Psychology: Think positively - or peel potatoes!

A friend tells me that the US Army's new weapon is "thinking positively":

FACED with rising rates of depression, post traumatic stress disorder, drug abuse and suicide among its war-weary soldiers, the Pentagon has turned to the founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, to train its troops in how to lead happier lives.

The aim of the four-year program is to make the US Army ''just as psychologically fit as physically fit'', Professor Seligman told the Herald, as a vanguard of more than 150 sergeants learnt about emotional resilience at his University of Pennsylvania research centre.

Despite their ''grizzled'' tough guy images, sergeants are in the best position to pass on psychological coping skills to soldiers in their command in a bid to prevent mental problems developing.

- Deborah Smith, science editor, "US Army's new weapon is thinking positively," Sydney Morning Herald, November 17, 2009

I do not know what "despite" is doing at the head of the last sentence. I would have thought that an experienced NCO or officer would be a useful resource for a troubled recruit.

I hope this’ll do some good (more than I can say for neuroshopping, and similar idle pursuits).

I am glad they US Army is doing this, but it is not new. Good officers have always helped their subordinates understand how to cope with crises and disasters. A person who cannot do so should not be an officer. He should fly a desk somewhere, where he can annoy people who are NOT risking their lives.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Psychology: Don't think about it, and you probably won't do it

In a New Yorker article titled admirably simply, "Don’t!" The secret of self-control,
Jonah Lehrer reflects on what investigators have learned about how children develop self-control:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children's ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel's conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the "strategic allocation of attention."

In other words, focus of attention.

Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow - the "hot stimulus" - the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from "Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated - it was merely forgotten. "If you're thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it," Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place."

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. ... Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. "What's interesting about four-year-olds is that they're just figuring out the rules of thinking," Mischel says. "The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that's a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room."

In the adult world, this need for focus of attention is one key reason for the millennia-old practice of religious retreats.

People often say they are going to make more time from their work day to think about the meaning of life. But do they? No, because they can't. They can't stop looking at the In Tray, the way many kids looked at the marshmallow.

Now just put that same person in a room with a chair, a desk, and a work by a serious spiritual writer - and NO phone, e-mail, or visitors - and many people begin to see key patterns in their lives that they had never noticed before. The trick is, as the kids discovered, to lose sight of the marshmallows of life.

Psychology: What short attention spans cost us

Columnist John Hawkin makes an important point here in my view (in a summary of what he thinks is wrong in the United States today):

2) Short Attention Spans: Perhaps because of the internet, the stunning variety of news sources, or the complexity of modern society, we've become much less able as a people to follow logical arguments and deal with complex messages.

This has bled over into Congress where they write legislation dealing with issues they don't truly understand. That legislation is voted on by legislators who admit that they haven't read it and it affects the lives of millions of people who were unaware that such legislation was even being contemplated.

The problem with this is that there are many issues in life that are too knotty to be broken down into a soundbite or a 30 second commercial. Those affairs require more extensive knowledge and deeper thought and consideration than can be placed on a bumper sticker or weaved into a music video. When we lose sight of that fact, utter disasters that have been in plain sight all along for anyone with an attention span longer than five minutes can blindside much of the population.

Yes, and short attention spans can also lead people to fail to see long term benefits from comparatively simple programs.

I have long been an advocate of school breakfast and lunch programs. For children, good nutrition is an important support for learning. Provision of food, as such, is not a problem in a technologically advanced democracy. Quite the contrary, farmers destroy tonnes of perfectly good food every year that they just cannot sell at market rates.

Pregnant cows and sows go to slaughter, when their offspring could be raised - and consumed by people who need the nutrition.

Also, breakfast and lunch programs provide respectable work in the community for cooks, servers, and cleanup crew - they do not need any special training apart from instruction in using the equipment, sanitation procedures, and common sense dealings with clients.

But what happens? A big uproar starts around who is "qualified" to enter the program. How about "whoever is enrolled in the school who wants to show up for breakfast"? The bureaucracy around entitlement then costs way more than just providing the breakfast.

(A parent or guardian should, of course, be required to sign a waiver in advance regarding allergies, when the child enrols for school that year.)

But so what if someone's Filipina nanny is also eating a breakfast (because her stingy mistress only gives her a piece of toast in the morning)? I think that, in that case, the program is more of a solution than a problem, at least for now.

Short attention spans mean that people fail to see the big picture and the long term. We are not short of food in North America, but we are plagued by rampant bureaucracy, and we must get free of it in order to help people do and be their best.

Phineas Gage: The evolution of the lecture room psychopath

I was at dinner the other week with a voluble atheist religion professor who, in defense of a materialist view of the human mind, raised the subject of Phineas Gage (1823-1860). Ah yes, the man whose personality changed completely after a horrific accident, a staple of Introductory Psychology.

Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 or read popular neuroscience books has probably heard Gage's story, which upholds the "frontal lobe" theory of personality. (= You are your frontal lobes.)

The story is that in 1848, a tamping rod went through Gage's head and totally changed his personality. He was "no longer Gage." Which demonstrates that the mind and the self are an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. A textbook case.

I pointed out over dinner that there are good reasons to doubt this story. The prof was, of course, withering. Hundreds and hundreds of psych texts have told Gage's story, he informed me, so how could it be false or questionable?

Well, I have written for newspapers most of my adult life, and one thing I know is this: Printing more copies of any type of information does not make it true. It makes it more widely disseminated.

A distant relative of the Textbook Case sent me an article by University of London historian Zbigniew Kotowicz, "The strange case of Phineas Gage," History of the Human Sciences (Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 115-131), which offers the story you and six hundred others in Psych 101 may not have heard.

First, let's go over exactly what happened: Gage, 25, was foreman of a gang blowing away rock to lay rail for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. Gage's job was laying explosives. On September 13, 1848, he was momentarily distracted, and the explosive detonated, pushing the tamping rod through his head. The rod was 5.9 kg (13.25 lb.), 1.05 m (over 3.5 ft) long and 44.45 mm (1.75 in) across. As Kotowicz tells the story,

It entered beneath his left cheek, passed behind the eye, pierced the base of the skull, went through the front of the brain, and fell on the ground over 100 feet (30.4 m) away. Covered in blood and brains.

Remarkably, Gage did not lose consciousness. He was able to move and speak. He took about two months to heal. He finished his recovery at his mother's home where, Harlow recounts, he entertained his nephews and nieces with fanciful tales, and looked after farm and domestic animals.

In all, three contemporary reports were written about Gage in professional journals:

1) A report given to a medical audience by his doctor John Harlow, three months after the incident. The famous passage in physician Harlow's account of the changed personality ("no longer Gage") referred to that period and not to the rest of his life. More on that presently.

2) A report by Harvard surgeon Henry Bigelow, who observed Gage over a period of two months somewhat more than a year later and took a life mask of his face (pictured above). According to Bigelow, Gage was calm, "talking with composure and equanimity of the hole in his head." and his behaviour did not fit the profile of a psychopath.

3) A report by Harlow seven years after Gage's death, based on information from his family.

The lecture room legend

And after that? After his death, Gage slowly morphed into the lecture room legend. According to Kotowicz,

... most of the subsequent descriptions of Gage were based on hearsay. Some of them were quite florid; Gage was portrayed as having fits of temper when not getting his own way, as being disinclined to work, as having a reduced libido, as being an aimless drifter and so on. A typical description of him would say that before the accident Gage had been a diligent, reliable, polite and socially adept person: after his accident, he subsequently became uncaring, profane and socially inappropriate in his conduct.

For example, at Neurophilosophy, we learn:

Thus, the damage to Gage’s frontal cortex had resulted in a complete loss of social inhibitions, which often led to inappropriate behaviour.

The documentary evidence

Kotowicz begs to differ:

However, after examining closely the accounts of Phineas Gage as given by the doctors who knew him, Harlow and Bigelow, one must conclude that the supposed psychopathic traits are not evident.

The drastic discntinuity was not so much between Phineas Gage pre- and post-tamping rod but between Phineas Gage (1823-1860) and the lecture room legend.

What we can learn from contemporary accounts of Gage's post-trauma life is this: For a while after the accident, he drifted, and even ended up briefly in P. T. Barnum's freak show, exhibiting himself and the tamping rod. But he then settled down and worked a year and a half in a stable. Later, he went with a friend to Valparaiso in Chile where he cared for horses and drove a coach and six for eight years.

Kotowicz points out the obvious,

Working in stables is not a job for a psychopath. Horses are very sensitive and they require discipline and calm; they have to be attended to regularly, seven days a week, and work begins early.

(They are also apt to bite, kick, rear, and stampede, if startled or abused.)

Of course, Gage had been catastrophically injured, and about twelve years later, the effects caught up with him. By February 1860, back from Chile, he continued to try to work on farms while living with or near his mother, who had moved to San Francisco. But he began to have frequent epileptic convulsions. They worsened, and he died on May 21, 1860. No autopsy was performed, but Harlow later exhumed the body and recovered Gage's skull and the tamping rod.

What no one stopped to think about

Kotowicz's account diverges still further from the lecture room legend:

... what is really amazing is that none of the many who comment on the case seem to have ever stopped for a moment to think what Gage might have looked like after the accident.

A team of researchers using modern computer techniques decided to try to reconstruct his post-accident face, "borrowing" the face of a student whose life mask looks like the one taken of Gage by Bigelow. (A life mask gives a correct image of shape but not of facial mobility.)

The reconstruction they provide would certainly startle a new acquaintance. Kotowicz contends that, to the extent that Gage was unsettled, it was probably mainly due to his horrifying disfigurement and not to psychopathic tendencies:

First he meets his workmates. Their attitude towards him has changed; now they turn their eyes away, they are not the same easygoing fellows; and the girls do not laugh and flirt with him as they did. And if there was some lassie that he was particularly fond of, well . . . all this must be really difficult to take. Someone will look at him, and we can imagine him snapping back, ‘What are you staring at, you bastard?’ And there are also those who are only too ready to give advice, but giving advice to someone in Gage’s predicament is a risky business. Again, we can imagine him telling them to go to hell. Very ungrateful; definitely, to ‘his friends and acquaintances’ he is ‘“no longer Gage”’. It is different at home, at his mother’s, where the final recovery takes place. He entertains his nephews and nieces by making up fantastic stories; they must love Uncle Phineas, and they do not care about his scars. He also grows fond of pets, especially dogs and horses. Animals not only do not care about his scars, they do not even see them. Gage quickly becomes attached to them. But the outside world of adults cannot be ignored. Gage needs to go back to work. And here comes the first tangible blow: he is not wanted back ..."

But he must work; he is a working man.

"As we have seen, Gage finds employment in a stable. Work is hard but it is most likely Gage does not mind, he probably shuns others and keeps to himself (and who in his place wouldn’t?). It may well be that like many before him and many since, he has decided that he is better off in the company of animals than fellow humans. For the rest of his life he will work with horses. After work in the stable, Gage leaves for Chile to set up a coachline. He is ‘occupied in caring for horses, and often driving a coach heavily laden and drawn by six horses’ (ibid.: 415). This means he has strength, dexterity and an excellent relationship with the animals; Gage has evidently mastered his metier.

And, as we have seen, he worked right up to the end.

But, as we have also seen, psych profs didn't need a working man who had independently adapted to his disability; they needed an aimless drifter, so,

... the image of Gage the psychopath has emerged; he is a contemporary construct. Harlow’s words telling us that the ‘equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed’, that he indulged ‘in the grossest profanity’ and that he was ‘no longer Gage’ are now routinely quoted, but nothing else about him is ever mentioned. In the myopic vision of the neurosciences, Phineas Gage has been reduced to a witless psychopath. It seems that the growing commitment to the frontal lobe doctrine of emotions brought Gage to the limelight and shapes how he is described. The psychopath Phineas Gage has now entered scientific folklore; according to a calculation from recent years (Macmillan, 2002: 333) some 60 per cent of psychology textbooks quote it as one of the first cases where personality change occurred after damage to the frontal lobes.

So Kotowicz asks, a century and a half - and hundreds of textbooks - later

Was this a life of a psychopath? Did be behave dismally? One neuroscientist claims that ‘Gage lost something uniquely human, the ability to plan his future as a social being’ (Damasio, 1994: 19). He asks, ‘Did he have a sense of right and wrong?’ (ibid.: 18), which is nothing short of asking whether he had a soul, and he wonders whether Gage was ‘responsible for his acts’ (ibid.). This is a slur on the dead man’s good name. Harlow does not report a single act that Gage should have been ashamed of, let alone made ‘responsible’ for. There is no mention of violence, theft, abuse; not even something as vague as ‘irresponsibility’. There is coherence and dignity in the way Gage dealt with his predicament. He deserves deep respect.

Gage indeed deserves deep respect. The materialist psychology texts routinely purveying false knowledge ("the things we know that ain't so") - not so much.

In recent years, the Gage industry has become more nuanced, perhaps in line with a less materialist emphasis on the mind, though many kind readers of this b log doubtless took Intro Psych before that change occurred.

Resources

Here's the abstract:

History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 1, 115-131 (2007) DOI: 10.1177/0952695106075178

The strange case of Phineas Gage
Zbigniew Kotowicz
Department of History, Goldsmiths College, London, z.kotowicz@gold.ac.uk

The 19th-century story of Phineas Gage is much quoted in neuroscientific literature as the first recorded case in which personality change (from polite and sociable to psychopathic) occurred after damage to the brain. In this article I contest this interpretation. From a close examination of the story of Gage I have come to conclude that first of all there was nothing psychopathic in Gage’s behavior and that changes in his life are more coherently explained by seeing them as his way of dealing with disfigurement that he suffered after the accident. This is not just a matter of reinterpreting a case. The way Gage has been presented and discussed in neuroscientific literature suggests that the new paradigm of neuroscientifically oriented psychiatry may lead to an erosion of clinical knowledge.

Key Words: brain damage • clinical experience • disfigurement • neurosciences

Here is another Gage scholar, Malcolm Macmillan of Deakin University School of Psychology in Victoria, Australia, where he maintains a Phineas Gage page. He writes:

Most of the accounts of Gage's life after 1848 are strange mixtures of slight fact, considerable fancy, and downright fabrication.

He deals with unanswered questions here.

Images of the injury to Gage's skull

Discussions in journals over the years are here. Here's a typical modern materialist account.

More stuff we know that ain't so: 19th century Christians opposed anaesthetics in childbirth; Mediaeval people thought Earth was flat; Copernicus demoted Earth from the centre of the universe.

Psychology: Picture yourself deciding you actually like the way you look!

In "The skinny on why thin is still in" (National Post, October 2, 2008), Joanne Laucius,
summarizes recent news and opinion around the ultra-thin, photoshopped models in magazines.

In one of his studies, Kees and a fellow marketing researcher found that, although female subjects felt badly about themselves after looking at ads with skinny models, they also evaluated the brands the models were selling more highly. The subjects who saw ads with regular-sized models didn't feel bad about themselves, but they also gave the brands a lower value.

It gets worse.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty got a lot of attention. A 75-second viral film for Dove that showed the fast-motion "evolution" of a live model into a billboard pastiche through the magic of makeup and retouching got more than 1.7 million views on YouTube in 2006.

But empowering women doesn't necessarily sell soap. Sales of Dove bumped up during the first two years of the campaign, then levelled off.

The sad fact is that many women are used to feeling bad about themselves, and they seek out opportunities. They decide that thin is good, and also hard to attain, and the rest is dieting, self-punishment, and eating disorders.

Laucius's informative article documents the conflicting opinions around the question of whether ultra-thin, photoshopped models encourage eating disorders among women of normal body size. I've written about that elsewhere, and, quite frankly - despite all the disclaimers you hear from the fashion industry and its supporters - the answer is, yes, of course they do.

For example, Dr. Janet Polivy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on eating behaviour, is quoted as saying, "If they're asked to compare themselves, naturally, they feel inferior". (And in the mood for self-punishment, I suspect.)

Recently, Spain banned ultra-thin models from the catwalk, and many supported the move. After all, low body mass index (= serious underweight) is strongly associated with early death. If the fashion industry is going to howl about the use of fur and such, they could at least spare a thought for human skin that dies to be thin.

Historically, thin has not been hard to attain. It is called starvation, and is widely shunned worldwide. That's why most traditional cultures thought plump women were beautiful. And they were right, too.

I am not advocating censorship; my solution is that readers should insist on models with normal body mass index - women who make normal look good.

I sometimes tell younger women, there is such a thing as healthy self-love. Here's one way of looking at it: The great religious commandment "Love your neighbour as yourself" assumes that you do love yourself. And if you don't, you won't be able to love others either. So just accept yourself the way you are today, and make the world a slightly happier - and less commercially driven - place.

See also:

"Hungry men supposedly prefer plump women for "evolutionary" reasons":

Oh? So everyone in the world is and always has been as obsessed with body shape and image as anorexic, white, middle-class American/European girls? ... The article notes the interesting cultural fact that some African women are force-fed milk to fatten them.

"Grandma was right: Just eat and be thankful" (Contrary to the scare stats, only seriously obese people (body mass index over 35) are at greater risk of premature death.)

Pudging the Truth Exercise matters far more to health than dieting

Our weighty obsession - this one should be required reading for teen girls you know. Eating disorders very often begin with a diet. And things have got so bad now that fashion gurus have started throwing emaciated models off the catwalk.

Psychology: What we see is as much reality as we can deal with

We think we see reality, but reality is overwhelming. So of course we do not really see reality.

One of the functions of our brains is to edit out unnecessary items and present a picture our minds can use. And to fill in things we expect to see.

Of course, that is precisely how our minds can be tricked!

Here are a number of visual illusions courtesy Michael Bach and of Lowell Psychology.

(Note: Many illusions did not work for me but it is an individual matter. Try them and see.)

Psychology: Jokes help us survive even when we daren't laugh aloud

Anyone who doubts that the human spirit is irrepressible should have a look at the jokes told under Communist rule. But, of course, many of them are ancient, as Noel Malcolm notes, reviewing Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes by Ben Lewis in the Daily Telegraph (15/06/2008). He asks,

... what exactly does it mean to 'generate' a joke? The precise origins of most jokes are unknown; in some cases, however, it is clear that the joke was recorded long before the birth of the Soviet Union.

Lewis gives a striking example of this: the story of the sheep who try to leave the country, explaining to the border guards that they want to get out because the secret police have received orders to arrest all elephants. 'But you're not elephants.' 'Try telling that to the secret police.' This joke, he discovers, can be found in a 12th-century Persian poem.

(I could add a few more examples. One of his gags, 'Is it true that half the Central Committee are idiots?' 'No, that's rubbish. Half the Central Committee are not idiots,' is a version of a story told about Disraeli: 'Mr Speaker, I withdraw that statement. Half the Cabinet are not asses.'

As for the wince-making joke about the Russian announcement that a man would land on the Sun - 'But Mr Brezhnev, the cosmonauts will burn up!' 'Do you take me for a fool? They'll be landing at night!' - I distinctly recall being told that one in a school playground, 40 years ago, about the Irish space programme.)

Some have gone to the trouble of trying to explain an evolutionary origin for humour. For example, David Sloan Wilson argues,

Our ancestors were laughing long before they were talking," says David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biological sciences and director of the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University in New York state. In his latest book, Evolution for Everyone, Wilson traces the evolutionary origin of humor over the past 7 million years, noting that apes engage in "tickling and chasing games accompanied by a facial expression and panting sounds very similar to human laughter."

"The original (and continuing) function of laughter is to create and coordinate a safety and playfulness that is essential for the development of human and social capital," Wilson writes in an e-mail. Laughter is contagious, he says, which enables members of a group to feel the same way at the same time. By fostering a feeling of mutual camaraderie, humor helps develop a sense of teamwork.

- from "Mind Matters: Laughter in the Lab" by Irene S. Levine (November 9, 2007)

But that, of course, has nothing to do with the sort of humour that helps people to survive a totalitarian regime. The latter is an acute awareness of the difference between what is and what ought to be, and the ability to express it through covert jokes. Whatever its origin, it does not predate a mind capable of making such an assessment.

And that's only a start. You can know what is wrong in great detail, and still not be funny, alas.

(Note: Mario and I send up David Sloan Wilson's theory of the origin of religion in The Spiritual Brain.)

Psychology: Babies know what is good for them: But is it nature or nurture?

A kind reader draws my attention to this story by AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein on the ability of infants of six to ten months to judge what is good for them:

Babies as young as 6 to 10 months old showed crucial social judging skills before they could talk, according to a study by researchers at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center published in Thursday's journal Nature. The infants watched a googly-eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly-eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with.

Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one.

The babies also chose neutral toys — ones that didn't help or hinder — over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones.

Apparently, the large eyes on the toys played a key role; babies' judgement declined when the eyes were removed.

Lead researcher Kiley Hamlin of Yale said that his research shows that humans have innate (= genetically programmed) social skills but psychology prof David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic says that the behavior is learned:

"Infants acquire a great deal of social experience between birth and 6 months of age and thus the assumption that this kind of capacity does not require experience is simply unwarranted,"

It's hard to know because you couldn't do the study much before six months of age and by then most tots know what's hot and what's not, so to speak. The most interesting part, to me at least, is that the researchers didn't seem to find any babies who were innately self-destructive (= chose the hurtful toy). That suggests that, whatever may be the case with wanting what is good for us, wanting what is bad for us is a behaviour learned later in life.

You can download the video here.

The Yale researchers now want to study animals, to see if the tendency to know what is good for oneself is as well developed. I suspect it is, but I am not at all sure that that will answer the nature or nurture question.

Psychology: Yale's National Risk and Culture Study tells us more of what we already sensed about how manipulation works

Well, they don't quite call it manipulation. But what they are talking about in the Cultural Cognition Project's Second National Risk & Culture Study: how we are persuaded, usually by organized lobbies, for better or worse:

For example, people are more likely to be persuaded of a problem if they like the proposed solution and they are more likely to be persuaded of the proposed solution by someone who takes a position that the hearer did not expect, while sharing their general cultural views:

Individuals’ expectations about the policy solution to global warming strongly influences their willingness to credit information about climate change. When told the solution to global warming is increased antipollution measures, persons of individualistic and hierarchic worldviews become less willing to credit information suggesting that global warming exists, is caused by humans, and poses significant societal dangers. Persons with such outlooks are more willing to credit the same information when told the solution to global warming is increased reliance on nuclear power generation.

How individuals respond to arguments about the risks associated with mandatory HPV vaccination for school age girls is highly dependent on the perceived values of the persons making such arguments. Individuals who are culturally predisposed to a particular position are even more likely to form that view when it is espoused by an advocate who shares their cultural outlooks. Such individuals are less likely to form that view—and cultural polarization is reduced generally—when a person who shares their values advocates a position on the HPV vaccination that is contrary to such individuals’ cultural predispositions.

It's fun imagining marketing campaigns using these ideas. For example, If someone wanted to convince the public that the mind does not really exist (the materialist position) and therefore manipulation of our mental states is harmless and good for us, it would be better to get a warm, fuzzy therapist to advocate that view than a cold, narcissistic research scientist. (We may feel culturally close to the therapist even if we have lingering doubts about her position.) And she should also hint that we are not - after all - responsible for the things we feel guilty about. (We are more willing to agree to her views if the solution she proposes sounds attractive than if it sounds unattractive.)

By contrast, suppose the cold, narcissistic research scientist said, "Look, my neuroscience research provides no reason whatsoever to think you are not responsible for your bad habits. Grow up and change!" Many people who would actually like to believe that they are in control might be inclined to resist the message.

What feels good and what's correct are constantly being conflated by our society's not-so-hidden persuaders.

Disorder: Increasingly, anything you do that annoys me ...

In “Psychology: The Hard Truth About a Soft Science”, Selwyn Duke observes,

I recently read about psychiatrists who are labeling the desire to engage in excessive text messaging a mental disorder. Then there is "Muscle Dysmorphia," or the obsessive belief that one isn't muscular enough; "celebriphilia," the strong desire for amorous relations with a celebrity; "Intermittent Explosive Disorder," or road rage; "Sibling Rivalry Disorder"; "Mathematics Disorder"; "Caffeine Related Disorder"; and "Expressive Writing disorder," to cite just a handful of the hundreds of made-up conditions in the DSM. And every time a new variety is conjured up, psychology's market and earning potential increases. I have to wonder, though, what do they call the obsession with labeling behaviors mental disorders? Some might call it greed.

Actually, it’s mostly a way of gaining social power, isn’t it? If I’m giving a talk and you are text messaging people who interest you more, I can get my revenge by getting your behaviour classified as a “disorder.” Of course, you could do the same to me. But we both need to qualify as psychiatrists first.