SLOW Movement

NY Times: Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain

August 15, 2010

Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain

By MATT RICHTEL

GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah — Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

But stepping away is easier for some than others. The trip begins with a strong defense of digital connectedness, a debate that revolves around one particularly important e-mail.

On the Road

The five scientists on the trip can be loosely divided into two groups: the believers and the skeptics.

The believers are Mr. Strayer and Paul Atchley, 40, a professor at the University of Kansas who studies teenagers’ compulsive use of cellphones. They argue that heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety, and that getting out into nature can help. They take pains in their own lives to regularly log off.

The skeptics use their digital gadgets without reservation. They are not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip — personally or scientifically.

This group includes the fast-talking Mr. Braver, 41, a brain imaging expert; Steven Yantis, 54, the tall and contemplative chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, who studies how people switch between tasks; and Art Kramer, 57, a white-bearded professor at the University of Illinois who has gained attention for his studies of the neurological benefits of exercise.

Also on the trip are a reporter and a photographer, and Richard Boyer, a quiet outdoorsman and accomplished landscape painter, who helps Mr. Strayer lead the journey.

Among the bright academic lights in the group, Mr. Kramer is the most prominent. At the time of the trip he was about to take over a $300,000-a-year position as director of the Beckman Institute, a leading research center at the University of Illinois with around 1,000 scientists and staff workers and tens of millions of dollars in grant financing.

He is also intense personally — someone who has been challenging himself since early in life; he says he left home when he was a teenager, became an amateur boxer and, later, flew airplanes, rock-climbed and smashed his knee in a “high-speed skiing accident.”

They are driving six hours from Salt Lake City to the river, and they stop at a camping store for last-minute supplies. Mr. Kramer waits out front, checking e-mail on his BlackBerry Curve. This sets off a debate between the believers and skeptics.

Back in the car, Mr. Kramer says he checked his phone because he was waiting for important news: whether his lab has received a $25 million grant from the military to apply neuroscience to the study of ergonomics. He has instructed his staff to send a text message to an emergency satellite phone the group will carry with them.

Mr. Atchley says he doesn’t understand why Mr. Kramer would bother. “The grant will still be there when you get back,” he says.

“Of course you’d want to know about a $25 million grant,” Mr. Kramer responds. Pressed by Mr. Atchley on the significance of knowing immediately, he adds: “They would expect me to get right back to them.”

It is a debate that has become increasingly common as technology has redefined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do people need to get information and respond to it? The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.

In his case, Mr. Kramer says there have been few side effects: the only time he could recall being overly distracted by technology was when he became too immersed in writing a paper, and was late to pick up his teenage daughter.

“As academics, we live on computers,” he says.

The scenery has turned spartan as they drop down into a red-rock desert. The group stops for gas in Green River, where Mr. Kramer checks his e-mail again. Mr. Strayer quips that he shows signs of addiction.

“Some people think only others have the problem,” Mr. Strayer says. But he concedes of Mr. Kramer, whom he likes and under whom he earned his doctorate: “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

On the River

They awaken at the Recapture Lodge, a rustic two-story motel surrounded by cottonwood trees. There are no phones in the rooms, but there is wireless Internet access, installed a few years ago because, the proprietor says, people could not stand to be without it.

Mr. Kramer still has not received any news on the grant. He stuffs his laptop into a backpack and stores it at the motel office.

Hours later, the group arrives at the raft launching site, Mexican Hat, named for a sombrero-shaped rock outcropping. The travelers assemble and pack the rafts, loading food for five days, beer, water jugs, a portable toilet, tents and sleeping bags, kitchen and first aid supplies. Then they’re off.

A short distance downstream they see it: a narrow steel bridge 150 feet above the river — after which there is no longer any cellphone coverage.

“It’s the end of civilization,” Mr. Atchley jokes.

Late in the afternoon, they make camp on the banks. They eat pork chops, the Big Dipper brilliant above, the thousand-foot canyon walls narrowing their view of the heavens. A few bats dart and dive, seeking bugs drawn to the flashlights.

The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain. They are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Mr. Strayer, the trip leader, argues that nature can refresh the brain. “Our senses change. They kind of recalibrate — you notice sounds, like these crickets chirping; you hear the river, the sounds, the smells, you become more connected to the physical environment, the earth, rather than the artificial environment.”

“That’s why they call it vacation. It’s restorative,” Mr. Braver says. He wonders if there’s any science behind the nature idea. “Part of being a good scientist is being skeptical.”

Mr. Braver accepts the Michigan research but wants to understand precisely what happens inside the brain. And he wonders: Why don’t brains adapt to the heavy stimulation, turning us into ever-stronger multitaskers?

“Right,” says Mr. Kramer, the skeptic. “Why wouldn’t the circuits be exercised, in a sense, and we’d get stronger?”

Ideas Start to Flow

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

This has become such a sizzling field of research that two years ago the National Institutes of Health established a division to support studies of the parts of the brain involved with focus.

Now, Mr. Yantis says, “we can study the brain and the mind together in a rigorous scientific way, rather than a Freudian sit-back-and-think-about-it way.”

This trip is more about rowing while thinking. Mr. Braver and Mr. Yantis sit in a red kayak in calm waters, passing a goose and her two goslings on the banks. The skeptics are talking about how to study the toll taken by constant interruption from e-mail and other digital bursts.

Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask. These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation.

“The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory,” Mr. Yantis says.

Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information — and that they might be able to prove it using imaging.

“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says Mr. Kramer, floating nearby.

Over the course of the next few days, the rafters find themselves darting in and out of such scientific conversations. Two scientists packing their tents discuss which imaging techniques may best show the effects of digital overload on the brain. The full group tosses around ways to measure the release of brain chemicals into the bloodstream. A pair paddling the big raft talk about how to apply neuroeconomics — measuring how the brain values information — to understand compulsive texting by teenagers.

The conversations blur, with periods of silence and awed looks at surroundings — the circling hawks, the bighorn sheep. There are moments, too, when the men experience intense focus during physical challenges, like rafting the rapids or hiking narrow canyon walls.

This is the rhythm of the trip: As the river flows, so do the ideas.

“There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” Mr. Braver says. He echoes the others in noting that the trip is in many ways more effective than work retreats set in hotels, often involving hundreds of people who shuffle through quick meetings, wielding BlackBerrys. “It’s why I got into science, to talk about ideas.”

‘Third-Day Syndrome’

“Time is slowing down,” Mr. Kramer says. He has been moving quickly his whole life, since he left home at 15, and has elevated himself to a position of great influence. It’s the second day on the river, and he has finished packing his tent. He’s the first of the morning to do so, but he feels no urgency.

He has not read any of the research papers he brought. And the $25 million e-mail? “I was never worried about it. I haven’t thought about it,” he says, as if the very idea were silly.

Mr. Kramer says the group has become more reflective, quieter, more focused on the surroundings. “If I looked around like this at work, people would think I was goofing off,” he says.

The others are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against coffee, bypassing his usual ritual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cautions against reading too much into it. “I sometimes forget to put my watch on at home, but in fairness, I usually have my phone with me and it has a clock on it.”

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the travelers are experiencing a stage of relaxation he calls “third-day syndrome.” Its symptoms may be unsurprising. But even the more skeptical of the scientists say something is happening to their brains that reinforces their scientific discussions — something that could be important to helping people cope in a world of constant electronic noise.

“If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

What he is getting at is something the scientists won’t put a fine point on until the last few minutes of the trip: they have ideas on how to answer this question.

Heading Home

Later that night, back at the Recapture Lodge, Mr. Kramer reclaims his laptop from the front desk. At first, he says he’ll wait to log on until he showers and rests. Then he decides to have a quick peek. He has received 216 e-mail messages, but nothing about the military grant.

“The $25 million saga continues,” he says, and logs off.

The next morning, he and Mr. Braver sit in the back of the car, heading to the airport, the pair of skeptics sharing beef jerky and a perspective. The trip didn’t transform them, but it did get them to change the way they think about their research — and themselves.

Mr. Braver says that when he retrieved his phone the night before, it dawned on him how much he turns to it in tiny moments of boredom: “Sometimes I do use it as an excuse to be antisocial.”

When he gets back to St. Louis, he says, he plans to focus more on understanding what happens to the brain as it rests. He wants to use imaging technology to see whether the effect of nature on the brain can be measured and whether there are other ways to reproduce it, say, through meditation.

Mr. Kramer says he wants to look at whether the benefits to the brain — the clearer thoughts, for example — come from the experience of being in nature, the exertion of hiking and rafting, or a combination.

Mr. Atchley says he can see new ways to understand why teenagers decide to text even in dangerous situations, like driving. Perhaps the addictiveness of digital stimulation leads to poor decision-making. Mr. Yantis says a late-night conversation beneath stars and circling bats gave him new ways to think about his research into how and why people are distracted by irrelevant streams of information.

Even without knowing exactly how the trip affected their brains, the scientists are prepared to recommend a little downtime as a path to uncluttered thinking. As Mr. Kramer puts it: “How many years did we prescribe aspirin without knowing the exact mechanism?”

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”

NY Times: But Will It Make You Happy?

August 7, 2010

But Will It Make You Happy?

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

SHE had so much.

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.

Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”

So one day she stepped off.

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.

Ms. Strobel’s mother is impressed. Now the couple have money to travel and to contribute to the education funds of nieces and nephews. And because their debt is paid off, Ms. Strobel works fewer hours, giving her time to be outdoors, and to volunteer, which she does about four hours a week for a nonprofit outreach program called Living Yoga.

“The idea that you need to go bigger to be happy is false,” she says. “I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn’t bring about happiness.”

While Ms. Strobel and her husband overhauled their spending habits before the recession, legions of other consumers have since had to reconsider their own lifestyles, bringing a major shift in the nation’s consumption patterns.

“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption — which is ‘buy without regard’ — to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, the retailing research and consulting firm.

Amid weak job and housing markets, consumers are saving more and spending less than they have in decades, and industry professionals expect that trend to continue. Consumers saved 6.4 percent of their after-tax income in June, according to a new government report. Before the recession, the rate was 1 to 2 percent for many years. In June, consumer spending and personal incomes were essentially flat compared with May, suggesting that the American economy, as dependent as it is on shoppers opening their wallets and purses, isn’t likely to rebound anytime soon.

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

If consumers end up sticking with their newfound spending habits, some tactics that retailers and marketers began deploying during the recession could become lasting business strategies. Among those strategies are proffering merchandise that makes being at home more entertaining and trying to make consumers feel special by giving them access to exclusive events and more personal customer service.

While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.

“This actually is a topic that hasn’t been researched very much until recently,” says Elizabeth W. Dunn, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia, who is at the forefront of research on consumption and happiness. “There’s massive literature on income and happiness. It’s amazing how little there is on how to spend your money.”

CONSPICUOUS consumption has been an object of fascination going back at least as far as 1899, when the economist Thorstein Veblen published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” a book that analyzed, in part, how people spent their money in order to demonstrate their social status.

And it’s been a truism for eons that extra cash always makes life a little easier. Studies over the last few decades have shown that money, up to a certain point, makes people happier because it lets them meet basic needs. The latest round of research is, for lack of a better term, all about emotional efficiency: how to reap the most happiness for your dollar.

So just where does happiness reside for consumers? Scholars and researchers haven’t determined whether Armani will put a bigger smile on your face than Dolce & Gabbana. But they have found that our types of purchases, their size and frequency, and even the timing of the spending all affect long-term happiness.

One major finding is that spending money for an experience — concert tickets, French lessons, sushi-rolling classes, a hotel room in Monaco — produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.

“  ‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Professor Dunn, summing up research by two fellow psychologists, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich. Her own take on the subject is in a paper she wrote with colleagues at Harvard and the University of Virginia: “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right.” (The Journal of Consumer Psychology plans to publish it in a coming issue.)

Thomas DeLeire, an associate professor of public affairs, population, health and economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently published research examining nine major categories of consumption. He discovered that the only category to be positively related to happiness was leisure: vacations, entertainment, sports and equipment like golf clubs and fishing poles.

Using data from a study by the National Institute on Aging, Professor DeLeire compared the happiness derived from different levels of spending to the happiness people get from being married. (Studies have shown that marriage increases happiness.)

“A $20,000 increase in spending on leisure was roughly equivalent to the happiness boost one gets from marriage,” he said, adding that spending on leisure activities appeared to make people less lonely and increased their interactions with others.

According to retailers and analysts, consumers have gravitated more toward experiences than possessions over the last couple of years, opting to use their extra cash for nights at home with family, watching movies and playing games — or for “staycations” in the backyard. Many retailing professionals think this is not a fad, but rather “the new normal.”

“I think many of these changes are permanent changes,” says Jennifer Black, president of the retailing research company Jennifer Black & Associates and a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors in Oregon. “I think people are realizing they don’t need what they had. They’re more interested in creating memories.”

She largely attributes this to baby boomers’ continuing concerns about the job market and their ability to send their children to college. While they will still spend, they will spend less, she said, having reset their priorities.

While it is unlikely that most consumers will downsize as much as Ms. Strobel did, many have been, well, happily surprised by the pleasures of living a little more simply. The Boston Consulting Group said in a June report that recession anxiety had prompted a “back-to-basics movement,” with things like home and family increasing in importance over the last two years, while things like luxury and status have declined.

“There’s been an emotional rebirth connected to acquiring things that’s really come out of this recession,” says Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategic Retail, a marketing consulting firm that works with manufacturers and retailers. “We hear people talking about the desire not to lose that — that connection, the moment, the family, the experience.”

Current research suggests that, unlike consumption of material goods, spending on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. (Academics are already in broad agreement that there is a strong correlation between the quality of people’s relationships and their happiness; hence, anything that promotes stronger social bonds has a good chance of making us feel all warm and fuzzy.)

And the creation of complex, sophisticated relationships is a rare thing in the world. As Professor Dunn and her colleagues Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson point out in their forthcoming paper, only termites, naked mole rats and certain insects like ants and bees construct social networks as complex as those of human beings. In that elite little club, humans are the only ones who shop.

AT the height of the recession in 2008, Wal-Mart Stores realized that consumers were “cocooning” — vacationing in their yards, eating more dinners at home, organizing family game nights. So it responded by grouping items in its stores that would turn any den into an at-home movie theater or transform a backyard into a slice of the Catskills. Wal-Mart wasn’t just selling barbecues and board games. It was selling experiences.

“We spend a lot of time listening to our customers,” says Amy Lester, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, “and know that they have a set amount to spend and need to juggle to meet that amount.”

One reason that paying for experiences gives us longer-lasting happiness is that we can reminisce about them, researchers say. That’s true for even the most middling of experiences. That trip to Rome during which you waited in endless lines, broke your camera and argued with your spouse will typically be airbrushed with “rosy recollection,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Professor Lyubomirsky has a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. “Trips aren’t all perfect,” she notes, “but we remember them as perfect.”

Another reason that scholars contend that experiences provide a bigger pop than things is that they can’t be absorbed in one gulp — it takes more time to adapt to them and engage with them than it does to put on a new leather jacket or turn on that shiny flat-screen TV.

“We buy a new house, we get accustomed to it,” says Professor Lyubomirsky, who studies what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” a phenomenon in which people quickly become used to changes, great or terrible, in order to maintain a stable level of happiness.

Over time, that means the buzz from a new purchase is pushed toward the emotional norm.

“We stop getting pleasure from it,” she says.

And then, of course, we buy new things.

When Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois and a former president of the International Positive Psychology Association — which promotes the study of what lets people lead fulfilling lives — was house-hunting with his wife, they saw several homes with features they liked.

But unlike couples who choose a house because of its open floor plan, fancy kitchens, great light, or spacious bedrooms, Professor Diener arrived at his decision after considering hedonic-adaptation research.

“One home was close to hiking trails, making going hiking very easy,” he said in an e-mail. “Thinking about the research, I argued that the hiking trails could be a factor contributing to our happiness, and we should worry less about things like how pretty the kitchen floor is or whether the sinks are fancy. We bought the home near the hiking trail and it has been great, and we haven’t tired of this feature because we take a walk four or five days a week.”

Scholars have discovered that one way consumers combat hedonic adaptation is to buy many small pleasures instead of one big one. Instead of a new Jaguar, Professor Lyubomirsky advises, buy a massage once a week, have lots of fresh flowers delivered and make phone calls to friends in Europe. Instead of a two-week long vacation, take a few three-day weekends.

“We do adapt to the little things,” she says, “but because there’s so many, it will take longer.”

BEFORE credit cards and cellphones enabled consumers to have almost anything they wanted at any time, the experience of shopping was richer, says Ms. Liebmann of WSL Strategic Retail. “You saved for it, you anticipated it,” she says.

In other words, waiting for something and working hard to get it made it feel more valuable and more stimulating.

In fact, scholars have found that anticipation increases happiness. Considering buying an iPad? You might want to think about it as long as possible before taking one home. Likewise about a Caribbean escape: you’ll get more pleasure if you book a flight in advance than if you book it at the last minute.

Once upon a time, with roots that go back to medieval marketplaces featuring stalls that functioned as stores, shopping offered a way to connect socially, as Ms. Liebmann and others have pointed out. But over the last decade, retailing came to be about one thing: unbridled acquisition, epitomized by big-box stores where the mantra was “stack ’em high and let ’em fly” and online transactions that required no social interaction at all — you didn’t even have to leave your home.

The recession, however, may force retailers to become reacquainted with shopping’s historical roots.

“I think there’s a real opportunity in retail to be able to romance the experience again,” says Ms. Liebmann. “Retailers are going to have to work very hard to create that emotional feeling again. And it can’t just be ‘Here’s another thing to buy.’ It has to have a real sense of experience to it.”

Industry professionals say they have difficulty identifying any retailer that is managing to do this well today, with one notable exception: Apple, which offers an interactive retail experience, including classes.

Marie Driscoll, head of the retailing group at Standard & Poor’s, says chains have to adapt to new consumer preferences by offering better service, special events and access to designers. Analysts at the Boston Consulting Group advise that companies offer more affordable indulgences, like video games that provide an at-home workout for far less than the cost of a gym membership.

Mr. Cohen of the NPD Group says some companies are doing this. Best Buy is promoting its Geek Squad, promising shoppers before they buy that complicated electronic thingamajig that its employees will hold their hands through the installation process and beyond.

“Nowadays with the economic climate, customers definitely are going for a quality experience,” says Nick DeVita, a home entertainment adviser with the Geek Squad. “If they’re going to spend their money, they want to make sure it’s for the right thing, the right service.”

With competition for consumer dollars fiercer than it’s been in decades, retailers have had to make the shopping experience more compelling. Mr. Cohen says automakers are offering 30-day test drives, while some clothing stores are promising free personal shoppers. Malls are providing day care while parents shop. Even on the Web, retailers are connecting on customers on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, hoping to win their loyalty by offering discounts and invitations to special events.

FOR the last four years, Roko Belic, a Los Angeles filmmaker, has been traveling the world making a documentary called “Happy.” Since beginning work on the film, he has moved to a beach in Malibu from his house in the San Francisco suburbs.

San Francisco was nice, but he couldn’t surf there.

“I moved to a trailer park,” says Mr. Belic, “which is the first real community that I’ve lived in in my life.” Now he surfs three or four times a week. “It definitely has made me happier,” he says. “The things we are trained to think make us happy, like having a new car every couple of years and buying the latest fashions, don’t make us happy.”

Mr. Belic says his documentary shows that “the one single trait that’s common among every single person who is happy is strong relationships.”

Buying luxury goods, conversely, tends to be an endless cycle of one-upmanship, in which the neighbors have a fancy new car and — bingo! — now you want one, too, scholars say. A study published in June in Psychological Science by Ms. Dunn and others found that wealth interfered with people’s ability to savor positive emotions and experiences, because having an embarrassment of riches reduced the ability to reap enjoyment from life’s smaller everyday pleasures, like eating a chocolate bar.

Alternatively, spending money on an event, like camping or a wine tasting with friends, leaves people less likely to compare their experiences with those of others — and, therefore, happier.

Of course, some fashion lovers beg to differ. For many people, clothes will never be more than utilitarian. But for a certain segment of the population, clothes are an art form, a means of self-expression, a way for families to pass down memories through generations. For them, studies concluding that people eventually stop deriving pleasure from material things don’t ring true.

“No way,” says Hayley Corwick, who writes the popular fashion blog Madison Avenue Spy. “I could pull out things from my closet that I bought when I was 17 that I still love.”

She rejects the idea that happiness has to be an either-or proposition. Some days, you want a trip, she says; other days, you want a Tom Ford handbag.

MS. STROBEL — our heroine who moved into the 400-square foot apartment — is now an advocate of simple living, writing in her spare time about her own life choices at Rowdykittens.com.

“My lifestyle now would not be possible if I still had a huge two-bedroom apartment filled to the gills with stuff, two cars, and 30 grand in debt,” she says.

“Give away some of your stuff,” she advises. “See how it feels.”

ST: Single but not spoilt

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Others > Story

Aug 1, 2010

Single but not spoilt

Experts say there is little proof to suggest that an only child will grow up to be a pampered brat

By Lin Wenjian

Mr Sean Siow and his wife Sally chose to have just one child, Ethan, 2 1/2, so that they can shower all their love on him.

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Brand manager Eileen Keh does not subscribe to the common belief that an only child will grow up to be pampered and spoilt.

The 29-year-old only child - mum, 52, is an administrator and dad, 60, works in a construction firm - tells LifeStyle that her parents certainly did not indulge her every whim when she was a child.

'My mother was very strict with me and was very fierce. She didn't believe in sparing the rod. In fact, I got hit very often. In hindsight, I would say her strictness helped me a lot because I became more disciplined as a result and did not mix with the wrong crowd,' says Ms Keh, who married her art director husband, 31, last year.

Neither did she get everything she asked for.

'When I was in primary school, whenever I asked my parents to buy me things such as Barbie dolls or new shoes, my mum would say she had no money, which I knew even then was not true,' she recalls with a chuckle.

Experts that LifeStyle spoke to corroborated Ms Keh's assertion.

Professor Jean Yeung, from the National University of Singapore's department of sociology and Asia Research Institute, says: 'There is no convincing evidence that a single child will be selfish or spoilt.

'Results from earlier research that suggest that are often based on small and non-representative samples that did not have an adequate sample size.'

She adds that a child's character depends on 'much more than family size'.

How children turn out has a lot to do with their upbringing, she explains.

That is good news for the future of Singapore, as the country is seeing more single-child families.

A finding by the Singapore Department of Statistics last year shows that 19 per cent of women here aged 15 years and above who are married, divorced or widowed have only one child.

This represents a slight increase from 2000's 16.6 per cent.

Prof Yeung attributes this to a general decrease in fertility, a problem that is prevalent in developed Asian countries such as Singapore, Japan and South Korea.

One reason for that is the evolving role of women in modern society.

'The process of industrialisation is bringing more women to the labour force and these women may grow to gain satisfaction from their careers, rather than having children,' says Prof Yeung, whose research interests include issues pertaining to demography and family and children.

Another factor, she says, is the rising costs of raising a child in Singapore, which make it more difficult for some people to afford having more children.

With just one son, research director Sally Kheng, 37, and her husband, senior engineer Sean Siow, 38, find it easier to travel as a family - and not just because it is more affordable.

'It's easy to take care of just one kid and we were able to go shopping together,' says Ms Kheng.

Just two months ago, the family of three spent a week in Hong Kong, where they visited Disneyland. On average, the couple have travelled with Ethan twice a year since he was born in 2007.

Ms Kheng is confident that her son will not grow up to be a spoilt brat.

She says: 'I am the kind of mum who wants to be at every learning step with my child, so I am not sure if I could ever share the love that I have for Ethan with a second child.

'With 100 per cent of our love and time, we can nurture him to be unselfish and instil the value of sharing in him.'

Mr Siow had wanted a second baby but has come to respect his wife's wish to have only Ethan - with no regrets.

One reason he cites for this change of mind is a stronger marriage. He says: 'My wife and I have more quality time together.'

Another mother, Ms Cassy Wong, has only one child, though it is not her choice to stop at one.

The 37-year-old senior production manager at a publishing firm and her husband, Mr Boon Teo, 39, have been trying for the last four years to have a second child but to no avail.

Instead of moping, the couple feel 'blessed' just to have Brigette, who turns eight later this month.

'We can afford to give her the best in what she needs,' says Mr Teo, who adds that Brigette takes swimming, piano and golf lessons.

He and his wife have discovered another advantage in having only one child at the moment: 'When we go on holidays, all of us can stay in one room,' he says.

However, counsellor Philip Ang says there are behavioural issues he has encountered that are mainly associated with being the only child.

'When they are growing up, they might prefer to hang out with their friends and not go home till very late as there is no one at home that they can talk to,' says Mr Ang.

'Children under 10 years old who are the only child in their families may also start to have imaginary friends,' he adds, though he points out that such cases are 'not common'.

Ms Keh confesses she had wanted an elder brother because 'it just seemed like I needed someone stronger to protect me'.

She also thinks she was more 'socially awkward', compared to her peers with siblings, whom she says were 'a lot more outgoing and more vocal' than she was in school.

In contrast, business development manager Kendrick How, 35, appreciated being the only child. He attributes his independent character to the fact that he had 'no older brother or sister to help me when I ran into problems in school or at home'.

'As a result of that, I learnt to look after and speak out for myself from the time I was in primary school. My independent spirit helps me in my job now,' says Mr How, who is single.

His parents, who are both 65 and retired, do not feel they have handicapped their son by not giving him a sibling.

Speaking in Mandarin, the elder Mr How says: 'When he was growing up, we always told him to talk to us if he faced any problems and we were around if he needed advice. So I don't think there was a problem.'

Asked why they did not consider having a second child, the former provision shop owner smiles and would only say: 'One son is good enough. We are happy with our lot.'

One thing the sexagenarian couple were not too pleased about in the past was the nagging they got from well-meaning relatives who felt the younger Mr How would be lonely without a sibling.

'We would just smile and thank them for their concern,' Mrs How says.

wenjian@sph.com.sg

FT: The role of remorse in court convictions

The role of remorse in court convictions

By Julia Apostle

Published: July 31 2010 00:16 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:16

Conrad Black – Crime: Fraud; Sentence: Six-and-a-half years; Date: 2007; Despite what the trial judge called his “stunning lack of remorse”, a Chicago court released Black on bail last week

The missing passport helped. when Conrad Black was granted bail by a Chicago court two weeks ago, the fact that he lacked the papers to leave the US for his native Canada may have boosted his case; it might even have had Americans warming to him. It’s hard to reconcile the image of a man with nothing but the ID card issued to him by the Federal Bureau of Prisons with that of the defiant and widely reviled high-flying media tycoon who in 2007 was convicted of defrauding investors in his companies out of millions of dollars.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Reportage: US middle-class crisis - Jul-30

How Peppa Pig brought home the bacon - Jul-30

Throughout his 2007 trial, Lord Black was much criticised for the way he vociferously asserted his innocence. Following his conviction, prosecutors requested the harshest sentence available – imprisonment for 24-30 years – in part, they claimed, because his media interviews indicated a “stunning lack of remorse”. “Out of all the defendants,” they argued, “Black has been the most vocal in his lack of remorse and his refusal to recognise the offence … [and this] makes clear that he would engage in the very same conduct again if given the opportunity.”

Black was given a six-and-a-half year sentence, but the focus on his remorse puts him on a similar footing not just to other convicted criminals such as Bernard Madoff and Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, but to a parade of Wall Street bankers, corporate chief executives and even central bankers who have been hauled before government panels, if not judge and jury, over the past few years. In the wake of the credit crunch and global ­recession, the world wants contrition – and it had better be sincere.

. . .

Robert Bierenbaum - Crime: Murder; Sentence: 20 years to life; Date: 2000; Having maintained his innocence throughout his trial, Bierenbaum was told he was cold-blooded

In the Puritan colonies of 18th-century America, public hangings were accompanied by an execution sermon, delivered by a minister who would call on the offender to repent. The repentance, if it came, had no impact on the individual’s certain fate, but was expected primarily for religious reasons and to deter the public from a life of sin and crime. Today that desire, with its religious origins, has become ingrained in justice systems around the world, including Britain’s, but most especially in the US.

In the autumn of 2000, Robert Bierenbaum sat motionless and silent at his trial for the murder of his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum. She had disappeared from the couple’s New York apartment in the summer of 1985, though no body has ever been recovered. With no physical evidence pointing to the accused – an affluent, well-respected plastic surgeon – the case had seemed an uphill battle for prosecutors; but in 2000, Bierenbaum was convicted of murder. Now, at his sentencing, Bierenbaum faced a conundrum: he had maintained his innocence at trial, but in doing so, had shut down the possibility of demonstrating any remorse. “I can only look at the defendant’s cold-blooded behaviour after the fact,” the judge said. “He is not rehabilitated – which means accepting, admitting and expressing remorse. Only then can one expiate guilt.” Instead of the minimum sentence sought by his lawyers, Bierenbaum was imprisoned for 20 years to life.

Bierenbaum’s trial judge was not unique. In the late 1990s, a US group called the Capital Jury Project (CJP) interviewed close to 1,200 people who had served as jurors in death penalty cases, and found that a vast majority of those who had voted in favour of execution said the defendant’s lack of remorse was one of the most important factors in his or her decision. Law professor Scott Sundby of Washington and Lee University, who headed the California portion of the study, says: “Time and time again they would say, ‘Gee, if the defendant had only shown the slightest bit of remorse, we would never have given him the death penalty.’”

Pleading not guilty in a criminal trial can be fraught with risk, then: judges and jurors are more likely to hand down tougher sentences if the offender fails to show remorse, even if they have maintained their innocence. William Bowers, director of the CJP, points out that in a case involving the death penalty, if a defendant maintains his innocence, he has lost his strongest mitigating factor for a life sentence. “To pursue a not guilty verdict and failing means almost certain death.” This amounts to what Sundby calls a “classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario”.

Jeffrey Skilling - Crime: Fraud; Sentence: 24 years; Date: 2006; The Enron CEO expressed remorse for the company’s behaviour, but pleaded personal innocence – to no avail

Even in cases where criminals have admitted guilt, remorse still plays a role in sentencing. Andy Fastow, Enron’s chief financial officer at the time of its collapse, pleaded guilty in a plea-bargain with prosecutors and received six years in prison. Jeffrey Skilling, the energy group’s chief executive, faced fewer charges; he pleaded innocent but attempted to demonstrate remorse for the failure of his company (“remorse without wrongdoing”, as he put it during his 2006 trial). The judge appeared unconvinced: he was sentenced to a maximum of 24 years in prison.

It was in the late 19th century, with the move from fixed to indeterminate sentencing, that criminal defendants began to use remorse as a form of currency within the justice system. According to Bryan Ward, a law professor at Ohio Northern University, “legislatures and courts began to view the purpose of punishment to be reforming the offender rather than merely locking them away”. As judges became responsible for setting minimum and maximum prison terms, remorse became a preferred indicator of an offender’s potential for rehabilitation – although more than a century later, no link between remorse and rehabilitation has ever been established.

What does that missing link say about society’s current craving for remorse from its white-collar criminals – or, more tellingly perhaps, from leaders whose companies or institutions may have made mistakes that lead to economic or environmental turmoil? Do apologies for the banking crisis, made by the former heads of UK banks before the Treasury Select Committee, mean that the banks will never make mistakes again? Did Tony Hayward’s perceived failure to express real contrition before a similar committee mean BP will fail to address the safety measures that led to the recent disaster in the Gulf? The answer to both questions must be “no”.

Remorse itself is a slippery concept to pin down, of course. The question as to whether someone genuinely feels regret and contrition is a highly subjective one. The most remorseful of defendants may not be skilled at articulating their emotions, for instance; or they may feel remorse but find it undignified to talk about the fact; or they may, as many speculated was the case with Tony Hayward, run up against cultural barriers and misunderstandings. Race, age and background can also have profound effects on self-presentation.

Richard Nygaard, a US appeals judge based in Pennsylvania, spent eight years on the bench overseeing criminal trials. The accused were often young black men who appeared sullen and arrogant. “I’d think: ‘Who are you, to look on this court in this way?’” he recalls. But he later realised that these were often instances of a “person trying desperately to maintain his own dignity, his ‘personhood’, perhaps willing to risk the wrath of the court to maintain it”. According to the CJP’s review of 74 capital cases involving a black defendant and a white victim, black jurors were more likely to believe that a black defendant was remorseful and white jurors were more likely to say that a black defendant had “not even pretended” to be sorry.

According to John Harding, former chief probation officer of the Inner London Probation Service (now the London Probation Area), a demonstration of remorse at trial can often depend on the defendant’s mental state. In the UK, most murders are committed by youths under 21 years old and, he says, “remorse is not necessarily an emotion that is very evolved with these individuals”.

Amanda Knox - Crime: Murder; Sentence: 26 years; Date: 2009; After her arrest, Knox performed cartwheels in the police station – behaviour the media seized upon as being far from contrite

This might help explain the much commented-upon behaviour of Amanda Knox, the young American student convicted by an Italian court last year of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007, when Knox was 20 years old. Knox was widely criticised for her lack of remorse, a lack that was proven – so the argument goes – by her performing cartwheels at the police station after being brought in for questioning. Although Knox maintained her innocence at trial, her failure to appear sufficiently contrite was frequently cited. Prosecutors have now filed an appeal against the 26-year jail term she received, arguing it is too lenient, reportedly in part because she showed no remorse.

White-collar criminals present a whole host of other problems. Scott Greenfield, the lawyer who defended Robert Bierenbaum, says that these offenders are often the most difficult to defend because, for so-called masters of the universe, expressing emotions such as remorse means losing “the last vestige of dignity they have control over”.

And Richard Weisman, a sociologist at York University in Toronto, says that in his research of different legal systems, he frequently encountered the view that “remorse is weakness”. Expecting a defendant to show remorse, he says, amounts to “a ritual of humiliation”.

Of course, there may be crimes so violent or vicious that remorse shown by the defendant has little or no impact on punishment: recent research by the CJP reveals that this is the only situation in which remorse has little effect on a jury’s decision to vote for a death sentence.

Bernard Madoff - Crime: Fraud; Sentence: 150 years; Date: 2009; Madoff expressed contrition at his trial, but the sheer number of letters his victims sent the judge meant his remorse went unheard

In the context of white-collar crime, Bernard Madoff’s $65bn Ponzi fraud might be an equivalent. Despite Madoff’s expressions of regret and remorse he received a 150-year prison sentence – a sentence whose duration was in part influenced by the extraordinary volume of letters and e-mails that Madoff’s victims sent the judge.

In Britain, even though the Sentencing Guidelines recognise defendant remorse as a potential mitigating factor, individuals working within the system say that it receives relatively little emphasis in trials. A study published in June last year for the Sentencing Advisory Panel found that more people think a defendant’s remorse should never result in greater leniency than think it always should.

It is at the probation stage that an offender’s remorse becomes more important. Prisoners can participate in a number of programmes in jail – such as anger management and drug addiction treatment – aimed at getting them to think about what they have done, why, and the impact of their actions on their victims.

John Harding believes that once a prisoner has been through this ­process, a demonstration of remorse at a parole hearing or at any point during incarceration is a “strong predictor” of a prisoner’s ability to reintegrate into society. A prisoner who maintains his innocence while serving his sentence, and who does not demonstrate remorse, is probably going to spend more time in jail. “Remorse,” says Harding, “is a key trigger to change.”

. . .

If legal practitioners recognise that concentrating on wrong-doers’ remorse is problematic, why is society fixated on it? The Financial Services Authority has started citing an individual’s remorse in enforcement notices. Prior to 2009, the concept rarely came up. And that mirrors the bigger picture – of a society eager not just for inquiries and investigations following bankruptcies, oil spills and economic meltdowns, but for public contrition on the part of the people responsible.

“The law mirrors what goes on in more informal social groups and remorse is part of all relationships across a multitude of situations,” according to Weisman. “Emotions are not just individual. They are closely monitored by society. If we don’t show remorse, we are [seen as] ­betraying the community.”

But just as some people in the world of criminal justice are pushing for less emphasis on remorse, perhaps political and social leaders should, too. Less attention spent on whether the Conrad Blacks and Tony ­Haywards of the world feel remorse might help us focus on developing meaningful safeguards against the next fraudulent – or merely foolish – debacle. In other words, it may be time for society to insist on a change: for its most powerful citizens to stop asking for forgiveness – and to start asking permission.

Julia Apostle is the FT’s senior legal counsel

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Enjoy!

Philip Zimbardo on "The Secret Powers of Time"

In this wonderfully animated video, Professor Philip Zimbardo (of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment) "conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world."

FT: Why We Lie

Why We Lie

Review by Hilary Spurling

Published: June 12 2010 00:41 | Last updated: June 12 2010 00:41

Why We Lie, by Dorothy Rowe, Fourth Estate RRP£18.99, 384 pages

Lies, in Dorothy Rowe’s book, form the basic coinage of human exchange. She investigates the catastrophic lies elevated to mythological status by the Nazis, and by Joseph Stalin with his army of assiduous western apologists headed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But Rowe is most disturbing when she concentrates on the everyday fibs we all tell, the little white lies defined by Louis Aragon – another French master of the arts of deceit and betrayal – as “the words we put on like gloves, to hide torn hands, for fear of gossip”.

Torn hands, and the cover-ups devised to conceal them, constitute Rowe’s special subject as a psychologist. In Why We Lie she strips down our inner safety mechanisms with methodical acumen. Nuts and bolts are exposed. Weaknesses, failures and fault lines are traced back to source. Rowe explores the reasons why we need to deny truths too painful to face, and lays bare the dangerous, sometimes devastating consequences for ourselves as well as for others.

Her analysis is gripping, astute and incisive. Parts of this book are hilarious, especially its side swipes at contemporary father figures from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Jeremy Clarkson, “a man unable to entertain any new ideas apart from those relating to cars”. Other parts – in particular Rowe’s account of the duplicity and evasiveness implanted by parents in children from infancy onwards – make grim and persuasive reading.

Rage, shame, guilt and the terror of disintegration override under stress human intelligence and honesty. This rule-of-thumb is amply borne out by the behaviour of power-brokers from bankers, politicians and government departments to religious believers and the CIA. “I have reached an age where I no longer need to pretend I know everything,” writes Rowe, who is 80 this year. Nor is she any longer prepared to put up with the narrow orthodoxies of her own profession. Scientific argument has, she crisply points out, much in common with religious war. Open dissent from entrenched belief puts careers and livings, if not lives, at stake: “Reputations can be ruined, and prestigious jobs and research grants lost.”

Psychologists come in for even more scathing treatment than the city financiers whose arrogance, ambition and contempt for truth Rowe dissects. Therapists speak a turgid jargon devised “to exclude and deceive”. Their research is too often trivial, their deductions superficial and self-serving, their dogmatism based on “habit and professional laziness”. They feel superior to patients perceived as so many clinical symptoms rather than as people whose underlying problems nobody wants to confront. Their unavowed intent, she says, is to ignore and, where possible, suppress “the irresolvable dilemmas and inevitable misery of human life”.

No wonder Rowe’s colleagues responded uneasily to her first arrival in this country at the end of the 1960s (“they may have discussed together the possibility of getting me deported back to Australia”, she remarks). At a time when mental disturbance was routinely treated with drugs and electro-convulsive therapy, Rowe caused consternation by listening to her patients instead.

Her conclusions, laid out in a series of veracious, intelligible and immensely popular books, call in question the concept of mental illness itself. They also effectively subvert the routine practice of prescribing harmful, addictive chemicals to deal with disorders for which “no physical cause ... has been found to exist”. This book is an alarming antidote to public and private doublethink, fudge, waffle, PR and the ability to hold two or more contradictory beliefs simultaneously, the cognitive dissonance of our time neatly summed up by Barbara Tuchman: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Hilary Spurling is author of ‘Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China’ (Profile)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

NY Times: Daring to Discuss Women in Science

June 7, 2010

Daring to Discuss Women in Science

By JOHN TIERNEY

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.

This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”

I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:

1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?

2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

Each of these questions is complicated enough to warrant a column, so I’ll take them one at a time, starting this week with the issue of sex differences.

When Dr. Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that “girls can’t do math.” But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced.

Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits. Men and women might, on average, have equal mathematical ability, but there could still be disproportionately more men with very low or very high scores.

These extremes often don’t matter much because relatively few people are involved, leaving the bulk of men and women clustered around the middle. But a tenured physicist at a leading university, Dr. Summers suggested, might well need skills and traits found in only one person in 10,000: the top 0.01 percent of the population, a tiny group that would presumably include more men because it’s at the extreme right tail of the distribution curve.

“I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” Dr. Summers told the economists, expressing the hope that gender imbalances could be rectified simply by eliminating social barriers. But he added, “My guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.”

Dr. Summers was pilloried for even suggesting the idea, and the critics took up his challenge to refute the hypothesis. Some have claimed he was proved wrong by recent reports of girls closing the gender gap on math scores in the United States and other countries. But even if those reports (which have been disputed) are accurate, they involve closing the gap only for average math scores — not for the extreme scores that Dr. Summers was discussing.

Some scientists and advocates for gender equity have argued that the remaining gender gap in extreme scores is rapidly shrinking and will disappear. It was called “largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors” last year by two researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Mertz. They noted evidence of the gap narrowing and concluded, “Thus, there is every reason to believe that it will continue to narrow in the future.”

But some of the evidence for the disappearing gender gap involved standardized tests that aren’t sufficiently difficult to make fine distinctions among the brighter students. These tests, like the annual ones required in American public schools, are limited by what’s called the ceiling effect: If you’re measuring people in a room with a six-foot ceiling, you can’t distinguish among the ones taller than six feet.

Now a team of psychologists at Duke University has looked at the results of tests with more headroom. In an article in a forthcoming issue of the journal Intelligence, they analyze the test scores of students in the United States who took college admissions tests while they were still in the seventh grade. As part of an annual talent search since 1981, the SAT and ACT tests have been given to more than 1.6 million gifted seventh graders, with roughly equal numbers of boys and girls participating.

The Duke researchers — Jonathan Wai, Megan Cacchio, Martha Putallaz and Matthew C. Makel — focused on the extreme right tail of the distribution curve: people ranking in the top 0.01 percent of the general population, which for a seventh grader means scoring above 700 on the SAT math test. In the early 1980s, there were 13 boys for every girl in that group, but by 1991 the gender gap had narrowed to four to one, presumably because of sociocultural factors like encouragement and instruction in math offered to girls.

Since then, however, the math gender gap hasn’t narrowed, despite the continuing programs to encourage girls. The Duke researchers report that there are still four boys for every girl at the extreme right tail of the scores for the SAT math test. The boy-girl ratio has also remained fairly constant, at about three to one, at the right tail of the ACT tests of both math and science reasoning. Among the 19 students who got a perfect score on the ACT science test in the past two decades, 18 were boys.

Meanwhile, the seventh-grade girls outnumbered the boys at the right tail of tests measuring verbal reasoning and writing ability. The Duke researchers report in Intelligence, “Our data clearly show that there are sex differences in cognitive abilities in the extreme right tail, with some favoring males and some favoring females.”

The researchers say it’s impossible to predict how long these math and science gender gaps will last. But given the gaps’ stability for two decades, the researchers conclude, “Thus, sex differences in abilities in the extreme right tail should not be dismissed as no longer part of the explanation for the dearth of women in math-intensive fields of science.”

Other studies have shown that these differences in extreme test scores correlate with later achievements in science and academia. Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university.

Of course, a high score on a test is hardly the only factor important for a successful career in science, and no one claims that the right-tail disparity is the sole reason for the relatively low number of female professors in math-oriented sciences. There are other potentially more important explanations, both biological and cultural, including possible social bias against women.

But before we accept Congress’s proclamation of bias, before we start re-educating scientists at workshops, it’s worth taking a hard look at the evidence of bias against female scientists. That will be the subject of another column.

NY Times: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

June 6, 2010

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panoramic photograph of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.

For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.

The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.

Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.

“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.

“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”

Always On

Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.

In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”

In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.

Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”

No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.

At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.

So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.

Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.

His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?

Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.

The Myth of Multitasking

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.

In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)

The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.

So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.

“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.

Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.

He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.

“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”

“I have to work to suppress it.”

Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.

Interrupted by a Corpse

It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.

Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.

But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”

That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.

On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.

Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.

The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”

Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”

The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.

Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”

The Toll on Children

Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.

They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.

“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.

“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”

Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.

“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”

But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”

So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.

No Vacations

For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.

But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”

She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.

Later she found him playing video games.

The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.

His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.

“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.

On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.

Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.

The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.

Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.

Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.

She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

FT: The faces of evil

The faces of evil

By Julian Baggini

Published: June 5 2010 01:19 | Last updated: June 5 2010 01:19

A scene from the 1922 German horror film ‘Nosferatu’, based on Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

On Evil, by Terry Eagleton, Yale University Press RRP£18.99, 192 pages

A Philosophy of Evil, by Lars Svendsen, Dalkey Archive Press RRP£11.99, 312 pages

Memory as a Remedy for Evil, by Tzvetan Todorov, Seagull Books RRP£10.50, 92 pages

Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick, Palgrave Macmillan RRP£19.99, 416 pages

The idea of evil, remarks Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, has in recent decades been seen as “a holdover from a mythical, Christian worldview whose time had already passed”. But the fact that Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Evil is being published within weeks of literary critic Terry Eagleton’s On Evil and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s Memory as a Remedy for Evil suggests that the secular world is not quite ready to dispense with the concept of evil just yet. At the same time, a new reissue of theologian John Hick’s 1966 classic Evil and the God of Love shows there’s still life in the Christian perspective too.

Perhaps this resurgence of interest is inevitable, for even though evil as an idea may have been out of fashion, as a reality it has never gone away. Attempts to do without the word in the face of genocide, torture and flagrant disregard for life, collapse into euphemistic absurdity.

But what exactly is evil? Hick adopts the standard theological distinction between the natural evil that arises independently of human action, such as earthquakes and pestilence; the moral evil that is the result of human action; and the metaphysical evil that inevitably results from a finite and hence imperfect universe.

For Eagleton, evil is characterised by its supreme pointlessness: “Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity,” he writes. Todorov, on the other hand, resists definition completely, simply saying that evil “is merely a catch-all term for various types of violence: war, genocide, massacre, torture, rape, crime, inflicted suffering and so forth”.

It is Svendsen, however, who offers the most comprehensive analysis – one that resists the twin errors of too narrow or too loose a definition. His clear, logical but essentially humane analysis of evil does not boil all evil down to one thing, but places its variants in four general categories.

Demonic evil is “the activity of doing evil precisely because it’s evil”. This is how the diabolical villains of Hollywood films are presented, but Svendsen argues that it is a cartoon caricature rather than a paradigm of evil. Eagleton’s book is putatively about this kind of evil, but since he agrees that it is rare and “not something we should lose too much sleep over”, he ends up having to discuss a lot of “plain wickedness” instead.

On the other hand, in order to have at least some proper evil to talk about, Eagleton is obliged to make the facts fit his definitions, rather than the other way around. In order for the Holocaust to count as evil, for instance, he has to say that it was “a genocide for the sake of genocide, an orgy of extermination apparently for the hell of it”, an “operation which had no practical point to it”. This is profoundly and importantly wrong. As Todorov and Svendsen point out, if we see the Holocaust as a unique, demonic aberration, we cannot learn anything from the memory of it. “By teaching the ‘specificity’, we are renouncing the universal application of the lesson,” Todorov says.

The evil of the death camps therefore needs to be understood in terms of Svendsen’s other three categories. The first of these is instrumental evil, which arises when we “do something evil, well aware that it’s evil, in order to accomplish some other goal”. As fundamentalists show, there is nothing more dangerous than a person convinced of the righteousness of his cause, for then any means might justify the end. Even love, when excessive, can motivate abject wickedness.

Instrumental evil is a close cousin of the idealistic variety, which is doing evil in the belief that it is in fact good. Witch trials and crusades are two obvious examples, but genocides also often fall into this camp. Rwanda’s Hutus were urged to massacre the Tutsi “cockroaches” because when the enemy is vermin, it is positively good to cut them down. Likewise, Jews were not just killed by the Nazis as an unfortunate means to the end of more lebensraum – they were also seen by the Nazis as a sub-human stain on the world.

Eagleton, in contrast, tries to explain the Holocaust as the result of a desire, akin to Freud’s death drive, to completely annihilate “being”. Hence the Nazis killed the Jews because they “represented a lack of being” that “threatened to evoke the Nazis’ horror of their own essential nothingness”. Read alongside Svendsen and Todorov, this looks like shallow conceptual pyrotechnics. One wishes at such moments that Eagleton rather than Svendsen, had written “my primary goal wasn’t to write an entertaining book”, but then Eagleton has for some time appeared to belong to the would-rather-be-wrong-than-boring school.

Svendsen’s fourth category is stupid evil, by which he does not mean evil resulting from a lack of intelligence but rather “a form of thoughtlessness”. It is an idea most closely associated with political theorist Hannah Arendt who, although more famous for the phrase “the banality of evil” only used it three times in her classic study of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazis’ “final solution”.

Stupid evil is perhaps the most common variety, but how can anyone be so blind to the obvious horror of flagrant wrongdoing? Psychologists have the best answers to this – and, as answers go, they’re remarkably mundane: habituation by increments, socialisation, distancing and divided responsibility can all lead previously decent people to do terrible things. Svendsen explains a lot of this, but more comprehensive accounts drawing more on empirical psychology can be found in recent books such as Kathleen Taylor’s Cruelty and Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect. Historically, of course, evil has been the subject matter not of psychology or philosophy but theology. Its so-called problem of evil is perhaps best summed up by Primo Levi: “There was Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist.”

Attempts to prove otherwise are known as theodicies. They do not seek to prove that a good god does exist, merely that his existence is compatible with the manifest evils we find in the world.

For once, Eagleton’s declarative confidence seems well-placed when he says of theodicies that “all of the arguments produced so far are bogus, and one or two of them are morally outrageous”. Svendsen goes as far as to call them evil because “they justify and uphold injustice”. That may sound extreme, but I think it’s spot-on.

I’ve read about a lot of evil but the only time I’ve really felt its presence has been when listening to a theologian explaining in cool, rational terms, why the suffering of the soldiers at Ypres in the first world war was good for us and good for them.

The theologian wasn’t a wicked man, but his line of thought most certainly was. “No doubt some good came out of the Holocaust, not least the courage and comradeship of some of its victims,” writes Eagleton, “but to imagine that any amount of human kindness could have justified it would be a moral obscenity.”

Hick’s own theodicy, however, along with comprehensive accounts of the ones that precede it, does not provoke quite the same outrage. What saves it is that Hick rejects as unacceptable any theodicy that does not have at its heart the Christian God of love. There is a humanity to this project that sets it apart from the detached logic of theodicies.

Hick’s defence of the existence of evil rests on the view that God is in the business of “soul-making” and that the only way we can become truly moral, autonomous agents is by living in a world of challenge and suffering. A person who grows into his or her goodness by learning from hardship and experience is “good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or of virtue”.

Although this is a logically consistent view, Hick’s theodicy ultimately has to bite the same bullet as any other: it has to conclude that the world could not have been made any better than it is. That’s possible, but is it likely? It’s hard to imagine that a Martian observing our world would conclude that it is as good as it could be, for sure. Hick’s theodicy may not be demonstrably wrong, but it remains deeply unconvincing.

If there are limits to how much evil can be explained and if it is fundamentally misguided to try to justify its existence, then what are we to do? A popular idea is that we should guard against future evil by remembering that of the past.

Todorov’s very short essay, accompanied by some striking semi-abstract photographs by Naveen Kishore, is an important challenge to the idea that memory is the panacea for evil; that the most important thing is to “never forget”. Remembrance has become widespread, institutionalised, even put into so-called memory laws. But there still seem to be no signs that evil is on the decline.

One reason for this is that too often, our memories make past evils look alien, foreign and nothing to do with the civilised people we have become today. “The memory of the past will serve no purpose if used to build an impassable wall between evil and us,” Todorov says.

The kind of remembrance Todorov advocates is the variety exemplified in truth and reconciliation councils, most famously in post-apartheid South Africa. This is the only way, he says, to avoid the two extremes of a vengeful perpetuation of evil by cancelling it out with yet another, and a permissive determinism that excuses everyone, on the basis that “individuals are not responsible for their acts, that they obey economic or psychological forces over which they have no control”.

This is not the only practical piece of advice to come out of these predominantly theoretical books. One lesson is that we should not be seduced by the illusion that we can eliminate evil. As is so often the case, Svendsen and Todorov are in wise agreement, cautioning that catastrophic results follow when people try to take on this purifying role.

But the lesson common to all four writers is the same one we’ve been hearing for decades now from the psychologists who perhaps know best. “The worst evils are committed not by monsters, but people no different from ourselves,” as Svendsen puts it. That’s why, in his defence, Eagleton’s refusal to call terrorism evil makes sense, because the danger of labelling it as such is that it can make the comprehensible look incomprehensible.

We should all know this by now. We can argue all we like about the best way to define evil and the point at which it becomes mere wickedness, but the facts are all in. Evil is not a mystery. That’s why Svendsen’s central point rings true: “The fact that evil exists is not so much a metaphysical challenge as it is a moral and political one.”

Julian Baggini is the author of ‘Do They Think You’re Stupid?: 100 Ways of Spotting Spin and Nonsense from the Media, Celebrities and Politicians’ (Granta)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Economist: A game of cat and mouse - Toxoplasmosis and psychology

Toxoplasmosis and psychology

A game of cat and mouse

Jun 3rd 2010
From The Economist print edition

There is tantalising evidence that a common parasite may affect human behaviour

IF AN alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing.

Toxoplasma gondii is not an alien; it is a relative of that down-to-earth pathogen Plasmodium, the beast that causes malaria. It is common: in some parts of the world as much as 60% of the population is infected with it. And it can harm fetuses and people with AIDS, because in each case their immune systems cannot cope with it. For other people, though, the symptoms are usually no worse than a mild dose of flu. Not much for them to worry about, then. Except that there is a growing body of evidence that some of those people have their behaviour permanently changed.

One reason to suspect this is that a country’s level of Toxoplasma infection seems to be related to the level of neuroticism displayed by its population. Another is that those infected seem to have poor reaction times and are more likely to be involved in road accidents. A third is that they have short attention spans and little interest in seeking out novelty. A fourth, possibly the most worrying, is that those who suffer from schizophrenia are more likely than those who do not to have been exposed to Toxoplasma.

Nor is any of this truly surprising. For, besides humans, Toxoplasma has two normal hosts: rodents and cats. And what it does to rodents is very odd indeed.

Fatal feline attraction

Joanne Webster of Imperial College, London, has been studying Toxoplasma for years. Like Plasmodium, which cycles between mosquitoes and man, Toxoplasma cycles between its rodent and feline hosts, living out different phases of its existence in each. In cats, it resides in the wall of the small intestine and passes out of the host in its faeces. These are then picked up by rats and mice (and also by other mammal species, including humans), where they form cysts in brain, liver and muscle tissue. Eventually, if the parasites are lucky, their rodent host is eaten by a cat and the whole cycle starts again.

Unlike Plasmodium, however, which can rely on the natural behaviour of mosquitoes to spread it around, Toxoplasma’s rodent hosts have a strong aversion to helping it into its next home. Which is where, in Dr Webster’s elegant phrase, fatal feline attraction comes in. Rats and mice infected with Toxoplasma start wandering around and drawing attention to themselves—in other words, behaving in ways that will bring them to the attention of cats. They are even, Dr Webster’s work suggests, attracted to the smell of cats.

How these behavioural changes come about was, until recently, obscure. But in 2009 Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds, in England, analysed Toxoplasma’s DNA. When he compared the results with those of other species, he discovered that two of the bug’s genes encode enzymes involved in the production of a molecule called dopamine. This molecule acts, in animals that have nervous systems, as a chemical messenger between nerve cells. It does not, however, have any known function in single-celled critters. Moreover, dopamine is particularly implicated in schizophrenia. Haloperidol, an antipsychotic drug, works by blocking dopamine receptors.

Intriguingly, Dr Webster has found that haloperidol serves to reverse fatal feline attraction in rats. This suggests the parasite is indeed interfering with the brain’s dopamine system—and thus that it might be doing the same thing in people. Dr McConkey is now making a version of Toxoplasma with the dopamine genes excised, to see if rats infected with this modified bug are protected from the fatal attraction.

Culture club

The evidence that human toxoplasmosis does more than appears at first sight is, it must be said, quite scattered. But it is intriguing and probably worth following up.

The connection with schizophrenia was originally suggested in the 1950s, but only really took off in 2003, when it was revived by Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, near Washington, DC. In collaboration with Bob Yolken of Johns Hopkins University, Dr Fuller discovered that people who suffer from schizophrenia are almost three times more likely than the general population to have antibodies to Toxoplasma.

That does not, of course, prove Toxoplasma causes schizophrenia. As every science student is taught from the beginning, correlation is not causation. It could be that schizophrenics are more susceptible to the infection, or some third, as yet unidentified variable may be involved.

Another interesting correlation has, though, been discovered by Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague. Dr Flegr has studied several aspects of the Toxoplasma question. In one case he looked at the infection rate of people involved in road accidents. Both drivers and pedestrians who had been in accidents were almost three times more likely to be infected than comparable individuals who had not been. Similar results have been found in Turkey, by Kor Yereli of Celal Bayar University, in Manisa. And Dr Flegr has found other abnormalities in infected people. These included reduced reaction times and shorter attention spans—both of which might help to explain the accident statistics—and a reduction in “novelty-seeking”.

This latter is curious. The sort of behaviour shown by rodents is, if anything, an increase in novelty-seeking. But the point is that novelty-seeking is controlled by nerve cells that respond to dopamine. Humans are dead-end hosts as far as Toxoplasma is concerned, so the exact effect will not have been honed by natural selection and may therefore be different from the one in animals that are actually useful to the parasite.

All of these suggested effects are obviously bad for the individuals involved, but some researchers go further and propose that entire societies are being altered by Toxoplasma. In 2006 Kevin Lafferty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper noting a correlation between levels of neuroticism established by national surveys in various countries and the level of Toxoplasma infection recorded in pregnant women (a group who are tested routinely). The places he looked at ranged from phlegmatic Britain, with a neuroticism score of -0.8 and a Toxoplasma infection rate of 6.6%, to hot-blooded France, which scored 1.8 and had an infection rate of 45%. Cross-Channel prejudices, then, may have an unexpected origin.

To repeat, correlation is not causation, and a lot more work would need to be done to prove the point. But it is just possible that a parasite’s desire to get eaten by a cat is shaping the cultures of the world.

Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: The road to the top is paved with good lies

The road to the top is paved with good lies

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 30 2010 20:22 | Last updated: May 30 2010 20:22

At the Chelsea Flower Show last Monday I saw a former British prime minister talking to a former newspaper editor. The ex-PM was smiling broadly and expressing delight at the chance meeting. Yet about five minutes earlier he had been overheard saying something disparaging about the ex-editor and trying to duck behind an oversized flower pot to avoid having a conversation.

What does this say about the politician? That he is a duplicitous weasel? Or that he has the polite charm that we require of the most successful people?

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lucy Kellaway - Apr-04

Principles for living we could do without - May-23

It’s the little things we should fret about - May-09

Kellaway: The scary Fabulous Fab - May-02

Ash cloud helped productivity - Apr-25

The joys of long service - Apr-18

Last week I heard Dorothy Rowe, the Australian psychologist, talking on the radio about her new book, Why We Lie. Even very small white lies, she argued, are motivated by a fear of damaging our idea of ourselves as people and will catch us in the end.

This is far too deep for me. Lying is surely caused as much by pragmatism as fear. In my experience, it can be jolly useful. And tests have shown that it doesn’t always catch up with you at all.

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review is an article stating that powerful people are better liars. Researchers from Columbia Business School asked bosses and staff to steal a $100 note and then convince someone that they hadn’t taken it – a trick that bosses could pull off far more successfully than their employees.

Earlier this month another study was published by psychologists at the University of Toronto showing that children who start lying by the age of two are more likely to be successful when they grow up. Lying is an important developmental stage: it means you can hold the truth at the back of your mind while saying something else at the same time.

Together, these two surveys seem to paint a scary picture. The cleverest are propelled to the top on a wave of lies, and once in power are compelled to lie even more. Before you know it the whole world is being run by Kenneth Lays and the worst sort of lying banker.

I don’t think it proves this at all. There is extreme lying, which is always bad. But there is also modest lying that is not bad; indeed it is absolutely essential to get through a day in the office. What is needed is more than being economical with the truth; it’s being sophisticated with it. People who thrive, like the ex-PM, have reached the further developmental stage of knowing just how far they can tell different stories to different people while still (one hopes) holding on to some core of honesty. It is knowing which lies harm and which help; understanding that truth is a bendy concept, and bending it to the best shape at the time.

Only the very stupid, the very rude and the very young never lie in this way.

In the British sitcom Outnumbered, the young daughter Karen is funny because she never lies. When she opens the door to a woman trying to sell something and is asked where her father is, she gazes at the woman angelically and says: “He’s on the toilet.”

Sometimes you come across grown-ups who have progressed no further than this child. Last week I bumped into someone who I had invited to my book launch party but who hadn’t come. Sorry not to have seen you, I said. “I get asked to a lot of parties. I thought I could give a miss to yours,” she explained.

Such compulsive truth-tellers don’t last in organisations for more than five minutes. Offices are glued together with lies. We pretend to like people we work with. We must pretend to be satisfied with our jobs. We must pretend to think our company is better than the competition. By accepting a place in any hierarchy, you are bending yourself out of shape.

So when asked by an anxious editor: how are you getting along with your column? I say: “Nearly done. It’ll be with you by six.”

The first bit is a lie. The truth is that I have wasted time and the column is barely begun. The next bit is true. Deadlines must be met. I am proud of my lies. Proud of my ability to adjust behaviour according to the circumstances, and hope I have passed on the gift to my children.

Last week I asked my 17-year-old daughter how many lies she’d told that day. None, she said. Was the answer in itself a lie, I worried. Or, even worse, was she not advanced enough to have learnt how to lie? But then I reflected that it was only 8am, she had just stumbled out of bed and “none” was her first pronouncement of the day.

lucy kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: The importance of being resilient

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May 30, 2010

The importance of being resilient

Foreign talents who make S'pore their home can add to our resilience and success

By Lee Wei Ling

Earlier this month, on May 14, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew addressed the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong. He told the audience what he had said to Deng Xiaoping when Deng visited Singapore in 1978.

Deng had congratulated my father on the progress Singapore had achieved. My father replied: 'We are the descendants of the landless peasants of the southern provinces. You have the zhuangyuan (the top candidates in the imperial examinations), the literati, artists, the cultured and the talented. Whatever we have done, China can also do - and do better.'

Deng did not reply. When he returned to China, he established special economic zones. In 1992, when he visited Shenzhen, he declared: 'We should learn from the world, especially Singapore, and do better than them.'

I disagree with my father that the huaqiao (overseas Chinese) are inferior to the intellectuals of China. He has long believed that those from Jiangsu region are descendents of the top mandarins who were sent to rule over or retire in this well-endowed region. Jiangsu is often called 'the home of fish and padi' because the land is fertile and the fish, abundant.

My father thinks that the genes for intellectual ability multiplied in this region. I doubt the theory because men who are good at passing examinations based on memorising Confucian classics do not usually select their wives and concubines according to their intellectual abilities, but rather their beauty.

The genes for academic intelligence are thus soon diluted. Furthermore, most of the mandarins and their families would not have faced adverse and dangerous situations, the acid test for courage and resilience.

Resilience in psychology refers to the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophes. It also includes the ability to bounce back to normal after a setback. Commonly used synonyms for resilience include 'hardiness', 'resourcefulness' and 'mental toughness'.

What the ancestors of the huaqiao might perhaps have lacked in academic ability - or more accurately, the opportunity to receive an education in the Chinese classics - they more than made up with their courage and resilience.

It took courage and a sense of adventure for our ancestors to make the dangerous journey to Nanyang (the South Seas or South-east Asia). The journey was extremely uncomfortable.

If an epidemic broke out on board the ship, many would die. Those who made it to Singapore were quarantined on St John's Island the duration of their quarantine, depending on the diseases they were suspected of carrying.

Thus the early immigrants from China to South-east Asia were selected for courage, resilience and physical fitness; plus an ability to survive despite the difficult circumstances.

All this must have involved some degree of intelligence, though that intelligence may not have resembled classical academic intelligence as measured by standardised tests.

My paternal great-great-grandfather travelled from his ancestral Hakka village of Dapu to Xiamen, from where he set sail to Singapore in a tongkang. A small sailing boat with two square sails, a tongkang is not very seaworthy in a storm.

After arriving in Singapore, great-great-grandpa worked for a shopkeeper and later married the shopkeeper's daughter, also a Hakka. Eventually, he earned enough to return to Dapu and buy himself a minor mandarinate (class 8).

His wife, however, had never been to China and had no desire to leave Singapore. So she hid her children, and her husband returned to China alone.

To our wise great-great-grandma, my family owes our good fortune. None of my nuclear family has any desire to visit our ancestral village of Dapu.

The Chinese immigrants who arrived in Singapore after 1920 came in steamships, which were faster and safer than tongkangs.

The newcomers were called sinkek, which means 'new guests' in Hokkien. Upon arrival in Singapore, their village associations would provide them with temporary lodging and other bare essentials.

My paternal grandmother considered the sinkek inferior Chinese compared to the Peranakan (which means 'children of the country' in Malay). When I spoke to my father in preparation for this article, I understood why she felt that way.

The Peranakan, in her view, were the descendants of the earlier, tougher immigrants who travelled to South-east Asia at a time when sea migration was an extremely hazardous affair.

All four of my grandparents were descendants of the earlier waves of immigrants. The customs, food and the language of the Peranakan - also known as Nonyas or Babas - was influenced to some extent by Malay culture.

Those who migrated later, the sinkek, faced fewer hazards, but life was not a piece of cake for them either. Those who survived and thrived under such conditions must have been resilient individuals.

Hence, I do not think the Chinese in South-east Asia are inferior to Chinese in China, including the descendents of intellectuals in Jiangsu.

My ancestors may not have passed imperial examinations. Indeed, all the womenfolk among my ancestors were not schooled. But their children, my uncles and aunts, have done well in life, as have their grandchildren.

Personally, if I had to choose between pure intelligence and resilience, I would choose the latter.

I myself am resilient but not outstandingly intelligent, and I am hopeless at art of any kind.

My father risked his life to join forces with the communists to eject our colonial masters - and then fought the communists. He and my mother knew how ruthless the communists would have been if he had lost.

Indeed, some of the wives whose husbands joined my father in the fight for independence were very cold towards my parents. But when the PAP came into power and Singapore flourished, these wives became friendly again.

That China will overtake Singapore some day is a given. With a population of 1.3 billion versus Singapore's 5 million, it is but a matter of time. As I have no children, I do not worry too much about this eventuality.

But for the sake of my brothers' children and those of my friends, I can only hope that Singapore will be successful in attracting foreign talent and that these foreigners will make Singapore their home and add to our resilience.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Send your comments to suntimes@sph.com.sg

NY Times: The Science of a Happy Marraige

The Science of a Happy Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Stuart Bradford

Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation?

To find the answer, a growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are studying everything from the biological factors that seem to influence marital stability to a person’s psychological response after flirting with a stranger.

Their findings suggest that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment.

Recent studies have raised questions about whether genetic factors may influence commitment and marital stability. Hasse Walum, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 552 sets of twins to learn more about a gene related to the body’s regulation of the brain chemical vasopressin, a bonding hormone.

Over all, men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant.

Although the trait is often called the “fidelity gene,” Mr. Walum called that a misnomer: his research focused on marital stability, not faithfulness. “It’s difficult to use this information to predict any future behavior in men,” he told me. Now he and his colleagues are working to replicate the findings and conducting similar research in women.

While there may be genetic differences that influence commitment, other studies suggest that the brain can be trained to resist temptation.

A series of unusual studies led by John Lydon, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, have looked at how people in a committed relationship react in the face of temptation. In one study, highly committed married men and women were asked to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite sex in a series of photos. Not surprisingly, they gave the highest ratings to people who would typically be viewed as attractive.

Later, they were shown similar pictures and told that the person was interested in meeting them. In that situation, participants consistently gave those pictures lower scores than they had the first time around.

When they were attracted to someone who might threaten the relationship, they seemed to instinctively tell themselves, “He’s not so great.” “The more committed you are,” Dr. Lydon said, “the less attractive you find other people who threaten your relationship.”

But some of the McGill research has shown gender differences in how we respond to a cheating threat. In a study of 300 heterosexual men and women, half the participants were primed for cheating by imagining a flirtatious conversation with someone they found attractive. The other half just imagined a routine encounter.

Afterward, the study subjects were asked to complete fill-in-the-blank puzzles like LO_AL and THR__T.

Unbeknownst to the participants, the word fragments were a psychological test to reveal subconscious feelings about commitment. (Similar word puzzles are used to study subconscious feelings about prejudice and stereotyping.)

No pattern emerged among the study participants who imagined a routine encounter. But there were differences among men and women who had entertained the flirtatious fantasy. In that group, the men were more likely to complete the puzzles with the neutral words LOCAL and THROAT. But the women who had imagined flirting were far more likely to choose LOYAL and THREAT, suggesting that the exercise had touched off subconscious concerns about commitment.

Of course, this does not necessarily predict behavior in the real world. But the pronounced difference in responses led the researchers to think women might have developed a kind of early warning system to alert them to relationship threats.

Other McGill studies confirmed differences in how men and women react to such threats. In one, attractive actors or actresses were brought in to flirt with study participants in a waiting room. Later, the participants were asked questions about their relationships, particularly how they would respond to a partner’s bad behavior, like being late and forgetting to call.

Men who had just been flirting were less forgiving of the hypothetical bad behavior, suggesting that the attractive actress had momentarily chipped away at their commitment. But women who had been flirting were more likely to be forgiving and to make excuses for the man, suggesting that their earlier flirting had triggered a protective response when discussing their relationship.

“We think the men in these studies may have had commitment, but the women had the contingency plan — the attractive alternative sets off the alarm bell,” Dr. Lydon said. “Women implicitly code that as a threat. Men don’t.”

The question is whether a person can be trained to resist temptation. In another study, the team prompted male students who were in committed dating relationships to imagine running into an attractive woman on a weekend when their girlfriends were away. Some of the men were then asked to develop a contingency plan by filling in the sentence “When she approaches me, I will __________ to protect my relationship.”

Because the researchers could not bring in a real woman to act as a temptation, they created a virtual-reality game in which two out of four rooms included subliminal images of an attractive woman. The men who had practiced resisting temptation gravitated toward those rooms 25 percent of the time; for the others, the figure was 62 percent.

But it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”

To measure this quality, couples are asked a series of questions: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? How much do you see your partner as a way to expand your own capabilities?

The Stony Brook researchers conducted experiments using activities that stimulated self-expansion. Some couples were given mundane tasks, while others took part in a silly exercise in which they were tied together and asked to crawl on mats, pushing a foam cylinder with their heads. The study was rigged so the couples failed the time limit on the first two tries, but just barely made it on the third, resulting in much celebration.

Couples were given relationship tests before and after the experiment. Those who had taken part in the challenging activity posted greater increases in love and relationship satisfaction than those who had not experienced victory together.

Now the researchers are embarking on a series of studies to measure how self-expansion influences a relationship. They theorize that couples who explore new places and try new things will tap into feelings of self-expansion, lifting their level of commitment.

“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”

Tara Parker-Pope’s new book is “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 11, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

NY Times: Indecision-Making - The Art of Choosing

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April 18, 2010

Indecision-Making

By VIRGINIA POSTREL

THE ART OF CHOOSING

By Sheena Iyengar

329 pp. Twelve. $25.99

Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.

Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-­taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?

“The study hardly seems mine anymore, now that it has received so much attention and been described in so many different ways,” Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, writes in “The Art of Choosing.” “From the various versions people have heard and passed on,” she adds, “a refrain has emerged: More is less. That is, more choice leads to less satisfaction or fulfillment or happiness.”

Now Iyengar is having her own say about the jam experiment and the many other puzzles and paradoxes of choice. More choice is not always better, she suggests, but neither is less. The optimal amount of choice lies somewhere in between infinity and very little, and that optimum depends on context and culture. “In practice, people can cope with larger assortments than research on our basic cognitive limitations might suggest,” Iyengar writes. “After all, visiting the cereal aisle doesn’t usually give shoppers a nervous breakdown.”

A congenial writer, Iyengar is less hard-edged and ideological than Schwartz and less glib than Malcolm Gladwell, who she says encouraged her to write this book. “The Art of Choosing” should appeal to fans of both writers. It’s full of the experimental results that make for good cocktail party chatter, but it offers fewer explicit lessons. Iyengar favors exploration over conclusions. “Isn’t this interesting?” she asks, rather than “Isn’t this awful?” or “Isn’t this useful?”

Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Iyengar is drawn to such cross-cultural comparisons. Consider an experiment she conducted with elementary-school children in San Francisco’s Japantown. Half were what Iyengar calls Anglo Ameri­can, and half were the children of Japanese or Chinese immigrants who spoke their parents’ native language at home.

“Ms. Smith” showed each child six piles of word puzzles and six marking pens. Each pile contained one category of anagram — words about animals, food, San Francisco, etc. — and each marker was a different color. A third of the children were told to pick whichever category and marker they wanted to play with. Another third were told they should work on a specific category with a specific marker. With the final third, Ms. Smith riffled through some papers and pretended to relay instructions from the child’s mother. In the latter two cases, the category and marker were in fact the ones picked by the most recent child to select freely.

The two ethnic groups reacted differently. The Anglo kids solved the most anagrams and played the longest when they could pick their own puzzles and markers, while the Asian children did best when they thought they were following their mothers’ wishes.

To the Anglo children, their mothers’ instructions felt like bossy constraints. The Asians, by contrast, defined their own identities largely by their relationship with their mothers. Their preferences and their mothers’ wishes, Iyengar writes, “were practically one and the same.” Doing what they thought their mothers wanted was, in effect, their first choice.

Anglos and Asians did share one important reaction: “When the choices were made by Ms. Smith, a stranger, both groups of children felt the imposition and reacted negatively.” Just because people happily comply with the choices of an intimate — or, for that matter, an authority they’ve selected themselves — does not mean they want bureaucratic strangers making their decisions. Advocates who want to use psychology experiments to justify choice-limiting public policy should keep that lesson in mind.

Iyengar began her scholarly exploration of choice with an undergraduate research project. She suspected that religiously observant people who obey lots of behavioral restrictions would feel unable to control their own lives and thus pessimistic. To test this hypothesis, she interviewed more than 600 people from nine different religions, ranging from fundamentalists to liberals. She surveyed their religious beliefs and practices, asked questions to test optimism and had them fill out a mental health questionnaire. What she found surprised her.

“Members of more fundamentalist ­­faiths experienced greater hope, were more optimistic when faced with adversity and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts,” she writes. “Indeed, the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians, especially those who were atheists. The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead, it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.”

In retrospect, the result seems obvious. Even many atheists would agree that believing that God cares about you or that your life is part of a cosmic plan can be a powerful source of hope (or, to put it pejoratively, a crutch). Meaning is as important as choice. Besides, Iyengar conducted her survey in the United States, where people are free to switch religions and often do. If keeping kosher or refraining from alcohol makes you feel constrained and helpless, you can abandon those strictures. The only people left in the restrictive groups are those who value the rules. In a modern, liberal society, religious observance does not “take away” choice. It is a choice.

Unlike “provocative” books designed to stir controversy, “The Art of Choosing” is refreshingly thought-provoking. Contemplating Iyengar’s wide-ranging exploration of choice leads to new questions: When is following custom a choice? How costly must a decision be to no longer qualify as a choice? Did Calvinism spur worldly achievement because its doctrine of predestination removed all choice about the hereafter? Do con­temporary Americans adopt food taboos like veganism because they crave limits on an overabundance of choices?

Human beings, Iyengar suggests, are born to choose. But human beings are also born to create meaning. Choice and meaning are intertwined. We use choice to define our identities, and our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, from advertising-driven associations to personal relationships and philosophical commitments. Some meanings we can articulate, while others remain beyond words. “Science can assist us in becoming more skillful choosers,” Iyengar cautions, “but at its core, choice remains an art.”

Virginia Postrel is the author of “The Substance of Style” and “The Future and Its Enemies” and the editor in chief of DeepGlamour.net.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Is Marriage Good for Your Health?

April 12, 2010

Is Marriage Good for Your Health?

By TARA PARKER-POPE

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.

All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself. The mere fact of being married, it seems, isn’t enough to protect your health. Even the Healthy Marriage Initiative makes the distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” relationships when discussing the benefits of marriage. “When we divide good marriages from bad ones,” says the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who is also the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, “we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.”

Some of today’s most interesting research on the relationship between marriage and health is being led by a pair of researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine. The duo, Ronald Glaser and Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, are also, fittingly, married to each other.

Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser’s scholarly collaboration has its roots in a chance encounter during a faculty picnic in October 1978 on the Ohio State campus. Glaser, who is a viral immunologist, spotted an attractive woman standing with members of the psychiatry faculty. Although their eyes met only briefly, he caught a glimpse of her name tag. Intrigued, he tried to track her down, calling the psychiatry department chairman to ask if he knew a petite blonde on staff with a name like “Pam Kiscoli.” The department chairman figured out that Glaser was talking about a new assistant professor named Jan Kiecolt. Glaser and Kiecolt eventually met for lunch at the university’s hospital cafeteria. They married a year later, in January 1980.

The coupling resulted in more than romance. The two scientists were fascinated by each other’s work, which they often discussed over meals or while jogging together. Glaser suggested that they collaborate professionally, but finding common ground was a challenge: he studied virology and immunology; she was a clinical psychologist who focused on assertiveness and other behavior. In the early 1980s, however, Kiecolt-Glaser came across a book on the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology, which concerns the interplay between behavior, the immune and endocrine systems and the brain and nervous system. The couple were intrigued by a science that lay at the intersection of their disciplines. Today, the two disagree on exactly how their professional collaboration began. “He says I started it,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. “But I say he started it.”

In their first research collaboration, they sought to measure the effect of psychological stress on the immune system. Although earlier studies had established that trauma and other major stress — like the death of a loved one or prolonged sleep deprivation — weakened the immune system, the Glasers wanted to know if lesser forms of stress, like those associated with the workplace or graduate school, had a similar effect.

The Glasers, who worked at Ohio’s State’s medical school, had ready access to an ample supply of stressed-out students, and so they decided to study the toll exacted by school pressure. They took blood samples from a set of students early in the semester and then did so again in the middle of final exams. The Glasers discovered that the stress of examination time seemed to cause a significant weakening of the students’ immune response: by examination time, the medical students showed a significant drop in so-called natural killer cells, a type of white blood cell that battles viruses and helps prevent cancer.

For their second collaboration, the Glasers turned their attention to domestic strife. They wondered about the role that relationships play in health and about the effects of marital stress, which, like school pressure, can be a source of nontraumatic but chronic strain. In what was to be the first of their many studies on marriage and health, the Glasers recruited 76 women, half of whom were married; the other half were separated or had divorced. The Glasers wanted to identify which married women were in troubled relationships as well as which of the women who were separated or divorced from their husbands were emotionally struggling the most. They did this by using marital-quality scales, types of questionnaires that ask couples to indicate agreement or disagreement with statements like “If I had to do it over again, I would marry the same person” or “We often do things together.” Next, using blood tests, the Glasers measured the women’s immune-system responses, tracking their levels of antibody production and other indicators of immunity strength. The results showed that the women in unhappy relationships and the women who remained emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands had decidedly weaker immune responses than the women who were in happier relationships (or were happily out of them).

Though pleased with this study, the Glasers knew that they had succeeded in taking the measure of marital happiness and health only at a single moment. The couple were also curious to study the effect of marital stress as it unfolded in real time. What happens to the body minute by minute, hour by hour, when couples engage in hostile marital disputes? To find this out, they recruited a study group of 90 seemingly happy newlywed couples. Each couple was hooked up to tubes so that blood samples could be drawn from the pair at regular intervals, and the husband and wife were seated face to face. Obscured by a curtain, the researchers watched the couples on video monitors; nurses took the blood samples. The participants, as they had been prompted to do, discussed their most volatile topics of marital conflict, like housework, sex or interference from a mother-in-law. “You wouldn’t think in a study situation that they would tear into each other,” Glaser, who is now the director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, told me. “But they get into it.” As expected, the couples who exhibited the most negative and hostile behavior during the conflict discussion showed the largest declines in immune-system function during the 24-hour study period.

These data strongly suggested that marital stress could affect the body in striking ways, but the Glaser team had yet to prove that marital conflict had any truly meaningful or lasting effect on health. Kiecolt-Glaser had an idea for another study that would meet this higher standard. She had read about a strange tool used by her dermatology colleagues: a small plastic suction device designed to leave eight tiny blisters on the arm and allow monitoring of the immune-system response at the wound sites. Kiecolt-Glaser’s proposal was to use this blistering device to measure how quickly or slowly physical wounds healed among married couples who had undergone different levels of marital stress.

The experiment had two phases. Each married couple, after their forearms were subjected to the blistering procedure, were asked to talk together for a half-hour: on one occasion they discussed topics chosen to elicit the couples’ supportive behaviors; on another day, after undergoing the blistering procedures again, they discussed topics selected to evoke conflict and tension and tried to resolve them. Before subjecting others to the blistering regimen, each of the Glasers had the device secured to his or her respective forearm to have his or her skin blistered. The sensation is comparable to “someone gently pinching your arm,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. Nonetheless, the Glasers knew it would be a tough sell to convince others couples to undergo the blistering procedure as well as two weeks of subsequent monitoring of the wounds as they healed. A study grant allowed them to offer $2,000 in total compensation to any couple willing to take part in the experiment. They managed to recruit 42 married couples for the study.

The results were remarkable. After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.

Published in 2005 in The Archives of General Psychiatry, the Glasers’ findings help explain epidemiological data showing that couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples. The results may also have practical relevance for surgical patients, for instance, waiting for incisions to heal. But most important, the study offered compelling evidence that a hostile fight with your husband or wife isn’t just bad for your relationship. It can have a profound toll on your body.

Kiecolt-Glaser told me that the overall health lesson to take away from the new wave of marriage-and-health literature is that couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it,” she says.

Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60s. The study, which grew out of work by researchers at the University of Chicago, found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerned single people who had never married. For more than 100 years, scientists have speculated that single people, because they generally have fewer resources, lower income and perhaps less logistical and emotional support, have poorer health than the married. But in the Chicago study, people who had divorced or been widowed had worse health problems than men and women who had been single their entire lives. In formerly married individuals, it was as if the marriage advantage had never existed.

Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”

Other researchers have also studied how the “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. In 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a three-year Swedish study of 300 women who had been hospitalized with severe chest pains or a heart attack; the study found that those who reported the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times as likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure. It is notable that these increased risks weren’t associated with other forms of stress. For instance, women who were stressed-out at work weren’t at any higher risk for a second episode of heart problems than women who were happy in their jobs.

Of course, all couples — happy or unhappy — are bound to experience some form of marital conflict. Surely this does not mean everyone is doomed to ill health; some conflicts are better than others. The University of Utah psychology professor Timothy W. Smith has addressed this question, studying how what he calls the “emotional tone” of conflict affects heart risk. In one study, he recruited 150 couples, most of whom were in their 60s and married for an average of 36 years. All were in general good health with no signs of heart disease. Smith collected video recordings of the couples discussing stressful topics like money management or housework. The arguments were then “coded” to indicate the number of warm, hostile and controlling statements and words that were used in the course of the dispute. In addition, the couples were put in heart-scanning machines to measure coronary calcium levels, which are a useful indicator of heart-disease risk. Smith then compared each person’s conflict style with their coronary calcium score.

Smith’s results suggest that there are important differences between men and women when it comes to health and the style of conflict that can jeopardize it. The women in his study who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger. “Most of the literature assumes that it’s how bad the arguments get that drives the effect, but it’s actually the lack of affection that does it,” Smith told me. “It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that predicted risk.”

For men, on the other hand, hostile and negative marital battles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk for a higher coronary calcium score, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control. It didn’t matter whether it was the husband or wife who was trying to gain control of the matter; it was merely any appearance of controlling language that put men on the path of heart disease.

In both cases, the emotional tone of a marital fight turned out to be just as predictive of poor heart health as whether the individual smoked or had high cholesterol. It is worth noting that the couples in Smith’s study were all relatively happy. These were husbands and wives who loved each other. Yet many of them had developed styles of conflict that took a physical toll on each other. The solution, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to fight more thoughtfully. “Difficulties in marriage seem to be nearly universal,” he said. “Just try not to let fights be any nastier than they need to be.”

Researchers have also started to examine the salutary health effects of social relationships, including those of a good marriage. In one recent study, James A. Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, recruited 16 women who scored relatively high on a questionnaire assessing marital happiness. He placed each woman in three different situations while monitoring her brain with an f.M.R.I. machine, which offers a way to observe the brain’s response to almost any kind of emotional stimulation. In one situation, to simulate stress, he subjected the woman to a mild electric shock. In a second, the shock was administered, but the woman held the hand of a stranger; in a third, the hand of her husband.

Both instances of hand-holding reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress. But when the woman was holding her husband’s hand, the effect was even greater, and it was particularly pronounced in women who had the highest marital-happiness scores. Holding a husband’s hand during the electric shock resulted in a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.

Coan says the study simulates how a supportive marriage and partnership gives the brain the opportunity to outsource some of its most difficult neural work. “When someone holds your hand in a study or just shows that they are there for you by giving you a back rub, when you’re in their presence, that becomes a cue that you don’t have to regulate your negative emotion,” he told me. “The other person is essentially regulating your negative emotion but without your prefrontal cortex. It’s much less wear and tear on us if we have someone there to help regulate us.”

With so much evidence establishing a link between marital stress and health, a new generation of research is set to explore the ways in which couples can mitigate the damaging effects of relationship stress. The Glasers are now conducting studies testing whether regular supplements of fish oil, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, can mitigate some of the physical symptoms of stress on the immune system.

The couple are also embarking on a new study looking at the interplay between nutrition and marital stress. Earlier research at Ohio State showed that when study subjects were given intravenous fat injections during times of stress, it took longer for triglycerides, fats that are associated with heart disease, to leave the bloodstream. But Kiecolt-Glaser is more interested in the real-world equivalent of the study: What happens to the body’s ability to cope with fats when couples fight at dinnertime? To find out, she’s planning to feed married couples two types of meals — one relatively healthful meal and one high-fat meal equivalent to fast food. During the meal the couples will be asked to discuss topics of high stress, and a blood analysis will offer a glimpse of the effect that mealtime conflict has on the body’s ability to metabolize fats. “It’s an ideal way,” Kiecolt-Glaser says, “to look at what happens to couples in the real world, where so many family conflicts happen over a meal.”

For the Glasers, their nearly 30 years of professional collaboration have not only given them new insights into the role of stress and health but have also helped them in their own marriage. Like every married couple, they have their disagreements, Glaser told me. But years of watching married couples interact and measuring the subsequent physical toll that conflict takes on their bodies has taught the Glasers the importance of taking time off together and making sure their disagreements don’t degenerate into personal attacks. “Don’t fight dirty,” he advised. “You never go far enough down the road where you hurt each other. We know enough to avoid those kinds of arguments.”

Kiecolt-Glaser added that the couple’s research shows that some level of relationship stress is inevitable in even the happiest marriages. The important thing, she said, is to use those moments of stress as an opportunity to repair the relationship rather than to damage it. “It can be so uncomfortable, even in the best marriages, to have an ongoing disagreement,” she said. “It’s the pit-in-your-stomach kind of thing. But when your marital relationship is the key relationship in your life, a disagreement is really a signal to try to fix something.”

Tara Parker-Pope is the Well columnist for The New York Times and the author of “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage,” to be published next month.

WSJ: Frendship for Guys (No Tears!)

MOVING ON

APRIL 7, 2010

Friendship for Guys (No Tears!)

By JEFFREY ZASLOW

Every summer for 25 years, Mark Vasu has gotten together for a weekend getaway with old friends from Duke University. The 15 men, who graduated in 1984, gather in the same cabin in Highlands, N.C.

"It's a judgment-free, action-packed, adventure-based weekend," says Mr. Vasu. "We go hiking, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, fly-fishing."

What they don't do is sit around as a group, the way women do, sharing their deepest feelings.

Dan Miller

Mark Leonard, second row center, with his friends in East Northport, N.Y., in 1980.

Male friendships like these are absolutely typical, but don't assume they're inferior to female friendships. "If we use a women's paradigm for friendship, we're making a mistake," says Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Social Work, who has studied how 386 men made, kept and nurtured friendships. Men might not be physically or emotionally expressive, he says, but we derive great support from our friendships.

Researchers say women's friendships are face to face: They talk, cry together, share secrets. Men's friendships are side by side: We play golf. We go to football games.

For several years, I've reported on the friendships women share, first for this column and then for "The Girls From Ames," a book about the 40-year friendship of 11 women from Ames, Iowa. And though I envy women's easy intimacy, I also know it wouldn't work for me and my friends.

I've played poker with the same guys every Thursday night for 18 years. We rarely talk about our lives. We talk about cards, betting, bluffing.

I used to say that my poker buddies don't even know my kids' names. But then I wondered if I was exaggerating. So one night I turned to my left at the poker table and casually asked my friend Lance: "Hey Lance, could you name my children?"

He shrugged, paused to think, then smiled sheepishly. "I could rename them," he said.

Dr. Greif isn't surprised by my story. In his poker game, he says, if a man were to reveal that he lost his job or that his wife left him, the other guys would say, "Gee, dude, that's too bad. Want us to deal you out this hand?"

Since 1978, Mark Leonard has played on a softball team with eight pals he grew up with in East Northport, N.Y. When they get together, they reminisce about shared experiences, like the time they were asked to leave an all-you-can-eat dinner at Beefsteak Charlie's because they had consumed every piece of meat in the restaurant.

View Full Image

Nelson Bakerman

Mark Leonard, center in vest, with his friends at his wedding in 2000. Dan Miller, with beard, is at his side.

"Our conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the feeling of things," says Mr. Leonard.

In his research, Dr. Greif found that men generally resist high-maintenance relationships, whether with spouses, girlfriends or male pals. When picking friends, "men don't want someone who is too needy," he says. A third of the men in his study said they learned positive things from female friendships, but 25% had a negative impression of women as friends, citing issues such as "cattiness" and "too much drama." And women are more likely than men to hold grudges toward friends, according to Dr. Greif's 2009 book, "Buddy System."

Studies show that in their late 20s and 30s, women have a harder time staying in touch with old friends. Those are the years when they're busy starting careers and raising children, so they don't have time to gather for reunions. Money is tighter, too. But around age 40, women start reconnecting. Before the 1990s, researchers assumed this was because they had more time for friendship in their 40s, as their children became self-sufficient. But now researchers consider this middle-aged focus on friendship to be a life stage; as women plan the next chapter of their lives, they turn to friends for guidance and empathy.

Men, meanwhile, tend to build friendships until about age 30, but there's often a falloff after that. Among the reasons: Their friendships are more apt to be hurt by geographical moves and differences in career trajectories. Recent studies, however, are now finding that men in their late 40s are turning to what Dr. Grief calls "rusted" friends—longtime pals they knew when they were younger. The Internet is making it easier for them to make contact with one another.

A woman from Wisconsin wrote to me recently to say that she effortlessly shares intimate feelings with her friends. That's in great contrast to her husband. He recently went on a fishing trip to Canada with four longtime friends. And so she wondered: What did they talk about for a whole week? She knew one of the men had problems at work. Another's daughter was getting married. The third man has health problems. Her husband said none of those issues came up. She couldn't believe it.

She told him: "Two female strangers in a public restroom would share more personal information in five minutes than you guys talked about in a week!"

I Love You, Man

New Line/Everett Collection

Five classic buddy movies.

• 'The Hangover' (2009)
• 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1969)
• 'Wayne's World' (1992)
• 'Some Like It Hot' (1959)
• 'Wedding Crashers' (2005; pictured above).

But again, it's a mistake to judge men's interactions by assuming we need to be like women. Research shows that men often open up about emotional issues to wives, mothers, sisters and platonic female friends. That's partly because they assume male friends will be of little help. It may also be due to fears of seeming effeminate or gay. But it's also an indication that men compartmentalize their needs; they'd rather turn to male friends to momentarily escape from their problems. The new buzzword is "bromance."

Frank Alessandra, 44 years old, remains close with five guys he grew up with in Denville, N.J. "As men, we feel the need to camouflage our sensitivity," he says, "but that doesn't mean we're not sensitive."

Timothy Smith, 55, of St. Charles, Ill., has been gathering with seven male friends each summer for 18 years. They bring their children, but their wives stay home. Without mothers around, the kids live a pirate adventure; they get to eat junk food, bathe irregularly, and jump off a cliff into a lake. They also get to see how their jocular dads treasure old friendships.

Larry Schulsinger, 51, remains close with his six childhood friends from North Miami Beach, Fla. Though they have since moved elsewhere, they made a pledge long ago to meet up each fall at Miami Dolphins away games. Now, when they're together, the conversations feel to him like scenes from the movie "Diner." They razz each other about their teen years as bellhops at Miami Beach hotels. They rarely discuss serious issues.

"I wouldn't talk about my insecurities with the guys," says Mr. Schulsinger, a consultant. "All my real insecurities—about work, finances, the kids—those I share with my wife."

A lot is left unspoken among Mr. Schulsinger's friends, but the love is there. One of his friends recently lost both parents, and without telling anyone, he started writing down his childhood memories of the group. He filled 150 pages and found it therapeutic to reminisce about those days when his parents were alive, and his friends were just a bike ride away.

More Moving On

• Doing Bad by Doing Good
• Love, Honor, Cherish and Scatter
• Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

Men often have their own quieter ways to show their feelings. Dan Miller, a member of Mr. Leonard's longstanding softball team, had bone cancer as a boy and walked with a crutch. He served as the team manager, Mr. Leonard says, "but we made sure he got at least one official at-bat each season, so he'd be in the scorebook."

The guys have fond memories of Dan getting a hit and using his bat as a crutch to make his way to first base. They'd kid him about that—with great affection—even after Dan had to have his leg amputated.

Dan died from cancer in 2001 at age 40, and in his final months, his teammates went to Atlanta, where he lived, to reminisce with him about softball and a thousand other memories.

Mr. Leonard says he and his friends all have issues in their lives, and they sometimes acknowledge when they're going through tough times. "We'll say, 'Yes. We understand. It's really hard. Now let's go play some baseball.'"

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It's Awesome

 

February 9, 2010

Findings

Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome

By JOHN TIERNEY

Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?

Now some answers are emerging thanks to a rich new source of data: you, Dear Reader.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.

The computer textual analysis could identify “affect-laden” articles like “Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness” or “When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next.” It distinguished positive articles like “Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love With the City” from downers like “Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies.”

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)

Surprising articles, like one about free-range chickens on the streets of New York, were also more likely to be e-mailed — which was a hardly a surprising discovery, of course. But the researchers also kept finding popular articles with a quality that went beyond surprise.

“If I went into my classroom dressed up like a pirate, that would be surprising, but it wouldn’t be awe-inspiring,” Dr. Berger said. “An article about square watermelons is surprising, but it doesn’t inspire that awed feeling that the world is a broad place and I’m so small.”

Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”

They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.

“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.

“Seeing the Grand Canyon, standing in front of a beautiful piece of art, hearing a grand theory or listening to a beautiful symphony may all inspire awe. So may the revelation of something profound and important in something you may have once seen as ordinary or routine, or seeing a causal connection between important things and seemingly remote causes.”

The motivation for mailing these awe-inspiring articles is not as immediately obvious as with other kinds of articles, Dr. Berger said. Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favor. There can also be self-interested reasons for sharing surprising articles: I get to show off how well informed I am by sending news that will shock you.

But why send someone an exposition on quantum mechanics? In some cases, it, too, could be a way of showing off, particularly if you accompanied the article with a note like, “Perhaps this will amuse, although of course it’s a superficial treatment. Why can’t they use Schrödinger’s full equation?”

But in general, people who share this kind of article seem to have loftier motives than trying to impress their friends. They’re seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said.

“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.” (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab to discuss your motives for e-mailing articles.)

The Penn researchers found evidence of readers’ sharing other emotions, too, like anxiety — which, based on the old “fear sells” theory of journalism, might be expected to be the most influential emotion on readers. But of all the variables studied, Dr. Berger said, awe had the strongest relationship with an article making the most-e-mailed list, and that finding strikes me as a high compliment to the Times audience.

In fact, Dear Reader, you could consider this new study to be firm scientific evidence of your own awesomeness. And if you want to share that feeling with anyone, you know what to do next.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

FT: Better Loving Through Chemistry

February 7, 2010

Slipstream

Better Loving Through Chemistry

By NATASHA SINGER

IF finding true love were an exact science, we wouldn’t need matchmakers, singles bars or, of course, online dating services.

Like job seekers who take the Myers-Briggs personality test to help steer them to suitable professions, we’d simply take a relationship test, whose results would identify our most compatible types of mates and rule out the frogs. Problem solved.

Of course, Cosmopolitan magazine has been running pop psychology love quizzes — “Which Bachelor Is Right for You?,” “Is He Naughty or Nice?” — for decades, prompting young women the world over to assess how sexually or socially compatible they might be with their objects of desire.

Now, a handful of dating Web sites are competing to impose some science, or at least some structure, on the quest for love by using different kinds of tests to winnow the selection process. In short, each of these sites is aiming to be the Netflix of love.

Instead of using a proprietary algorithm to recommend movies you might enjoy, based on your past choices, however, these dating sites offer you a list of romantic candidates whose selection is based on proprietary analyses of personality characteristics or biological markers.

Consider ScientificMatch.com, founded about two years ago, which aims to create romantic chemistry via genetic testing. The site, which matches people based on certain genetic markers for the immune system, takes its cue from studies showing that women are more attracted to the smell of men who have very different immune systems from their own. The site charges $1,995.95 for a lifetime membership — the lofty fee includes a cheek swabbing kit, DNA processing, a criminal and bankruptcy background check, as well as verification of age and marital status, the site says.

Then there’s Chemistry.com, started in 2006 by the dating giant Match.com. Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist who developed Chemistry.com’s questionnaire, says the site is designed to predict compatibility based on traits of temperament like adventurousness, decisiveness or empathy. And it charges a premium for its services: about $50 for a one-month membership, compared with about $35 for Match.com.

But both ScientificMatch.com and Chemistry.com are refinements of an idea originally developed by eHarmony.com.

Founded in 2000 by a psychologist with experience in marriage counseling, eHarmony focuses on singles willing to invest time and to pay premium prices to find a long-term partner. People who register with the site fill out a long questionnaire that is intended to match people based on similarities in sociological variables like values, family background and social styles. Membership can cost up to $45.95 a month.

Online dating is a $976 million annual industry in the United States, according to estimates from Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm. So, to stand out among hundreds of mass-market, open-community sites that attract everyone from people trolling for quick hookups to those headed for holy matrimony, a few services offer more elaborate mate-finding methods.

They build brand identity when they “target people who are looking for relationships rather than just dating,” says John LaRosa, the research director at Marketdata Enterprises. That means matchmaking sites with fewer users can charge more per subscriber than larger sites that list online personals.

Match.com, with an estimated 1.2 million paid subscribers, had revenue of about $365 million in 2008, Mr. LaRosa estimates. EHarmony, meanwhile, with about 656,000 paid members, had estimated revenue of $216 million that year, he says. But do partner-prediction sites do better at matching people than less-structured dating sites where people seek, sort and select others on their own?

Success rates for online dating are hard to measure. But eHarmony says it clearly enhances the process by catering to people who are looking for relationships leading to marriage.

People tend to be adept at heeding that first spark of attraction but may be less dexterous at recognizing the commonalities that are the foundations of good marriages, says Gian Gonzaga, eHarmony’s senior director of research and development. The site suggests potential matches based on areas of compatibility —like values, beliefs and important experiences — that are predictors of relationship success, he says.

“In the long haul, you want to be able to manage conflicts, celebrate positives and get through the day-to-day relationship,” Dr. Gonzaga said. “Our system is there to take care of that so you can now focus on who you find really attractive, that you feel really passionate about.”

Chemistry.com, meanwhile, uses answers to a detailed questionnaire to suggest potential partners based on their brain chemistry, says Dr. Fisher, a research professor in the anthropology department at Rutgers University. Based on a review of scientific studies on neurotransmitters and chemicals like dopamine in the brain, she determined that humans tend to express one of four dominant temperaments.

Since the site’s introduction in 2006, more than eight million people have answered Dr. Fisher’s questionnaire, and she has used their answers to pinpoint traits that attract people to one another. She says people of decisive, straight-talking temperament, whom she calls “directors,” tend to be attracted to empathetic, intuitive types she calls “negotiators.” Spontaneous types (“explorers”) tend to be attracted to their own kind, while traditional pillars of society (“builders”) also tend to seek out partners that resemble themselves.

“If Helen Fisher can give you right off the bat individuals that your brain is more likely to be attracted to,” she says, “so much the better.”

At the end of the day, however, it may be that the success of such sites is attributable not so much to their proprietary methods as to their choosy, self-selected members who don’t want to wink at and woo the first person whose profile they read online. The sites attract cohorts of people interested in slowing down the online dating and mating process, in finding out more information about potential partners — or in ruling out unlikely suitors — before they graduate to the meet-and-greet stage.

THE more advanced the partner prediction sites, the more they may actually serve a more old-fashioned role. The sites provide background details on a person’s family, education, aspirations, character, genetic traits and general health of the type that was once public information in farming or immigrant communities or even in hunter-gatherer societies, Dr. Fisher says.

Indeed, at least from the point of view of evolutionary science, you’d be better off spending $50 — and more likely to find a mate — by using a premium dating site than by dropping $50 on drinks in the uncertain waters of singles bars.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

FT: Lunch with the FT - Susie Orbach

Lunch with the FT: Susie Orbach

By William Leith

Published: January 1 2010 19:46 | Last updated: January 1 2010 19:46

The writer and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, best known as an authority on eating disorders, wants a quick lunch. She has chosen Bradleys, a smallish restaurant near where she lives in Belsize Park, north London. It is sparse, with modern-looking pictures on the walls, and carries a powerful whiff of the 1980s – possibly the sort of place where the chef arranges the food into neat little towers.

She is sitting in a booth at the back, and when I get in, it’s a tight squeeze. Perhaps people were thinner then. Or perhaps I am fatter than I think. Orbach is gamine and petite. She is 63 but looks much younger, partly because she is so slender. She looks very good. Her black silk top by Ghost hangs off her small frame.

I have met Orbach a couple of times before. In fact, when I had a problem with overeating, she recommended a therapist, who was very good. Now she tells me she won’t have wine: “I don’t do wine at lunchtime.” Also, she has slight misgivings about being interviewed. “You know us shrinks – we’re really circumspect.”

Actually, she isn’t – she’s extremely bright and talkative. She still sees lots of patients. Her most famous patient, of course, was Princess Diana. But she feels she can’t talk about that. Still, Diana was her patient for two years and it’s been said that, without Orbach’s influence, she wouldn’t have been so open in her famous BBC Panorama interview in November 1995, in which she talked about her post-natal depression, self-harming and bulimia.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12

Right now Orbach, who is a visiting professor in sociology at the London School of Economics, is working on a paper for an academic journal about how parents transmit their body shapes to their kids. I tell her I’ve been looking at the effects of economic growth – one of which is that it makes people fat.

“Growth,” she says. “In growth, we don’t count the cost of repairing all the excesses, right?” She often says “right?” at the end of a sentence. Sometimes this makes you want to say “right” as well.

I order half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. She orders mineral water. We haven’t even looked at the menu, and we’re already into a conversation about greed in the modern world and the problems it’s causing. We agree that greed causes pollution. “All those chemical compounds!” Orbach says. “Obviously human beings can accommodate a certain amount of chemicals. But we don’t know that we’re excreting all this ... stuff into our water system, and double-ingesting it. And there are very strange effects.”

We both glance at the menu for a few seconds but get sidetracked into a conversation about thinness and fatness. Orbach’s first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, published 31 years ago, was groundbreaking. In it, she tried to answer a simple question. Why do women get fat? Her research led to some fascinating conclusions. Some women get fat, she found, not because they were greedy, but because being fat made them feel safe.

Orbach realised that, for many women, being slim could get you the wrong kind of attention – not just from men, but from other women too. Slim women can be magnets for men and also attract envy, she writes in the book. This means that lots of women have an unconscious drive towards being fat, even if they think, in their conscious minds, that they want to be slim. That’s why people can find it so hard to lose weight – because they secretly want to be fat, and they don’t even know it.

But why are women so desperate to be thin? Not just slim but really, really thin. Why is being skinny such a powerful draw?

“We have a constructed aesthetic which we’re all inside of now,” she says. “It’s a visual aesthetic. Thinness is the desired object now. Whereas 40 or 50 years ago, there were Wate-on tablets at the chemist, right?”

I nod.

“That’s because, in those days, the desired object was Marilyn Monroe, or Sophia Loren. So there was no desire to be thin.”

When did women start wanting to be thin? Orbach thinks that the change came during the 1960s. Before then, if you were thin, you looked poor, because lots of poor people couldn’t afford to eat. In 1966, Twiggy did not look poor, or pinched, or like she might be suffering from rickets. She looked new and challenging.

“This was a new culture,” Orbach says. “We were no longer thin from poverty. Finally there was excess in our society. We didn’t need to have our forms of plenty represented by bigness. Then there was a whole generation who grew up with that. Then they reproduced. And they have that aesthetic inside them.”

I tell her my theory that I think women like to be thin because it enables them to wear sexier clothes – and fashion designers are making women’s clothes skimpier and more revealing all the time.

“No, I think that’s nonsense. Here’s where you and I might disagree. Don’t you think Marilyn Monroe was sexy?”

I do, I tell her.

“But I don’t think she’s sexy per se. I think she’s sexy because of all those images. It’s the fault of the fashion designers, and the critics. But they are rethinking this, under pressure, thank goodness. It’s also the failure of art directors, I think. Because you can make anything look spectacular if you’re an art director, right?”

Right.

“Take Rankin. He’s a fantastic photographer. He’s shot women of different sizes, and they look spectacular. They have glamour, they have pizzazz, they have that sense of, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ He’s taken pictures of people who were paraplegic who were very very stylish. So art directors are geniuses. And something happens in the visual cortex. What these art directors do affects us, and goes into us.”

Something is happening in my visual cortex. It is the waiter. We need to order, and quickly. Time is rushing by. Orbach orders a soup of Jerusalem artichokes to start – and another starter, a plate of scallops. No main course. She also orders a green salad. I go for Dorset crab, followed by halibut on a bed of vegetables, and a side order of dauphinoise potatoes.

Orbach’s latest book is Bodies, in which she tells us what has happened to our bodies in the three decades since she wrote about fat being a feminist issue. “The problems I sought to describe have mushroomed,” she writes. The contemporary body is a battleground. In fact, people have never felt worse about their bodies than they do now. Makers of face cream are telling us we are too wrinkly; owners of gyms are telling us we’re too flabby; plastic surgeons are telling us our faces are all wrong. We are constantly being told that we look unattractive – and the terrible thing is that we believe it.

In the book, she talks about “the merchants of body hatred”. Her point is that, if people are anxious and needy, they make better consumers; if they are anxious about something as fundamental as their bodies, they are easy prey for marketers. And things are getting worse. “In my mum’s day”, she says, “you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn’t start at six and go on until you’re 75, right?”

Our food arrives. Orbach’s soup looks bland but she says it tastes fine. “I like Jerusalem artichokes”, she says, “but I don’t like the way you have to clean them out – all that scraping.” My Dorset crab is arranged in a tower, as I had suspected it would be. It looks jellified. I demolish it with a couple of deft jabs of the fork. It crumbles and lies in pieces on my plate. When I try it, it’s rather salty.

Orbach tells me she grew up in nearby Chalk Farm. Her father, Maurice Orbach, was a Labour MP until he lost his seat around the time of the Suez crisis. She remembers it from a young girl’s point of view: “There was a canal. Lots of double-crossing. My father was seen to be pro-Nasser [Egypt’s then leader].” Later her father was elected as the member of parliament for Stockport.

Her father’s parents came to Britain from Poland in 1899 to escape the pogroms, she says. She doesn’t know where in Poland. They were heading for America but got off the boat in Cardiff and stayed. Maurice was one of eight children. He started life as a chorister but, as a young man, became interested in the labour movement. He met Orbach’s mother on a speaking tour of America. She was “on the rebound”. He was, Orbach imagines, giving a “rabble-rousing talk”. He took her across the Atlantic and they married in England in 1936. They had a son, Laurence, who went on to run the publishing house Quarto, and, in 1946, Susie was born.

THE SHAPE WE’RE IN

Our bodies have been changing over the past few decades – on average, we have become taller and heavier.

● There have been just two national surveys of British body sizes. The first, in 1951 was done manually (only measuring women). In 2001-2002, a more detailed UK Sizing Survey by Size UK was carried out on 11,000 adults. In 1951, the average woman was 5ft 3in. Fifty years later, she had grown an inch and a half. In the same period, she had gained several inches around the waist, going from 27.5in to 34in.

● Men are also getting taller and heavier, having grown a couple of inches on average in the past half century. A 2002 American study for the Centers for Disease Control found that, between 1962 and 2002, the average male weight jumped from 11 stone 6lb to 13 stone 6lb. In the same period, the female average went from 10 stone to 11 stone 7lb.

● As well as getting heavier, women’s shape is changing too. The Size UK survey revealed that only 8 per cent of women had the classic Sophia Loren-style “hourglass shape”, which has given way to a more rectangular look. Busts and hips are bigger than they were in the 1950s.

● Mintel research published in 2008 showed that the UK men’s plus-size market had grown by 40 per cent in the previous five years (the women’s market grew by 26 per cent over the same period). The average UK woman is a size 16, and some 4.6m women are a size 18 or over – although Mintel points out that retailers have made clothing sizes more generous so that fewer women have to go up to a “plus sized” 18.

● But if the real shape of women is growing, the fantasy shape is shrinking. As the feminist writer Naomi Wolf pointed out in The Beauty Myth (1990), a generation earlier the average model had been 8 per cent lighter than the average woman. But by 1990, models were 23 per cent lighter. A recent survey by Wired magazine demonstrated that, between the 1960s and today, the body mass index of Playboy Playmates has, on average, declined from 19.2 to 17.6, while that of real women has risen from 22.2 to 26.8.

As a young girl, Orbach says, she was influenced by her mother’s fastidiousness around food. “She was very careful. And also, three times a year, she’d go on the Mayo Clinic diet [low in carbohydrates and high in fat]. So I think I grew up thinking that the grown-up thing to do is diet. I copied my mum. And there’s nothing like a diet to institute longings for food.”

The waiter collects our plates. The restaurant is, slightly surprisingly, one of those places where the waiter takes the wine away from the table and pours you some when your glass is empty. He pours me some wine.

Orbach says: “I had what now would be such a mild version of what I call bingeing, which bears no relation to what people are doing now. And also restricting – which also bears no relation to what people are doing now. It would mean not having supper.”

But the Orbachs didn’t have much fattening food in the house. “My dad kept his sweets in the car and my mum had her chocolates at the top of a cupboard and ate them in the middle of the night.”

Our main courses arrive. For Orbach, a smallish plate of scallops. For me, a chunk of halibut placed on top of some vegetables, with a layer of olive paste on top. It is the shape of a car park – several levels in an oblong shape. Orbach eats her scallops. She doesn’t strike me as a great foodie. Food is just something she eats, in relatively small quantities. She eats fish and chicken. She says she cooks pasta nearly every day, and if she had a favourite cuisine, it would be Italian.

She has two children – a son of 25, who lives in London, and a daughter of 20, who lives in New York. For years Orbach lived with their father, Joseph Schwartz, a writer and psychotherapist, but she has, according to newspaper reports, recently started a relationship with the writer Jeanette Winterson. I ask her if this is true.

“Yes,” she says, suddenly beaming with happiness.

She won’t have a pudding. Nor will I. Somehow, my two turrets of seafood feel slightly bulky in my stomach. We order coffee and get on to the subject of addiction. I tell her my theory about why smoking is so hard to quit – because it gives you something to worry about. When you stop, your other worries come flooding back. She agrees. She says she’s seen a German cigarette advertisement that worries her. “Be smart – wait until you are 18. Well, hey, is that an invitation to a 15-year-old?”

Orbach was, as you’d expect, very bright as a child. She got a scholarship to North London Collegiate, an academic private school, although she was expelled at the age of 15. She went on to read women’s history at the school of Slavonic studies at London University, and then went to New York to do a PhD in psychoanalysis at the City University of New York, the college her mother had attended. That’s where she got the idea of running therapeutic workshops for women. And that’s where she picked up her very slight mid-Atlantic accent.

Our coffee arrives. I wonder if the nature of her job as a psychotherapist has changed over the years. Do people have different problems? “No. You get more men not knowing how to make relationships than you did before. Let me revise my answer. It’s not a no. It’s a yes. I particularly get, from North America, a certain kind of referral – women who will come and say, ‘I’ve been to the best universities, I’ve got the best job, I’ve got the great body ... I’ve even got the boyfriend.”

But these women still feel empty. Why?

“It’s something about the whole notion of success and performance, and creating a whole notion of yourself that you can adore and admire.”

We finish our coffee – mine with sugar, hers without. And now it’s time to go. The lunch has lasted exactly one hour. “It was perfectly pleasing,” she says. “My scallops were juicy. They were perfectly cooked. I don’t agree with olives in the salad myself. Or green beans. But that’s just my opinion. I would just have green salad, like lettuce and rugola. And I would have liked to have drunk wine, but I’m going back to work.”

And with that, she walks away smartly.

‘Bodies’ (Profile) is published in paperback on January 7, £8.99

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Bradleys
25 Winchester Road
London NW3

Artichoke soup £6.00
Crab £9.50
Scallops £9.50
Halibut £19.00
Dauphinoise potatoes £3.00
Salad £5.00
Single espresso £2.50
Double espresso £5.00
Large sparkling water £3.50
Half bottle Sauvignon Blanc £11.50

Total (including service) £81.28

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.