Rachel’s Musings

In a recent interview of David Brooks by Charlie Rose, Brooks recounts experiments done by Walter Mischel. Mischel, starting several decades ago, presented 3- and 4-year old kids with the choice of eating a marshmallow now or receiving another one 10 minutes later if they could resist eating that marshmallow in front of them. Mischel noticed by following these kids as they grew up that those who resisted the temptation of instant gratification were more likely to be successful later on. He posits that there might be something genetic going on. It certainly has some deterministic overtones if we can predict a person’s life success based on their consumption of a marshmallow when they weren’t even in kindergarten. And it is bothersome that other factors don’t seem to have an impact even though Mischel is cited in a New Yorker article as saying that

“In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation. [...] The two influences are completely interrelated.”

Is this experiment valid? Can we really conclude from it that kids who have mastered self-control at age 4 will be more successful?

Considering the validity of research within psychology, I usually look at three things:

• Sample size
• Length of study
• Presence of a control group

Exploratory research often has small sample sizes. We can make some inferences based on that research but they are on shaky ground. What holds for 20 people might not hold for 1000s. I suspect that the sample sizes in these experiments were small.

Study length varies from point-in-time to longitudinal, sometimes over decades. As Bella DePaulo has pointed out eloquently, using point-in-time studies for psychological research doesn’t give us results to stand on. Mischel’s study is clearly longitudinal, which gives it more credibility.

I think Mischel’s study falls apart with the lack of control groups. Control groups are important if we want to ensure that there aren’t other variables that might be impacting the outcome – suggesting that what we think is the cause (self-control) is really just another symptom of something else. It is plausible that the same environmental factors that increased the self-control in 4-year olds also contributed to their increased success. Maybe they had more involved parents; maybe they had access to better education. Or maybe – something suggested by the researchers themselves – these kids had developed skills that helped them distract themselves from the marshmallow. That might not have anything to do with self-control. It could simply be cunning calculation: Two marshmallows are better than one, after all.

There certainly is something to be said for self-control but I caution to jump to conclusions based on these experiments. Clearly, they are not investigating systemic impacts but are solely looking at personal responsibility.

Addendum:A new British report on health inequalities also seems to underscore factors beyond genes in things like health inequalities. As the latest Too Much newsletter summarizes:

But British health inequalities go far beyond this contrast between rich and poor. The rich live longer and healthier lives than the near rich, the near rich longer and healthier than the middle-income. Health in the UK follows, in other words, a “social gradient.” The lower a person’s social status, the worse a person’s health.
[...]
We typically blame poor health on unhealthy behaviors. Or bad genes. Or a lack of access to health care. None of these factors, as important as they may be, turn out to statistically explain why some among us live lives so much longer and healthier than others. What does?

Says the Marmot Review: “Social and economic differences in health status reflect, and are caused by, social and economic inequalities in society.”

If we truly want to tackle health inequalities, advises the Marmot commission, we need to address “inequalities in the conditions of daily life and the fundamental drivers that give rise to them: inequities in power, money, and resources.”

I wonder if such inequalities also impact our ability to delay eating a marshmallow…

Yesterday, two people told me that “people are talking” that there will be an earthquake soon. It scared me. Am I ready for an earthquake? Maybe I should review the meeting spots. Maybe I should… Then it started to puzzle me. We just had an earthquake drill. No, that wasn’t it, one person assured me. It’s the weather. It has been rather humid here lately and that’s what the weather was like before the 1989 earthquake. I didn’t think to ask: How often has the weather been humid between now and 1989 and no earthquake happened? As I continued to reflect, I realized the perils of folk wisdom: It scares people and it gives false hope of control. Reality is that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Earthquakes happen here, humid weather or not. And reality is that earthquakes are very difficult to predict. That’s why we have the relatively useless official forecast that a big one will hit sometime between now and the next 30 years – something like that, maybe it’s just 20 years but, still, it doesn’t help me to plan to move to non-earthquake country tomorrow, so that I miss the quake on Tuesday, and can come back a week from Tuesday after the essential services are restored. So, why do people think they can predict earthquakes by the humidity (or how the bells ring)? Well, it probably goes along with the line written on the sidewalk in chalk: “Jesus is coming!” He has been expected for the last 2000 years give or take a few decades. Any guest who is that late, shouldn’t really be welcome anymore. So it is with humid weather: If I say earthquakes come with humid weather, chances are that one day an earthquake does indeed happen when it’s humid. This goes back to the difficulty of predicting earthquakes: There is a very large random element in the prediction, so almost anything is possible.

Bottom line: If you live in an area where earthquakes are likely, you live in an area where earthquakes are likely. Unfortunately, that’s not very useful, so the best thing is to be always prepared, at least a little. Know what to do, know where to go. Have food, water, and medication supplies for at least 72 hours. And then stop worrying about it! If it gets humid, put on a t-shirt. I’ve heard rumors that they sell those even in San Francisco…

I admit it. I am angry. Not exactly sure what precisely I am angry about but it’s a reaction to a talk Michael Mamas gave at the Commonwealth Club. I think what I am angry about is how he can present such nonsense so authoritatively and get people to believe it. Nonsense? Who am I to say something a DVM espouses is nonsense? Well, I don’t know it for sure but I have a pretty good hunch that his mixture of quantum physics, evolution, relativism, and hope is nonsense. Sorry. The universe is not filled with a consciousness that is in all of us – it is “supremely hostile to life,” a fact that Neil deGrasse Tyson emphasizes frequently. Susan Blackmore eloquently shows that the idea of consciousness is, uhm, a helpful construct but doesn’t really exist. The unified field that physicists talk about is not the same as a soul. And, btw, Einstein did not support quantum physics – and he was the one who came up with the idea of the unified field. It sounds like he later rejected the very idea of a unified field:      Continue reading this post » » »

Some relationships seem to be based on the exploitation of inner resources – viewing love as a commodity rather than something that’s freely flowing, unrestricted. But this doesn’t happen just between people. The whole capitalist system is built on it: Our inner resources – intelligence primarily – are exploited for the benefit of the few. And we have to use it within the confines defined by them. Take risk, for example: Whole groups of people at banks are worried about preventing the risk of fraud yet we completely missed the big risk of credit default swaps and other financial nonsense. Get rich quick schemes are only illegal in some instances – not if you bill yourself as a financial genius. And now we’re bailing them out, continuing the farce. We only have to pay for our mistakes if we don’t make a lot of money. When the Obama administration suggested to impose limits on CEO incomes, a chorus repeated: The income of a CEO has to be unlimited because otherwise they don’t have any incentives. Incentives to do what? Exploit. It is not a fair trade. Society is loosing: most of us got the expensive end of the bargain. All we get in return are bills, for generations to come. Social structures seem to be set up to ensure that a few people can get obscenely rich, not that there is fairness, that everybody has a decent standard of living, that everybody has health care. Our system is rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. And the price of that reward is large: Ultimately, it will lead to self-destruction.      Continue reading this post » » »

As I’ve mentioned before, I came out as a single by choice in my new years newsletter to friends and family. I am getting mostly positive reactions, including from my parents. Still, it is interesting that the blatant singlism is coming from Germany. And there I had thought that Europeans are more progressive (I am still hoping this is a result of the unrepresentative sample, though…). Although I never wrote that I’d be shunning men, period, that seems to be the message that gets across. I have several male friends, so how they’d fit into this black-and-white picture I never painted is beyond me but apparently the only legitimate way of relating to a man for a woman is to be sexually involved, what is commonly called a “relationship.” And why would I want to commit myself to being eternally single (read always alone), especially since I am so successful professionally? Uhm, I am simply not choosing one more man than a married woman. Would this person freak out the same way if I had written that I was getting married? After all, I’d be committing myself to not be in a “relationship” with a gazillion minus one guys. Now I am simply including this one guy in the gazillion… (I am eternally grateful to whoever came up with the definition of atheists as rejecting just one more god than theists. It is coming so handy in clarifying my thinking on choosing to be single). Apparently, making that point in my original newsletter didn’t get across… Yet another reminder how much consciousness raising there remains to be done.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) recently released a 64-page analysis on The Challenge to Act: How Progressive Women Activists Reframe American Democracy. In their press release, IWPR stressed that the report “calls for political leaders and progressive activists to speak to the values that inspire women to act for social change.”

The report is an attempt to take back the claim on moral values from the right and make them our own. The authors argue that “values – our deeply held beliefs, the principles
that guide our thoughts and actions – infuse our lives with meaning.” And that “the cry for values-based politics, on both the left and the right, is about a search for inspiration and meaning.” The Challenge to Act is also a call to incorporate a vision into our activism. IWPR points out that

Progressives working for change sorely need such forward-looking vision. We rely heavily on statistics and policy analysis to do our talking for us; we too often assume that these tools alone can convince people to agree with our prescriptions for change.

Data is important but facts & figures are not very inspiring. Instead, we need a vision that is informed by our values (and the facts). Only that can truly motivate and inspire us to fight for change.

What are those values? Based on more than 120 interviews, the authors of the report determined that women activists are driven by this core set of moral values:

• Community, where people from all walks of life gather to define and pursue the common good
• Family, which offers life-giving relationships and shared care-giving
• Equality, which gives us all the opportunity to pursue our own chosen goals and paths
• Power, which ensures that public life includes and responds to diverse voices
• Compassion, which is a sensitivity to the emotions and experiences of others that requires us to eliminate injustice and respect the complexity of others’ life choices
• Balance, which allows us to negotiate the multifaceted nature of our lives without sacrificing our most cherished goals and ideals
• Practice, which enables us to bring our values to life through action

Wow! I agree with those values! It is great to know that there are core values that do not at all sound religious. This is consistent with what the authors of the report found:

This diversity in our values and their sources means that we cannot identify a shared set of “women’s values” that is innate or universally embraced by all women. Indeed, women who come from many walks of life have different experiences, ways of looking at the world, and belief systems. Our research has found, however, that even in the midst of their significant differences, progressive women activists often articulate a core cluster of values.

Maybe these are really progressive values, not (just) women’s values, despite the authors’ claims to the contrary: “our research focuses not just on progressive values but on a particular set of progressive values that often motivate women’s activism.” I have a hard time believing that progressive men are not motivated by this same set of values. The report does not make clear how these values motivate women more than they motivate men. Carol Tarvis has pointed out the danger of claiming that women are somehow morally superior, thus, it is not very likely that women have a set of values that is different than that of men. Our values are likely more informed by our experience as human beings than by our gender. Nevertheless, looking at values is an important part for building a progressive movement that can counteract the religious wrong’s claim on the framing of issues using their regressive values.

Who are the women they interviewed – I am particularly interested in knowing if they included atheists (my radar turned on when the press release mentioned “faith based”) and single women (a group all too often left out)? According to the report:

These women live and work all over the country. They come from every major racial and ethnic group; over half are women of color. They are Christian and Jewish, Muslim and Hindu, Buddhist and Unitarian. Some are atheist. They are rich and they are poor; they are national leaders and grassroots activists.

Okay, so the non-believers are covered. What about the unmarried? Well, they are not mentioned, at least not in the section that gives a top level introduction to the women (p. 2-3). The word “unmarried” does not appear in the rest of the report (although the word “married” does not show up either). The word “single” only appears coupled with “mother,” as if the only single women are single mothers (although, to be fair, the report does point out the fallacy of marriage promotion to “cure” poverty; yet marriage itself does not seem to be challenged). That hardly feels inclusionary. As Page Gardner points out, progressives need to deliver on the hopes for change that led unmarried women to the polls (hat tip to Bella DePaulo. With a marital status gap of 37-points in favor of Obama, the unmarrieds can really no longer be ignored (you’d think). Unmarried women contributed strongest to that gap (with a 44-point gap vs. a 27-point gap from unmarried men). These gaps suggest differences in values by marital status (and gender, though the gender gap indicates only 13-point female preference in favor of Obama). It would be tremendously interesting to find out what, if anything, unmarried women and men value that is different from married people. The marital status gap in voting suggests that unmarried people are more progressive. It also would be important to understand why unmarried women who were undecided flocked to Obama: The marital status gap in polls was smaller than it was based on actual results (of course, this could be a result of differing methodologies). (It’s interesting to note that even when looking at the swing – the change in Democratic votes between 2004 and 2008 – unmarried folks are still clearly supportive of Obama.)

Overall, the IWPR report gives plenty of food for thought, though it’s ignorance toward marital status suggests that the discussion around values has just begun. It would have been nice if their research would have been informed by these statistics because I am sure there are values behind them that would be interesting to explore and are important in keeping unmarried people motivated for a progressive agenda.