Category Archives: culture

Jean Twenge watch

Posted on by

She writes,

The result is a generation whose members are often afraid to talk to one another, especially about anything that might be upsetting or offensive. If everyone must be emotionally safe at all times, a free discussion of ideas is inherently dangerous. Opposing viewpoints can’t just be argued against; they have to be shut down, because merely hearing them can cause harm.

She adds,

Members of iGen are also taking longer to grow up. As I found in analyzing seven large national surveys of teens, today’s adolescents are less likely to drive, drink, work, date, go out and have sex than were teens just 10 years ago. Today’s 18-year-olds look like 15-year-olds used to. They don’t reach adulthood too early, but they also lack experience with independence and decision-making.

Her book is out, but I have yet to read it. The reviews have been mixed. Tyler calls it new and excellent.

Jonathan Haidt does not mention Twenge in this interview, but his observations parallel hers.

Haidt believes there is a mental-health crisis on campus: ‘I have never seen such rapid increase in indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years’, he says.

The interesting brief interview with Haidt includes this:

‘Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.’

Re-reading David Brooks

Posted on by

Almost twenty years after it first appeared, I review Bobos in Paradise.

What Brooks might have foreseen, but did not, was how this Bobo project would play out as it gathered momentum. In the last two decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the long-term trend toward expansion of the more abstract-oriented industries, such as finance and entertainment, and a decline of the more concrete-oriented industries, such as manufacturing and mining. As a result, the cultural influence of Bobos has soared. The Bobos became insistently cosmopolitan on issues of immigration and foreign relations, increasingly aggressive in their assault on traditional ideas about gender, and increasingly eager to stifle the speech on campus of those with whom they disagree.

Robert Sapolsky defines culture

Posted on by

Crediting Frans de Waal, Sapolsky writes in Behave.

“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means.

I guess that is close to my preferred definition, which is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”

I am about half way through the book. I have two nits to pick.

One nit is that he says that when behavior correlates with a gene in one setting but not another, that proves gene-environment interaction. An example would be that a gene correlates with violence in people who were abused as children, but not in people who were not abused as children. In my view, this might be gene-environment interaction. But it also could be gene-gene interaction. That is, the behavior might be influenced by a gene other than the one on which you are focused, and that gene correlates with whether the person was abused as a child.

Another nit is when he talks about gender and math ability. First, he points out that the very top percentile in math is dominated by males (the fact that Larry Summers was fired for pointing out). Then, he reports on a study showing that male-female math differences are less in egalitarian cultures. However, that is only relevant to the Larry Summers issue if that study refers to the very top percentile. As I read the study, by Guiso, Zingales, and others, it is about averages, not the very top percentile.

The way I see it, a lot of academics are dogmatically insistent that genes matter little and the environment matters a lot. Sapolsky is not one of those, but these examples suggest that he is somewhat biased in the direction of the prevailing dogma.

Jean Twenge Update

Posted on by

She writes,

Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

I don’t think a crusade against cyber-bullying is the answer. I am enough of a McLuhanite to say that the medium is the message. There is something about smart phones that is damaging, and I suspect it is the sheer immediacy of them. I think that this immediacy is what makes contemporary politics so stressful. You see what somebody posts online and if you like it, great, and if you don’t it really gets your fight-or-flight hormones raging.

Also, this is something I noticed and remarked on when I was teaching high school:

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

The book is due out in less than two weeks.

Another definition of culture

Posted on by

From Pseudoerasmus.

‘Culture’ is defined as any information inside the mind which modifies behaviour and which got there through social learning — whether from parents, or peers, or society at large. Non-genetically inherited ‘content’ would obviously include technology/knowledge (“how to remove toxins from edible tubers”), beliefs (“witches can cause blindness”), and customs (use of knife & fork). But it also includes what economists would describe as “informal institutions”, i.e., mating systems, ethical values, social norms, etc.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Apparently this is an updated version of an earlier essay. I recommend the piece as an excellent survey. Many sentences are worth quoting, including:

One might argue, the real institutional difference between developed and developing countries is actually a “social capital” gap: there are just many more coordination failures in developing countries.

Of course, you do not explain North Korea vs. South Korea on the basis of a “social capital gap.” But I think that the concept does have value in many other instances.

If you want to jump to the bottom line,

So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’ institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer.

And, yes, he does get around to citing Garett Jones.

A book recommendation

Posted on by

from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff:

The social psychologist Jean Twenge has just written a book, titled iGen (which is short for “internet generation”), in which she analyzes four large national datasets that track the mental health of teenagers and college students. When the book is released in August, Americans will likely be stunned by her findings. Graph after graph shows the same pattern: Lines drift mildly up or down across the decades as baby boomers are followed by Gen-X, which is followed by the millennials. But as soon as the data includes iGen—those born after roughly 1994—the rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide spike upward.

Due out one month from now.

Human conflict: a Girardian view

Posted on by

Dan Wang writes,

If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read the entire essay.

Wang links to a useful summary of Girard’s ideas.

If people imitate each other’s desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects. Girard usually distinguishes ‘imitation’ from ‘mimesis’. The former is usually understood as the positive aspect of reproducing someone else’s behavior, whereas the latter usually implies the negative aspect of rivalry.

Again, there is much more at this link. Wang’s idea is that when you throw a bunch of similar people together ini college, you make it natural for them to desire the same things and to be prone to conflict.

I admit that I am still trying to fully grasp these ideas.

The Theory of Mind

Posted on by

I just finished reading The Enigma of Reason by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. They look at the process by which we arrive at reasons for actions. The following thought occurs to me:

You probably assume that understanding your own mind is prior to having a “theory of mind” about other humans. However, it could be the other way around.

Sperber and Mercier do not make this sort of claim. However, I do not think that it is terribly inconsistent with their views.

A theory of mind seeks to explain why agent X performs action A. What I am suggesting is that we arrive at this theory not through introspection but instead by observing action A followed by consequence B repeatedly. After we have seen this happen enough, we develop the insight that perhaps agent X is performing action A in order to achieve consequence B. Call this the basic theory of mind, or at least a theory of what motivates others. Note that we might hold such a basic theory of mind or motivation about animals or even about an inanimate object.

Given that we have a basic theory of mind and that we assume that others have similar basic theory of mind, we can engage in a new form of teaching. If I tell you that I am performing action A in order to achieve consequence B, then you can get the point of performing action A without my having to repeat action A many times.

This explanatory form of teaching is very efficient. With cultural communication so important in humans, we have become very good at explaining to others why we do things. Moreover, explanation and justification are similar functions. We develop the ability to justify to others why we do things.

We are concerned with what others think of what we say and do. As I read Sperber and Mercier, they argue that the natural function of reason is to try to gain respect and approval of others for our actions. I think that Sperber and Mercier do not give enough credit to the role of reasons in making teaching more effective. Imagine telling a child to look both ways before crossing a street without telling the child why they should do so. The child could perform the ritual exactly as directed and then walk right in front of moving car.

But the role of reasons in teaching does not address the enigma to which Sperber and Mercier refer. The enigma is that our reasoning process evolved to be biased rather than optimized to arrive at truth. Their explanation is that our reasoning process evolved as a mechanism to explain and justify our actions to others. The goal of reasoning is not to seek Truth but to defend our status. Biased reasoning is helpful for defending status. Bias is less helpful when we are trying to make decisions, but when we make decisions we are simply adapting our reasoning tool to a less natural context.

Sperber and Mercier make another claim, which is that when we argue with one another, we arrive at more reasonable conclusions than when we reason on our own. They say that this is because when we evaluate our own reasons we lack objectivity. They think we are more objective when we evaluate others’ reasons, so that our evaluations are more reliable. I do not find that persuasive. I think that part of defending our own reasons is attacking our opponents’ reasons, and I believe that we tend to be uncharitable to those who disagree with us. I am more inclined to ascribe the benefit of arguing to exposure to reasoning that we have not considered, rather than to a greater objectivity in hearing others’ points of view than in evaluating one’s own.

If reasoning evolved to justify our actions, then how do we get to a point where we use reasoning to make decisions? I think that the most consistent application of their idea would be to say that when we make decisions we anticipate having to defend our actions. As we go through this mental process, we may decide that some actions are unwise. Anticipating my wife’s reaction should I come home drunk, I stop drinking.

It could be that people with poor self-control have difficulty engaging in this exercise. That is, they either lack the ability to anticipate the reactions of others or they are less sensitive to such anticipated reactions.

It is interesting to note that I have often advised people in the throes of making a decision to imagine explaining that decision to a variety of other people. If you are thinking of quitting your job, imagine explaining that to your family, to close friends, to co-workers, and so on. I have suggested that such an exercise can help to clarify your thoughts.

Anyway, what occurs to me is that we obtain our theory of mind “outside-in” rather than “inside-out.” That is, by observing other people and listening to their reasons, we develop a theory of how our own minds ought to work.

Interesting Sociology

Posted on by

From a Joint Economic Committee Report.

In the early 1970s, nearly seven in ten adults in America were still members of a church or synagogue. While fewer Americans attended religious service regularly, 50 to 57 percent did so at least once per month. Today, just 55 percent of adults are members of a church or synagogue, while just 42 to 44 percent attend religious service at least monthly.

…Between 1970 and the early 2010s, the share of families in large metropolitan areas who lived in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 40 percent. Over that same time period the share of families living in poor neighborhoods rose from 19 percent to 30 percent, and those living in affluent neighborhoods rose from 17 percent to 30 percent.

…Between 1974 and 2015, the share of adults that did any volunteering who reported volunteering for at least 100 hours increased from 28 percent to 34 percent.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

Interesting throughout. Some, but not all, of the findings relate to what I have called Narrower, Deeper, Older. That is, people are drifting away from the sort of lowest-common-denominator activities that require a modest commitment of time. Instead, people prefer narrower niche activities in which they become more deeply involved.

If you look at associational life in terms of the broader, shallower associations of 1960, our social capital is going down. But looking at it in terms of the narrower, deeper associations of today, the analysis is more complex.