic measures don’t capture this fact. If you used them alone, you’d thing everything was fine.

    A few more points. At the time of this study, Diener and Seligman (2004, remember) reported that:

    • 50% of a national sample had experience at least one mental disorder in their lifetime, 30% in the last year, and 18% in the last month
    • 16% of young adults in a British study were classed as having a neurotic disorder
    • Depression is the third highest cause of loss of “quality adjusted lifespan” (ie taking into account the life in the years, not just the years in the life). Behind only arthritis and heart disease, and higher than cancer and diabetes.

    Social relationships and well-being

    The need to belong is a psychological need, and when we don’t have positive, supportive people in our lives, we tend to feel very bad. The quantity and quality of our relationships are among the best predictors of an individual’s well-being. This was very well established by the research even back in 2004.

    Of course, economic indicators of progress miss the impact of social relations completely. In fact it can be worse – when policies are made with only economic indicators in mind, the outcome back be worse relationships.

    Some social indicators do exist – crime rates, marriage/divorce rates, gender equality and so on, but they don’t capture the full picture of the amount and quality of relationships that people have.

    Systems of Indicators

    Economic indicators clearly aren’t doing their job in terms of being adequate gauge of societal well-being.

    A number of other large scale well-being surveys are out there, carried out by the EU, Gallup, and others. But these aren’t quite there either.

    So what’s the answer?

    Well, it’s probably not a single indicator, but a system of them. Which covers a range of different variables, using a range of methodologies.

    For example, a wide-scale cross-sectional survey, combined with a subsample studied using the Experience Sampling Method (basically buzzing people in their phones a few times a day to ask how they feel, rather than giving them one big questionnaire at a single point in time).

    Such a system of indicators would have to:

    • be policy-focused
    • fairly represent all stakeholder groups in a nation
    • Include broad and narrow aspects of well-being
    • Have a set batch of questions that remain stable over time (to allow long-term comparisons), as well as shorter-term scales that can be added and removed as needed

    The authors didn’t discuss the specific variables that should be included in such a survey, and left that as a topic for another day.

    Well-being instead of money?

    The authors conclude by pointing out that we’re not getting rid of money anytime soon. It’s too entrenched into our culture, has a proven track record, and furthermore, well-being isn’t a panacea that’s going to come along and solve everything.

    One of the challenges will be finding a balance between the two – building economic stability without negatively impacting well-being in the process, and pursuing well-being without sacrificing the benefits that the money economy has brought.

  • PredPol – Predicting crime through data mining

    Not too long ago in LA, crime was going up while the number of officers was going down. The LAPD had to try something different if they wanted to make a dent in this, so they looked to an anthropologist and mathematicians from UCLA, Santa Clara University, and UC Irvine.

    “PredPol,” mines vast amounts of crime data and predicts where crimes will occur. Unlike the “hot spot” system, which identifies crime-heavy areas, PredPol is updated in real time and gives predictions for the next 12 hours. Cops in LA would go to these “boxes,” sometimes as small as 500 feet square, just to make their presence known and look out for criminal activity.

    According to PredPol’s Proven Results page, the system was twice as effective as trained crime analysts. In the areas in which PredPol was tested, crime dropped by 13% while other areas showed a 0.4% increase.

    PredPol works because, although an individual’s behaviour is very difficult to predict, once you put people in herds the trends and averages become very apparent. If you know the factors that contribute to a certain behaviour, you can work out a probability of that behaviour occurring. The more factors you know and the more accurately you know them, the better your prediction will be.

    PredPol is being rolled out further, including the UK.

    It’d be interesting to see how far you can take this. If you imagine a day where PRISM style data mining is legal and totally accepted, and governments can access all data, then combine that with “quantified self” monitoring (it won’t be long before neuro imaging become cheap and portable enough to be the latest personal informatics tool), you could pretty much predict anything, couldn’t you?

  • 6 ways that the influence of Facebook has changed our lives

    I’m writing this partly for posterity — maybe in 10 years back when we’re living our entire lives in the Facebook Virtual Reality Matrix, we’ll look back and say “Remember when it was just a social networking site?” And partly out of old-fashioned curiosity. I should disclose that I’m one of the five or six people in the world that doesn’t have a Facebook account.

    Ubiquity

    If you don’t use Facebook, you know about it. It has close to a billion users, about 1/7th of the human population of the planet! And if you use Facebook, you really use it:  3.2 billion likes or comments are generated, every single day while in the first quarter of 2011 over 300 million photos were uploaded each day. Each day!

    Entertainment

    A study this year tried to find out what was driving the eight hours a month that Americans spend in front of Facebook. They tested the five established categories for online activity: information seeking, interpersonal communication, self-expression, passing time and entertainment. Only information seeking wasn’t relevant to Facebook, with the biggest factors being entertainment and time passing. In other words, we use Facebook because mainly we’re bored!

    Business

    Over 4 million businesses have pages on Facebook now. With a billion people to sell to and ease of content sharing, why wouldn’t they be? If you can write a good piece that people like, and people share it, they’re doing your marketing for you. Facebook itself is the second top earner of online display ads (behind the mighty Goog), although their growth forecast was cut last month by about a billion dollars.

    Lex-Appeal

    Through shock and awe Facebook has invaded our vernacular. It can be a noun — “Are you on Facebook?” A verb “Look, a goat that sounds like a man, I’m going to Facebook that!” It even has a gerund: “Are you still Facebooking?” Other aspects of Facebook vernacular have also found their way into the dictionary, like “Unfriend.” Yes, unfriend is a word and has been since 2009.

    Email is for dinosaurs now

    Email is passe now? You’re kidding me. Yet it makes sense — why log in to Gmail when you can message your friends on Facebook? They probably check Facebook more often than email, giving you more chance of a reply, and you don’t have to open a new tab. I remember when people would say to me “I don’t have email,” and I’d think “Dinosaur.” Now I’m the dinosaur. Hey, don’t you get cocky, Facebooker. In 20 years you’ll be trying to double-click your quantum mind-control matrix interface and your kids will be laughing at you.

    Don’t search us, we’ll search you

    This is one that I find particularly interesting. People are expecting less-and-less to go and find news and content they find interesting; they expect it to come to them. And the more that sites know about you, the better they can get at delivering what you want. Facebook are not the only ones involved in this process — even search engines now deliver results to you not based on an objective search of the web, but based on your past searches and browsing history. But the nature of Facebook necessitates this. Although most people post things on Facebook that they like, not necessarily what they think their friends like, birds of a feather flock together, making it a safe bet anyway.

  • 3D Printing – A new form of life?

    Imagine your kitchen floor is dirty. Since you don’t want to clean it yourself you log in to a robot design website, tell them that you want a robot capable of cleaning your kitchen floor. They give you a quote, you pay, and then they email the design to you. You click “Print,” the design goes to your 3D printer, and out pops a fully functioning robot, yours to command.

    That might sound far fetched, yet perhaps it’s not so far away. 3D printing has been around for around three decades and can now print objects in glass, metal, plastics and even bio-degradable materials. It has been used to create everything from jewellery, shoes, aeroplane components and even mechanical devices.

    Peter Schmitt of MIT has already successfully printed a mechanical clock, and is working on servo mechanism which could be used to make custom-built robots. Much has been made over 3D printing’s potential to revolutionise industry, putting manufacturing more strongly in the hands of garage hobbyists (if you think piracy of digital goods is a big issue, wait until everyone can pirate 3D objects!). But imagine if manufacturing was taken out of everyone’s hands.


    The Prusa Mendel RepRap 3D Printer from RepRap.org

    Evolution. Skip this section if you know it.

    Evolution works through a combination of replication, mutation and selection. Organisms develops through instructions contained within their DNA, which they gets from their parent/s. For example, daddy tiger and mommy tiger copy some of their DNA and store it in their sex cells. After an evening of tiger love, they combine these sets of DNA to create a new set of instructions for “building” baby tiger.

    But the DNA copying process isn’t perfect, and mistakes — called mutations — cause changes a given trait or characteristic — called a phenotype — of the organism to which that DNA will eventually belong. These phenotypic variations may affect the organism’s chances of surviving or reproducing.

    If a mutation in daddy tiger’s DNA causes baby tiger to have sharper claws, it might get food more easily and therefore have more chance of surviving and passing this beneficial mutation on. If it results in weaker knees, the tiger might not catch any food and then die without passing on it’s DNA. This is evolution through natural selection. It is this process that eventually produced intelligent humans like yourself, able to ponder their own ancestry.

    Replication, mutation, and selection. If machines can print 3D items, mechanical devices and even robots, is it possible to create “life,” or at least, objects that reproduce and whose offspring is subject to selection pressures?

    Replication

    Replication would require a 3D printer able to print, and construct, itself. The RepRap machine, designed by Adrian Bowyer of Bath university and seen the video above, is almost there. It knows how to print the plastic parts necessary to build itself. With the ability to build components out of different materials, it doesn’t seem infeasible that a modified RepRap could include construction as well as production capabilities. The printer contains a small hard drive, and the parent copies its own design onto its child’s hard drive. Replication achieved.

    Mutation

    Naturally, you want your printer to build things perfectly, so designers will try to remove mutations from the process. Also, the “DNA” in this analogy is the design on the computer, which we know is highly resilient to copying errors. However, you could imagine some flaw that creates mutations in the child design, or a non-natural form of mutation where the printer theorises about future designs that would increase its child’s ability to reproduce itself, and tests these, keeping logs of previous “tests” in its hard drive.

    Selection

    Natural selection could work here, as the printers need access to a source of power and raw materials. For power, you could imagine each one has a solar panel, and tests theories on how to build more efficient ones. The raw materials area a harder part though.

    Automation

    At what point would you be able to leave the printer running, then move all humans off the planet with confidence that they would continue to thrive? Presumably, you’d need to give the printers a head start, for example, the ability to build none-replicating drone scouts to look for raw materials, and transport robots to return it to the replicating “queens,” with the queens playing a sort of real-life game of Civilization. Or perhaps the queens themselves would produce new queens that could move and source the raw materials. Perhaps the queens see scouts from other printer families as threats, and build warrior drones to fight their resource wars.

    If self-replicating machines were made that were capable of finding the resources and energy they needed to continue to reproduce, at what point do you call it life?

    Of course I’m just thinking out loud with all this, but I think it’s interesting and fun to consider the possibilities. Many people think of 3D printing as a door to a techno-utopian future where the means of production is held inside every household — and maybe it is. However, if we manage to build completely self-replicating machines with the capacity for mutation and a form of selection pressure, I’m just saying, they might lead to a different future.


    🙂

  • Why debating doesn’t work (and how to fix it)

    Here’s another TV program that made me want to throw my shoes at the TV – Prime Minister’s Questions.

    In PMQ’s, members of the opposition get to ask the PM questions about their party’s policies and actions. Ostensibly the point of this is to reach useful conclusions and actionable steps that will improve the country. Occasionally there is an inkling of that happening. But the bulk of it is shoe-throwing-bad (if you’re wondering, the other program that made me wish for more aerodynamic footwear is Big Brother).

    I watch in complete disbelief as questions on issues affecting the country were answered with ducking, weaving, and ad hom attacks aimed at the asker. The aim is to “beat” the asker, rather than respond intelligently to the question. These attacks are always followed by jeering and cheering – this is all considered normal and acceptable.

    This philosophy, of winning the discussion rather than productively debating, you also see disgustingly often when politicians are being interviewed on TV. It’s often done with a restatement of their  position on the issue, or some random hyperbole. Something like:

    Q: “How do you respond to the claim that your policies have increased unemployment?”
    A: “This is a complex issue and we need to look at all our options and make the right moves going forward, to encourage growth and get the economy back on track.”

    Or…

    Q: “How do you respond to the claim that your policies have caused unnecessary death during the pandemic?”
    A: “What I’m focused on now, is making sure that our brave front-line workers have the PPE they need to do their jobs, so they can keep themselves, and us safe.”

    They don’t answer the question. They just say words.

    The problem here is that free-form debating of a topic isn’t very useful. It’s too open to hacking. We are able to out-debate people even when we are wrong and they are right. We are able to change people’s minds to our way of thinking regardless of what the actual truth is. We even have scientifically researched ways of doing so — although sometimes good old-fashioned talking over the other person is all that’s needed.

    This problem is exacerbated when groups of people are mass-debating because it’s hard to come to a satisfactory conclusion without someone else butting in first.

    Free-form verbal debate is highly effective in finding out who the most charismatic, silver tongued and/or dominant person is. It’s not very effective in reaching productive conclusions.

    For that, the scientific way is better. Scientist A writes a paper, and scientist B responds with their criticisms. Scientist A can then publish another addressing these, perhaps after collecting more data. And so on. Because it’s all laid out in writing, it is obvious to everyone if a question has been dodged.

    This is too slow for politics, but maybe there’s a middle ground…

    Who Dares Wins

    Future of British politics? (Note the isolation booth)

    Who Dares Wins was a game show in which opposing contestants sit in sound-proofed booths, betting on which one of them can list the most items from a particular category, for example, films starring Johnny Depp, or number 1 singles. As soon as I saw this, I knew it was essential to politics.

    I propose that this studio be repurposed for interviewing politicians, CEOs of companies that have done something naughty, and perhaps built into the House of Commons itself (neon lights, dramatic music and all).

    Here’s how it would work.

    The interviewer sits in one booth, the politician in the other. In the middle is be a large screen to display the arguments and responses thus far. A number of online tools have been created to visually represent debates in this way, so we already know how to do that.

    The interviewer asks their first question, and it appears on the screen. During this time, the microphone in the politician’s booth is switched off. The booth is sound-proof, so no one can hear them no matter how loudly they shout.

    Next, the politician gets his chance to respond. The interviewer’s booth is switched off and the politician’s turns on. They get their chance to reply, and their responses appear on the screen. Then the response is analysed by an impartial adjudicator, to ensure that it does in fact answer the question, and isn’t some clever ducking and weaving.

    If the answer is suitable, it goes up on the board, and the interviewer gets to challenge these responses. The process continues in this way.

    If the answer isn’t suitable, it will be quite obvious to all. The interviewer or adjudicator could then challenge the response, and if it cannot be defended, that answer would be stricken from the board and they could be invited to answer again.

    Personal attacks and logical fallacies from either side would also be stricken off the board, and perhaps a small punishment applied, such as a smacked bottom or a gunging.

    Head-to-head debates would work in a similar way, with each debater’s booth switched off while the other is talking.

    Advantages

    • No longer would people be able to dodge questions without appearing to do so.
    • No longer would people be able to win arguments through verbal jiu jitsu.
    • No longer would people be able to win arguments by having the loudest voice.
    • Potentially hilarious.

    Disadvantages

    • None.

    Political debate is broken, people. To fix it we need sound-proofed booths and neon lights. Especially neon lights.

  • Resilience applied to food

    I saw a TED talk that made me think about resilience, and how it’s such a broad and useful concept to have in your mental repertoire. You can apply it to anything and it will give you useful, practical ideas. This example is access to food, but I think the general formula can apply to anything.

    For a culture that praises individuality and “making it on your own,” we’re pretty dependent on other people and external systems. That’s not necessarily bad, but for some people it sets off an internal alarm bell – what if these external systems were to fail?

    That idea is not implausible. It happened to every society that went before us and many more that once existed concurrently to ours.

    Resilience

    In psychology there’s an excellent concept called resilience. Some people are more negatively affected by trauma than others. These people are more resilient. Trauma and difficulties bounce off the highly resilient like bullets bounce off Robocop. Less resilient – more fragile — people are not so lucky. It takes a weaker blow to psychologically knock them down, and they have a harder time getting back on the horse afterwards. [1]

    Many factors determine who is psychologically resilient and who isn’t, and I can write about that if you want. But for the moment let’s expand the idea outside of psychology and into one of the basic survival needs – food. How resilient is our access to food?

    Getting Food

    At the moment you work for money, then buy food with that money. This relies on:

    • Having a job/money
    • There being affordable food in the shop

    Without either of these two things, you can’t get food.

    Money

    How resilient is your income? How secure is your job? What’s the economic outlook? Do you have savings? Is your currency’s value going to hold?

    Shops

    Shops rely on transport, which relies on fuel, which relies on the price and availability of oil. If oil prices go up, so do food prices. If your country is a net food importer, its system is fragile to the same extent as the countries from which it imports.

    Assessing Food Resilience

    Lots of other things could affect your access to money and your local supermarket’s access to food for it to sell. Look into them. For each one, ask yourself, “What would happen to my access to food if this happened?” For example, if oil prices went up, if you lost your job, if the government cut back unemployment benefits, etc.

    Knocks to the System

    Resilient systems can absorb trauma and keep going. Fragile systems crumble. Anti-fragile systems [1] get stronger through trauma.

    Now that you’ve researched and thought about it, is your “access to food” system resilient? What about in five years, or ten years?

    If you consider your system resilient, let me know why – Do you have a garden? Will the market provide? Are you Ray Mears?

    Increasing Resilience

    If you can maintain your access to food in the event of the factors you identified earlier, your system is resilient. What might this look like?

    • Growing food
    • Urban homesteading
    • Having chickens
    • Stored rations/preserving food
    • Foraging skills
    • Wasting less

    And so on. These are resilient to wider, global problems and hence are more resilient. But each one of these are fragile to different factors. If everyone in your town learned to forage, the skill would be useless if everyone quickly stripped the land. So you might have to go through this process several times, thinking out contingencies.

    I like the general process though and I think it’s worth going through these steps for a number of key areas (food, water, transport, energy, health, mental health, community, entertainment… etc).

    Here’s the visual aid:

    [1] Naseem Taleb has argued that these two concepts – resilience and fragility — are not opposites. The opposite of fragility, he argues, is anti-fragility – a quality whereby variance actually strengthens its possessor, as opposed to its possessor being simply immune to the negative effects of variability. A related concept in psychology is post-traumatic growth, which is a positive psychological-style approach to reaction to trauma; and a valid viewpoint I think – if you only study post-traumatic stress, that’s all you’ll find.

  • Five things everybody needs to know about materialism

    “The things you own, end up owning you”
    – Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

    I’ve seen Fight Club about 58 times. It’s my favourite film. I love it so much I even had the above quote engraved onto the back of my iPod.

    In the film, Brad Pitt’s character Tyler Durden is a pretty heavy anti-consumerist. He is disturbed by the way people look for self-esteem and happiness in material things, and senses a better way.

    Tyler Durden Fight Club

    Was he right about materialism? Some researchers have been looking into the effects that materialism has on people. Here are five things everybody should know:

    1) High importance of money = low satisfaction with life

    Seven-thousand people, in 41 countries were surveyed about the importance they place on money, and on love.  When these were correlated against life satisfaction it looked approximately like this:

    money_love_happiness

    As you can see, unsatisfied people (to the left) thought money way important and love wasn’t, and satisfied people (to the right) thought the opposite. (1,4)

    2) Materialism is associated with mental health problems

    People who value financial success highly are more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety. Likewise, materialists have lower levels of self-actualisation and vitality, (2) and are more likely to be visited by ghosts at Christmas time. (3)

    3) Material goals can never be fulfilled

    First you want the iPod. Then the clothes, the car, the big house, the boat, the bigger house, the bigger boat. You get stuck on a hedonic treadmill; today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities, as your income and consumption rise, so do your desires and expectations. It’s like moving to a higher weight division in boxing – you can do it, but there’s always a bunch of bigger guys there waiting for you.

    And if you combine high material aspirations with low income, you’re like a flyweight fighting a heavyweight. This is the worst combination of income and materialism you can have, in terms of well being. (4)

    4) You seek self-esteem in things

    Another study found a way to manipulate how important people think money is: they had people write out a list of their inadequacies. Once their failings had been literally spelled out for them, they thought money was more important. Their self-esteem had lowered, and they thought money could fill the gap.

    The problem with this, is that you’re rooting your self-esteem in things outside of your control. It’s unstable. So if you lose a load of money from, say, I don’t know, a stock market crash, you’re more likely to feel bad about yourself, feel unpleasant emotions, and so on. (5)

    5) Materialists live avoidance-based lives

    It seems that the link between materialism and poor quality of life can be explained through something called “experiential avoidance.” This refers to the tendency to avoid negative experiences, thoughts, and behaviours, rather than to seek out good ones. Experiential avoiders are focused on getting away from what they don’t want, as opposed to moving towards what they do want. (6)

    When the road to their goals and values is paved with the occasional negative experience, they tend not to walk the path, preferring to develop avoidance strategies. Ultimately, living in fear of negative thoughts, experiences and behaviours is associated with a number of negative mental health consequences, and is emotionally draining. This isn’t a black and white thing, and experiential avoidance may not be the defining feature of a person; but it tends to be more pronounced in people who have strong material desires.

    Unanswered Questions

    As satisfying as it would be to say that materialism causes all the above ailments, the evidence isn’t clear. All the above studies are correlational, so they can’t tell us what is causing what. It could be that people develop unhappiness, mental health problems or experiential avoidance first, and then turn to material goals as a way of coping, as in point 4. Clearly though, if this is the case, materialism doesn’t seem to be the answer.

    The Solutions

    How can we reduce materialism?

    1) Gratitude

    Grateful people are consistently found to be less materialistic, and when people are told to express more gratitude, they find themselves becoming less materialistic. The exact instructions given in one study, if you wanted to try this, were as follows:

    Please put your pen or pencil down, close your eyes,
    and consciously disengage from unpleasant mental and
    emotional reactions by shifting attention to the heart.
    For a few minutes, focus on sincerely feeling apprecia-
    tion for what you have been given in life. Now, in the
    space below please write about your experience and
    about some of the things that came to mind.

    Simpler gratitude exercises have been tested, such as each day writing down three good things that happened that day, and why they happened.

    Why does it work? Gratitude, as I mentioned before, tends to make people happier. It could be that more satisfied people don’t seek well being in possessions as much. (7)

    2) Meditation

    The difference between what you want financially, and what you have, is called your “aspiration gap.” The bigger your aspiration gap, the lower your well-being. Consumer culture tells you that, rather than reduce this gap, you should fill it with things. Another path, which is popular in Eastern philosophy, is to reduce your desire, learn to want what you have. (8)

    One way to do this is through mindfulness meditation.  I’m not qualified to give a run-down of how to meditate, but there are some good resources online: John Kabat-Zinn walks you through it in this video, and you can get guidance in mp3 format from Mental Workout (they are cheap: $1-2 each; I’m going through a few of their programs they seem pretty good so far).  Otherwise, just Google.

    3) Watch Fight Club 58 times.

    Worked for me.

    Recommended Reading:

    References:

    (1) Diener, E. and S. Oishi: 2000, ‘Money and happiness: Income and subjective well-being across nations’, in E. Diener and E.M. Suh (eds.), Subjective Well-beingacross Cultures (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).

    (2) Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration, journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 410-422.

    (3) Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas Carol in Prose.

    (4) Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2009). Will money increase subjective well-being?: A literature review and guide to needed research. The science of well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener (pp. 119-154). New York, NY US: Springer Science

    (5) Unpublished study, reported in (4)

    (6) Kashdan, T., & Breen, W. (2007). Materialism and diminished well-being: Experiential avoidance as a mediating mechanism. Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, 26(5), 521-539.

    (7) Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Stillman, T., & Dean, L. (2009). More gratitude, less materialism: The mediating role of life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(1), 32-42.

    (8) Brown, K., Kasser, T., Ryan, R., Alex Linley, P., & Orzech, K. (2009). When what one has is enough: Mindfulness, financial desire discrepancy, and subjective well-being. Journal of Research in Personality

  • Money and pain

    Some researchers have proposed that, because people can get through money certain things they can get through acceptance, money might act as a substitute for social acceptance. Since social distress and physical pain seem to have similar underlying mechanisms, a few interesting experiments have been done to test this idea. One study reports six experiments, which I’ll summarise briefly here.

    Money and pain might be linked (not just through paper cuts)

    Rejection

    Participants got together in groups of 4. They spent 5 minutes breaking the ice, then were led to separate rules and asked who they wanted to work with as a pair on an upcoming task. The researcher came back a little later, and randomly assigned the participant to one of two groups (method of random assignment was not mentioned). Either everyone wanted to work with them, or no one did.

    After that, participants’ desire for money was assessed in three ways. They were asked to draw a coin from memory (previous research shows people with a bigger desire for money draw bigger coins), they were asked whether they’d permanently give up certain pleasures for money (e.g, chocolate, the beach), and they were asked to donate to an orphanage. Participants who were in the rejection group drew bigger coins, were more willing to give up pleasures for money, and donated less.

    So social rejection appears to increase the desire for money, although maybe it’s negative emotions generally rather than rejection.

    Pain

    I love priming research. Just being exposed to words (sometimes so quick they are below conscious awareness) can have measurable effects on behaviour. Makes you wonder how much you’re being influenced by advertising and such as you go about your life (hope you’re enjoying the subheaders by the way!).

    So money and rejection might be linked, what about money and pain? They might too. Exposing people to words like headache, sore, and pain caused increased desire for money, as indicated by the coin task and the giving up pleasures task. So as expected, social rejection and physical pain both seem to trigger desire for money, or priming related to pain at least.

    More rejection

    Participants were first asked to “test their finger dexterity”, by either counting money, or plain paper. They they played a computerised ball tossing game (Cyberball), which they thought they were playing with other people by computer link-up, but really was a simulation. For some people, the computer included them, for others, it started excluding them from the game after 10 throws (never trust a psychologist. They’re always up to something). Measures were taken of distress, positive and negative affect, and self-esteem.

    What happened? People who had just counted money reported less distress and higher self-esteem after just being excluded. Maybe that’s why Scrooge took so long to change his ways – the money was a slight buffer against exclusion.

    More pain

    I’m probably going to put people off of ever taking part in psychological research by writing this. Another test of money and pain, similar set up to last time. Participants (or should we call them subjects?) counted money or paper, this time followed by a pain task – hand immersion in water at 50 degrees C. Then they rated how painful it was and took a mood scale.

    Counting money prior to the task reduced self-reported pain. So now you know what to do before your next flu jab. There was no overall effect on mood.

    Losing money, and being rejected

    Maybe the previous results were due to being distracted by the money. To test this, the researchers tried to bring up feelings of losing money, and then exposing people to rejection (Cyberball again). Half of the participants wrote about what they’d spent recently, half wrote about the weather.

    As you’re expecting by now, distress from Cyberball was higher in people who had just been writing about their expenditures. This also goes along with the main idea that money can be a proxy for social acceptance – soon after it’s gone (or you perceive it as going), the sting of rejection hits you harder. Unemployment must be a tough time.

    Losing money, and pain

    You get the idea by now – participants did the writing task from the previous test, followed by the hot water test from the one before that. Losing money and pain were also linked. People who had just been reflecting on the money they spent over the last 30 days reported that the water was more painful than people who had been reflecting on the weather.

    These studies fit the general idea that money helps people to cope. Maybe it gives you a sense that, if something went wrong you’d be able to handle it, in much the same way that having close friends does. Since social rejection and physical pain seem to be closely intertwined, this proxy effect seems to carry over to that, too. Note that it’s a general sense of being able to cope that money provides, because in none of these studies would money be any help at all (unless you pay people to throw balls to you). And the effects seemed to be specific to rejection and pain, as the mood scores were not affected by the tests.

    It’s interesting that we can be influenced subtly by symbolic and abstract things like money (or thinking about money). If these results are correct, and because of the repeat occurrence of the words ‘pain’ and ‘rejection’, presumably most people reading this article will be feeling a stronger desire for money right now than the people who chose a physics one. Maybe you’re one of them.

    Need a hug?

  • The impact of 9/11 on American character

    Let’s have some fun and pick apart a paper (try saying “pick apart a paper” 10 times fast!)

    The question is, did 9/11 impact the character of Americans? I mean that personally not just in political attitudes towards this or that. It’s a tough question to answer empirically.

    “What do you mean by character?” is the obvious first hurdle. Peterson and Seligman (2003) had a go, using their VIA model. They have a website, authentichappiness.com, where people can take a VIA self-report strengths test. I’ve discussed this model previously, here’s an overview, and here’s a comparison to another model of strengths. Your interest in the rest of the article will depend on how suitable you think that tool is to answering this question. It’s pretty new and quite easy to pick it apart (see the previous posts and comments).

    So, thousands of people log in to that site and take the strengths test, giving the researchers a good opportunity to compare the results pre and post 9/11. First they looked at the 30 days before compared with the 30 days after 9/11. They found an overall difference, and then narrowed down to look at individual strengths. This is a part I’m confused about. There are 24 VIA strengths in this model, but they used a p value of .01. Surely they should have used .05 / 24 = .002? I’ve looked through the paper several times and can’t see a justification for using .01, it seems pretty arbitrary.

    Anyway, using .01 they found significant differences for the strengths of gratitude, hope, kindness, leadership, love, spirituality and teamwork. Kind of interesting, teamwork makes sense, maybe you’d expect a drop in things like hope straight after a terrorist attack.

    When testing longer time periods, they stuck to the strengths that were significantly different in the month immediately after “For the sake of convenience”. Here are the results (this is a composite measure of the strengths identified in the first analysis which they name “Theological Virtues”):

    At first glance 9/11/01 is clearly separating this increase. But how big is the difference? Effect sizes are not reported in the paper. As you can see in the graph, the difference is from about 3.7 to 3.8. What does it mean to be .1 higher in a combination of gratitude, hope, kindness, leadership, love, spirituality and teamwork? Does that mean anything in real terms, or does the difference only exist statistically? Even then, the exact p value is not given, in favour of “ps < .05". So we're back to .05 now, even though they say they tested each of the pre to each of the post time-points (12 tests), and presumably the ps are between .01 and .05 otherwise why not say < .01, or less than .001? We should also note that the sample sizes are massive - 4510 participants overall, which cannot help but contribute to lower p values, regardless of real-world effects. Anyway, even if this result was correct, maybe it isn't truly representative of the nation. As I mentioned, these results were from people who found the website (not a controlled sample). "Walk-ins" you might say. Another explanation is, after 9/11, people with more hope, leadership, gratitude etc., were more inclined to seek out and complete questionnaires of this type. I started by asking whether 9/11 affected the character of Americans. The answer is, "Who knows?" Saying that 9/11 gave Americans more gratitude, hope, kindness, leadership, love, spirituality and teamwork is a nice story, but I don't think these results really show that. Reference: Peterson, C.,&Seligman, M. E. P. (2003). Character strengths before and after 9/11. Psychological Science, 14(4), 381-384.

  • Terror Management Theory – I don’t want to die! (But I do want to shop…)

    One of the most common forms of self-medication in capitalist societies surely has to be retail therapy. Is there really a problem that can’t be solved by a new pair of shoes, or the latest iWhatever? Interestingly, one of the problems people might be trying to overcome is the fear of death.

    The insecurity and anxiety caused by the fear of death has some interesting effects on people. When people are reminded of their inevitable demise, they become more rooted in their outlook on life, this is called Terror Management Theory. For example, we start to see people with similar values and beliefs more positively, and people with different beliefs more negatively than we ordinarily would (1). We also become more reluctant to use cultural symbols like flags in improper ways (2).

    Since some of the more salient values of Western culture are materialistic in nature – earn more money, accumulate more stuff, etc., – it might be the case that being reminded of our mortality makes us more materialistic, as we move deeper into our adopted values.

    Local businesses attempt practical application of Terror Management Theory (Newsbie Pix)

    Tim Kasser and Ken Sheldon did a couple of studies in 2000 to look into this (3). The exercise they used to induce mortality salience is just about as unpleasant as you’d expect – participants had to write about their feelings about the own death. The control group wrote about listening to music, which is obviously does not increase your awareness of death (unless your favourite band is Cannibal Corpse, perhaps).

    After this, the people who wrote about death expected to be earning more in 15 years than the controls, and expected to be spending more money on “pleasure items.” In a second study, participants played a forest management game, and after writing about death, people were more willing to use up the resources of the forest, and were more interested in making profit. Curiously, another study found that materialistic people have more dreams about death (4).

    Playing a game does not mean they would act this way if they were really head of a timber company, but it’s an interesting behavioural measure to go along with the self-report. There might be some parallels to other low-consequence scenarios (cutting yourself a larger slice of pizza, for example!). Maybe. The aim here was to investigate greed, a typical characteristic of materialistic people.

    So although a self-report and imagined exercise are not definitive, they at least give an idea of the direction of causality, to go along with correlational data linking materialism with concerns about one’s death (5) – this study also found partial mediation of the relationship by insecurity, which fits with the general idea that higher materialism comes about to make up for some personal insecurity, which itself can be triggered by the fear of death.

    You could make some speculations linking these ideas to George Bush’s advice to go shopping following the 9/11 attack. People have their own theories on why W gave that advice, which we won’t go into here, but maybe here’s an idea on why people were so ready to take the advice.

     

    References:

    (1) Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., et al. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 308-318.

    (2) Greenberg, J., Porteus, J., Simon, L.,&Pyszczynski, T. (1995). Evidence of a terror management function of cultural icons: The effects of mortality salience on the inappropriate use of cherished cultural symbols. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(11), 1221-1228.

    (3) Kasser, T.,&Sheldon, K. (2000). Of wealth and death: Materialism, mortality salience, and consumption behavior. Psychological Science, 11(4), 348-351.

    (4) Kasser, T.,&Grow Kasser, V. (2001). The dreams of people high and low in materialism. Journal of Economic Psychology, 22(6), 693-719.

    (5) Christopher, A., Drummond, K., Jones, J., Marek, P.,&Therriault, K. (2006). Beliefs about one’s own death, personal insecurity, and materialism. Personality and Individual Differences, 40(3), 441-451.